post-colonial_translation

The case of the Indian English novel 55
negotiates between languages, but comes to inhabit the space of
language itself.
(Simon 1992: 174)
This use of translation, which ‘inhabits the space of language itself’,
allows Indian writers to create a space for themselves in between Anglo-
American English and Indian culture. This is not unique in any way to
Indian English literature or writers. As Samia Mehrez points out,
these texts written by post-colonial bilingual subjects create a
language ‘in between’ and therefore come to occupy a space ‘in
between’. In most cases, the challenge of such space ‘in between’
has been double: these texts seek to decolonize themselves from
two oppressors at once, the western ex-colonizer who naively
boasts of their existence and ultimately recuperates them and the
‘traditional’, national cultures which shortsightedly deny their
importance and consequently marginalize them.
(Mehrez 1992: 121)
As in the case of their anglophone post-colonial counterparts, English
automatically gives Indian English writers an outsider perspective; but
it is one that derives from their belonging to Indian culture – it permeates
and changes the language and is expressed in and through this hybrid
English. Thus the medium of expression is so much part of their creativity
that they are not very successful when translated into Indian languages.
They are situated in the interface of cultures. This is perhaps why, as
A.K. Ramanujam reports, R.K. Narayan is ‘not too well received’ in
Tamil or Kannada translation (see Naik 1982: 289). Creating an English
that resists easy appropriation by the British or the West as a whole is
thus a primary task, but it is complicated by the fact that English does
give Indian English writers a Western audience and that the translation
skills they put to use primarily address audiences across cultures
(including across India). Hence, initially, the earlier Indian English
writers employ footnotes and/or glossaries to explain certain terms.
Anand records that he deliberately gave up this practice: ‘while I used
glossaries of Indian words with their translations, at the end of my
novels, in the first few years, I have not offered these appendices for
some years now’ (Anand 1979: 36).
Recent Indian English writers who publish in India do not do so
because they see their primary audience in India itself, and not because
they feel easier with the language or because there is an acceptable and