Translating India

IT is well known that India has a translating consciousness and we keep translating every moment of our active lives. He has delineated the motifs behind his work in a dedicatory letter to his translator, W. Dumergue: “First my wife’s oft-expressed desire to read in her own language a novel written after the English fashion, and secondly a desire on my part to try whether I should be able to create a taste amongst my Malayalee readers not conversant with English, for that class of literature represented in the English language by novels, of which at present they… have no idea, and… to illustrate to my Malayalee brethren the position, power and influence that our Nair women who are noted for their natural intelligence and beauty, would attain in society, if they were given a good English education and finally to contribute my mite towards the improvement of Malayalam literature, which I regret to observe, is fast dying out by disuse as well as by abuse.” Nandshankar Mehta also has similar things to say about his Gujarati novel Karan Ghelo : “The former education inspector of our state Mr Russell has expressed to me his desire to see Gujarati books written along the lines of English novels and romances. Premchand got translated into almost all major Indian languages; this was also the case with writers like Thakazhi, Basheer, Jayakanthan, Akhilan, Savitri Roy, K.A. Modernist trends Later, when modernist trends began to appear in Indian languages, they were also spurred on first by translations from abroad like the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, Rainer Maria Rilke, T.S. Gradually, the Indian radicals also began translating one another’s poetry so that the works of poets like Dhoomil, Pash, Amarjit Chandan, Samar Sen, Saroj Dutta, Varavara Rao, Cherabanda Raju and several others began to appear in languages like Malayalam, where there was a strong people’s cultural movement allied to Maoist revolutionaries.