post-colonial_translation

52 G.J.V. Prasad
‘So I have been to a holy man, who taught me what I must do.
Then with my few pice I have taken a bus into the country to dig
for herbs, with which your manhood could be awakened from its
sleep . . . imagine, mister, I have spoken magic with these words:
“Herb thou hast been uprooted by Bulls!” Then I have ground
herbs in water and milk and said, “Thou potent and lusty herb!
Give my Mr Saleem thy power. Give heat like that of Fire of Indra.
Like the male antelope, O herb, thou hast all the force that Is,
thou hast powers of Indra, and the lusty force of beasts.”’
(Rushdie 1982: 192–3)
The narrator signals immediately that this is a transcript of a speech
made by an illiterate woman with an aside that works like a prefatory
note: ‘(given in her own words, and read back to her for eye-rolling,
high-wailing, mammary-thumping confirmation)’. This note also
alerts the reader (or since the reader will already know this, one could
say it reinforces the fact) to Padma’s character as well as her cultural
otherness: ‘eye-rolling, high-wailing, mammary-thumping’. The
layered nature of otherness is underlined by the fact that the main
narrator is the ‘Saleem baba’ referred to in the passage, himself an
other to the speakers of British English. Indian English speakers can
be classified according to their competence in different modes of
English and assigned their place in the cline of bilingualism; Padma,
for example, is shown to be a bilingual with very poor control of
English. Further, Indian English speakers can be separated on the basis
of region as well as ethnicity, so that one might have a person with a
very low competence in English, with high interference from the
mother tongue. The cline of Englishes in India ranges from educated
Indian English to varieties such as Babu English and Butler English.
Having placed Padma low down in this cline, Rushdie introduces
various kinds of grammatical and lexical deviation. Before looking at
these we must examine the way Padma addresses the narrator. ‘Saleem
baba’ indicates the class status of the two characters – ‘baba’ being
used in this manner for the offspring of the upper class by their servants
– but may also indicate a difference in gender and age, giving Padma a
maternal, proprietorial position akin to an ayah’s. In other words, while
‘baba’ places Saleem in a higher class than Padma it also diminishes his
position, making a boy of him. On top of all this, ‘baba’ is also a term of
affection, so it is not surprising that it is the one term in this passage left
untranslated – for how could all this have been conveyed in English