post-colonial_translation

42 G.J.V. Prasad
This is a difficulty any translator will admit to facing; one has to decide
how ‘to convey the various shades and omissions of a certain thoughtmovement
that looks maltreated in an alien language’ (ibid.). But, as
Rao hastens to add, English is not an alien language to Indians. Most
educated Indians are bilingual, with ‘many of us writing in our own
language and in English’ (ibid.). Like Rushdie later, Rao states that ‘[W]e
cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as
Indians’ (ibid.). Thus Rao posits a struggle for space, between colonial
English and the native Indian languages. The act of writing in English
is not ‘merely’ one of translation of an Indian text into the English
language, but a quest for a space which is created by translation and
assimilation and hence transformation of all three – the Indian text,
context and the English language. Thus the English that each Indian
writer uses is partly the message as well as the medium, and is important
in itself. Rao advocates in his foreword both Indian narrative strategies
and Indianization of the English language. He is also aware of the nature
of power – he compares English to Sanskrit and Persian, the two
languages that were used for communication across the sub-continent
in earlier times, both having predominated over other Indian languages.
Writing in either language, as in the case of English, would have been
an act of translation into and a transformation of (as well as by) a more
powerful language.
It must be noted that Raja Rao does not claim to be writing in Indian
English. He is not writing in British English either. He is creating a
language as well as creating in it. His attempt in Kanthapura is to create
a ‘rough’ text, one that will underscore the otherness of the language
used as well as the culture depicted. Many of his characters in this novel,
including the narrator, would not speak any kind of English and yet the
novelist has to bring out the rhythm of their expression, the tempo of
their speech and the configurations of their world-view in his English
novel. Thus, in Meenakshi Mukherjee’s words, there is a ‘double
complication’ involved in Indian English fiction, because it ‘is written
in a language that in most cases is not the first language of the writer
nor is it the language of the daily life of the people about whom the
novels are written’ (Mukherjee 1971: 24). Though writing here about
Indian English fiction in general she pinpoints the particular challenges
that Raja Rao faces and overcomes in Kanthapura:
Technically the problem becomes most acute in the writing of
dialogue and presenting conversation . . . . But apart from dialogue,
even in description, narration and reflection, the Indo-Anglian