This Blog-post is a response to the thinking activity task on 'Comparative Studies' given by our professor Dr.Dilip Barad Sir. To know more about Comparative Literary Studies, CLICK HERE.
Here I hyperlinked other articles.
Article 1. 'Why Comparative Indian Literature?' by Sisir Kumar Das
Article 2. Comparative Literature in India by Amiya Dev.
Article 3. 'An Overview of its History; by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta
Article 4. What is Comparative Literature Today? by Susan Bassnett
Article 6. Translation and Literary History: An Indian View by Ganesh Devy
Article. 7 On Translating a Tamil Poem' by A.K. Ramanujan
Article. 8 History in Translation by Tejaswni Niranjana
The task assigned by our professor is to read the article and give an Introductory presentation on a particular topic with our group members. We studying the paper, 'Comparative Literature and Translation Studies in which the eighth article 'History in Translation' by Tejaswni Niranjana presented by Hinaba Sarvaiya, Bhavna Sosa, and Dhvani Rajyaguru on 19 December 2022.
Introduction/Key Points:
In the article, Niranjana's concern is to explore the place of translation in contemporary Euro-American literary theory (using the name of this "discipline" in a broad sense) through a set of interrelated readings. She argues that the deployment of "translation" in the colonial and post-colonial contexts shows us a way of questioning some of the theoretical emphases of poststructuralism.
1. Situating Translation:
Colonial relations of power have often been reproduced in conditions that can only be called neocolonial, and ex-colonials sometimes hunger for the "English book" as avidly as their ancestors.
By now it should be apparent that I use the word translation not just to indicate an interlingual process but to name an entire problematic. It is a set of questions, perhaps a "field," charged with the force of all the terms used, even by the traditional discourse on translation, to name the problem, to translate translation.
The thrust of displacement is seen also in other Latin terms such as transponere, transferre, reddere, vertere. In my writing, translation refers to:
(a) the problematic of translation that authorizes and is authorized by certain classical notions of representation and reality; and
(b) the problematic opened up by the post-structuralist critique of the earlier one, and that makes translation always the "more," or the supplement, in Derrida's sense.
Niranjana's study of the translation does not make any claim to solve but it seeks rather think through this gap,. this difference, to explore the position. of the obsessions and desires of translation, and thus to describe the economies within which the sign of translation circulates. Her concern is to probe the absence, lack, or repression of an awareness of asymmetry and historicity in several kin sown ng on translation.
The post-colonial distrust of the liberal-humanist rhetoric of progress and of universalizing master narratives has obvious affinities with post-structuralism.
A critique of historicism might show us a way of deconstructing the "pusillanimous" and "deceitful" Hindus. Her concern here is not, of course, with the alleged misrepresentation of the "Hindus.". Rather, I am trying to question the withholding of reciprocity and the essentializing of "difference".
Niranjana states at the end of this point that, her concern is not, of course, with the alleged misrepresentation of the "Hindu". Rather, she tries to question the withholding reciprocity and the essentializing of "difference"
2.Translation as Interpellation:
Her main concern in examining the texts of Jones is not necessarily to compare his translation of Sakuntala or Manu's Dharmasastra with the so-called originals. Rather, what I propose to do is to examine the "outwork" of Jones's .translations-the prefaces, the annual discourses to the Asiatic Society, his charges to the Grand Jury at Calcutta, his letters, and his "Oriental" poems-to show how he contributes to a historicist, teleological model of civilization that, coupled with a notion of translation presupposing transparency of representation, helps construct a powerful version of the "Hindu" that later writers of different philosophical and political persuasions incorporated into their texts in an almost seamless fashion.
The most significant nodes of Jones's work are:
(a) the need for translation by the European, since the natives are unreliable interpreters of their own laws and culture;
(b) the desire to be a lawgiver, to give the Indians their "own" laws; and
(c) the desire to "purify" Indian culture and speak on its behalf.
In Jones's construction of the "Hindus," they appear as a submissive, indolent nation unable to appreciate the fruits of freedom, desirous of being ruled by an absolute power, and sunk deeply in the mythology of an ancient religion. In a letter, he points out that the Hindus are "incapable of civil liberty," for "few of them have an idea of it, and those, who have, do not wish it''
Jones's disgust is continually mitigated by the necessity of British rule and the "impossibility" of giving liberty to the Indians.
The idea of the "submissive" Indians, their inability to be free, and the native laws that do not permit the question of liberty to be raised are thus brought together in the concept of Asian despotism.
he be- gan to learn Sanskrit primarily so that he could verify the interpretations of Hindu law given by his pandits. In a letter, he wrote of the difficulty of checking and controlling native interpreters of several codes, saying: "Pure Integrity is hardly to be found among the Pandits [Hindu learned men] and Maulavis [Muslim learned men], few of whom give opinions without a culpable bias". Before embarking on his study of Sanskrit, Jones wrote to Charles Wilkins, who had already translated a third of the Dharmasastra: "It is of the utmost importance, that the stream of Hindu law should be pure; for we are entirely at the devotion of the native lawyers, through our ignorance of Shanscrit.
Even before coming to India, Jones had formulated a solution for the problem of the translation of Indian law.
Two main kinds of translators of Indian literature existed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: administrators like William Jones and Christian missionaries like the Serampore Baptists William Carey and William Ward.
William Ward's preface to his three-volume A View of the History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos 38 is instructive for the virulence with which it attacks the depravity and im- morality of the natives.
Unlike William Jones, however, Ward does not see the present state of the Hindus as a falling away from a former Golden Age. Instead, like James Mill, who quotes him approvingly and often, Ward sees the Hindus as corrupt by nature, lacking the means of education and improvement. He suggests that the "mental and moral improvement'' of the Hindus is the "high destiny" of the British nation. Once she was made "enlightened and civilized," India, even if she became independent, would "contribute more to the real prosperity of Britain" by "consuming her manufactures to a vast extent.'
In the last part of this discussion, Niranjana makes a critique of history. She states that The critique of historicism may help us formulate a complex notion of historicity, which would include the "effective history' of the text; this phrase encompasses questions such as: Who uses/interprets the text? How is it used, and for what?" Both the critique of representation and the critique of historicism em- power the post-colonial theorist to undertake an analysis of what Homi Bhabha (following Foucault) has called technologies of colonial power. These critiques also enable the reinscription of the problematic of translation: the deconstruction of colonial texts and their "white mythology" helps us to see how translation brings into being notions of representation and reality that endorse the founding concepts of Western philosophy as well as the discourse of literary criticism.
3. The Question of "History"
At the final of this article. Niranjana's concern is not to elaborate on the battle for "history" now being staged in Euro-American theory but to ask a series of questions from a strategically perspective that of an emergent post-colonial practice willing to profit from the insights of post-structuralism, while at the time demanding ways of writing history in order to make so of how subjectification operates.
She elaborates that how the word historicity to avoid invoking History with a capital H, my concern being with "local" practices (or micro practices as Foucault calls them) of translation that requires no overarching theory to contain them.
"History," in the texts of post-structuralism, is a repressive force that obliterates difference and be- longs in a chain that includes the meaning, truth, presence, and logos.
The point is not just to criticize these characterizations as "inadequate" or "untrue"; one should attempt to show the complicity of the representations with colonial rule and their part in maintaining the asymmetries of imperialism.
It is part of my argument that the problematics of translation and the writing of history are inextricably bound together, I shall briefly go over Spivak's main points regarding the Subaltern historians.
Derrida's double writing can help us challenge the practices of "subjectification" and domination evident in colonial histories and translations. The challenge will not, however, be made in the name of recovering a lost essence or an undamaged self. Instead, the question of the hybrid will inform our reading. As Bhabha puts it:
Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities; it is the name for the strategic re- versal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the "pure" and original identity of authority). Hybridity is the re-valuation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects. It displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination.
Conclusion/Concluding remark:
In the concluding part of the article, Niranjana about Hybridity. She noted that the notion of hybridity, which is of great importance for a Subaltern critique of historiography as well as for a critique of traditional notions of translation, is both "ambiguous and historically complex." 96 To restrict "hybridity," or what I call living in translation to a post-colonial elite is to deny the pervasiveness, however heterogeneous, of the transformations wrought across class boundaries by colonial and neocolonial domination. This is not to present a meta-narrative of global homogenization, but to emphasize the need to reinvent oppositional cultures in nonessentializing ways. Hybridity can be seen, therefore, as the sign of a post-colonial theory that subverts essentialist models of reading while it points toward a new practice of translation.
Here are the presentation video and the presentation.
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