I shall in my presentation address that part of our theme which the organisers of the symposium have called the historiography of cultural India. This will require going back to the making of colonial Indian consciousness during the 19th century. For, that consciousness constitutes the subsstratum of the India which, through translations from Hindi literature, the symposium is exploring .

It is a long and complex saga. Of that saga I shall, in the next twenty minutes, offer an outline by making three inter-connected points. First, I shall deal with a weird project of translation that a pressing historical necessity obliged educated Indians to undertake. Second, I shall point to the initial bafflement of Indians with the notion of translation. Finally, I shall show how both the selection of texts and the modes of their translation were influenced by the kind of consciousness that was then emerging.

I

Translation, by definition, is for an other. You do not translate for yourself that which you know. Hindi literature is not translated for Hindi readers. ‘Translating India’, the theme we are probing, assumes that, no matter whether done by Indians or non-Indians, the translation of India is for others. India will not be translated for India. Colonial presence obliged Indians to do precisely that.

Things were different in the beginning. Translations and interpretations were done for the foreign masters. When the masters needed to know in the law courts, Indian pundits and maulavis were there to tell them. When the masters decided to codify the vast variety of laws obtaining in India, translators were ready at hand. The large corpus of the Sacred Books of the East was similarly compiled. Individuals like William Jones got attracted to the beauties of Indian literature and undertook translations.

But Indians did not have to translate their own literature and knowledge for themselves.

Things began to change as colonialism, relatively confident of its political position, sought to deepen its hegemonic hold on the colonised people. Without going into the details of the hegemonising project, I shall straightaway illustrate its triumph. I shall do that by referring to two major litterateur-intellectuals who, like most educated Indians of their time, were concerned with the twin question of subjection and envisioning a regenerated, free India.

One of them was Govardhanram Tripathi (1856-1907), the first major Gujarati novelist. It may be significant in the context of our symposium to mention that the Gujarati novelist wrote his diary in English ; and also that he records some dreams that came to him in English. In a lecture delivered in 1891, Tripathi defined an educated Indian as one who could ‘enjoy Shakespeare and Kalidasa’ equally. [1] This definition, actually, was a description of an existing reality. Translations from Sanskrit and English had already started appearing in increasing numbers. This is clear from the following summing up by Ranade, an eminent early nationalist :

… a very sensible contribution to the stock of our best works has been made, and the fact that Spencer, Max Muller, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Bacon, Sir Bulwer Lytton, Buckle, Defoe, Swift, Bunyan, Smiles, and Lubbock have furnished the models for these additions, justifies the hope that the national mind is showing signs of awakening.

Ranade hoped that this two-pronged translation process would ‘enable the national mind to digest the best thoughts of Western Europe with the same intimate appreciation that it has shown in the assimilation of the old Sanskrit learning.’[2]

As a subject people schooling themselves to claim an honourable place under the sun, Indians had hit upon a wonderful strategy. But, then, insidiously and.unbeknown to them, subjection entered their soul. The ideal of equal intimacy with both the traditional and Western knowledge systems was irretrievably damaged. Tradition began to be translated in western terms. You may suspect that I am stretching the meaning of translation. To allay that suspicion, I shall return to Tripathi. When he decided to delve deep into the Upanishads, Tripathi wrote in his diary : ‘I think there is some meaning in all this, which must be translated into the language of modern ideas before I could accept or reject it.’What this translation into the language of modern ideas meant can be seen from the following remark in the same entry :’Nirgun and Nishkarma would not mean more than what Mill would have called « Not manifested through visible sensations ».’[3]

To the end of his life, Tripathi remained engaged in such translation. During 1902-03, he embarked upon a particularly ambitious essay, entitled ‘Adhyatmajivan athva Amarjivan no Shrutibodh’, that sought to explain the basic assumptions and findings of Western physics, chemistry, physiology and psychology in order to test the veracity of traditional Indian knowledge with regard to such issues as God, human volition, man’s immortality, and states of consciousness.

But, and this is significant, Tripathi could never sense the total epistemological submission that this translation implied.

He was not alone in this blindness. Even the few who could see in an occasional moment of insight soon lost their lucidity. This brings me to Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya (1838-94), the second of the two representative litterateur-intellectuals whom I have selected to highlight the significance of that defeatist translation project. In a rare assertion of epistemic independence for the times, Bankim once told European scholars off on the ground, as he put it, that ‘no knowledge to them is true knowledge unless it has passed through the sieve of European criticism.’[4] Yet, Bankim himself could not do without the European sieve. For example, immersed though he was in the Indian aesthetic theory of rasa, he sought to countenance it with Western poetics.[5] Similarly, in his discussion of ancient Indian epistemology, he drew upon Western philosophy to uphold the traditional Indian position(s) with regard to the question of ‘proof’. [6] Again, in an otherwise scintillating essay on Sankhya, a philosophical system he admired immensely, Bankim enlisted contemporary Western psychology and atheism in support of Kapil, the founder of Sankhya.[7]

To return to Shakespeare and Kalidasa, the two emblematic figures, the scales employed by the new breed of educated Indians were necessarily weighed against Kalidasa. Translated into the language of Western literary theory, he would now be valorised as the Shakespeare of India. Shakespeare would not be evaluated in terms of Bharat or Anandvardhan and anointed as the Kalidasa of the West. Reflecting the same trend, Bharatendu Harishchandra (1850-85), the father figure of modern Hindi literature, argued, in his seminal essay on ‘Natak’, for adapting indigenous dramatic forms in the light of Western dramatic forms and principles.[8]

The collective self-distanciation or alienation that this process of rupture marked proved irreversible. Ranade’s hope of equal intimacy with the Self, if I may so put it, and the West was, in a bizarre combination, both belied and realised. In an irreversible process of self-distanciation or alienation, educated Indians began to drift nearer Western.and farther from trditional categories of thought. So rapidly and comprehensively did this happen that philosopher K.C. Bhattacharya (1875-1949) had to warn his people, in the 1920s, against the subtle ‘domination exercised in the sphere of ideas by one culture on another’ He said : ‘Slavery begins when one ceases to feel the evil and it deepens when the evil is accepted as a good.’ Bhattacharya was not heeded. Nor was a more distinguished contemporary of his. This was Gandhi, whose alternative to the West, as proposed in the Hind Swaraj, was completely and summarily rejected in independent India. The defeat of Gandhi’s world-view marks the ultimate triumph of the self-defeating translation project.

II

This brings me to my point about the initial bafflement the notion of translation caused Indians. As the continuing popularity of the Ramayan and the Mahabharata in their innumerable regional and local variants would testify, Indians had for centuries drawn upon the works of other writers. This ultimate tribute to other writers does not, however, seem to have led to a recognition of the individual authors’ ownership of their respective works. Ostensibly, any work that existed out there was meant to be available for others to retell it the way they liked, and claim the retelling as their own independent work.

This tendency can be noticed in the Hindi literary world till the last quarter of the 19th century. The situation with regard to original writing and translation is more fuzzy than scholars seem to have realised. In fact, serious research is required to determine the authorship, as we understand the term today in consonance with the laws and morality of copyright, of several 19th century works. These will include even some celebrated works by celebrated writers.

Let me offer you two rather startling illustrations. One is ‘Angrej Stotra’, a delightful little composition in which Bharatendu Harishchandra reviles the English and their English-educated Indian lackeys. Nowhere in his text does Bharatendu indicate that it is not his work. It has also found its way in various collections of his writings, and not as a translation. But in actual fact Bharatendu’s’Angrej Stotra’ is a verbatim translation of Bankim’s ‘Ingrej Stotra’.

My other example is Radhacharan Goswami’s Budhe Munha Munhase. No less erudite a critic than Ram Vilas Sharma has described Budhe Munha Munhase as one of the most radical texts in the entire Indian literature of the period, and offered it as an example of Goswami’s greatness as a writer. Now, though not verbatim like Bharatendu’s ‘Angrej Stotra’, Goswami’s Budhe Munha Munhase is a translation of Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s well-known farce, Bure Shaliker Bade Rom.

I have in the preceding sentence said Goswami’s Budhe Munha Munhase on purpose. Technically we may retrospectively withdraw from Goswami the authorship of a text he claimed as his own. We may also, for that matter, pronounce him, and others like Bharatendu,guilty of plagiarism. But that will be a hasty exercise in anachronism. It will rather be worth our while to try and see if the notion of translation itself needs to be historically situated. Should we decide to do that, differential notions will come into view during the very period I am talking about. On the one hand will be the likes of Bharatendu and Goswami who, with a clear conscience, rewrote any text they liked and claimed it as their own. On the other hand, we will encounter Bankim, the most ‘translated’ or ‘plagiarised’ Indian author of his time, complaining bitterly about his novels appearing in Hindi without his permission and without any payment to him.

III

It is in the context of this fuzzy situation that I make my last point about the choice and modes of translations and translation-like creations being influenced by the emerging social consciousness. Not necessarily in that order, the didactic, erotic, religious and patriotic would subsume the literature – and consequently the translations – appearing at that time. The categories often overlapped. For example, Bharatendu’s Pakhand Vidamban, rendering in Hindi the third Act of a frequently translated 11th century Sanskrit play, is a burlesque at the same time erotic, lascivious, and religious.

Besides Sanskrit and English, Bangla literature exercised a powerful influence on the making of modern literature not only in Hindi but also in several other Indian langauges. It was only normal that a large number of contemporary writings in Bangla, many of them now forgotten, should have found their way in Hindi, and other Indian languages. Though Bankim would have been an automatic choice for the kind of discussion we are having, I shall rather talk about R.C. Dutt (1848-1909). Dutt is known primarily as a pioneer of what is conventionally called economic nationalism in contradistinction to ‘cultural’ nationalism. This reputation rests on his Economic History of British India, by far the most influential exposé of the exploitative aspect of British rule. What is forgotten about Dutt is what he described as his ‘literary patriotism’. Inspired by this patriotism, he wrote, among other things, six novels and a History of Civilization in Ancient India. The first four of his novels were historical, and they appeared in quick succession between 1874 and 1879.

Dutt’s History of Civilization in Ancient India recalls a glorious past. The historical novels lament the loss of that past. The lament is also a call to the present generation to work for the recovery of old glory. The four novels reveal a sharp divide between the Hindus and the Muslims. You can have an idea of that from merely the titles of two of these novels. They are Rajput Jivan Sandhya and Maharashtra Jivan Prabhat. As is clear, the first is a melancholy account of Maharana Pratap’s defeat at Akbar’s hands, and the other recreates the rivalry between Shivaji and Aurangzeb.

Dutt’s novels fired the imagination of his Hindu readers. All the four were translated in Hindi. It is a measure of the impact of Dutt’s writings that when Maithilisharan Gupta wrote his immensely influential poem, Bharat Bharati (1912-13), the work that influenced his portrayal of ancient Indian glory the most was Dutt’s History of Civilization in Ancient India. Further, in the last section of the poem, that described India’s degenerate present, including the sad state of its fiction, of the two novels mentioned as offering hope, one was Maharashtra Jivan Prabhat.

While he was being lionised for his patriotic literary interventions, Dutt himself was feeling uneasy with the kind of historical fiction that sharpened the Hindu-Muslim divide. He gave his frenetic fiction writing a pause. His fifth novel came out seven years later, and the last even later. Both these novels were in the social realistic mode. Neither received the attention the historical novels did. Nor were they translated at the time,

For reasons too complex to be discussed here, most Hindi writers, like most Hindus of the time, carried a deep antipathy towards the Muslims, even as they realised the need for Hindu-Muslim unity. That antipathy, which masqueraded as nationalism, inclined the Hindus to be fired by Dutt’s historical novels. This affected in a significant way the selection of texts for translation. As also the modes of translation. For, an extra edge can be discerned in the rendering of scenes juxtaposing Hindu valour or generosity and Muslim cruelty or licentiousness.

Before ending this presentation, I shall shift from translation to adaptation to further highlight the point about the mode of treatment. In 1900, a short story, called ‘Indumati’ appeared in the newly launched magazine Sarasvati. Accepting it as an original work, some scholars have described it as the first short story in Hindi. In fact, it is a thinly disguised adaptation of The Tempest. Indumati, a beautiful sixteen year old virgin, is brought up by her father away from human habitation in the forests of Vindhyachal. She is Miranda born as a Hindu. Prospero appears in the story as the fugitive ruler of a Hindu kingdom. But, unlike Prospero, he is not dethroned by his brother. He is attacked and defeated by the last Sultan of Delhi for having refused to send his wife to the Sultan. The deposed ruler vows to give his daughter in marriage to the killer of his enemy. Meanwhile a handsome young man appears in the forest. He and Indumati fall in love. It transpires that the young man has slain the Sultan in battle.

The Tempest inspiring a Hindi retelling of itself for venting the Hindus’ animus against the Muslims is a reminder of the power extra-literary forces exercise over translations/ adaptations.

Notes

8. Hemant Sharma, ed., Bharatendu Samagra, Varanasi, 1987, pp. 555-79.