As scholar, critic, translator Gayatri Spivak turns 80, an extract from an exhilarating 1998 speech

I am deeply honoured that the Sahitya Akademi have decided to acknowledge my efforts to translate the fiction of Mahasweta Devi. At any rate, I proposed a translation of Mahasweta’s short story ‘Draupadi’ for Critical Inquiry, with the required essay on deconstruction plotted through a reading of the story. Not only did Mahasweta Devi not remain Gayatri Spivak’s way of freeing herself from France, but indeed the line between French and Bengali disappeared in the intimacy of translation. But let me crave your indulgence for a moment and cite a couple of sentences, withholding theory, that I wrote in a letter to my editor Anjum Katyal of Seagull Books, when I submitted to her the manuscript of my translation of ‘Murti’ and ‘Mohanpurer Rupkatha’ by Mahasweta Devi: the aporias between gendering on the one hand and the ideology of national liberation on the other, are also worth contemplating. Shri Namwar Singh, professor of Hindi at Jawaharlal Nehru University, who presided over the occasion, will remember that instructors at the Department of Modern Indian Literatures at Delhi University had asked me in 1987 why, when Bangla had Bankim and Tagore, I had chosen to speak on ‘Shikar’, one of the stories included in Imaginary Maps.