Download Complete Volume - National Translation Mission

Disputing Borders on the Literary Terrain: Translations and140 the Making of the Genre of ‘Partition Literature’people who have lived together for ages. Thus, he usesYazid, not to strengthen the historical or religious claimsof a few survivors of the riots in Pakistan, but to replacethe language of religion by the practice of a mode ofanalysis which is concrete, moral and psychological, andin the service of community-making (2001: 30).It is debatable whether Manto’s Yazid signifies the Yazid (=the evil, the irresponsible and the bloody-minded) in each of us, asBhalla suggests. Such a reading, for instance, cannot explain whyKarim Dad would choose to give his beloved son such anunflattering name with the connotations still unchanged andnegative. Such an interpretation diffuses and draws attention awayfrom the evilness of the action of damming the river on the part ofIndian powers, an act Manto neither condoned nor wished away.Yazid does not seem to talk about the evil in all of us or the evilactions that we all perform which may make us Yazids. Instead, thestory suggests that Karim Dad would like to make Yazid undo thisaction, so that he no longer remains Yazid or a metaphor of hate.Bhalla’s interpretation of Manto’s Yazid takes place in thecourse of his dismissal of Khalid Hasan’s translation of Manto as a“communal” one. Bhalla’s attempt here is to purge the “communal”taint from Manto and recover him for the genre of ‘PartitionLiterature’. So we see a playing down of Manto’s critique of India’sill-intention and a turning of Manto’s social and political criticisminto moral criticism, as socially and politically motivated threat isreinterpreted as an abstract and diffuse ‘evil-in-all-of-us’.I took up for study Bhalla’s critique of Khalid Hasan inorder to show how a text is worked on and around to fit into thegenre of ‘Partition Literature’. In this case, first, the translator isshown as incompetent, unreliable and communal; next, the readingleavens the text to fit into the genre; finally, the iconic figure of the