Another Idea of India Indian Literatures in the Bhashas (original) (raw)
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ANOTHER IDEA OF INDIA. INDIA LITERATURES IN THE BHASHAS
The aim of this article is to discuss the translation of Indian narratives in the bhashas, the vernacular languages of the Indian subcontinent into English through a politics and poetics of translation that gives voice and visibility to cultures that, otherwise, would be restricted to a very close range of dissemination. In this way, not only the Indian literatures of the front yard, i.e., Indian narratives written in the English of the diaspora become visible, but also the narratives of the backyard of the Indian literary tradition written in the vernacular languages. In the process the term vernacular comes under erasure in the sense that what is actually vernacularized is the English language as it becomes a vehicle through which these bhasha literatures gain visibility. To illustrate this process, the article also brings a critical reading of the short story "Thayyaal", written in Tamil, one of the languages from the South of India.
Uma outra ideia da Índia. As literaturas nas línguas Bhashas
Cadernos de Tradução, 2013
The aim of this article is to discuss the translation of Indian narratives in the bhashas, the vernacular languages of the Indian subcontinent into English through a politics and poetics of translation that gives voice and visibility to cultures that, otherwise, would be restricted to a very close range of dissemination. In this way, not only the Indian literatures of the front yard, i.e., Indian narratives written in the English of the diaspora become visible, but also the narratives of the backyard of the Indian literary tradition written in the vernacular languages. In the process the term vernacular comes under erasure in the sense that what is actually vernacularized is the English language as it becomes a vehicle through which these bhasha literatures gain visibility. To illustrate this process, the article also brings a critical reading of the short story "Thayyaal", written in Tamil, one of the languages from the South of India.
To the Indian Manner Born: How English Tells its Stories
Hermēneus. Revista de Traducción e Interpretación, 2018
Writing from outside the Anglo-American world is appreciated largely for the social life of English in worlds elsewhere, the linguistic oddities of its non-native cast of characters that spot poor translations. While English is easily granted inordinate powers of cultural assimilation, the languages of erstwhile colonies, the bhashas of India for example, from which this ‘translation’ presumably takes place, are seen to be rather weak and ill-equipped to meet the challenging demands of western narrative gambits. This essay offers three concrete examples of English fiction where its Indian writers afford us glimpses of a phenomenon critics have barely begun to notice. The passages examined here show how the bhashas sound differently when cast in English, or how English begins to breathe an unmistakable Indian ethos and idiom. When the Indian bhashas and English so happen together, there is no discrete language from which or into which translation occurs. It is evident that the writers here are no ‘Indianizers’ of a language whose fortunes now are global in reach and affect. For readers in India, English is still a bhasha-in -the- making, which is neither set in a ‘colonial’ far away and long ago, nor yet within current precincts of some ‘postcolonial’ felicity. If the efforts of these writers at resisting translation win, it is because they have asserted their right to imagine a language as a form of global life toward which English has taken them.
POPULAR LITERATURE, TRANSLATION AND INTERROGATING POST-COLONIAL INDIA
IASET, 2013
This work is a perspectival analysis of translated popular literature in post-colonial India. Popular literature serves useful functions in that it seeks to fulfill an intellectual and cultural vacuum in the minds of a vast mass of our populace who seem to have barely benefited by the educational structure existing in the country. However, the past fifty years reveals unmistakable signs of a sense of inertia and casualness afflicting such author’s choice of works and the manner of presentation to the reading public. The object of this paper is to bring into analytical focus, the role, expanse and prospects of local Kannada writers like Bhairappa, Girish Karnad, etc. vis a vis the innumerable anonymous authors whose works infiltrate the streets. The authors discuss the poetic and politics of popular literature and the type of readership that patronizes it. The middle ground between these two categories of writers is occupied by the ‘elite’ literature of the Shobha De type, whose works have been canonized and yet which seems merely opportunistic.
"Changing Language and Themes in the Twentieth Century Indian Fiction-Critical Perspective"
isara solutions, 2022
Every literature is a reflection of its own period. The twentieth century in India is remarked to be the era which changed the face of India forever. The pre-independence struggle along with the changing political and social atmosphere set the tone for the early 1900s, while the crux of these uprisings led to the ultimate freedom for India from the British colonial rule in mid-1940s. The years that followed were of disarranged and distorted constructions of a new India. From going through the brutal and horrifying partition, to conquering problems internally, India was losing many battles after winning the war. It is at this time, when literature of partition, of history turned into words, came to form a huge canon of its own. The themes changed, from one kind of struggle to another, from past glories to present victories and hopeful futures. On the other hand, India had also to come around the newly acquired language which it couldn't shake off its tongue-English. English kept on cumulating new meanings for Indians by becoming a language they had learned under compulsion and slowly being accepted as a language they felt is now their own. To say that India only went through major political changes in the twentieth century is a huge understatement; as cultural, social, economic, lingual, and psychological changes were equal contributors to twentieth century Indian literature, arisen out of this modern history. This paper attempts to journey across these changing themes and language(s) from the early twentieth century to the dawn of twenty-first, when Indian fiction in English explored, expanded, and underwent many impactful currents of change, only today, to be widely accepted in the West as refined and worthy.
Dungar College ÖZET Çeviri; bir kültürün, bir bölgenin edebiyat›n› di¤er bir kültüre-bölgeye tafl›r ve karfl›l›kl› kültürel iliflkiyle birlikte güven duygusu oluflmas›na katk›da bulunur. Fakat Hindistan örne¤inde bölgesel kültürün ürünü olan edebiyat›n daha güçlü olan milli kültürün içinde erime tehlikesi vard›r. Dolay›s›yla, çevirmenin stratejisi hem alt kültür ürününü muhafaza etmek, hem de milli kültürle bar›fl›k olmal›d›r. Yani çeviri metin Hintlilerde bu eserin kendilerine ait oldu¤unu hissettirirken, ayn› zamanda da bir bölge kültürüne ait oldu¤unu göstermelidir. ‹ngilizce'nin farkl› kullan›mlar› oldu¤u gibi, teori ve pratikte bir Rajastan metni de bir Pencap metninden daha farkl› okunmal›d›r. Hindistan gibi çok dilli bir ülkede alt kültüre ait ve daha az bilinen Marwari (Rajastanca olarak bilinen dil) dili ve dillerin ürünü olan edebiyat ürünleri ve çevirileri öncelik kazanmaktad›r. Bu makalenin amac›; Hindistan özelinde üretilmifl, kültürel anlamda benzerlik tafl›yan alt kültüre ait metinleri dikkate alarak, dilller aras› çeviri metinler üzerinden yerel-bölgesel kültürün önemini vurgulamakt›r. Makalenin ilk bölümü çeviri teorisi ve uygula-malar› üzerinedir. ‹kinci bölüm ise, Vijaydan Detha'n›n k›sa hikaye antolojisi olan Chouboli adl› eserini çeviren Christi Merrill'in bir çevirmen olarak durumunu de¤erlendirecektir. Sonuçta, Christi'nin eserinin önsözünde kendi tecrübesinden yola ç›karak ifade etti¤i "etkili bir uygulama olarak çeviri" bafll›-¤›n›n bir tart›flmas› yap›lacakt›r. ANAHTAR KEL‹MELER yerel edebiyat, çokdillilik, çeviri çal›flmalar›, dil içi çeviri çal›flmalar›, yeni yaz›n, dil ve kültür topluluklar ABSTRACT Translation makes the literature of a culture and region known to other regions and establishes a certain credibility and relationship of mutual regard. But in the context of India there is the danger of so called regional literature subsumed into more powerful national culture. Thus the translator's strategy would be to bring out the sense of continuities within the nation as well as the distinct sense of location of the text that has been translated. The readers will have to be convinced of both the fellow Indianness of the translated text as well as of the uniqueness of its location. A Rajasthani text has to be read differently from a Punjabi text and calls for different kind of theory and practice, also different kinds of Englishes. Thus in a multilingual country like India, the translation of indigenous literature and culture should be treated as a matter of primary national importance in that it would contribute to spreading the knowledge about lesser known social and linguistic groups such as Marwari (popularly known as Rajasthani). The present paper is an attempt to look at the nature of interlingual translation practices within India and locate the significance of parallel texts which address different linguistic and cultural communities at large and provide an opportunity to celebrate culture specificity. The first part of the paper addresses the issue of translation as theory and translation as praxis. The second part focuses on Christi Merrill's position as the translator of Vijaydan Detha's short story collection Chouboli. It discusses at length Christi's own experiences as expressed in the foreword which she titles, 'translating as a telling praxis'.
Le Comparatisme comme Approche Critique, Local and Global: Circulations, 2017
In this paper, I wish to discuss attempts by Indian writers and critics to “indigenize” or “de-orientalize” Indian literary history by discarding some of the premises and categories on which Orientalist knowledge is based, and by moving beyond what has been defined as “Orientalism’s linguistic and literary invention of India”. Indian literary history, because of its complex lineages and the diverse multilingual literary cultures that make up what is conventionally identified as “Indian Literature”, is essentially a field of debate. These debates have recently focused on the oft-cited “crisis” of literary history and literary criticism in India, and on the polemical concept of nativism (translated as “deshivad”, from “deshi”, the local or indigenous). These debates also crystallize a certain “anxiety of Indianness” that hinges on the desire to retrieve what is meant to be truly or authentically “one’s own”. Yet, as Aamir Mufti brilliantly argued in relation to the colonial logics of indigenization, however, “the route to the discovery of that which is meant to be properly one’s own is a tortuous one, leading through precisely that which is to be rendered foreign and alien”.In this paper, I will discuss the diverse positions of authors such as G. N. Devy, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Amit Chaudhuri, Arun Kolatkar and Kiran Nagarkar.
Indian Literature in English: New Introductions
International Journal of Research, 2017
Indian Literature in English might as yet appear as a conundrum. India is of course, India, and English the language of England. English in India still reflects the stereotypical colonial hangover. But without resorting to such platitudes like English being an international language, and writing in English in India being one major way of getting noticed overseas etc, I might state that there is as yet little need for pleading the case for the existence and flourishing of Indian writings in English. But in festivals like this one where we are celebrating poetry from India under several sections like women’s writing and Dalit Writing and writing in the regional languages, how do we envisage the situation of the writer in English? A fish out of water? Or a sore thumb? Barring the specific curio aspect of the language the experience of the Indian writer can unarguably be evidenced through this chunk of the Indian literary spectrum—this usually gets noticed in the west but sometimes for ...
Translating from India and the Moving Space of Translation (Illustrated by the Works of Ajñeya)
2010
The inadequacies and obsolescence of Eurocentric theories based on a binaryand static worldview have become a staple topic of postcolonial studies, and tosome extent also of translation studies. Nonetheless, the literary texts that arecalled upon in order to show the dynamism and hybridity of (post)modern worksbelong for the most part to the languages of the former colonial powers, especiallyEnglish, and remain inserted in a system that construes literatures interms of opposition. As a consequence, there is outside India a doubly misleadingunderstanding of Indian literatures other than those written in English:firstly, that translations of works in Hindi and in the Indian bhāṣā seem to belacking, if not inexistent, and secondly, that these "minor" literatures - as theyare regularly termed - are still often viewed as being highly dependent on theidea of "tradition," in opposition to the "postmodern" hybridity of the literatureswritten in the "domina...
RETROSPECTING INDIAN ENGLISH LITERATURE: TEXTS, CONTEXTS AND CONSEQUENCES
This paper deals with Indian sensibilities that appeared to be the subjects of primary concerns and sites of ideological, cultural confrontations and religious contestations, particularly in the literary texts that were being experimented in Indian English. It takes up three novels Untouchable, Train To Pakistan and That Long Silence by Mulk Raj Anand, Khushwant Singh and a slightly later writer Shashi Deshpande to discuss the issues which became both explicit and implicit allusions in their texts and drew the world's attention to such a new genre.