Before the Translation: Madan Soni

If, for a short period, we were to agree to think of the source language as the target language’s ‘other’, it may be possible to imagine a translation – you may call it an ideal translation- where a text may preserve its undistorted identity in ‘another’ language. Where translation is not simply a means for the target language to express itself in reference to the other, but an opportunity to witness itself from the site of the other. We may refer to this as translation’s dialogic form where two texts or languages approach closest to each other, discarding the extremities of their otherness; a relationship of ‘intimate distance’, in Nirmal Verma’s phrase, one where the relation between the two languages turns most economical without compromising the otherness that defines it.

But Europe and India have not had only such a relationship. Irrespective of the present shape of this connection, its foundations have been instituted by a certain dominant notion of otherness where the other is perceived as, and I quote Nirmal Verma once more, “ever different from the self, an external entity”, something at once a “source of terror and an object of desire”. To be frank, Europe’s historical relation to India has not been one of understanding the other in its own poetics, but of control and colonization; a relationship where Europe seemed only able to define itself in opposition to the image of an other it had to itself distort through its own concepts and categories. Here, let us note that colonial constructions of ancient Indian texts into European languages played a significant part in configuring this relationship. The recollection of this past is significant, for it has of course not just become ‘history’ -a dismissive remark that is all too common- but it is a part that in ironical ways continues to shadow the present.

In context of this correspondence, when I consider the problematic of translation of modern Hindi literature into a European language, it appears before me as a different metaphor. Breaking out of the confines of a relationship between two languages, the metaphor of translation, as it were, begins to appropriate the relation between these two cultures; it becomes a metaphor for Europe’s relation to India. Clearly this experiment of the metaphor, draws an equivalence between translation and colonization. It may appear like to be a reductive, even an unfounded metaphor. It could be argued that in equating the two, this metaphor at once tries to de-demonify colonialism, justify it as a liberal-humanist enterprise, and to ridicule the act of translation as a reproachable, inhuman activity. Perhaps, the equation is absurd by itself. But in the context of the relationship between India and Europe, it may not seem quite as inappropriate if we were to recognize a specific form of translation – you may call it a “poor” translation, though it certainly enjoys a good amount of prestige in our parts- one that is instituted at such an extreme point of colonization and violent suppression of the ‘original’ [1] that it subsumes the signature of the ‘original’ and installs itself in the other’s place. And you soon begin to see and treat it as ‘the original’. Postcolonial India, I feel, is such a translated India. And so ‘translating India’ as the title of this symposium is not just a figurative expression, it reads like a literal one; except that the project of translating India was finished long ago. A major translator called colonialism has been at work. So, perhaps what remains to be done, and what we do most of the time in the name of translation, is a sort of transliteration of an already translated India.

Before getting into the intricacies of the construction and transmission of representations of Indian culture, and the motives and rationales that guide contemporary translations or translators, we need to take into account this ‘cultural translation’; the fact that India as it exists is already translated. We also need to consider how Hindi literature has accounted for this phenomenon, and the kinds of responses that have become a part of its constitution.

By ‘colonization’, I am of course not trying to indicate the easily highlighted aspect of political subjugation that the Indian freedom movement concentrated on, to more or less successful effect. Instead, my metaphor is pointing at another aspect of colonialism, an aspect which was considered ‘positive’, one that had left a strong impression on the intellectuals of the period. I’m trying to point towards the dream of a ‘modern’ India projecting out of a colonial experience, which the Indian intelligentsia seemed to so spontaneously welcome and embrace; but for a lone exception in Gandhi who with his characteristic perceptiveness could recognize the acute psychological repression inherent to colonialism, and who struggled to make it the primary object of national resistance. The way Gandhi was rejected and ridiculed, by the closest of his friends and followers, is evidence enough of the strong attraction a ‘modern’ India had for the Indian intelligentsia.

Postcolonial discourse recognizes, and have repeatedly emphasized that the dream of a modern India was projected in contrast to the image of contemporary India constructed by British rulers and their scholarly or missionary associates based on their political economic interests and intellectual and racial prejudices; of course, with translations of ancient Indian texts playing a major role. Such readings have also shown how the India thus constructed was a dark, savage, superstitious, inert, backward, passive, dormant, aged, pusillanimous, effeminate, child-like, profane, fallen, corrupt, immoral, brutal, and unjust culture. However, the complicity of Indian intellectuals in the construction of this ‘idea’, that I wish to emphasize here, has not been sufficiently recognized. To what extent the Indian intelligentsia had embraced colonial observations on India is evident in the pratidhvani(s) (echoes) of those observations in the renaissance rhetoric that emerged from Calcutta/Kolkata in the nineteenth century. (Pratidhvani translates as ‘echo’ in English but I wish to emphasize the possible bivalency of the word, where it may signify both the repetition of a sound, and a counter sound that repeats the first sound in the process of countering it). Of course, the renaissance described in Hindi as Punarjagarana (literally, ‘reawakening’), and Gyanodaya (literally, ‘enlightenment’), itself carried the pratidhvanis of the European renaissance and its presupposition of the rising of the modern world from the remnants of a dark age. It also carried the echoes of the enlightenment project of universal peace, happiness, and progress going on in Europe, and ironically producing colonialism and its characteristic vocabulary that we have been discussing. When a translation of Indian past and present in the terms of European dark ages arrives with the counter signature of the Indian punarjagarana, it hardly looks a translation. It is possible to hear the echoes of these ‘terms’ even in quotations from the “original” language and “original” texts ( I mean the Upanishads) to such extents that the colonial version appears as if it were not just a translation but a transliteration of the original.

It is obvious that figures of darkness, death, untruth, inertia, dormancy, and ignorance that the rhetoric of punarjagarana invokes do not come from Upanishadic thinking, where all these are simply aspects of being. They were actually attributes of the very image of the “plight of India” (bharat durdasaa, also the title of a popular poem by Bhartendu Harishchandra) that colonization had shaped. But such complicity was not limited to an endorsement of colonial observations and their dutiful reproduction. Much deeper, it was marked by internalizing these observations and in translating a culture’s self, its past and present, its religion and society in western terms and categories; a translation supported by footnotes that were either apologetic of the ‘native’ tradition, or promised and proposed reforms, or exaggerated elements of native culture to prove them equal to or greater than their European counterparts. Overall, it was a translation of India’s pagan ethos into the power-knowledge-power oriented vocabulary of liberal humanistic ideals, linear time and Semitic theology.

It is this colonial inheritance – a ‘translated India’- that manifests in India’s ironical present. The irony may be witnessed in India’s strange location where on the one hand, it is uprooted off its tradition such that this tradition is no more the rhythm of its being but something confined to its external manifestations only ritually accessible, or is forgotten/disowned indiscreetly; while on the other, the modernity that it paid this heavy price for has not become its second nature and remains more an imposed gift than a fruit of its own labors. Perhaps the best outcome of modernity on the Indian consciousness expressed itself as a sense of nationhood and desire for freedom that helped it break free of political subjugation. Else its relation with modern institutions is not very different from the external relations it has with its traditional institutions and the pantheon of gods and goddesses.

Communal and caste violence, atrocities against minorities, dalits, women and children, female feticide, disastrous damage to nature and environment, the great middle class loot, unimaginable corruption among politicians and bureaucrats, poverty such that malnutrition is a common cause of death, suicides of debt-ridden farmers, the displacement of divinity from the countryside and the huts of the poor to middle-class kitsch and amidst the cacophony of mushrooming “temples”, the appropriation of all personal and public spaces in a globalized market place, the assumption of these forms into the rhythm of politics, and finally the appropriation by such politics, installed as the ultimate gaze, of a multitude of worldviews-this typical scenario of contemporary India is neither part of its tradition nor of modernity. So absolute is the disjuncture that a reference to either ‘tradition’ or ‘modernity’ precipitates into a self-contradictory formulation. Surely there exist forces that resist the anomaly of this state but it would be difficult to argue that these are not animated by the same factors.

I thought it important to dwell at length on this rather familiar narrative of the constitutive process of “modern” Indian reality for it has a profound and complicated relationship with the subject matter we know as “modern Hindi literature”. Indeed the modernity of this literature that began to take shape in the early decades of the last century is itself a byproduct of this constitutive process. This byproduct was as extraordinary and revolutionary an event in the history of Hindi literature as modernity in Indian history; it came forth as nothing less than a new medium- prose- and a new form of language – khari boli. Prose, the new medium, was not just the offspring of modernity; here, it was its founder and pioneer. Not only was it to enrich Hindi literature with such forms as the short story, the novel, the essay, and criticism, but it also inaugurated into Hindi poetry a modern sensibility and the rhythm of prose.

If at this particular juncture, Hindi literature that despite inheriting a convention which regarded prose as the ‘ touchstone of poetry’ (गद्यं कविनां निकषं वदन्ती) and a rich prose tradition in its ancestral language Sanskrit, never developed a prose tradition in 900 years of its history, suddenly happened to witness a flourish of prose, it could only have been some ‘other’ prose. This was not a case of reinvention of a prose with a tradition, this was a prose that in Ramesh Chandra Shah’s words, “characteristically had a way out of tradition”; not one referred as ‘the touchstone of poetry’ ,but one that had modernity for its test. It emerged in the epoch of colonization and “renaissance”, with the same logic of resistance and internalization that I discussed in relation to the Orientalist construction of Indian culture, perhaps only in a marginally different form. Translation again played an equally significant role: if translations by British scholars and Christian missionaries had an important part in propagating the Orientalist construct of India in contrast to its modern image, translations of Christian religious texts into India’s native languages to spread the word of ‘God’ had an equally crucial role in modeling a prose that would serve as a blank slate for modernity. The irony here is worth a note, prose, the medium of missionary activity, was to become the first and most powerful medium of secular literature in Hindi. In another important act of translation, in these early years Hindi authors were to translate a substantial volume of English prose into Hindi to sustain the prose initially used to counter missionary activity, and to shape it according to modern sensibilities.

There is no denying that the invention of khari boli was a major historical event; however, the overall project for modernization of Hindi literature, with its regulating psyche, logic and effects was little different from the project of the modernization of India executed by its enlightened intellectuals. It was similarly, and to an equal degree, animated by the Orientalist bhashya (commentary) of India. Here too, in “Oh! India’s plight I cannot bear” (हा हा! भारत दुर्दशा देखि न जाए), “who we were, what we have become, what else we are to be”( हम कौन थे, क्या हो गए हैं, और क्या होंगे अभी) “a new vigor returned into hoary India, she fought like a man, the queen of Jhansi”( बूढे भारत में भी आई फिर से नई जवानी थी, खूब लड़ी मर्दानी वह तो झाँसी वाली रानी थी), and in the endless evocations of ‘waking up’, ‘rising’, and ‘marching forth’ one may hear pratidhvanis of the same Bhashya. These pratidhvanis may also be heard in the rejection of Reetikaal (the greatest movement of secular poetry within Hindi’s own tradition, which immediately preceded the modern period) inspired by Christian morality; and so also in the discourse on tradition in many important writers including Jayshankar Prasad, Prem Chand, and Hajari Prasad Dwivedi. This is Hindi’s very own Orientalism – an unconscious, latent Orientalism.

Chhayavaad is perhaps the last stop in the journey to modernization when moments of uncertainty and hesitation may still be witnessed, where literature, before rushing to absolute awakening, could yet in its oneiric state feel the sensations of a tradition engraved deep in its unconscious. Otherwise, barring a very few exceptions, Hindi literature has steadily carried on with this journey, be it in the light of an amnesia of tradition or under a ‘torch of history’, which consumes tradition for fuel. As Agyeya remarked, “in our literature, we do not see our skepticism, nor our concerns. We only see their concerns, their skepticism, and their tragedy. We consider ourselves modern in that respect…we are not concerned about what our concerns should be”.

The modernity of Hindi literature may easily be discerned in its foundations that are basically a translation or transformation of the foundations of a Western modernity based on the dichotomy of God versus man. Heavenly/earthly, religion/literature, saint/poet, mythical consciousness/historical consciousness, tanmayata/tadvivek [2] , timeless/contemporary, fiction or fantasy/reality, imaginative vision/moral vision, impersonal/personal, public/private, comedy/tragedy are the binary opposites that construct these foundations, of which all the firsts are credited to tradition, the seconds to its modernity – without ever considering that the pagan character of Indian tradition hardly permits such binary opposition; that in its pagan conventions endless such opposites continually construct and deconstruct themselves, and that it is only in the radiations from this constant construction and deconstruction that this Paganism evolves itself.

The second important evidence of being oblivious of tradition may be found in modern Hindi criticism which has almost no correspondence with the rich, two thousand year long tradition of Indian poetics. Most of the semantically pregnant terms of Indian poetics are completely absent here. The commonly used terms/concepts are generally formulations of Western criticism, translated via English. And this state of Hindi criticism can hardly be said to be indifferent to the state of Hindi’s creative literature.

But after a century or more of its identification with the modern, could modernity really become the second nature of Hindi literature? Or is it yet just a drape? Just a translation? Could it internalize the values of modernity or is its relation with modernity similar to that of Indian society with modern institutions? What role has the ‘critical consciousness’ that had Hindi enroll in the school of modernity, in the latter’s relation to itself? How does Hindi literature’s relationship with modernity affect the possibility of a post-modern awakening? If it contains in its genes those very elements of modernity which have produced the typical reality of contemporary India as I tried to map earlier, how can it generate in itself the possibility of offering some meaningful resistance to this reality; to become its counterpoint, to represent it critically? And finally, if it is uninformed of these questions, then what significance does its ‘translation’ have for a Western reader, other than to present itself before this reader as a strangely draped, poor, pitiable relative of his/her own literature?

In my view, when selecting a modern Hindi literary text for translation, a European translator should be able to make a criterion out of how a particular text addresses such questions/problems. For these questions hold not just the source culture or text accountable, but also the target culture and the translated text, and indeed the entire act of translation that in our present discussion emerges as something more than a literary genre, as a space animated by such overwhelming force that its powerful magnetic field destroys the identities of both source and target, of the “original” and the “translated”.

Much of Hindi’s contemporary writing has gone so far ahead and is so absorbed in its contemporariness that it would be useless to expect it to care for its genetics. Nevertheless, there is sufficient writing in Hindi that would sharply negate all my generalizations, writing conscious of these questions and adequately prepared to face, to hold its own before them. More so in poetry, than in prose. Perhaps despite the modern influence, poetry could find resistance in the force of its own tradition. Prose’s case, as we know, is not one of being influenced by modernity but of being characteristically modern; it therefore has had to inculcate this consciousness and power from within. Of the many possible examples of such writings, I briefly discuss one, Nirmal Verma’s fiction, for a concluding note to this essay. The purpose of the description is only to depict how a writer deals with the unacceptable yet inevitable legacy of colonialism, with this ‘given’ that is at once a curse and a gift, something that is a vital constitutive element of his consciousness before it becomes its subject; a legacy that inhabits his language like an interpreter ever present not just in the dialogue with the other but in dialogues in the self, one that has so conditioned his medium of expression that all his experience is always already in conformity.

While citing Nirmal Verma, I do not wish to entertain certain misgivings regarding the relation of his writing to Europe based on the observation that European locale/characters are all too common there, and for which the progressive community of Hindi literature often labels him an ‘outside’ writer. I think this is merely a consequence of his frequent stays in Europe, and in the context of the present discussion this reference is at most a seductive blank reference. Europe, whether culturally or politically, directly or indirectly, is never the context of Nirmal Verma’s fiction. To him Europe is neither a ‘home’ nor an ‘outside’. His writing is not enacted as a conflict between two cultures with well-defined identities and boundaries where one has the option, however painful, of choosing between the two. It is not a site of accident or conflict; rather, the conflict or accident is its invisible backdrop. In the existential condition of Nirmal Verma’s characters are to be found metamorphosed traces of some calamity that struck long ago that, in Mir’s words, suggests “ask not of the extent my heart is ruined, it seems a legion marched over this path.” (दिल की आबादी की इस हद है खराबी कि न पूछ, जन जाता है कि इस रह से लश्कर निकला) [3] There is undoubtedly a sense of duality in Nirmal Verma but it is a duality without reference, a duality-in-itself as it were that transmits itself into every relationship, every human situation, multiplying into two points of reference, manifesting as an experience that belongs neither to this point nor that, that is neither at ‘home’ nor away.

It is attracted towards both points; like the divide in Ghalib, “faith restrains me and blasphemy lures; I am stranded between Kaba and Kalisa” (ईमाँ मुझे रोक है, तो खेंचे है मुझे कुफ्र, काबा मेरे पीछे है, कलीसा मेरे आगे) [4] This tension keeps it suspended in an interval, where faith and blasphemy are so embedded that they may not be distinguished. Employing various motifs, metaphors and situational intrigues, Nirmal Verma has powerfully created this interval in his fiction. What however makes this work compelling is the fascinating quality of the prose that instead of simply explicating this experience, participates in its performance, and thereby simultaneously addresses its destiny of being a colonial legacy.

I find this experience of Hindi, this kind of prose and fiction the proper subject of a translation into European languages. Not just because modern India is more convincingly translated in such translation but because for Europe itself that would be a more convincing translation of its own colonial past.

Notes

4. Trans. G. K.