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The
greatest impact exerted by any Persian text on the imagination of Indian
writers during the colonial period is Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyyat, not
the original one but the English version mediated by Edward Fitzerald’s
translation or ‘transcreation’, and this happened at the fag end of the
colonial period. By the thirties of the twentieth century, it had been
translated into most of the Indian languages, creating a stir in poetic
circles and giving rise to new ways of writing poetry in some languages.
Haribanshrai Bachchan both translated and transcreated it in Hindi. One he
called Khayyam ki Madhushala and the other simply
Madhushala. So widespread was the impact of these two versions that
they gave rise to a new trend called ‘halavad’ which can be roughly
translated as ‘hedonism’. The Marathi translator Madhav Patvardhan who was
a Persian scholar and who had initiated ghazal writing in Marathi produced
three different Marathi versions of it between 1929 and 1940, which
present multiple perceptions of the original. The reception of Omar
Khayyam’s Rubaiyyat in different Indian languages constitutes a
unique case for Translation Studies and an analysis of the strategies
adopted by different translators in so many Indian languages will help us
to make coherent statements about indigenous translation practices. In
this context, Borges’s seminal essay on the reception of Alif Laila O Laila i.e. the
Arabian Nights in the European world can serve as an example (2004)
As the Orientalists lost to the Anglicists, Persian
literature and language lost its salience by the middle of the nineteenth
century. The new language of power was English, and with English language a
wholly new world opened up to the people ofIndia. Soon
there emerged a section of writers and intellectuals who can truly be said to be
“translated men” in the most comprehensive sense of the phrase. Though brought
up on traditional Indian literary and cultural values, their mental horizon was
formed by literature written in English or translated from English. The lack of
openness on the part of Indians to foreign literature that Sisir Kumar Das
bemoans with reference to an earlier era does not seem to be valid for this
phase of history when Indians took massively to works of English literature,
reading them with passion, translating them and adapting them to their purpose.
It is important to remember that the phenomenon of colonial modernity that was
negotiated in the nineteenth century
India and that
has changed us irrevocably was possible only through translation. The writers in
various Indian languages were invariably reading European and English authors,
and translating, if you take the larger view of translation, these into the
Indian languages. There were prolific translations from Shakespeare and some
lesser known Victorian novelists like G.W.M. Reynolds. The writings of Addison
and Steele were very popular in
India and the
prose tradition as it developed in some Indian languages was indebted to them.
The famous Urdu periodical Avadh Punch (1887), which facilitated the
growth of a kind of sinuous literary prose, used to publish the essays of
Addison and Steele regularly. As pointed out before, many Indian writers read
and translated these authors and assimilating their style and content, tried to
make use of them in the development of their own literatures. The emergence of a
genre like the ‘novel’ can be traced to this phenomenon of translation and
assimilation. To take some stray examples: In Malayalam, Chandu Menon’s
Indulekha (1888), commonly regarded as the first novel in that language,
was an adaptation of Disraeli’s Henrieta Temple (1837); in Urdu, Nazir
Ahmad is usually regarded as the first convincing practitioner of the genre and
his novels were based on English prototypes, his Taubatun Nasuh (1874)
being based on Defoe’s The Family Instructor; In Bangla, Bankim Chandra
Chatterjee was greatly influenced by Walter Scott’s practice of the genre of the
‘historical novel’. Frequently, works in English (or those translated into
English from other European languages) were adapted to the Indian situation and
domesticated to an appreciable degree. These translations and adaptations opened
a window to world literature for Indian readers. Rabindranath Tagore recalls
discovering a “pathetic translation 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 story
conjured up for me on that terraced roof in Calcutta. And oh! The romance that
blossomed along the forest paths of that secluded island, between the Bengali
boy-reader and little Virginie with the many-coloured kerchief round her head!”
(cited in Joshi 2004:312). The colonial administration gave utmost encouragement
to the translation of Western texts that would facilitate the process of
acculturation. It would be unfair to expect that the translators of that period
were sensitive to the aspects of complex cultural negotiations, and such ideas
as suggested in statements like “translation as a practice shapes, and takes
shape within, the asymmetrical relations of power that operate under
colonialism” (Niranjana 1992). In fact, if one takes a close look at the
translation of literary texts of that period it will be found that translators
were not unduly concerned about loyalty to the original text or they agonized
much over a definitive version or edition of a text. Translations -- more
specifically, literary translations -- were carried out more or less in the
“fluent tradition” as Lawrence Venuti (1995) defines it in the context of the
English translation of Latin American texts in
North America, where translations often masqueraded as the original.
Whatever that be, it can be asserted with reasonable certainty that we are what
we are today in the realms of literature and language by virtue of the literary
and cultural exchanges and negotiations that took place in the nineteenth
century. Priya Joshi, in her essay,
“ Reading
in the Public Eye: The
Circulation of Fiction in Indian Libraries”, mentioned earlier, studied
the reading pattern of the people in the nineteenth century and concluded:
…[T]he
Indian world survived and succeeded by translation – not just the literal
translation of reams of printed matter but also a symbolic and metaphoric
translation in which the Indian world was carried forth from one state to
another through the act of reading and interpretation. The encounter with
British fiction generally and the melodramatic mode in particular helped Indian
readers translate themselves from a socially and politically feudal order to a
modern one; from cultural and political subjection to conviction; from consumers
to producers of their own national self-image (Joshi 2004:321).
Thus, the project of nation-making was intimately connected to the wide
dissemination of works in translation. The concept of the nation as the
‘imagined community’, as Benedict Anderson would have it, if it ever took shape
in India, did so at this time through the publication of novels and the
translation of novels, not only from English but also from and among Indian
languages, and through publication of periodicals and other means of print
capitalism.
Right in the middle period of the Indian colonial encounter with the
West, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, translation between and
among modern Indian literatures began. Translation from Bangla literature formed
the staple diet of many readers in different Indian languages. Bankim’s novels,
Anandamath (1882) in particular, were translated into
most of the major Indian languages. B. Venkatachar (b.1845) was well-known for
his translation of Bankim’s novels into Kannada. He acquired such a reputation
for his craft that his translations are known as “Venkatachar’s novels”.
Saratchandra Chattopadhay almost single-handedly made Bengali fiction the most
attractive commodity for translators, publishers and reading public all overIndia (Das
1995:40). Sarat’s popularity was so phenomenal through several decades of the
twentieth century that Jainendra Kumar thinks his contributions towards the
creation and preservation of cultural India are second, perhaps, only to those
of Gandhi’s. He sums up the role of translation and inter-literary relationship
by asking the rhetorical question – “Saratchandra was a writer in Bengali; but
where is that Indian language in which he did not become the most popular when
he reached it?” (Kumar 1977:51). The enthusiasm for Bengali literature, some
might rather call it ‘hegemony’ today, only increased when Tagore was awarded
the Nobel prize in 1913, and later, writers from different parts of
India gathered
at Santiniketan to read Tagore in Bangla, and then, when they returned to their
own language habitat, introduced him in their own languages. Tagore indeed
strode like a colossus on the Indian literary horizon in the early decades of
the twentieth century, but there were lesser writers too who had been freely
translated into many regional languages. Dwijendralal Ray’s plays which
recreated the glories of the Mughal and the Rajput past were also very popular.
Bhisma, a play based on the Mahabharata hero was translated into Gujarati
in 1919, followed by Mebar Patan in the following year. At least six of
his plays were translated into Gujarati during the independence movement. No
less than thirteen plays were translated into Telugu. Translations did take
place also from Subramanya Bharati, Premchand and other writers. In fact the first half of the twentieth century
may be said to be the golden period of translation within Indian languages.
Though the translations were done largely in the fluent tradition and the
translators displayed a sureness of touch and a kind of confidence which
emanates from sharing, more or less, the same cultural values and the same
mythological universe, there is no room for complacency even here. Even if both
the source and target texts are Indian language texts a comparison of the
original and the translation often reveals asymmetry and a fair amount of
cultural ignorance.2
In the
post-independence period we find a gradual attenuation of translation within
Indian languages. The space that was open to translation between Indian regional
literatures gradually shrank and English began to intervene. However, even
though the postcolonial moment belonged to translation from Indian languages
into English, the translation scene even in English was fairly desultory in the
first three decades after independence. Aside from the Akademi, some significant
translations during this period were those sponsored by UNESCO Collection of
Representative Works. Foremost among them are: Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhay’s
Bengali novel Pather Panchali: Song of the Road (1968, trs. T.W. Clark
and Tarapada Mukherji), known world-wide for its film version by Satyajit Ray;
Manik Bandopadhyay’s Bengali novel, The Puppet’s Tale (1968, tr. S.L.
Ghosh); Shridhar Pendse’s Marathi novel,
Wild Bapu of Garambi (1968, tr. Ian Raeside); Thakhazi Sivasankara Pillai’s Malayalam novel, Chemmeen: A
Novel (1962, tr. Narayana Menon), Premchand’s Hindi novel, Godan: The
Gift of a Cow (1968, tr. Gordon Roadermal) and Aziz Ahmad’s Urdu novel,
The Shore and the Wave (1971, tr. Ralph Russell). The
absence of any dialogue among translators about their craft and the lack of
any tradition of documentation of problems encountered by individual
translators meant that they worked in a kind of vacuum, depending mainly on
their instincts and their own resources. Omission and compression are the two
basic strategies adopted by translators in this period, including the
well-thought-out translation projects undertaken by the UNESCO. The
translators added, deleted and reordered materials, often in an arbitrary
fashion, the common plea being that they were trying to make the work more
suitable to the target readership.
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