Riddles of Belonging: India in Translation and Other Tales of Possession

Four: A Divided Sense

168 f o u r A Divided Sense The Displaced No-Place of Vernacular-English Exchange How do we map those acts of literary exchange that take place across languages ? Pollock might champion the idea that in the Sanskrit cosmopolis the site of power was “nowhere in particular,” but in the world where we live today, if the mother tongue you write in is Rajasthani or Gı̄kūyū, having your work sited “nowhere in particular” might not necessarily represent the triumphant challenge to global center-periphery binaries that Pollock imagines for world literature circa 300 to 1300 ce.1 If, like Vijay Dan Detha or Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o, your Rajasthani or Gı̄kūyū writing is celebrated in English on the Web, translated and published in the online journal Words Without Borders, for example, or on the Commonwealth Foundation’s official page announcing the short list for the 2007 Booker Prize, someone could well argue that your literary work can no longer claim to be sited at the periphery.2 And this may be so, but I would A Divided Sense 169 want to point out that Detha and Ngũgı̃ are both identified in English on those particular Web sites (Words Without Borders, Commonwealth Foundation ) by the country where they grew up (India and Kenya, respectively) and so, in the utopic (no-place) imaginary of the Web, are very much locally placed. Even if the issue of the source languages they wrote in is given scant attention by readers, and even if a writer like Ngũgı̃ is forced to write his work in exile from the country he calls home, these writers working in non-European, non-English vernaculars are sited as peripheral. To ask how we map these translated texts is to ask how we identify and make sense of crucial differences in this nowhere-in-particular, home-(page-)away-from home that is the community of world literature in translation. David Damrosch worries that in this “postcanonical, hypercanonical age,” we pretend to have moved beyond the two-tiered system of major and minor canonical authors which we judge based on gradients of perceived mastery (“Western masterpieces”) to a system so market-driven that it treats world literature as “some literary Miss Universe competition, an entire nation . . . represented by a single author,” with the result that formerly celebrated but “minor” authors such as Premchand and Ghalib (his examples) are now neglected by world literature scholars.3 Damrosch implies that the former expertise of what he calls “the home-country and area-specialist audiences” is now considered so parochial as to be perceived as dowdy, an attitude that helps establish the cultural capital of postcolonial cosmopolitanisms in the name of a vague postnationalism.4 Given that much of the work of these neglected minor authors is more critical of nationalist projects (and in much more specific detail) than much of the work of professedly postnationalist cosmopolitan writers like Salman Rushdie , it might help to ask more specifically: What is the place of vernacular literature in the world today? Salman Rushdie himself tries answering this question in his introduction to The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947–1997 by focusing more on the question of the literary and less on vernacularity. Given that the anthology promises to celebrate fifty years of Indian nationhood, his assumption that the literary and the vernacular are mutually exclusive categories caused quite some controversy when it was published. Since his map of world literature seems to make clear where he locates vernacular literature (that is, at the periphery), I would rephrase the above question to ask instead: How might we value vernacular literature in translation? 170 A Divided Sense Since the days of the fatwa following the publication of The Satanic Verses, we are no doubt used to Rushdie provoking us. Here, too, in the introduction to this anthology, he cannot seem to resist playing up his own ambivalences about the country of his birth in such a way that resonates both home and abroad (however one maps those terms): he describes the diversity of the Indian experience in terms of the country’s vast size (“Put India in the Atlantic Ocean and it would reach from Europe to America; put India and China together and you’ve got almost half the population of the world”) and its teeming culture (“that vast, metaphoric, continent-sized...