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translations from south asia 167 167 Translations from South Asia: The Power of Babel Christi A. Merrill South Asia’s historical multilinguality has become synonymous with ethnic diversity, making linguistic identity an integral part of ethnic identity in the twentieth century’s nationalist struggles. As a result, linguistic identity has become as much of a cause for violent division and a rallying call for unity as religious identification has. Today, for example, we see ongoing civil war between Sinhalese speakers and Tamil speakers in Sri Lanka. In the 1970s, the resentment of the Bengali-speaking population of East Pakistan toward Urdu as the national language led in part to the formation of a separate Bengali-speaking state, Bangladesh. Before then, the region’s newfound independence from the British empire resulted not only in the formation of two separate nation-states—Pakistan and India—in 1947, but also in the institutionalization of two separate national languages, Urdu and Hindi, written in scripts associated with Arabic and Sanskrit, respectively. In the decades leading up to independence and partition, it was not clear that Urdu and Hindi should be considered separate, and nationalist leaders such as Mohandas K. Gandhi urged for the adoption of a less sectarian language called Hindustani. Gandhi wanted Hindustani to be written in the more neutral roman letters that did not declare a division between an Islamicized Urdu and a Hinduized Hindi. Even if this impossible compromise could have been worked out, nationalist leaders also had to contend with the fact that speakers of Dravidian languages, such as Tamil, in southern India felt alienated by the prospect of designating an Indo-Aryan language to represent the diversity of Indian speakers. Leaders decided in the end to promote Hindi as the national language in gradual increments but to recognize Tamil, English, Urdu, and eleven other viable idioms as official languages of India. In the intervening years of much contentious struggle, 168 literature in translation eight languages have been added to the number recognized by the Indian constitution. In practice, however, English has continued to be the de facto language of governance and business for the elite in many South Asian countries, serving to bridge linguistic gaps both intranationally as well as internationally among the many languages in use in South Asia. Rather than bemoaning such a situation, many scholars and activists see such daily acts of translation as an opportunity to rethink the terms of such exchanges. G. N. Devy argues that the subcontinent’s long-standing multilinguality promotes what he calls a “translating consciousness” that allows individual speakers to maintain fluid boundaries among the various formal language systems in which they are fluent, and thus to move easily from one register or dialect to another without signaling the move as a transgression of fixed linguistic categories (135). Meenakshi Mukherjee likewise suggests that “translations have always been a vital part of Indian literary culture even when the word ‘translation’ or any of its Indian language equivalents— anuvad, tarjuma, bhashantar, or vivartanam—were not evoked to describe the activity. . . . Translations, adaptations, abridgements and recreations were overlapping activities and it was not considered important to mark their separate jurisdictions” (187). Both Mukherjee and Devy insist that traditionally , such works have not been judged on their ability to replicate a prior text; instead, in Devy’s words, they were evaluated on the basis of their “capacity to transform, to translate, to restate, to revitalize the original” (147). At its best, such an approach promotes a flexible heterogeneity that might serve as a model for challenging us to rethink the ways we demarcate difference in the rhetoric of nationalist-minded or even globalized identitarian politics. For a theorist such as Tejaswini Niranjana, the issue is not the relationship of the original to its derivative per se but rather the hierarchies of relation that arepartofthereceivedrhetoricoftranslationin English.Sheisespeciallycritical of translation projects that apply such an approach in order to “fix” South Asian literature to make it seem derivative of European examples, therefore depicting South Asian culture as chronically lagging behind. While the history of translation into English is rife with images of the translator slavishly following in the footsteps of the author, the hierarchical implications of such spatialized imagery is especially potent in the context of relations between European and South Asian cultures. Niranjana, like so many theorists of postcoloniality, cites Thomas Macauley’s infamous 1835 “Minute on Indian Education” that was part of the debate about the official language of adminis- [18.218.61.16...

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