Upper-Caste Idioms in Translation

And what of the debates over multilingualism taking place in languages other than English? Here we must contend with issues of translation in more than one sense, because the translation into English must find a way to convey the multilingual play of the source text, itself considered—by many a postcolonial theorist—to be a type of translation.

G. N. Devy for one has claimed (in After Amnesia [1992]) that, since the Indian subject must learn from birth to communicate in multiple languages, everyone operates with an unmistakable “translating consciousness” that has become an instinctual part of daily language use. Such an assertion forces us to rethink not only the definition of “translation” but also of “language.” Devy’s postcolonial examples feature highly-educated intellectuals shifting smoothly between one or more of India’s official languages and the language of the former colonizer (in this case, English) as well as illiterate speakers switching (unconsciously) to whichever dialect and register their addressees of the moment might understand. India is, after all, characterized by a multilinguality that is decidedly fluid. In this regard, we should add to Devy’s list of examples the ways speakers might emphasize a more Sanskriticized or Arabicized vocabulary in the Hindi-Urdu continuum depending on their interlocutor’s perceived ethnic identity (often understood reductively in Hindu vs. Muslim terms), a strategy the prominent Hindi-Urdu author Munshi Premchand put to particularly artful effect nearly a century ago. Also, we cannot ignore the ways linguistic shifts have been used conventionally to mark caste hierarchies, both to exalt and to insult. Here too Premchand is considered a master of the form: his ability to render these dramatic social interactions in his short stories and novels has made this kind of fluid multilingualism a key feature of Hindi literature since the late colonial era, inspiring generations of subsequent writers, confounding his many English-language translators, and consternating Dalit activists, in particular, who in the last decade have made very public stands denouncing his treatment of untouchable characters. At issue is not only the fact of these characters being represented as untouchables, but of their being portrayed as speaking a distinctive, class-inflected, caste–bound idiom that is essential and inescapable. How do we understand such nuances a language away, in English?

Laura R. Brueck devotes an entire chapter of her recent monograph, Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature (2014), to analyzing the complicated reception of Premchand by Dalit writer-activists—that is, by those who have come into consciousness (“chetna”) about the pervasive oppressiveness of the caste system. Brueck opens her book with a description of the burning of Premchand’s novel, Rangbhumi (1925), at a public park in the center of India’s capital, New Delhi. (An English-speaking reader may want to read Christopher R. King’s 2010 translation, Rangbhumi: The Arena of Life, to understand the wider context of the critique.) The event was staged to raise awareness about the ways mainstream society unthinkingly colludes with an upper–caste mindset and ultimately condones caste–based discrimination. In her discussion, Brueck uses the example to pose more general questions about the vexed relationship of politics to aesthetics in literary criticism. After all, the novel is celebrated in mainstream Hindi criticism for its realistic portrayal of an exceedingly diverse range of characters facing all manner of difficult circumstances. How does the American scholar reconcile these two different ways of valuing (and evaluating) postcolonial literature: as representative works (i.e. Great Books) of important literary traditions around the world, or as evidence of systemic discrimination still taking place in specific local cultures? Her discussion draws attention to the heterogeneity of perspectives on the history of Hindi literature beyond facile colonizer/colonized binaries because it accounts for hierarchies of class, caste, gender, and regional identity in the writing of these very literary histories. She rightly insists that those with literary training need to bring back the focus on issues of rhetorical technique in understanding the forces contributing to those evaluations without...