Download Complete Volume - National Translation Mission

during this time. Asaduddin suggests that the centre of gravity shiftsfrom a Persian-centred literary culture towards an English-centredworld view during the later half of the 19 th century. Perhaps this shiftneeds to be investigated thoroughly.With colonialism we enter a phase where translation itselfneeds to be conceptualized differently. Both Orientalists andAnglicists wanted to translate India into their respective ‘languages’to reinvent it after their own models. Colonialism was a colossalproject of translation where human beings and not texts became theobject of translation. Asaduddin rightly says that the project ofcolonial modernity was made possible by translation. He comments:“Soon there emerged a section of writers and intellectuals who cantruly be said to be ‘translated men’ in the most comprehensivesense.” And like all translated beings we become asymmetricalentities haunted by the incommensurate nature of the inadequateequivalences we have to live by. The problem with post-colonialapproaches to translation is that they fail to explore the process andproject of subjectification inherent in ‘colonial’ translation.In a nuanced argument, Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta pointsout how translation of poetry in the context of modernitycomplements one’s sense of being in the world. For SudhindranathDutta translation is self-expression where the original poem is theexperience you create. For Budhadeva Bose the process oftranslation involves a merger with the original. Bishnu Dey locatesthe significance of translation in a moment of correspondencebetween the text and the socio-political context of its translation.This goes beyond Benjamin’s perception of translation as arealization of some significance inherent in the original. Thequestion these three poets confront in varying degrees is how far weare ‘translatable’. Buddhadev Bose’s idea of ‘atmasuddhi’ can beread against the grain to locate the site of translation within the self.This becomes even more apparent in Sudhindranath Dutta’s idea oftranslator as ‘Eklavya’. The solitary learner of archery has a