India As A Translation Area: Some Cud-chewing

P.P.Giridhar

 Whether emancipatory or censure, translation is power-not simply an instrument of power or of a certain power but intrinsically power, without which there is no translation.

                                                               Jean Marc Gouanvic

        Translation entails at the same time a relinguisticisation, a recodification and a reculturisation., which means encoding a conceptual cosmos, a sociocultural world, an alien thought movement in another linguistic code. One is at the same time reculturising the code at issue. The paper seeks to investigate the issue of whether such relinguisticisation and cultural recontextualisation across Indian language-pairs have anything in common. This issue is clearly bound up with issues such as whether the Translation Area that India could possibly be is a consequence of it being a Linguistic Area and a Sociocultural Area, a Semantic Area. Except for the northeast and certain other topographical pockets, India is a Sociocultural Area. It appears that India is more of a Sociocultural Area than a Linguistic Area, which is all the more reason why it should be considered a Translation Area. It will pass up questions such as whether India is a Sociocultural Area in situ, or as an outcome of convergence. Issues such as the putative thesis of unity in diversity and the blurring of the line between original writing and translation that happened, and that still keeps happening in India atleast for time-tested epics will be examined for their contribution to the formation of India as Translation Area .

      As the title suggests, the exposition is some cud-chewing. It is a first approximation, if not an array of shots in the dark, of a complex question that can not be addressed in its totality in the confines of a single paper, given India 's civilisational complexity and its delightfully rich and colourful multilingual ethos. It suggests possibilities and hints at pointers to answers to the question of India as a translation area. It raises questions the elaborate answers to which could lead one on the road to the arena of the translation area that India could possibly be. A more definitive picture could emerge only with more research and investigation into the various 'blogs' thrown up here.

     Contact-induced commonalities in linguistic behaviour are what lead to a 'linguistic area'. A 'linguistic area' is a geographical area, a geopolitical area that shows convergence in linguistic structure because of the coexistence of the languages concerned over a significantly long period of time. Languages show an osmotic capacity to adopt and adapt elements from languages they are in contact with. Oriya, for example, shows Dravidian features because of a long period of coexistence with speakers of Dravidian languages. Sanskrit has long been known to have got its retroflexes from Dravidian languages. Konkani has shown convergence with Kannada in syntax, which is a remarkable thing to happen. 'Translation compounds' in languages (eg jal-paan , tan-badan ) showing osmotic changes in the lexical items are evidence of the capacity of languages to absorb and adapt. India seems to be a translation area not so much because it is a linguistic area as because it is a sociocultural area. This is because one translates not languages but sociocultural worlds that speakers of languages inhabit. This throws up the curious fact that linguistically different languages could enshrine common ways of living and thinking.

     A number of things are said about translation in India . That the author and the translator merge(d) seamlessly, and that there is/was no distinction between original writing and translation. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata have been appropriated by the regional languages and changes made in their version as if there was no author and as if there was no copyright violation. These epics, mind you, had authors. In Kamban Ramayana, for example, the Tamil version of the Sanskrit Ramayana Ravana abducts Sita along with the hut she was in without even touching her. As Mukherjee (1981) points out, these translations are considered "complete self-contained literary works irrespective of their sources.", and "writing in this context is not divorced from the act of original composition"

As Paniker (1998) says,

     Innumerable are the versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in Sanskrit and modern Indian languages. While they are not translations in the literal 'modern' sense, they were what people read and understood as incarnations of these two epics.Folk versions, dramatisations, lyrical presentations of selected episodes or scenes, stylised as well as realistic renderings, versions from different points of view --- all these were able to circulate as translations. Few people used to worry about the authenticity of the definitive translation; when the Ramayana was rendered in this way, it became acceptable to the local people. and the process of localisation involved substantial changes in characterisation, plot construction and language.

        This was 'domesticating' at its best when the term domesticating hadn't had its technical charge. Changes brought about in response to the felt needs of the target culture that needed to be narrativised, or for reasons of communicative preferences, cultural norms which are informed by values and so on. Amitav Ghosh (qtd in Simon 2000) avers that this unlike the kind of European classics in translation that we read is a 'continuous life-giving and creative process'. The two kinds of transaction are two different kinds of cultural diffusion, the latter forming a somewhat artificial export culture, the latter resulting in 'a static and potentially oppressive array of cultural goods'. This seems to make a lot of sense, although the locution 'potentially oppressive' cries out for clarification. This lends credence to the current view that translation is no longer a mechanical change of containers, it is not a linguistically driven automated transfer. Very interestingly such innovative retellings, adaptations appropriations, subversions of Sanskrit works in the regional literatures, it has been noted, has had a salutary unifying effect on the Indian psyche! No one seems to feel that this is transgression of the original in any significant or exceptionable way. On the contrary people welcome this and are perfectly happy with it. This is very interesting. I can't resist quoting a beautifully insightful passage from Hermans (2002) as a possible argument for why this is the way it is.. Translation is of interest as a cultural phenomenon precisely because of its lack of neutrality or innocence, because of its density, its specific weight and added value. It it were a merely mechanical exercise, it would be as interesting as a photocopier. It is more interesting than a photocopier in that it presents us with a privileged index of cultural self-preference, or if you prefer, self-definition. The practice of translation comprises the selection and importation of cultural goods from outside a given circuit, and their transformation into terms which the receiving community can understand, if only in linguistic terms, and which it thus recognises, to some extent atleast, as its own. And because each translation offers its own, overdetermined, distinct construction of the 'otherness' of the imported text, we can learn a great deal from these cultural constructions-and from the construction of self which accompanies them. The paradigms and templates which a culture uses to build images of the foreign offer privileged insight into self-definition.

      Translation then is not quite 'rational reconstruction'. It is production, rather than a reproduction, of a world mediated by the translating consciousness which is a kaleidoscopic welter of things defining the self as against the 'other'. It is some kind of 'imagined (mediated) rationality' which is one characterisation of metaphor. This is the reason why all translations tend to be plural, decentred, hybrid, multitrack, multilithic and polyphonic. Translations are not transparent representations of the original. This trend, to come back to translation in India , has continued in the twentieth century, as has been noted again, with the Bangla Saratchandra getting subverted in its Telugu and Tamil avatars. This is quite in tune with the trend in TS these days. There is now in the translatorial transaction give and take between the source and target cultures, a dialogue between the source and target cultures. Negotiating, redoing ('manipulating' is the word used, which I think is too strong.) the original in the service of local, regional needs, if not of power and ideology, seemed to have obtained in India long back. One wonders whether it is true now. Epics are oceans built by a collective unconscious represented by a single author from which one could freely draw. Even now one could for example effect changes in Ramayan Darshanam (Kannada, Kuvempu) in its avatar in another language without much objection but can a Samskara (Kannada, UR Ananthamurthy) undergo any change on its way to other languages the way the epics did ? This however did happen in Nineteenth century India when fidelity was not a virtue in the practice of translation, or as Shantha Ramakrishna (2000) puts it, fidelity was understood in a different way. Vidyarthi's translation of Victor Hugo's Quatre-Vingt-Treize may be argued to be no translation at all but adaptation at its worst. Shantha argues for the 'relevance' of a translation to its specific time and audience. "If the relevance" she continues, "of a translated work consists in how it is received and what it means to the target culture, we may conclude that Vidyarthi's Hindi translation of the French text was a relevant one." We move thus from 'fidelity' to 'relevance' as a measure of translatorial ontology. In the 1930's when Tamil stalwarts translated the best in the foreign literature into Tamil the strategy they employed was adaptation. We see that what is now received wisdom in TS India had long back. The history of translation in India is full of such adaptations, which of course meant deviation from and lack of 'fidelity' to the original. A.K Ramanujan's English translation of Tamil Sangam classics has taken its share of flak for misrepresenting the originals. I have taken my share of flak for messing up an original, a 'classic' Kannada novel. (Gendethimma 1997 Macmillan India Ltd). Mukherjee (1981) argues that the practice of ignoring the copyright of works of art is ingrained in our literary practice and that distinguishing between the original and the translation came to us from the West.

      One could argue that except for pockets like the north east and the extreme north of India there is a deep underlying current of unity running through the whole of India, particularly after the creation of the nation state, and the geopolitical entity called India, a genuine unity because of the sociocultural world we share because of a continuous miscegenation over centuries of coexistence. In a celebrated Ananthamurthyian insight though even as one feels there is a common thread running through the Indian subcontinent one per force pauses to feel the diversity informing the unity, and when one feels we are really a diverse people, a set of peoples rather than a people, the unity informing the diversity comes home to us. As it is, humans are biologically and cognitively prewired almost identically. We homosapiens are much more similar than we assume we are. As de Ward and Nida (1986) aver,

      All peoples share more cultural similarities than is usually thought to be the case. What binds people together is much greater than what separates them. In adjustments to the physical environment, in the organisation of society, in dealing with crucial stages of life (birth, puberty, marriage and death).in the development of elaborate ritual and symbolism, and in the drive for aesthetic expression.people are amazingly alike. Because of all this, translating can be undertaken with the expectation of communicative effectiveness.

     Such being the case one expects a country held together by historical circu mstances and contemporary compulsions and concerns to be substantially the same underlyingly. Theo Hermans (2002) points out that when the Jesuits tried proselytisation in China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they needed to express very Western Christian concepts like 'god', 'heaven' 'sin', 'soul' and so on in Chinese, and they found themselves against a stone wall. In Chinese the only terms available to them were those which echoed Buddhist and Confucian usage. These were wholly incommensurable with the Christian message. The Jesuits, Hermans concludes, were greatly puzzled by their lack of success in China . Absolute expressive equality among natural languages does not seem to exist. If it did how would one explain the historical fact that Hermans has drawn our attention to. And there is no reason for us to doubt the historical fact. Linguists have to realise this. That despite the fact that nothing is ineffable in any language, despite the fact that homo sapiens are cognitively biologically prewired identically, languages are incommensuarble somewhere. This is because, although man antedates language by a long chalk which is what makes linguistic meaning attach separably to form, the relationship between experience and cognition seems basically culture specified, which is what seems to make the linguistic sign iconic. Linguists have long thought with ironclad confidence that the cognitive act of the Eskimoes of cutting up or slicing the empirical construct called 'ice' in English into several units and expressing them in their language is no big deal. That the asymmetric askewness in expression between English and Eskimo in this regard is no big deal. Translation shows that such expressive askewness IS a big deal. English for example has a monopartite expression of the second person pronoun as against a tripartite expression in languages like Hindi/Urdu: 'You' against tuu , tum and aap . Now part of an Urdu poem goes like this:

Aap ban gayi tum

Tum ban gayi tuu

 Consider an English translation of this

You (remote?) turned into you (less remote?)

You (less remote?) turned into you/thee (intimate?)

 Or

 You 1 turned into you 2

You 2 turned into you 3

       The best translation thinkable is nowhere near the delightful expressiveness of the Hindi/Urdu poem. It is all very well to say that this is the way English expresses it and it is okay for the English. This is well taken. It is there for all however to see that English pales into inexpressive colorless inelegance in a crosslinguistic perspective. The point here is that such expressive deadends, aporias and like the one we saw in the English-Chinese case would be rare in a cross-Indian language perspective. Which is an implication of the assertion that we inhabit and share a deeply similar sociocultural world. Which is what could make for or underpin the intense fertile kind of translation area that India could be. On the other hand one has instances like the following: in Kannada for example we have the saying kaaLidu karrage, booLidu beLLage anta maataadtaa kuutkotare , meaning 'people sit around, talk about things that don't concern them, they gossip'. The literal meaning is 'they talk that Kali's is black and Boli's white' Notice that the nouns in the Kannada sentence are nominalised genitives and with the head noun being obligatorily absent it is never known what it is they talk about, what it is about Kali and Boli they talk about. What is talked about is left delightfully open-ended and vague. This open endedness, some kind of interesting piquancy is regrettably lost in languages that make the presence of the head noun obligatory. The notion of a translation area makes sense if no Indian language either nominalises its genitival adjectival expressions leading to the obligatory absence of the head noun or all Indian languages do en block. This is unlikely to be the case since Indian languages are distributed across six language families, and typologically, belong to different groups. One is not saying that this particular linguistic characteristic would define India as a linguistic area. There must obviously be some overarching parameters by which one could declare an area a translation area.

      Are we the Indians the same or similar in our translational behaviour? What would be the parameters by which one judges the sameness or otherwise of translational behaviour? One could talk of tendencies of transfer, the nature of the transit. For example there has been talk of the translator as a stabiliser. That English for example is a language of understatement while Indian languages are typically languages of overstatement. The translator who mediates between the two carriers plays things down when the traffic is between Indian languages and English whereas one plays things up when the direction of flow is from English toward Indian languages. Five dimensions of crosscultural differences have been identified between German and English. Germans or the German language have been shown to prefer positions on the left side while the English prefer those on the right.

Directness Indirectness

Orientation towards the self Orientation toward the other

Orientation towards content Orientation toward persons

Explicitness Implicitness

Ad hoc formulation Use of verbal routines

      This phenomenon is called cultural filtering, the means by which the translator compensates for culture-specificity. We have to see how Indian language-pairs behave and along what parameters. Possibly what Steiner calls 'resistant difference' is not very high among Indian languages, and the 'elective affinity' which is the feeling of empathy or affinity the translator feels for the content of the target text, among them is very high. This would be clear when one translates for example from Angami into Kannada or from Konkani into Meithei, from Hindi into Oriya, or from Santali into Kashmiri, Ladakhi into Malayalam, Khasi into Marathi, Tamil into Bhili, Moyon into Mao Naga, Telugu into Bodo, Bangla into Miri, Konyak into Garo, Kodava into Sema, Marathi into Pochuri and so on. It is usually held that the greater the paratextual rewriting or the 'translator's longhand' as it is called, the greater is the distance between the two languages. Such paratextual writing seems to be greatest when the traffic is from English into Indian languages or the other way round, or from Tibeto-Burman languages into Dravidian languages, and so on. That is, across genetically unrelated languages. There would be such paratextual writing even among genetically related languages as well. The exact nature and extent of the transfer defined in terms of such 'translator's longhand' need to be assessed, determined empirically. By this we would be getting at the exact nature of India as a translation area. The dialogic nature of the cultural transaction called translation would be different for different language-pairs. If it is the same or similar for what are called 'Indian languages' we are a translation area.

     Pidgins and creoles provide a powerful model of the historical form of cultural contact, providing patterns of 'interpenetration and overlay' and as has been noted (Young 1995), they suggest a distinctly different model from that of a straightforward power relation of dominance of the coloniser over the colonised. One wonders if through a long and close coexistence Indian languages could approach such a situation in the distant future. Which would really make it a translation area.

      Translation as a site for intercultural contact, convergence, diffusion, intrusion, fusion, flow and disjunction needs to be investigated in India . The postcolonial cultural dynamics of translation which is different from the dynamics of colonial translation needs to be probed. It has begun to be probed. This could shed light on relations of alterity, power, symbiosis, mutual sustenance and nourishment and so on, the nature of the traffic in general that obtain between and among Indian languages. (Literary) translation is an instance of what happens at the interface between the linguistic, literary and cultural codes. The nature of this interface needs to be studied for the contributory participation of each of these codes. And here, is India a translation area?

      What is the nature of the double existence of translations, that as an independent text and a derivative text, in India ? Is the nature of this dual existence contingent on what is peculiarly Indian? Languages are similar in function although they are different structurally. They have the same function of organizing, cognizing, expressing and communicating such organized cognized world views. Can we mark off India as an entity in this function, which could lead one to set her up as a 'translation area'?

      A translation is a chiaroscuro in terms of which a picture of the source text emerges. We need to find out if, all things being equal, the picture of the source text that emerges from the target text is different for different language-pairs in India and what that is a function of. I remember a distinguished translator saying that the translation of the discourse chunk 'let there be light and there was light' of English sounds odd in Oriya. It is not clear why this is so, why this should be so. It is interesting to speculate and wonder whether this does not happen among Indian languages (?)

      Do we (=Indians) do more 'overt' translation where the process of translation leaves behind traces or 'covert' translation where the translated text does not look like a translation, but is a second original, a translated text designed to look like an original source text in the target language? Do we do both? And driven by what ethosal compulsions and cultural circumstances?

     To perorate after some rambling discursiveness, the notion of India as a translation area could be looked at or conceived from various angles. It could be because it is a sociocultural area, or because of co-existence-induced commonalities in translational behaviour, of similar translation traditions, methodologies, translation models and strategies adopted like the 'domesticating' kind of methodology that has been prevalent in India until recently where translation is seen as a site where the author and the translator meet but the translator turns away from the authorial text in the pursuit of narrativising local moods and needs, catering to the demands of the consciousness of the target culture, working to make the text 'relevant' to the target community rather than mechanically reproduce the original photocopier-like.

WORKS CITED

Ghosh, Amitav. qtd in Sherry Simon (2000)

Hermans, Theo. 2002. Paradigms and Aporias in Translation and Translation Studies in Alessandra Riccardi (ed) CUP

Mukherjee, Sujit. 1981. Translation as Discovery. New Delhi : Allied Publishers.

Paniker, K. Ayyappa. 1998 Towards an Indian Theory of Literary Translation in Tutun Mukherjee (ed) Translation: From Centre to Periphery New Delhi: Prestige.

Ramakrishna, Shantha. 2000. Cultural Transmission Through Translation: An Indian Perspective in Sherry Simon and Paul St Pierre (eds) Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era. Hyderabad : Orient Longman.

Simon, Sherry and Paul, St Pierre . 2000. eds Changing the terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era. Hyderabad :Orient Longman.

Young, Robert J. C. 1995. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London / New York : Routledge.