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54 G.J.V. Prasad<br />

complaint about Bhabhani Bhattacharya that ‘he does something very<br />

strange and inexplicable’: ‘He uses expressions that are obviously not<br />

English, their deliberate quaintness being meant to suggest that they<br />

are translated from Bengali. In reality, however, they have no<br />

counterparts in Bengali either’ (Mukherjee 1971: 179; emphasis<br />

added). When Bhattacharya uses words and terms like ‘childling’,<br />

‘wifeling’, ‘picture-play’, ‘sun-up’, etc., or writes whole sentences<br />

which look and sound strange (one of the examples Meenakshi<br />

Mukherjee gives is ‘Villagefuls of folk were on the high road’), he is<br />

not translating from Bengali. Nor is he writing Indian English.<br />

Mukherjee finds it ‘difficult to understand what is gained by coining .<br />

. . strange adjectives when legitimate English attributes could have<br />

served as well’ (ibid.: 180). But ‘legitimate’ English would not reinforce<br />

the otherness of the culture depicted. Many Indian English writers<br />

create the language in which they write, and part of their intent is to<br />

make things difficult for the monolingual (English) reader. Far from<br />

using Indian words and expressions for local colour, to create an exotic<br />

ethnographic text, they attempt to make the process of reading as<br />

difficult as that of writing. Mulk Raj Anand declares that Raja Rao<br />

and he had purposes other than to ‘elaborate the illusion of realities<br />

in India in the Anglo-saxon language, for sale to the jaded reading<br />

public, in a manner which may be easy . . . to swallow’ (Anand, 1979:<br />

39). As Bhabha argues when discussing the appearance of a Hindi<br />

letter in Adil Jussawalla’s poem, ‘Missing Person’, not only does the<br />

untranslated letter signal the hybridity of the <strong>post</strong>-<strong>colonial</strong> context,<br />

it also explodes the notion of the purity of the colonizing culture: ‘Now<br />

we can begin to see why the threat of (mis)<strong>translation</strong> . . . among those<br />

displaced and diasporic peoples who picked through the refuse, is a<br />

constant reminder to the <strong>post</strong>-imperial West, of the hybridity of its<br />

mother tongue, and the heterogeneity of national space’ (Bhabha<br />

1990: 203). This is true not just of the untranslated letter but also of<br />

the transliterated word, as well as all linguistic deviations which derive<br />

from a different culture. In a different context, writing about Canadian<br />

literatures, Sherry Simon argues that Quebec literature exhibits<br />

cultural hybridity and self-doubt which are characteristic of much<br />

contemporary writing. She observes that<br />

These doubts increasingly take the form of the cohabitation within<br />

a single text of multiple languages and heterogenous codes. In<br />

this case, <strong>translation</strong> can no longer be a single and definitive<br />

enterprise of cultural transfer. Translation, it turns out, not only

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