post-colonial_translation

The case of the Indian English novel 53
The deviations in English are striking in Padma’s first sentence itself.
The literally translated ‘from which cause I did run from you’ (from
Hindustani/Urdu, which Rushdie knows) should jar on an English
reader even if the excessive ‘pride and vanity’ does not. The last segment
of this sentence – ‘you are so much needing a looker-after’ – with its ‘so
much’ and ‘looker-after’ and its ‘to be + verb + ing’ construction provides
further examples of deviation caused by literal translation. What
Rushdie has attempted here is to locate the character in terms of region,
class and gender through the construction of a specific English using
the strategies and resources of a translator. Do people actually speak
like this Perhaps, but never so consistently. Most Indians, regardless
of bilingual competence, would switch codes as well as mix them,
speaking even whole sentences in a different language. It is impossible
for someone with such a competence in English as low as Padma’s to
speak purely in English, however deviant it might be.
The point here is that although the passage may read like a transcript
of the speech of an Indian with low competence in English (i.e. like
some kind of Indian English), it is actually a carefully constructed
translation. Padma’s prayers, the quotes within quotes, include archaic
vocabulary (‘thou’ and ‘hast’) to indicate that they are in an older
language (perhaps Sanskrit); the contrast between this and Padma’s
English is highlighted by the intervening ‘Then I have ground . . . ’.
The names of the divine beings cannot be translated, but Rushdie
inserts the very Indian ‘Mr Saleem’. (This use of the honorific with
the first name is actually more common in South India, but Rushdie’s
aim is not versimilitude.) Curiously Rushdie uses ‘holy man’, a term
which does not carry the same connotation as ‘sadhu’. But ‘holy man’
is the term that exists in English and Rushdie’s strategy is to translate
everything possible. He does not attempt to have Padma explain the
mythical references, translation being impossible, because she would
be sure that Saleem being Indian (even if a Muslim, and that tells a
tale of Hindu majorityism) would know them. The other (North)
Indian expression that is left untranslated is the onomatopoeic
exclamation ‘hai-hai’ which like all such exclamations though
understandable is so culture-specific as to be untranslatable.
III
Indian English writers are thus not so much translating Indianlanguage
texts into English as using various strategies to make their
works read like translations. This leads to Meenakshi Mukherjee’s