Download Complete Volume - National Translation Mission

anxiety of authenticity. This was perhaps because they could be surethat the text would not translate them. In the precolonial period theritualistic context allows translations to realize the possibilities ofsubtexts in the target language. Translating any text is finally amatter of locating its subtexts and it is here that English poses someof the basic problems. And English poses problems here largelybecause of its historical location.There is a dialectical relation between English as thelanguage that translates us and English as a language that wetranslate in. As the story of Tagore’s self-translations would suggest,English regulates the subjectivity of the text to suit the requirementsof Englishness as a colonial site. When Tagore realizes that he hasnot been translating his poems into English but has been translatedby English into what he never was, he disowns his translations. Ithink this is a moment of post-coloniality in the Indian translationtradition. In other words, the ‘colonial phase’ was a period whenEnglish translated us into its epistemology. The translation ofShakuntalam uses the conventions of Romantic comedy and in theprocess produces a colonial text that corresponds to their worldview.Nikhila’s paper suggests that strategies of translationemployed in creating genres like ‘partition literature’ which isdeeply implicated in the narrative of nationhood and collectiveidentities, misread and misrepresent the texts for appropriating theminto categories that are arbitrary and misleading. The post-colonialmoment, in this sense, is a moment of contesting Englishnessthrough textual practices which would include translational (andsub-national) ones.Ideally, post-colonial translation should involve a project ofdecolonization where subtexts will remain strongly Indian. Whatwas described as pre-colonial translation was in this sense postcolonial.Perhaps Indian traditions in translation will always have tocontend with the problem of colonialism in its various forms. The