post-colonial_translation

The case of the Indian English novel 45
is not the natural national medium for his social novel. He describes
his process of creation thus:
I found, while writing spontaneously, that I was always translating
dialogue from the original Punjabi into English. The way in which
my mother said something in the dialect of central Punjabi could
not have been expressed in any other way except in an almost
literal translation, which might carry over the sound and the sense
of the original speech. I also found, that I was dreaming or thinking
or brooding over two-thirds of the prose narrative in Punjabi, or
in Hindustani and only one-third in the English language. This
happened usually while I was writing stories and novels.
(Anand 1979: 36)
Anand says that he decided ‘to consciously introduce translation of
Punjabi, Urdu and Hindi words into all my writing’ (ibid.). R.K.
Narayan, who had the ‘benefit’ of Graham Greene’s editorial
intervention, still manages to write an Indian English capable of
negotiating the terrain between Tamil, and possibly Kannada, and
English. He has to make the choices that translators are forced to
consider: what to translate from Tamil, which Tamil words to retain,
whether to render in English certain styles of speech, etc. Narayan says
of his generation of writers that ‘often the writing seemed . . . an awkward
translation of a vernacular rhetoric, mode or idiom. But occasionally it
was brilliant’ (Narayan 1979: 22). This process of transmutation of
English, he says, has served his ‘purpose admirably, of conveying
unambiguously the thoughts and acts of a set of personalities, who
flourish in a small town named Malgudi (supposed to be) located in a
corner of South India’ (ibid.)
Khushwant Singh, another writer who has experienced this need to
create a new language, calls this Indian English by the quaint term
‘Indish’ (Singh 1986: 36). He writes that ‘Anglo-Indian’ writers like
Thackeray had already ‘introduced the English literati to Indian words
and proverbs’. Indian English writers carried the process further and
‘experimented with literal translations of Indian words into English’
(ibid.: 37). He identifies Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand as the writers
who took the lead in this and goes on to state that ‘Salman Rushdie’s
use of Indian vocabulary is altogether more natural and sophisticated .
. . [and he] uses the kind of Indish that the jet-set of Bombay do today’
(ibid.: 37). Drawing our attention to the bilingual contexts of the writers
as well as their own bilingualism, Singh even quotes a dialogue from