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Translation and Indian Literature: Some Reflections 9novel’. Frequently, works in English (or those translated intoEnglish from other European languages) were adapted to the Indiansituation and domesticated to an appreciable degree. Thesetranslations and adaptations opened a window to world literature forIndian readers. Rabindranath Tagore recalls discovering a “pathetictranslation of Paul et Virginie (1787)” in the Bengali serial,Abodhbandhu (The Common Man’s Friend) in 1868-69, over which,“I wept many tears … what a delightfully refreshing mirage the storyconjured up for me on that terraced roof in Calcutta. And oh! Theromance that blossomed along the forest paths of that secludedisland, between the Bengali boy-reader and little Virginie with themany-coloured kerchief round her head!” (cited in Joshi 2004:312).The colonial administration gave utmost encouragement to thetranslation of Western texts that would facilitate the process ofacculturation. It would be unfair to expect that the translators of thatperiod were sensitive to the aspects of complex cultural negotiations,and such ideas as suggested in statements like “translation as apractice shapes, and takes shape within, the asymmetrical relationsof power that operate under colonialism” (Niranjana 1992). In fact,if one takes a close look at the translation of literary texts of thatperiod it will be found that translators were not unduly concernedabout loyalty to the original text or they agonized much over adefinitive version or edition of a text. Translations -- morespecifically, literary translations -- were carried out more or less inthe “fluent tradition” as Lawrence Venuti (1995) defines it in thecontext of the English translation of Latin American texts in NorthAmerica, where translations often masqueraded as the original.Whatever that be, it can be asserted with reasonable certainty that weare what we are today in the realms of literature and language byvirtue of the literary and cultural exchanges and negotiations thattook place in the nineteenth century. Priya Joshi, in her essay,“Reading in the Public Eye: The Circulation of Fiction in IndianLibraries”, mentioned earlier, studied the reading pattern of thepeople in the nineteenth century and concluded: