The possibilities for multiple readings as a continuous on going process and of infinite nature in medieval Indian telling traditions needs further exploration. Within the hermenutic tradition, the multiple readings that are possible due to extra-textual field of reference, the reading that are possible due to inter-textual field of reference can result in the production several re-presentations. If the listeners of the telling tradition is brought into focus here to theorize the relationship between the performers and listeners, then the process of representation and its readings not only become collective but also its re-presentation becomes a continues process and its possibilities are going to be infinite. Tellings in such cultural contexts do not have a hierarchy or power relationship as they could also act as mutual contestants. This is all the more significant if we consider the fact that there always exists a power relationship between the original text and its translation.

It is in the backdrop of this problematization that we need to look at the translation and reception of tragedy in Kannada literature. In this context, the present paper not only urges to look at the medieval Indian processes of tellings in problematizing the translations studies but also interrogates the power and authority that has been acquired by the discipline, both academically and economically.

Any one who tries to take a closer look at the development of drama in different Indian languages is struck by certain conspicuous trends that is more or less common to all of them. First of all, there is a conspicuous absence of a dramatic tradition, marked by the lacuna of written plays till the introduction of the English education system. It was for the needs of this newly educated class that the professional drama companies, based on the model of the Parasi theatre companies, started adapting and writing new plays with the specific intention of performing them on the stage. This stage, in fact, was then using the conventions of the proscenium theatre from the European continent, which had made in roads into the newly emerging Indian theatre. On the one hand, plays were adapted and translated from the classical source, mainly from Sanskrit, where a long standing dramatic tradition had been claimed to have prevailed. On the other hand, plays were also adapted and translated from English, mostly the plays that the Parasi theatre companies were performing during those days. In addition, new plays were also written, mostly making use of the Puranic themes from Indian mythology. Thus the emergence of drama in different Indian languages have an underlaying Orientalist statement that the light to overcome the darkness created by the absence of drama has to be over come not only by establishing a link with the tradition of Sanskrit drama through constructing its historical and thematic components (the ancient east), but also through establishing a link with the European west (the modern west). It is interesting to note here that several of the newly written plays, though contained Puranic themes, followed the conventions of the Parasi theatre, thereby, implying the Western form in its desi version, blending with the traditional Indian themes. An interrogation of the choice of the genre, the nature of translations, the selection of the themes, the modifications and transformations incorporated into them in the process of translation and the heated discussions that have taken place around these early experimentations reveal and demonstrate the complexities of an ambivalent society that was trying to blend the western genre with eastern sensibilities and the transitional nature of the newly emerging middle-class society and their world view.

It is in his background that this paper problematizes the emergence of the genre tragedy in Kannada in the form of translations and adaptations and the reception and controversies that surrounded it during the early phase of its experimentation. Though most of the discussion has been confined to the tragedies that Sri (B.M. Srikanthaiya) wrote during the third and the fourth decades of the present century, I have gone beyond this time frame. Firstly, I have probed the period prior to the beginning of theatre movement in the Kannada speaking regions during the later part of the nineteenth century and subsequently, to the later period, which involved the controversies following the introduction of the tragedies in Kannada literary and drama spheres. The paper has four parts. In the first part, an introductory background for the study of translations and reception of tragedies has been outlined. The second part deals with the three translated / adapted texts of Sri and the controversies that surrounded them. The third part brings into focus the attempts made by the scholars to construct a history or tradition of tragedy in Indian and Kannada literatures, on the one hand to justify the need for it, and on the other, to show that it is not something totally new to the Indian world view. In the last part, an attempt has been made to show how it is actually the demands of the theatre and the audience that necessitated the emergence of tragedy in Kannada and the subsequent experimentation and diffusion of the characteristics of the new genre.