post-colonial_translation

44 G.J.V. Prasad
The day rose into the air and with it rose the dust of the morning,
and the carts began to creak round the bulging rocks and the
coppery peaks, and the sun fell into the river and pierced it to the
pebbles, while the carts rolled on and on, fair carts of the
Kanthapura fair . . .
(Rao 1971: 60)
It is this individual effort to translate local speech rhythms, idioms
and culture-specificities that Meenakshi Mukherjee refers to when she
says that ‘Mulk Raj Anand at his best manages to convey a Punjabi
flavour through his English’ and that R.K. Narayan ‘depicts the customs
and manners of the Tamil people accurately . . . [and] what is more
important, through skilful use of the English language he delineates
people whose actions, behaviour and responses are shaped by a language
different from English’ (Mukherjee 1971: 174). What is even more
important however is that, as she points out, Narayan’s characters are
shaped by a language ‘not only different from English, but also markedly
different from Punjabi which is the language of Anand’s most successful
fictitious characters, or Bengali, the normal mode of speech of characters
created by Bhabhani Bhattacharya’ (ibid.). The Englishes that these
writers create (in) are not unintentional, and are not merely or wholly
illustrative of varieties of Indian English. As stated earlier, many of their
characters would not speak English at all, and people who belong to
the particular regions concerned may speak English quite differently.
The aim of the authors is not to reproduce the specific characteristics
of the English spoken in the regions they depict but to create an English
that fulfils their translational-creative aims. The text-specificity of these
authorial styles is immediately evident if we compare the Kannadaness
of the language of Raja Rao’s Kanthapura with the language he
uses in The Serpent and the Rope. S. Nagarajan suggests that in the
latter novel Raja Rao ‘has tried to adapt his style to the movement of a
Sanskrit sentence’ (cited in Mukherjee 1971: 183). In each individual
novel the Indian English writer has to write an English suitable for the
task at hand, to convey the particularities of the situation and region
portrayed. Each writer is aware of this task and makes a conscious
attempt at it through various linguistic experiments as well as the use
of imagery.
Mulk Raj Anand, who along with Raja Rao and R.K. Narayan
forms the great trinity of Indian English fiction, records that he chose
to write not in Urdu but in English with Mahatma Gandhi’s
permission. He is aware of the politics of his choice and that English