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Translation of Bhakti Poetry into English: A Case Study ofNarsinh Mehta 249national identity. Largely influenced by the Orientalist writings, theIndian intellectuals of the colonial period believed that the pan-Indian Sanskritic literature, often termed as ‘margiya’ tradition,embodied the ‘true essential Indianness’. However, afterIndependence, the Indian intellectuals with modernist leanings foundthis notion of India discriminatory, brahminical and hence veryconstricting. They disapproved of the whole elitist project ofcolonial modernity with its emphasis on the western education,literacy, and the westernized-brahminical notion of nationhood.Accentuating the import of more `local’ and `demotic’ oraltraditions, they found an alternative to this elitist colonial modernityin the Bhakti literature. Apart from the fact that Bhakti poetrybelongs to the pre-colonial, oral and folk cultural traditions of oursociety, it also embodies a far more radical and democratic vision incontrast to the Sanskritic-Brahminical literature. In the words ofAijaz Ahmed, 'Bhakti had been associated, on the whole, with anenormous democratization of literary language; had pressed thecultural forms of caste hegemony in favour of the artisanate andpeasants ...was ideologically anti- brahminical; had deeplyproblematised the gender construction of all dialogic relations.’(1992:273). The Bhakti literature also provided an indigenous modelof modernity for many modernist and postcolonial intellectuals. Dueto this modernist revisionary reading of the Indian literary historyand tradition, today the Bhakti poetry has come to mean somethingunambiguously native and Indian and hence extremely crucial to ouridentity.Historically, the shift from the hegemonic Sanskrit literatureto Bhakti is believed to have occurred somewhere towards the end ofthe first millennium. A.K. Ramanujan (1993:103) observes, ‘A greatmany-sided shift occurred in the Hindu culture and sensibilitybetween the sixth and ninth century ... Bhakti is one name for thatshift...’ He has made an interesting use of the word ‘shift’ as he saysto suggest a linguistic analogy, for example, ‘the great consonantal