Jheel Barad's Blog: SITING TRANSLATION- Tejaswini Niranjana

This blog is a response to a task assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad Sir. The syllabus of the Department of English, MKBU includes paper no.- 208 Comparative Literature and Translation studies which includes around 9 articles. We (students) are assigned a task of classroom presentation of assigned articles in a pair. In this blog we are supposed to write abstract, key points / arguments and concluding remarks on all two articles of Unit 4 of paper Comparative Literatures and Translation Studies. It also includes the recording of class presentations presented by respective students. Blogger and her partner have made a presentation on the third article, presentation and a video of a particular article is embedded (as per the task).

ARTICLE 1

SITING TRANSLATION

History, Post- Structuralism and The Colonial Content

Tejaswini Niranjana

This article is an Introduction chapter of Tejaswanini’s book Siting Translation. It is divided into three parts:

Situating Translation
Translation as Interpellation
The Question of “History”

SITUATING TRANSLATION

In a post-colonial context the problematic of translation becomes a significant site for raising questions of representation, power, and historicity, the asymmetry and inequality of relations between peoples, races, languages. Conventionally, translation depends on the Western philosophical notions of reality, representation, and knowledge. Reality is seen as something unproblematic, "out there"; knowledge involves a representation of this reality; and representation provides direct, unmediated access to a transparent reality.

Jacques Derrida suggests-

They come out of and circulate through various discourses in several registers, providing a "conceptual network in which philosophy itself has been constituted." In forming a certain kind of subject, in presenting particular versions of the colonized, translation brings into being overarching concepts of reality and representation.

Translation functions as a transparent presentation of something that already exists, although the "original" is actually brought into being through translation. Paradoxically, translation also provides a place in "history" for the colonized. Tejaswini’s concern here is to explore the place of translation in contemporary Euro-American literary theory through a set of interrelated readings. She argues that the deployment of "translation" in the colonial and post-colonial contexts shows us a way of questioning some of the theoretical emphases of post-structuralism. the larger context of the “crisis" in "English'' that is a consequence of the impact of structuralism and post-structuralism on literary studies in a rapidly decolonizing world.

Tejaswini proposes to make a modest beginning by examining the “uses” of translation. The rethinking of translation becomes an important task in a context where it has been used since the European Enlightenment to underwrite practices of subjectification, especially for colonized peoples.

In my writing, translation refers to

(a) the problematic of translation that authorizes and is authorized by certain classical notions of representation and reality; and

(b) the problematic opened up by the post-structuralist critique of the earlier one, and that makes translation always the "more," or the supplement, in Derrida's sense.

This study of translation explores the positioning of the obsessions and desires of translation, and describes the economies within which the sign of translation circulates . The concern is to probe the absence, lack, or repression of an awareness of asymmetry and historicity in several kinds of writing on translation. A representation thus does not represent an "original"; rather, it re-presents that which is always already represented.

Aspect of post-structuralism is a rethinking of translation is its critique of historicism, which shows the genetic and teleological nature of traditional historiography. The essay questions the withholding of reciprocity and the essentializing of “difference”.

TRANSLATION AS INTERPELLATION

In the projects of William jones- who arrived in India in 1783 to take his place on the bench of the Supreme Court in Calcutta- that translation would serve “to domestic the Orient and thereby turn it into a province of European Learning.” He came to India, declared that his ambition was "to know India better than any other European ever knew it.” The main concern in examining the texts of Jones is not necessarily to compare his translation of Sakuntala or Manu's Dharmasastra with the so-called originals. Rather, what Tejaswini proposes to do is to examine the "outwork" of Jones's translations.

The most significant nodes of Jones's work are

The need for translation by the Europeans, since the natives are unreliable interpreters of their own laws and culture.

The desire to ba lawgiver, to give the Indians their “own” laws; and

The desire to “purify” Indian culture and speak on its behalf.

In Jones's construction of the "Hindus," they appear as a submissive, indolent nation unable to appreciate the fruits of freedom, desirous of being ruled by an absolute power, and sunk deeply in the mythology of an ancient religion. In a letter, he points out that the Hindus are "incapable of civil liberty," for "few of them have an idea of it, and those, who have, do not wish it".

As a Supreme Court judge in India, Jones took on, as one of his most important projects, the task of translating the ancient text of Hindu law, Manu's Dharmasastra. In fact, he began to learn Sanskrit primarily so that he could verify the interpretations of Hindu law given by his pandits. In a letter, he wrote of the difficulty of checking and controlling native interpreters of several codes, saying: "Pure Integrity is hardly to be found among the Pandits [Hindu learned men] and

Maulavis [Muslim learned men], few of whom give opinions without a culpable bias". Even before coming to India, Jones had formulated a solution for the problem of the translation of Indian law. Writing to Lord Cornwallis in 1788, he mentions once again the deceiving native lawyers and the unreliability of their opinions. This obvious remedy is the substitution of British translators for Indian ones.

Apart from the fact that giving the Indians their own laws would lead in Jones's logic to greater efficiency and therefore to greater profit for England, there is perhaps also another reason for employing Indian law. This kind of deployment of translation, colludes with or enables the construction of a teleological and hierarchical model of cultures that places Europe at the pinnacle of civilization, and thus also provides a position, for the colonized.

Two main kinds of translators of Indian literature existed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: administrators like William Jones and Christian missionaries like the Serampore Baptists William Carey and William Ward. The latter were among the first to translate Indian religious texts into European languages. Often these were works they had themselves textualized, by preparing "standard versions" based on classical Western notions of unity and coherence. Their only salvation, the missionaries would then claim, lay in conversion to the more evolved religion of the West.

Grant contended that only education in English would free the minds of the Hindus from their priests' tyranny and allow them to develop individual consciences. The function of anglicized education was "to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect." Macaulay's brother-in-law, Charles Trevelyan, wrote about how the influence of the indigenous elite would secure the "permanence" of the change wrought by Western education: "Our subjects have set out on a new career of improvement: they are about to have a new character imprinted on them."

As Gauri Viswanathan has pointed out, the introduction of English education can be seen as "an embattled response to historical and political pressures: to tensions between the English Parliament and the East India Company, between Parliament and the missionaries, between the East India Company and the native elite classes.

Translation is overdetermined, so is the "subject" under colonialism, overdetermined in the sense that it is produced by multiple discourses on multiple sites, and gives rise to a multiplicity of practices. European missionaries were the first to prepare Western-style dictionaries for most of the Indian languages, participating thereby in the enormous project of collection and codification on which colonial power was based.

THE QUESTION OF “HISTORY”

Foucault declares, "effective history affirms knowledge as perspective"; it may be seen as a radical kind of "presentism," which we may be able to work from. Louis Althusser's critique of historicism, which leads him, in Jameson's words, to formulate the notion that "history is a process without a telos or a subject," "a repudiation of ... master narratives and their twin categories of narrative closure and of character.

Derrida is claiming that there is no primordial "presence" that is then re-presented. The "re-" does not befall the original. "History," in the texts of post-structuralism, is a repressive force that obliterates differences in a chain that includes meaning, truth, presence, and logos. He has indicated more than once that translation perhaps escapes "the orbit of representation" and is therefore an "exemplary question." If representation stands for the appropriation of presence, translation emerges as the sign for what Derrida would call “dissemination”.

Since it is part of my argument that the problematics of translation and the writing of history are inextricably bound together. Derrida's double writing can help us challenge the practices of "subjectification" and domination evident in colonial histories and translations. Hybridity can be seen, therefore, as the sign of a post-colonial theory that subverts essentialist models of reading while it points toward a new practice of translation.

Video recording of this article's presentation, presented by my classmates Bhavna Sosa, Dhvani Rajyaguru and Hina Sarvaiya