Textual Travels: Theory and Practice of Translation in India 9781317587606, 131758760X

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Textual Travels

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Textual Travels Theory and Practice of Translation in India

Editors Mini Chandran Suchitra Mathur

London new York new deLhi

First published 2015 in india by routledge 912 Tolstoy house, 15–17 Tolstoy Marg, Connaught Place, new delhi 110 001 Simultaneously published in the Uk by routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, oxon oX14 4rn Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Mini Chandran and Suchitra Mathur Typeset by Shine Graphics A-8/249, east Gokalpuri, Amar Colony delhi 110 094

All rights reserved. no part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library iSBn 978-1-138-82207-8

Contents Foreword by Supriya Chaudhuri

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introduction Mini Chandran and Suchitra Mathur

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1. Translation Theory: An indian Perspective G. N. Devy 2. Self-Translation as Self-righting: o. V. Vijayan’s The Legends of Khasak Chitra Panikkar 3. Singarevva and the Palace: Translation across Genre Vijaya Guttal 4. Graphic Adaptations/Textual negotiations: reading Feluda in english Suchitra Mathur 5. on Adapting the Popular Meena Pillai

1

21 35

48 62

6. othello’s Trave(ai)ls: The ways of Adaptation, Appropriation and Unlimited intertextuality K. M. Sherrif

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7. in the Marketplace: Publication of Translations in regional indian Languages Mini Chandran

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8. Scripting Language, Scripting Translation Sowmya Dechamma 9. of ‘Breaks’ and Continuities: TV Advertisements as Multimodal Translations Nikhila H.

112

130

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10. Cricket, iPL and Cultural Mobility: The new Cosmopolitan idiom of Sport Pramod Nayar

153

About the Editors Notes on Contributors Index

171 172 174

Foreword Supriya Chaudhuri

in india, as in the world today, translation is the air we breathe: not only in its original sense of ‘carrying over’ (trans-latio), the condition of meaning — of the conversion of words into signs — but a ceaseless process whereby we make sense of cultures, languages, institutions, and social practices. Yet, while Translation Studies has flourished as an academic discipline, there has perhaps been insufficient attention to the everyday life of translation as social necessity and public instrument. The editors of this volume, Mini Chandran and Suchitra Mathur, cite roman Jakobson’s distinction between intralingual, interlingual and inter-semiotic translation to conceptualise the diversity of translation today and to indicate their own concerns as academics seeking to intervene in a field that is not for academics alone. This is a timely and important venture at a time when ‘literary’ translation has absorbed the greater part of scholarly attention, and Cultural Studies has failed to reach consensus on the use of the term ‘translation’ for a wide variety of social processes. Yet, as Finbarr Flood’s remarkable book Objects of Translation (2009) shows, one can also think of objects, customs and institutions as carried over from one culture to another, and acquiring, in this process of transference, new layers of social meaning. in his famous essay ‘on the different Methods of Translation’ (1813), Friedrich Schleiermacher called everyday translations ‘the conversations of the marketplace’: as nations appear to mix in our time to a greater extent than they did before, the marketplace is everywhere and these are conversations of the marketplace, whether they are social or literary or political, and really do not belong in the translator’s domain but rather in that of the interpreter. (Schleiermacher 1992: 37)

Schleiermacher was dismissive of these transactions of the marketplace, preferring to focus on literary translations alone, but globalisation and its effects have made such a restriction impossible for us today. The human use of language itself produces a world penetrated by the phenomenon of intertextuality — the presence of signs in other

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signs, texts in other texts. Shadows of other meanings possess and inhabit ‘all’ texts, rendering them always different from themselves. They are intertextual sites, filled with ghosts or visitants from a different cultural order. As walter Benjamin emphasised, it is important that a translation be recognised as such: All translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages . . . it is not the highest praise of a translation, particularly in the age of its origin, to say that it reads as if it had originally been written in that language. (Benjamin 1971: 79)

‘(T)he foreignness of languages’ — i think it is important for us to hold on to that phrase, to ask how translation can both grant autonomy to what is linguistically and culturally other, and, at the same time, make the stranger welcome. For, it is more or less accepted today that the translator’s task is not to produce the illusion that the work was originally written in the language of the translation. it is only by recognising ‘difference’ that translation can live, that it can inhabit the precarious middle-ground between languages and cultures; for if there were no differences, translation would not be necessary, and if translation could obliterate difference, it would not be translation. Schleiermacher thought that the goal of translating in a way such as the author would have written originally in the language of the translation is not only unattainable, but is also futile and empty in itself. For whoever recognizes the creative power of language, as it is one with the character of the nation, must also concede that for each of the greatest authors his whole knowledge, as also the possibility of expressing it, is formed in and through language. (Schleiermacher 1992: 50)

For the nineteenth-century philosopher, this assumption is premised upon the notion of a mother tongue as it is upon the idea of the nation. But both notions are under attack today, and have never been comfortable assumptions in India. We live in a country with 22 official languages as listed in the eighth Schedule of the indian Constitution, 29 languages with more than a million speakers each, and at least 415 living languages, though the survival of many is threatened. Translation is not, though current theory seems to assume this, a postcolonial concern seeking to link countries like india to a postulated ‘global’ community. in india it has always been practised between languages

Foreword b ix

and ethnic communities, if one looks at the evidence provided by the circulation of both ancient and modern literary texts, from Sanskrit and Persian to the modern indian languages, and in them, between Bengali, Gujarati, hindi, Malayalam, Marathi, oriya, Assamese, and so on. Many writers — Sharatchandra Chattopadhyay is probably the most immediate example — have achieved ‘classic’ status across a number of languages. in a polity marked by multiplicity, linguistic difference, and energetic striving for both identity and identification, that is, representation in a non-homogenised public sphere, the political problem of claiming a ‘mother’ tongue or a ‘mother’ land encounters the paradox set out by Jacques derrida in his formulation: ‘1. We only ever speak one language. 2. We never speak only one language’ (derrida 1996: 7). instead of assuming the primacy of an ‘original’ or parent text of which the translation is a faint echo, it would be wiser to assume the existence of an echo-chamber of repetitions and resonations, into which the text enters by its very condition as text. So the distinct linguistic identity of the source-text can only be claimed in a context of plurality, not singularity; the uniqueness of the source-text is one singular among many. To say that the full, lived quality of the linguistic ‘habitus’ cannot be conveyed in translation is a platitude: all representation suffers from some degree of ‘inauthenticity’, which is simply a term by which we struggle to express our feeling of loss in the symbolic field of language. So, in a sense, translation should not set out to convince us of the death of the author: it should prompt us to ask the nietzschean question, ‘who speaks?’ and to follow it with the more urgent query, ‘what is she saying?’ Unless we can hear the stranger’s voice, we will not pay attention; unless we can, at some level, understand what is being said, we will not continue to listen. Literary translation has always worked by allowing us, in our reading, to experience the unfamiliar, but also to naturalise its idiom. Many academic arguments about translation focus on what is lost in translation, but attention to cultural practice makes us more conscious of what is gained in it. This is not just because our lives are made richer by translation, but because we become aware of what is left as the intractable residue beyond representation itself. This is what Jean-Jacques Lecercle has called the ‘remainder’, something that constantly stages ‘the return within language of the contradictions and struggles that make up the social’ (Lecercle 1990: 182). For Lecercle, this remainder is also the literary, unquantifiable ‘excess’ of language, the non-linguistic surplus that textual analysis cannot explain. in the

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everyday processes of understanding and interpretation, in the advertisements we read, the radio programmes that we listen to during our daily commute, the public spectacles we witness, the books we leaf through at a railway bookstall, the transitions we effect between print and digital, participatory and spectatorial forms of cultural action, we are all of us translators. we know what it is to move on, in life as in knowledge, carrying with us what we can: we also know what it is to leave things behind, to suffer loss and oblivion. Translation is therefore the medium in which we conduct our transactions with the world. I welcome this volume as a significant effort to comment on an inescapable aspect of our social existence.

References Benjamin, walter. 1971. ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations, ed. hannah Arendt, trans. harry Zohn, pp. 69–82. London: Fontana. derrida, Jacques. 1996. Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Flood, Finbarr Barry. 2009. Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval Hindu–Muslim Encounter. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. 1990. The Violence of Language. London: routledge. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1992. ‘on the different Methods of Translating’. Trans. w. Bartsch, in rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (ed.), Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, pp. 36–54. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Introduction Mini Chandran and Suchitra Mathur

ever since the discipline of Translation Studies took the cultural turn in the 1980s, the idea of translation as mere linguistic transfer has been dispelled. Translation is now seen as more than an innocent exchange of literary texts, as a politically loaded activity enmeshed in the complex strands of the socio-cultural fabric of a given society. Susan Bassnett recalls that by calling for a shift of emphasis in the focus of translation studies theory, they were suggesting that translation theorists pay greater attention to the ‘textual and extratextual constraints upon the translator’, and the ‘constraints, or manipulatory processes involved in the transfer of texts’ (Bassnett 1998: 123). heeding this call, the discipline embarked on a journey that liberated it from the quiet alleys of fidelity and equivalence to reach the broader and busier highway of Cultural Studies. with the aid of post-structuralist and postcolonial theories, it probed the roots of the process of translation to uncover the socio-political contexts that it was founded on. even before the turn of the century, the domain of cultural studies that maintained an alert antenna for new signals in the cultural stratosphere had woken up to the realisation that the world was speaking in multiple tongues. Cultural pluralism had ceased to be an abstract academic concept and became a reality that even apparently monocultural european societies had to grapple with, making translation a part of everyday life. So while globalisation like a centripetal force bringing the world together tried to make the idea of global village a reality, postmodern societies were in actuality on a centrifugal track spinning away and apart on variant cultural axes. These socio-cultural trends had the effect of making Cultural Studies take a translation turn. india has followed Anglophone translation theory with diligence, being quick to pick up on the cultural nuances that seem to answer its own homespun issues of plurality and diversity. Anglocentric translation theory, for example, has proved useful to highlight the uneven development of languages in india, the lopsided governmental policies, and the irony of the supremacy accorded to english. however, acknowledgement of linguistic plurality itself is not an issue for

xii a Introduction

indians, as they revel in multiple languages. As G. n. devy points out: ‘An indian . . . is inevitably bicultural and lives within a bilingual or even a multilingual cultural idiom. he is born with a skill to switch his culture-code according to the needs of his social situation’ (devy 1995: 13). But, what the present day has successfully shattered is the myth that bilingualism is a condition only of the educated urban indian. Changing economic patterns following the 1990s policies of ‘liberalisation’ have resulted in the large-scale migration of job-seekers from one part of india to the other and not necessarily from rural to urban areas, creating a situation where the plurality of languages and cultures is felt in not only the cosmopolitan urban spaces but also the small towns of india. The country is aware more than ever of the diversity of languages and culture. Be it in the form of hindi signboards for Bihari labourers in the small town Perumbavoor of kerala or the nation singing the Tamil ‘why this kolaveri’, india is suddenly alive and resounding with the sound of music which is created by its many different languages. ‘Translatedness’ has become well and truly an indian condition, both urban and rural. it is in fact seeping out of every pore of our existence at a rate faster than all our academic and theoretical debates can hope to stanch. in Gentzler’s words, ‘[c]ommunication moves over, under, behind and through traditional boundaries . . . The success of a culture, of a person within a culture, depends on their very ability to negotiate the translational fabric of a nation. we are all translators’ (Gentzler 2012). Globalisation, in its current economic and cultural avatar, has made this translational aspect of communication a lived reality for us in our everyday lives. Far from being confined to the realms of literature, translation now abounds in the areas of commerce, sports and other forms of entertainment. From popular cinema to the national game of cricket, all are being re-defined through a mode of translation that is increasingly creating a new hybridity that blurs the line between ‘foreignisation’ and ‘domestication’ as distinct translational strategies. The formation of the indian Premier League in cricket, for example, brings together players speaking different languages and belonging to different cultural backgrounds from across the world to form an ‘indian’ team. At the same time, hollywood blockbusters are being dubbed not just into hindi but also Telugu and Tamil, indicating a market-driven global realisation of local heterogeneities. A similar intersection of the global and the local in translational travels is evident in Bollywood

Introduction b xiii

which, while continuing its tradition of ‘adapting’ Hollywood films, is also ‘translating’ into hindi movies made in indian regional languages such as Malayalam or Tamil which are proving to be superhits. Hera Pheri (2000), for instance, comes to hindi from the Malayalam Ramji Rao Speaking (1989), with the Tamil version Arangetra Velai (1990) in the background. in terms of translation studies, these instances could be seen to exemplify the cultural turn in translation which has involved a radical rethinking as to what one means by a text in translation studies. As Gentzler says: Definitions of what constitute a text are also changing, as more oral and performative texts are included in studies. Lines between translation, adaptation, abridgement, paraphrase, and summary are blurring. intersemiotic translations complicate definitions, as images, paintings, movies, and music are also being studied under translation rubrics. (2012)

in the process, the lines between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture as well as between academic high seriousness and the joy of trivia are also becoming increasingly blurred. The theoretical aspects of translation as well as the practical aspects of the process of translation like the choice of text, publication and marketing are therefore increasingly being studied by scholars of translation studies today. however, there has been a clear disconnect between the academic and practical aspects of translation in india. while scholars debate translation strategies and methods at conferences and through scholarly publications, they barely heed the tumult of languages in different spheres of popular culture. The present volume proposes to undermine this very distinction between the academic and practical aspects of translation that has so far remained largely sacrosanct when it comes to translation studies in india. The premise of this book is to bring together chapters that investigate not only the theoretical concerns of translation but also the sweat and grind of the process of translation that is undertaken in various cultural spheres of indian life. As Bassnett observes: ‘what we can see from both cultural studies and translation studies today is that the moment of the isolated academic sitting in an ivory tower is over, and indeed in these multifaceted interdisciplines, isolation is counterproductive. Translation is, after all, dialogic in its very nature, involving as it does more than one voice’ (Bassnett 1998: 138). This volume aims to embody this dialogic nature of translation in

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the contents of the individual chapters as well as in the collection as a whole. hoping to encourage readers of the volume to participate in this dialogue, we have brought together chapters that span the gamut of translational relationships (the intra-lingual, the inter-lingual, and the inter-semiotic) as categorised by roman Jakobson (1959: 114); the volume deals with issues ranging from the analyses of translation in the literary (Chitra Panikkar’s chapter) as well as the inter-semiotic contexts (the chapters by Meena Pillai, Vijaya Guttal, k. M. Sherrif, and Suchitra Mathur), to explorations of the practice of translation in cultural texts such as cricket and television advertisements (the chapters by Pramod nayar and nikhila h.). while the ordering of the chapters indicates the expanding definitions of ‘text’ within the field of Translation Studies, we have carefully refrained from dividing the volume into sections that would place the chapters in discrete categories. The intention is to question any such categorisation and to allow an open conversation to occur amongst these various perspectives on the theory and practice of translation in contemporary india. G. n. devy’s well-known essay on translation theory within the Indian context is placed at the very beginning as the first chapter to provide a historical perspective, a starting point that acts as an openended frame for the ensuing chapters that engage with translation theory in light of practical translational activities that characterise the cultural landscape of india. These chapters not only attempt to bridge the gap between the academic and the practical aspects of translation, but also offer important interventions in current debates regarding the cultural turn in translation from the perspective of the ‘global south’. The complex politics of neo-colonial globalisation have significantly altered the neat postcolonial categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘east’ and ‘west’, ‘colonised’ and ‘coloniser’. what is often referred to as the ‘global south’ today cannot be mapped easily onto the first term in the above-mentioned binaries which are premised upon geopolitical boundaries. The concept of the ‘global south’ cuts across all such boundaries, highlighting the intersections between global and local configurations of power, and re-defining the meanings/implications of resistance. Within the Indian context, this complex re-configuration means grappling not only with the global politics of the english language alongside the many regional languages, but also the local hegemonies of the latter within overlapping geopolitical spaces. while the chapters

Introduction b xv

by Panikkar, Guttal, and Mathur grapple with the former, Pillai, Sherrif, Chandran, and Dechamma investigate the latter in the specific contexts of Malayalam and kannada respectively. Panikkar’s analysis of Vijayan’s self-translation of his Malayalam novel Khasakkinte Itihasam into the english The Legends of Khasak explores the ways in which translation acts as a means of self-correction to produce, paradoxically, a more ‘authentic’ text in the target language. Guttal’s chapter, on the other hand, deals with translation as an act of political resistance through its reading of Laxmi Chandrasekhar’s dual translations of kambar’s Singarevva and the Palace — first as an English novel, and then as a solo performance script, wherein the latter enacts a feminist appropriation of the source text. A comparative study of dual translations of the same source text is also the subject of Mathur’s chapter that analyses two english language versions of Satyajit ray’s Feluda stories. examining the relationship between a literary translation and a graphic adaptation, Mathur highlights the politics of production for a linguistically defined audience that is nonetheless interpellated in culturally distinct ways through these two versions of the same source text. The chapters by Pillai and Sherrif take us from the politics of translation into english to the politics of translation in(to) a regional language. Pillai’s comparative analysis of Chemmeen the novel (1956) and the film (1965) foregrounds the deep inter-connections between the two texts as creators and purveyors of the ‘popular’ as a significant shift within Malayali cultural politics in this mid-twentieth century decade. Sherrif, on the other hand, traces such shifts through a longer historical span in his investigation of the many adaptations of the othello story from the italian to the english, through Shakespeare’s play, to the kathaprasangam and film in Malayalam. Analysing the forms of cultural appropriation enacted by each version, Sherrif highlights the shaping influence of the socio-political context of its time as well as the ideological perspective of its creator. Chandran’s chapter complements these studies of the ideological imperatives governing adaptations of specific texts with a more general study of the material conditions that determine the production and publication of texts in translation. Through a case study of dC Books, the single largest publisher of translations in kerala, as well as two practicing translators from kerala, Chandran explores the

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relationship between the theory and practice of translation within the very uneven linguistic landscape of india. A very different perspective on this uneven terrain is offered by dechamma’s chapter which moves us beyond the english — regional languages dichotomy which dominates translation studies in india to a consideration of local regional language politics. Through a nuanced analysis of the strategies of preservation adopted by kodava, a minority language within the kannada-dominated karnataka region, dechamma explores the complex intersection of local hegemonies that problematise any easy consideration of the politics of resistance within a binary ‘minority’/ ‘majority’ language framework. The cultural dynamics of regional languages is also the subject of nikhila’s chapter, though here the focus shifts from the self-conscious resistance politics of the academic world to the market-driven politics of contemporary india. Focusing on television advertisements for the same product in different regional languages, nikhila analyses the everyday practice of translation as it shapes (and is shaped by) the movement of global products within local marketplaces. negotiating the twin forces of commerce and culture, the push for profit and the pull of ‘tradition’, such travels redefine identities by traversing across boundaries. The politics of such new identities, their complicities with global power structures as well as their enabling potential for resistance, are explored by nayar in his chapter on a representative embodiment of these identities — the indian Premier League (iPL). nayar’s carefully theorised notion of translatio cosmopolitania, which he develops as a framework to delineate the politics of a translational phenomenon such as the iPL, is an enabling intervention in translation studies as it grapples with the rapidly changing contours of a globalised world. Together, these chapters map the many itineraries of textual travels within the complex cultural landscape of india. Through their examination of the politics that frame such cultural travels across not only time and space, but also languages and media, the articles in this volume open up new spaces for considering the practice and theory of translation in contemporary india. we hope that the journeys initiated by this volume will lead to further explorations in the yet vast unexplored territories of translation in the fields of popular culture and everyday practices within india.

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References Bassnett, Susan. 1998. ‘The Translation Turn in Cultural Studies’, in Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere (eds), Constructing Cultures: Essays in Literary Translation, pp. 123–40. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. devy, G. n. 1995. ‘Multiculturalism’, in In Another Tongue: Essays on Indian English Literature, pp. 13–19. Madras: Macmillan. Gentzler, edwin. 2012. ‘Translation without Borders’, Translation: A Transdisciplinary Journal, 1. http://translation.fusp.it/articles/translation-withoutborders (accessed on 15 September 2012). Jakobson, roman. 1959. ‘on Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader, pp. 113–18. new York: routledge.

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1 Translation Theory An Indian Perspective G. N. Devy * I

An apt parable for translation study would be a scene from kafka’s Trial. The hero of that extraordinarily metaphorical narrative opens the door leading to a tiny room out of casual curiosity. He finds in it innumerable children packed in a surrealistic jumble of space. Literary translation has been a poorly attended corner room in the field of literary study. But when we try to probe into it, an endless series of questions faces us: what is a good translation? is translation possible? Should the translator move from his mother tongue to the other tongue? or, should a translation be always into the mother tongue? Can poetry be translated without losing its soul? what are the aesthetic principles that operate in a bilingual literary activity? To which history of literature does a translation belong — source language (SL) or target language (TL)? what should be the aim of the translator, to keep the sense intact or to keep the word structure safe? is a ‘free’ rendering better than a faithful rendering? is the local colour important in a translation? what is the place of archaism in translation? kafka’s hero quickly shuts the door of the funny little room and walks on. That is what most translators do. They find tentative answers to some of these questions at a pragmatic level, and move on. it is not their job to arrive at some precise theoretical formulations. But a student of translation needs to be more inquisitive. he must persist. More so if he is an indian student, for the maximum bulk of literature available to us today comes through translations. An Indian student of literature finds himself precariously hanging between a literary metaphysics which rules out the very possibility of translation and a literary ethos where translation is becoming increasingly important. reared on theories of literature shaped in monolingual cultures of europe, the aesthetics of kant, Croce and others, which

2 a G. N. Devy

considers a work of literature as a ‘unique’ entity, the militant new Critical interest in the ‘being’ of texts, modern indian criticism often harps on the impossibility of literature translation. on the other hand, the increasing distance between Sanskrit and modern indian languages, and the need to receive new literatures being written in languages of the world other than english, have made it imperative for us to have an enormous volume of translated literary work at hand. Besides, the twentieth-century image of india as one culture unit presses us towards curiosity about literatures in indian languages. Thus, literary translation has acquired social sanction and prestige. Perhaps, the poly-lingualism inherent in indian culture seeks to express itself through this overwhelming zeal for literary translation. As expected, the theoretical interest in literary translation is also on the increase. But there are serious difficulties in making a systematic formulation of a theoretical nature, for the general literary aesthetics and the principles of criticism that are operative in the field of Indian literature today are not, unfortunately, rooted in indian literary practice. however, critics and writers like Sujit Mukherjee, A. k. ramanujan, dilip Chitre, Bhalchandra nemade, et al., have made perceptive statements on this subject. My modest aim in this chapter is to underline some of the major difficulties in following Western criticism on literary translation and also to discuss translation theory keeping in view the indian practice of literary translation.1

II ‘Translation is the wandering existence in a perpetual exile’, says J. hills Miller.2 The statement obviously alludes to the biblical myth of the fall, exile and wandering. in western metaphysics, translation is an exile; and an exile is a metaphorical translation — a post-Babel crisis. The multilingual, eclectic hindu spirit, ensconced in the belief in the soul’s perpetual translation from form to form, may find it difficult to subscribe to the Western metaphysics of translation. The pre-structuralist basis of translation theory in the west has been metaphysical and, owing to the institutionalised fear inspired by the myth of Adam un-paradised, the literary traditions reared on Christian metaphysics have often viewed the act of literary translation with some embarrassment. The strong sense of being an individual given to a western individual through a systematic philosophy and the logic of social history makes him view translation as an intrusion of ‘the other’, sometimes desirable. This intrusion is desirable only so long as it helps define

Translation Theory: An Indian Perspective b 3

one’s own identity. it is natural for the monolingual literary cultures of europe to be acutely self-conscious of the act of translation. The indian consciousness, on the other hand, and in a crude manner of differentiating, is itself a ‘translating consciousness’. The act of shifting from one dialect to another, from one register of speech to another, of mixing two or three languages within the span of a single sentence, does not seem unnatural to it. The extent to which bilingual literary production has been accepted in india as normal literary behaviour, and the historical length of the existence of such practice, are indicative of india’s ‘translating consciousness’. india can boast of various imaginative methods of physical torture and mental persecution in its long history; but it has no martyrs to the cause of translation as eitenne dolet (1509–46) in France, who was executed for attempting a rather ‘free’ translation of Plato (Bassnett-McGuire 1980: 54). The Bible (king James’ version and Martin Luther’s version), which enriched these two languages so substantially, were such attempts. interestingly, modern europe’s celebration of its modernity through the acts of translation coincided with its attempt to humanise and internalise the myth of ‘perpetual exile’. Translation is at once a move away from the origin and an effort to re-situate the origin. To the western consciousness it is a paradox. if translation is a metaphysical enigma, it is yet a powerful political weapon. it is a means of appropriating power for oneself. The translations of the Bible were no mere literary exercises or spiritual enterprises. They were obvious acts of political defiance. The political significance of translation can be evidenced in Indian tradition too. The whole bhakti movement of poetry in india had the desire of ‘translating’ the language of spirituality from Sanskrit to the languages of the people. however, translation as a political weapon is not always and necessarily employed towards reducing the gap between the divine and the profane, the high and the low. in europe, it changed its political purpose with the advent of colonialism. The translation enterprise during the period of the renaissance and the enlightenment was of diachronic nature. its aim was to nativise in the european vernacular languages the ancient store of wisdom. That is how the Bible and homer’s poems received attention by translators in this period. The second great period of translation in modern europe was of synchronic nature. its aim was to open up other cultural areas, mainly of the orient, to europe. The translations by Sir william Jones, h. e. wilson, edward FitzGerald, and those attempted and encouraged

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in Germany by Goethe, differed in orientation from the earlier translations of the Bible and homer. while the renaissance translations were attempts to raise the status of the translators’ culture, the romantic translations were aimed at raising the cultural status of the works translated. Their minimum requirement was to seem exotic without being essentially ‘unenglish’ or ‘unGerman’. in praising omar’s Rubaiyat in FitzGerald’s translation, that is the implication of Frank kermode: where omar asks for a loaf, a jug of wine, a sheep’s thigh and a pretty boy, FitzGerald omits the meat, substitutes a ‘Thou’, and introduces a poetry book (which no Persian scholar would need) and a Bough, which is not a property of Persian wilderness. When we see that the translator’s first prose shot said “a bit of mutton and moderate bottle of wine”, we become aware that, having left Persian poetry out, FitzGerald was putting english poetry in, and his changes obscurely touch the heart of a people which rarely reads verses and, rarely drinks wine. he is exotic without being foreign. (kermode 1968: 61)

To be exotic, whether foreign or not, was the first requirement of european translations during the days of colonial expansion. The third phase of european translation has been comparative in nature. Leaving aside the historical fact that european scholars in the romantic and post-romantic period created a three-level hierarchy for literature — ‘Anthropology’ for literatures of the colonies with oral cultures; ‘orientalism’ for the colonies with impressive cultural histories; and ‘Comparative Literature’ for literatures of european countries — this third phase seems purely academic in nature. Goethe, again, had a great share in initiating the comparative phase of european translations. The modern european translations from contemporary literature in other european languages helped literary scholars in understanding the processes of growth and disintegration of languages and in the study of literary history. The main focus in these studies was a result of the nineteenth-century philosophy of political nationalism. over the last two centuries, nationalism and colonialism (or postcolonialism) have guided translation activity in europe, making spaces for the exotic and the comparative simultaneously in this area. This coexistence continues till today. As an illustration, i quote from two discussions of translation that appeared on the same page of the Times Literary Supplement (1989). The first is by the Latin-American

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novelist Joao Ubaldo ribeiro, who has translated his own works from Portuguese to english: it took me longer to translate the book than to write it: almost two years of hard labour and gnashing of teeth, during which i honestly thought i would never finish, and had suicidal fantasies. First, there is the cultural problem. in general, people in england and the United States know as much about Brazil as about traffic conditions in Kuala Lumpur. They are very much astonished when they find out that we speak Portuguese, not Spanish, and that some of us wash, have teeth, wear clothes and live in houses. So should i suffocate the book with hundreds of footnotes, making it longer than the new York telephone directory? i decided i wouldn’t. That involved a little cheating here and there — with the knowledge of the publishers. (Times Literary Supplement, 1989: 1268)

his translations have been acclaimed as being very good translations, for he has made them ‘exotic but not foreign’. The second passage is from a report about a recent discussion at the national Theatre about translation and adaptation: Since the 1950s, it has become standard practice that a play translated for the British theatre is first translated by a linguist and then adapted by a dramatist, who may or may not speak the language of the original. The point of such ‘translations’ is to make dialogue both credible and easier to say. But paradoxically, updating a play’s language can produce anachronisms to rival those that result from a literal translation . . . The problem is of course not a strictly linguistic one . . . Timberlake wertenbaker feels obliged to ‘tone down Anouilh . . .’ since parts of his plays feel ‘unacceptable at the moment.’ She takes ‘adaptation’ to mean fitting something for an audience, as opposed to ‘translation’, which she claims is to do with transporting them. neither word is usually given these interpretations, and appealing to playwright’s intentions and an audience’s values is dangerous territory. even if offence is not intended it may be more important to retain information about the implicit assumptions of the playwright’s era than to spare the audience’s sensibility. (ibid.)

when we compare the implications for translation in the two passages earlier discussed, we may notice that translation as colonial curiosity and translation as a comparative discipline continue to coexist simultaneously in european literary practice. The various theories of the linguistic translations and semantic mutations involved in translation, as developed in europe, have for their background the metaphysical anxiety and political objectives

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of european translation activity itself. when translation was a rediscovery of the ‘original’, free translation was welcome; when translation became a means of turning the colonial world into an ‘object for consumption’, ‘exotic but not foreign’ translations found demand; and when european nationalism encouraged academic comparatism, faithful translations acquired prestige.

III Though the common reader and the literary critic tend to look at a translated literary work as being less original than literature produced within one language, owing to its bilingual linguistic involvement, translation poses highly complicated problems to the literary theorists. The most complicated and defeating problem is: what makes a good translation ‘good’? While it is also difficult to sort out such an issue in relation to poetry or fiction, there are at least some attempts to presume that aesthetics of literature can be related to some such criteria as ‘organic structure’, ‘relevant form’, ‘complexity’, or ‘imagination’. over the centuries, most literary cultures seem to have settled the basic issue about literature in that no one raises any longer the question whether literature is ‘meaning’ or mere ‘expression’. But with translation even that issue is still undecided. It is still difficult to say whether the place of translations is in the literary history of the Source Language or in that of the Target Language, or whether translations (within a manageable group of languages) form an independent tradition by themselves. Since this ontological uncertainty haunts translation activity, most of the debate about translation revolves round a haphazard polarity: ‘the original meaning and an alien expression’ or ‘the original structure and an altered meaning’. Unfortunately for translation, the various developments about the interdependence between meaning and structure in the field of linguistics have been based on monolingual formulations proposed by structural linguistics and are not sufficiently adequate to unravel the intricacies of translation activity. roman Jakobson is an important name in the history of structural linguistics. in his essay on the linguistics of translations, he proposes a three-fold classification of translations: (a) those from one verbal order to another verbal order within the same language system; (b) those from one language system to another language system; and (c) those from a verbal order to another system of signs (Jakobson 1959: 232–39).

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As he considers theoretically a complete semantic equivalence as the final objective of translation act (which is not possible), he asserts that poetry is untranslatable. he maintains that only a ‘creative transposition’ is possible. Modern semantics has devoted itself very vigorously to the discussion of synonym and polysemy.3 it has concluded that synonymy in a language will create redundancy, and since no language-structure admits redundancy, synonymy is only a popular belief but not a scientific linguistic fact. With the innumerable difficulties that a translator faces in selecting his translation diction, the synonymy = redundancy equation appears valid. This assumption finds a further support in the literary aesthetics of Formalist theory which considers every act of creation as a unique event. it is not possible to present in this short chapter an exhaustive account of the history of meaning-equivalence thought in the west, to do which will take volumes of specialist writing. however, it is very important for us to speculate on the extent of its validity. it is necessary to recognise that synonymy within one language system is not conceptually identical with synonymy or equivalence between two different languages. historical linguistics has some useful premises that throw light on this difference. in order to explain linguistic changes, historical linguistics employs the concept of ‘semantic differentiation’ as well as that of ‘phonetic glides’. while the linguistic changes within a single language occur along the line of semantic differentiation, they also show marked phonetic glides. however, the degree of such glides is more pronounced when a new language comes into existence. in other words, linguistic changes within a single language are predominantly of semantic nature, the linguistic differences between two closely related languages are predominantly phonetic. Technically speaking, then, if synonymy within one language is a near impossibility, it is not so when we consider two related languages together. Structural linguistics considers language to be a system of signs, arbitrarily developed, that tries to cover the entire range of ‘significance’ available to the culture of that language. The signs do not mean anything by or in themselves but acquire significance by virtue of their relation with the entire system to which they belong. This theory naturally looks offensively at translation which is an attempt to rescue significance from one system of signs and to wed it with another such system. But, language is an open system. it keeps admitting new signs as well as new significance into its fold. It is also ‘open’ in the

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socio-linguistic sense that it allows an individual speaker or writer to use as much of it as he can or likes. if this is the case, then how ‘open’ is a particular system of verbal signs when a bilingual user, such as translator, rends it open? Assuming that for an individual, language resides within his consciousness, we can ask whether the two systems of verbal signs, which can be materially told to be different, retain their individual identities within a single consciousness or become one extended open system? If translation is defined as some kind of communication of significance, and if we accept the structuralist principle that communication becomes possible because of the nature of relation between signs and their entire system, it follows that translation is a merger of sign systems. Such a merger is possible because systems of verbal signs are open and vulnerable. The translating consciousness exploits the potential openness of a language system, and as it shifts significance from a given verbal form to a corresponding but different verbal form, it also brings closer the materially different sign systems. if we take a lead from Phenomenology and conceptualise a whole community of ‘translating consciousness’, it should be possible to develop a theory of inter-lingual synonymy. The concept of ‘translating consciousness’ and of communities of people possessing it, are no mere notions. in most Third world countries, where a dominating colonial language has occupied a privileged place, such communities do exist. in india, several languages are used as if they form a continuous spectrum of signs and significance. To conceptualise this situation is beyond european linguistics, which is based largely on monolingual views of language. Ferdinand de Saussure is considered to be the founder of modern western linguistics. one of the three major distinctions he postulated to describe language was that between ‘parole’ and ‘langue’, the former being the language as used by an individual, the latter the entire system of language as such. Through this distinction, Saussure initiated a discussion about the relation between the system of signs and the use of signs. however, his distinction overlooked the inter-lingual dynamics of significance. Had Saussure thought about the openness of language systems that permits performance by a ‘translating consciousness’, and had he looked at language from a multi-lingual perspective, his theory would have provided a sound basis to think about inter-lingual synonymy. At the time Saussure proposed his new observations on the nature of language and linguistics, they were useful in liberating european

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linguistics from historical and comparative philology. But since the progress of comparative philology was overtaken by Saussurean linguistics, the subsequent socio-linguistics in the west has shown little interest in the problem of a simultaneous multi-lingual perception. when linguistics analyses this problem, it will have very valuable propositions for translation studies. There are, of course, innumerable studies in the area of language acquisition and second language learning. But they are centred round the assumption that an inevitable chronological order or priority scale exists in language learning situations. This field of activity — what may seem in India a very natural activity — is stratified in terms of value based indicators ‘L1’ and ‘L2’. in Chomsky’s model of language acquisition, the concept of semantic ‘universals’ plays an important role. But his level of abstraction marks the farthest limits of the Saussurean linguistic materialism. in practice, however, the translating consciousness treats the SL and TL as parts of a larger and continuous spectrum of various intersecting systems of verbal signs. owing to the structuralist’s unwillingness to acknowledge the existence of any non-systemic or extra-systemic core of significance, the concept of synonymy in western semantics has remained inadequate to explain translation activity. And in the absence of a linguistic theory on a multi-lingual perspective or on translation practice, the translation thought in the west overstates the validity of the concept of synonymy. J. C. Catford presents a comprehensive statement of theoretical formulations about the linguistics of translation in his work A Linguistic Theory of Translation (1964), in which he seeks to isolate various linguistic levels of translation. his basic premise is that since translation is a linguistic act any theory of translation must emerge from linguistics: Translation is an operation performed on languages: a process of substituting a text in one language for a text in another. Clearly, then, any theory of translation must draw upon a theory of language — a general linguistic theory. (Catford 1965: vii)

The ‘general linguistic theories’, as they exist today, are closely inter-linked with developments in anthropology, particularly after durkheim and Levi-Strauss. As noted earlier, colonial europe had distributed knowledge related to human behaviour and culture into a three-fold hierarchic structure: comparative studies for europe;

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orientalism for the orient; and anthropology for the rest of the world. in its various phases of development, modern western linguistics has had connections with all these. After the ‘discovery’ of Sanskrit by Sir william Jones, historical linguistics in europe depended heavily on orientalism. For a long time after that, linguistics followed the path of comparative philology. And after Saussure and Levi-Strauss, linguistics started treating language with an anthropological curiosity. when Linguistics branched off to its monolingual structuralist path, Comparative Literature persisted in its faith in translation. in fact, Translation Studies forms, with the study of literary history and literary perception, a very important branch of Comparative Literature. Most of the comparative studies of literature are conventionally based on translations of works from (some of the) languages/ literatures compared. it is because of this background that a valuable concept of structure-style has emerged in the field of comparative literature, in turn reaffirming the viability of translation. The concept needs to be understood in relation to another related concept of ‘culture-style’. Comparatists believe that every literary movement has a specific national style which is guided by native traditions; but it also has a transnational and trans-cultural style. The first is designated ‘culture-style’, the second as ‘structure-style’. Such a distinction helps comparatists define the nature of various literary and artistic movements such as romanticism, Modernism, renaissance, etc. Heinrich Wolfflin was the first to recognise that besides an ideologically conditioned culture-style there is also an ideology-free structurestyle (hatzfeld 1968: 81). it is indeed possible to build a theoretical statement about translation around this distinction. That statement will assume that between two related languages there are certain areas of significance that are shared just as there are other areas of significance that can never be shared. Translation can then be seen as an attempt to bring the entire language system as close to the shared areas of significance as possible. All translations operate within this shared area of significance. Such a notion may, then, help us in differentiating between synonymy within a single language and the shared significance between two related languages. The translation problem is more of an aesthetic problem than a purely linguistic problem. Literary translation is not just a replication of a text in another verbal system of signs. it is replication of an ordered sub-system of signs within a language to another correspondingly ordered sub-system of signs within a related language. Translation is not transposition of significance or significating signs. After the act

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of translation is over, the original still retains its position. Translation is rather an attempted revitalisation of the original in another verbal space and verbal period. Like a literary text which belongs to its original period and style and also continues to exist through successive periods, translation at once imitates the original and transcends it. The problems in translation studies are, therefore, much like those in literary history. while literary history has been classifying, describing, reviewing — through various ideological biases — the production and/or reception of literary works, translation studies so far has been merely analysing the proximity between the original version and the revitalised version. if translation shows a fascinating complexity as a linguistic activity, it also presents profoundly radical questions as an aesthetic activity.

IV A literary translation has a double existence as a work of literature, and as a work of translation. Those who do not know the original language tend to look at it as literature, those who do know the original, look at it as a secondary product of translation. Literature as a linguistic activity is supposed to renew the language resources of the reading community. it creates an unprecedented order within that language. it reveals the imagination or the talent of the writer evident in the patterns of language and significance created. In translation too, the activity of organising language, testing its resources and expressive potential, contributing to the available significance, and so on is in progress. however, while creative literature has received ample attention by critics and philosophers, literary translation has had no privilege of having a well-developed philosophy of ‘beauty in translation’. Most of the western studies of literary translation have been prescriptive in nature. They tell us what the translator should or should not do in order to arrive at a satisfactory result in his enterprise. when these studies are descriptive, they seem to engage attention in classifying the types of translations. i record some representative examples of these as paraphrased by Susan Bassnett-McGuire:4 (1) Etienne Dolet laid down the following five principles of good translation: (i) The translator must fully understand the sense and meaning of the original author, although he is at liberty to clarify obscurities;

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(ii) The translator should have perfect knowledge of both SL and TL; (iii) The translator should avoid word-for-word renderings; (iv) The translator should use forms of speech in common use; (v) The translator should choose and order words appropriately to produce the correct tone. About half a century later Chapman postulated that a translator must (a) avoid word-for-word renderings; (b) he should attempt to reach the ‘spirit’ of the original; and (c) he should avoid over-loose translation. during the eighteenth century, Alexander Frazer Tytler suggested that (a) the translation should give a complete transcript of the idea of the original work; (b) the style and manner of writing should be of the same character with that of the original; and (c) the translation should have all the ease of the original composition. These are some important examples of prescriptive translation theory. on the other hand, the observations by Steiner, Jackson and nida are classificatory though descriptive in nature. Here is Bassnett-McGuire’s summary of eugene nida’s typology: (a) translation as a scholar’s activity, where the pre-eminence of the SL text is assumed de facto over any TL version; (b) translation as a means of encouraging the intelligent reader to return to the SL original; (c) translation as a means of helping the TL reader become the equal of what Schleiermacher called the better reader of the original, through a deliberately contrived foreignness in the TL text; (d) translation as a means whereby the individual translator, who sees himself like Aladdin in the enchanted vault, offers his own pragmatic choice to the TL reader; (e) translation as a means through which the translator seeks to upgrade the status of the SL text because it is perceived as being on a lower cultural level. The question at the back of the prescriptive studies is, ‘what makes the act of translation a satisfactory act?’ The question at the back of the classificatory studies is, ‘what are the various motivations behind the act of translation?’ But they lack vigour in asking the question ‘what makes literary translation literature too?’ That question has been raised by some post-structuralist thinkers in europe, among whom Jacques Derrida is a very important figure. It will be useful to present his line of thinking in some detail here. The new philosophy of reading as a continuous deconstruction of texts made influential through the writings of Derrida has raised many fundamental questions about the absolute position that a literary text

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occupied in the traditional critical discourse. Challenging its central position, derrida argues that at each new instance of reading the text is a different occasion to experience the absence of its meaning. This view has become influential in France and in several American universities. when the production and reception of literature is viewed from derrida’s perspective, the received notions of the absolute separation between the SL text and the TL text in translation become debatable. derrida writes: within the limits of its possibility, or its apparent possibility, translation practices the difference between signified and signifier. But, if this difference is never pure, translation is less so, and a notion of transformation must be substituted for the notion of translation; a regulated transformation of one language by another, of one text by another. we shall not have and never have had to deal with some ‘transfer’ of pure signifieds that the signifying instrument — or ‘vehicle’ — would leave virgin and intact, from one language to another, or within one and the same language. (quoted in Spivak 1982: lxxxvii)

The idea that translation is an inter-textual exercise has been further developed by critics who follow derrida. An example of this recent development in translation theory can be had in the comments by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. in her Preface to her translation of derrida’s Of Grammatology, she writes, drawing on Jeffrey Mehlman’s essay on translation: i began this preface by informing my readers that derrida’s theory admitted — as it denied — a preface by questioning the absolute repeatability of the text. it is now time to acknowledge that his theory would likewise admit — as it denies — translation, by questioning the absolute privilege of the original. Any act of reading is besieged and delivered by the precariousness of intertextuality. And translation is, after all, one version of intertextuality. if there are no unique works, if, as soon as a privileged concept-word emerges, it must be given over to the chain of substitutions and to the ‘common language’, why should the act of substitution that is translation be suspect? if the proper name or sovereign status of the author is as much a barrier as a right of way, why should the translator’s position be secondary? (ibid.: lxxxvi)

Derrida’s considerations, and those of his followers, form the very first step towards granting literary translation the status that it deserves, that is the status of literature in addition to that of a complicated translingual activity.

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it needs to be added that derrida has not tried to give any systematic theory of literary translation. his observations, quoted earlier, occur in an interview with Julia kristeva where derrida explains the assumptions in Of Grammatology. one of his central assumptions is about the relationship between the sign and the signified. In an attempt to challenge the established philosophies of meaning and language from Plato to Saussure, derrida proposes a more dynamic theory of that relationship. At another place in that interview, derrida comments: if expression is not simply and once for all surpassable, expressivity is in fact always already surpassed, whether one wishes or not, whether one knows it or not. in the extent to which what is called ‘meaning’ (to be ‘expressed’) is already, and thoroughly, constituted by a tissue of differences, in the extent to which there is already a text, a network of textual referrals to other texts, transformation in which each allegedly ‘simple term’ is marked by the traces of another term, the presumed interiority of meaning is already worked upon by its own exteriority. it is always already carried outside itself. it already differs (from itself) before any act of expression. And only on this condition can it constitute a syntagm or text. only on this condition can it ‘signify’. (1982: 33)

Should another linguist like Catford follow derrida’s line of thinking about the relation between meaning and text, should the western anxiety about the metaphysical exile from the origin be cured, should a multi-lingual perspective strengthen linguistics in this postcolonial age, then an adequate theory of translation will emerge in western critical thought. Fortunately, for an indian student of translation these binding constraints do not prevail. indian metaphysics is not haunted by the fear of exile from the absolute right. indian sociology does provide a multi-lingual context to literary study. And india has a tradition of linguistics that combines a material view and a transcendental view of language. The most remarkable presentation of this combined linguistics view in India can be located in Bhartṛhari’s exposition of the sphota theory. In the first chapter of his monumental work the Vakyapadiya, he comments: Nadasya Karmajatatvanna purvo na parasca sah, Akramah kramarypena bhedavaniva jayate. Prativimbam yathanyatra sthitam toyakriyavasat,

Translation Theory: An Indian Perspective b 15 Tatpravrittimivanveti sa dharmah sphotanadayoh. Atmarupam yatha hnane jneyarupasca drsyate, Artharupam tatha sabde svararupsca prakasate (Bhartṛhari 1984: 34)5

A crude translation of these verses would read as, ‘since the phonetic manifestation is sequential, language express itself in a sequentially graded body though in itself it is without a sequence in terms of a “pre” and a “post” existence. The relation between nada (phonetic manifestation) and sphota (semantic realisation) is like that between the reflection of something in flowing water, a reflection which is of a steady object but which acquires the movements of the current of water. As knowledge reflects its own nature as well as the nature of the giver of that knowledge, so do phonetic forms reflect their own forms as well as the forms of significance.’ The image of meaning as reflection in the current of phonetic expression is remarkably illuminating. No reflection is possible unless there is a substance which holds this reflection; yet the reflection in itself and by itself is a pure nothing. Meaning exists in language not as a positive presence but as an absence which reflects its independent presence. Here, I am not trying to show how Bhartṛhari anticipates Derrida. Such speculations are usually sterile, and are born out of a blind nationalism. My intention in quoting Bhartṛhari is to indicate that India has linguistics that can provide a good take-off point for constructing a theory of translation, linguistics which does not suffer from anxiety about the loss of the origin.

V it is a general supposition that the linguistic success of a translation depends on the richness of diction and the flexibility of structures in the TL. Though it appeals to our commonsense, this view is not correct. The success, even the very possibility, of a translation depends on the history of translation activity in the TL. A successful translation can never be an unprecedented event in any language, however rich it may be in its diction. it may be possible, and even appropriate, to maintain that all preceding translation from a given SL to a given TL, together determine the quality of every subsequent translation from that SL to TL. if a translation from language A into language B is satisfactory, it need not be true that any translation in the reverse order too would be similarly satisfactory. For instance, we may consider the following

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passage from the Bible: ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have an everlasting life’ ( John: 3, 16). we are told that this passage is translated into over 1,100 languages. howsoever rich the diction of the english language is, it is not possible for it to accommodate comfortably translations of religious discourses from these 1,100 languages. Most of the terminology of western literary criticism, to take another example, has been translated into modern indian languages in some operative form; but even the basic terms of ancient indian poetics have not yet been housed in english. The reason is that the practice of translating criticism from english to indian languages is widespread; but the practice of translating criticism from indian languages to english has a poor history. Thought does depend on the flesh and blood of a given TL; it is like an independent muscle of language which can gain strength through exercise and discipline. or to use more fashionable linguistic terminology, translation is a discourse by itself, and a dynamic one. Theories of translation, therefore, can be formulated within the specific context of one-way communication between a given SL and a given TL. And such theories need to be founded on the specific nature of translation tradition in that context. The attempts to build supposedly universal theories of translation are futile exercises, as they are in the case of universal theories of style or form. Just as the translation tradition in a language strengthens every subsequent work of translation, so every new work of translation strengthens the TL. This is not, however, done by creating/donating more lexical items to the TL, though that too is achieved by translation occasionally. The contribution to the TL is made by creating a new sub-system within the TL. As Bhalchandra nemade points out in an excellent article in Marathi, every translation strikes linguistic compromises between the SL and the TL (1987: 81). Collectively, many translations create a convention of linguistic compromises which then becomes a sub-system within the TL. depending on the cultural importance of the kind of works translated, such a sub-system or systems may come to occupy a more central position within the dominant literary dialect of the TL. in the indian context, literary translation can be divided into three types: (a) those interested in preserving the ancient literary heritage; (b) those interested in ‘westernising’ indian languages and literature; and (c) those interested in ‘nationalising’ literature in modern indian

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languages. in correspondence with the different objectives of these three types their mode of operation differs. The modern indian languages originating in Sanskrit have a long history of translations from Sanskrit. Their literary traditions are full of instances of numerous renderings of the Sanskrit epics and other literature. Many of these languages have some or the other illustrious translation at the very beginning of their literary tradition. Jnanesvari in Marathi is one such example. These translations were made without any inhibition, and they rarely maintained a word-for-word, line-forline discipline. The categories useful for the study of these translations are not ‘the TL and the SL’ or ‘the mother tongue and the other tongue’. The poets/writers attempting vernacular renderings of Sanskrit texts treated both the languages as their ‘own’ languages. They had a sense of possession in respect of the Sanskrit heritage. But in translating Sanskrit texts, they sought to liberate the scriptures from the monopoly of a restricted class of people. hence, their translations became a means of re-organising the entire society. no theory with an exclusively linguistic orientation can be adequate to understand the total magnitude of this tradition of translation activity in india. with the advent of the British power in india, and with the spread of english education, a false value-structure emerged in india. in this value-structure, everything British was considered to be inherently good. in literature, the most obvious consequence of this colonial value scheme was an indiscriminate institutionalisation of english literature. during the nineteenth century, it was highly fashionable in india to translate all and sundry works of english literature. in that period, Shakespeare was translated side by side with Scott and Bunyan. The basic idea behind such an indiscriminate translation activity was that more translations from english would strengthen indian languages. when the translation activity in a given language grows in a proportion that is completely out of tune with the natural growth of that language, the sub-system of language within which translations operate comes to occupy centre-stage. Most of the translations from english to indian languages were in prose. Therefore, the prose styles in modern indian languages have acquired an inevitable tenor and tone of translation language. They are less supple than what they need to be. Today, when an indian writes prose in an indian language, the reader often suspects the existence of an undesirable gap between the written prose and the spoken language. This colonial legacy is so firmly rooted in contemporary Indian literary culture that often we find Indians making

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a naïve claim that literary prose is a positive and original contribution made by the British to indian culture. The purely linguistic and neutral theories of translation would be inadequate to understand the politically motivated colonial translation activity. in order to arrive at a satisfactory analysis of the indian translation activity initiated by colonialism, the linguistic theories need to be supported by an awareness of the colonial discourse. British colonialism in India created a conflict in cultural priorities. it created a desire for a rapid westernisation. it also created a tendency to revive the past culture, much of it left behind in the natural course of time. in addition to these two tendencies, colonialism created a longing for national unity. These three tendencies — ‘westernisation’, ‘revivalism’, ‘nationalism’ — are seen appropriately reflected in the translations attempted during the colonial period in india. The difference between the medieval translations/renderings from Sanskrit and those attempted during the colonial period was that the medieval translations aimed at liberating the society, whereas the colonial translations were merely ‘reactionary’. They came either as a reaction to the colonial situation that had hurt the national pride of india, or as imitations of the indological translations of Sanskrit works by scholars like Sir william Jones, Max Müller and others. By the end of the First world war, the soldiers had returned home after getting an exposure to european culture other than the British. Also, Mahatma Gandhi had entered the political scene in india creating a new national awareness. A result of these changes was that indian translators turned now to european literature as well as to literature in other indian languages. That is how, during the three decades of the Gandhian freedom struggle, inter-lingual exchange within indian languages multiplied. Tagore’s works, for instance, were translated into many indian languages. So were Premchand’s, k. M. Munshi’s and V. S. khandekar’s. during the postcolonial decades, the translation scene in india shows a new trend. Most indian writers seem to vie with each other to get their works translated into english. The number of such translations from indian languages into english has been constantly growing. Getting translated into english has at present become a kind of status symbol for writers in indian languages. From the foregoing remarks it should become clear that translation is not a politically innocent activity. its political motivations may not be seen on the surface, but when one relates it to the entire culture context within which it functions, these motives become evident.

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Translation, therefore, is not merely a linguistic activity. it is a cultural act. Because it is so, the nature of translation activity cannot simply be universally uniform, such as will allow formulation of a single grand theory of translation. Translation is an activity that is guided by its national/cultural past. hence, any theory of translation has to be built on the foundation of the actual translation practice in a given culture and language. in a country that has had a tradition of housing numerous languages at any given time in history, and in a culture that accepts metamorphosis as the basic principle of existence, an intelligent and appropriate theory of translation becomes one of the primary needs of literary criticism. in a country which has large and various communities of ‘translating consciousness’, and in a culture that at present thrives on literature in translation from all quarters of the world, theories based on anxiety about exile from the original home can cause difficulties in self-perception. not everything in the western theory of translation is not useful to us nor is everything in it useful. we need to exercise discrimination. i shall conclude this discussion by quoting from an excellent essay on translation by the Marathi poet-translator dilip Chitre. in his essay, ‘Life on the Bridge’, Chitre writes: i have been working in a haunted workshop rattled and shaken by the spirits of other literatures unknown to my ancestors. in fact, unknown spirits claim to be my literary ancestors clamouring for recognition. europe has already haunted my house. A larger indian tradition besieges it too, and this tradition was sometimes perceived as such by the Europeans first. Even as an independent practising poet, i live in the post-modern world transformed by translation. This is my predicament as a writer. i have to build a bridge within myself between india and europe or else i become a fragmented person. (1989: 14)

Notes * The chapter was originally published as an essay in The Bombay Literary Review, 1989, p. 2. 1. Unfortunately, no exhaustive bibliography of theoretical writings on translation in india is still available. i hope someone takes up the project of compiling such a bibliography. 2. i have quoted from my notes of a lecture given by Professor J. hillis Miller at the iX Centenary Celebration Symposium of the University of Bologna,

20 a G. N. Devy italy, in october 1988. his lecture will be published soon; i have quoted his words without any change. 3. For more work on Semantics: J. A. Fodor and Jonathan katz, The Structure of Language (1965); Charles ogden et al., The Measurement of Meaning (1957); Stephen Uilman, Semantics (1962); G. h. r. Parkinson, The Theory of Meaning (1968); G. Leech, Semantics (1974); Frank Palmer, Semantics (1976). 4. The entire paragraph following the reference indicator is based on pages 54, 55, 63, and 71 of Susan Bassnett-McGuire’s Translation Studies. 5. The verses quoted are from the Prathama kanda, pp. 49–51.

References Bassnett-McGuire, Susan. 1980. Translation Studies. London and new York: Methuen. Bhartṛhari. 1984. Vakyapadia: With Gujarati Translation and Notes. Trans. J. M. Shukla. Ahmedabad: L. d. institute of indology. Catford, J. C. 1965. A Linguistic Theory of Translation. London: oxford University Press. Chitre, dilip. 1989. ‘Life on the Bridge’, The Bombay Literary Review, 1: 14. derrida, Jacques. 1982. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. hatzfeld, helmut. 1968. ‘Comparative Literature as necessary Method’, in P. demetz, T. Green and L. nelson (eds), The Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation, and History, pp. 79–92. new haven and London: Yale University Press. Jakobson, roman. 1959. ‘on Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, in r. A. Brower (ed.), On Translation, pp. 232–39. Cambridge: harvard University Press. kermode, Frank. 1968. Continuities. London: routledge and kegan Paul. Mehlman, Jeffrey. 1972. ‘Portnoy in Paris’, Diacritics, 2(4): 21–28. nemade, Bhalchandra. 1987. Sahityachi Bhasha. Aurangabad: Saket Prakashan. ribeiro, Joao Ubaldo. 1989. review Article. The Times Literary Supplement, 17–23 november 1989, 1268. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1982. ‘Translator’s Preface’, in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (trans.) Of Grammatology, pp. ix–lxxxvii. Baltimore and London: The Johns hopkins University Press.

2 Self-Translation as Self-Righting O.V. Vijayan’s The Legends of Khasak Chitra Panikkar

This chapter recognises self-translation as an area of intrigue which

demands a separate slot for itself within Translation Studies. o. V. Vijayan’s self-translation of his Malayalam novel, Khasakkinte Itihasam (1969), into the english version, The Legends of Khasak (1994), is used in this chapter as a model to discuss this intriguing phenomenon. in the case of Vijayan, it emerges that the process of self-translation designates a form of self-righting, and a minimal detailing out of this process comprises the body of the chapter. O. V. Vijayan is a name to be reckoned with in the firmament of selftranslation in india. he has consistently and successfully translated himself into english and belongs to a group of recognised bilingual, selftranslating writers in india — Girish karnad, kamala das, Qurrutulain haider, Bhisham Sahni — to name a prominent few. i choose o. V. Vijayan’s novel for the analysis here not only because i have direct access to his work in Malayalam but also because he has been noticed as having shifted himself ideologically — from agnostic to believer — over a period of two to three decades. in the 1950s, Vijayan was a Communist card-carrier; in the 1980s, he had become an ardent devotee of karunakara Guru, whose understanding of hinduism seemed to attract Vijayan who then acknowledged him as his spiritual master. The Malayalam novel, Khasakkinte Itihasam, and its english translation happened during the phase of this change spanning nearly three decades. i thought it would be interesting to trace the story of this selftransition in the self-translation procedure, if analysis would indeed make these traces visible. Apart from this crucial point, there are also other aspects of Vijayan’s personality and writing which would help us posit this text as a modelpiece. The novel in question, the source text, Khasakkinte Itihasam, has

22 a Chitra Panikkar

an unrivalled place in modern Malayalam fiction. The habitual critical reference to modern Malayalam fiction in terms of pre- and postKhasakkinte Itihasam testifies to the position accorded to Vijayan’s novel in the history of Malayalam literature. That Vijayan has effectively and successfully translated this novel into english gestures to Vijayan’s supreme command over both Malayalam and english. it shows up Vijayan’s tendency to write his novels and stories first in Malayalam and then translate them into english (a bit like Beckett’s attempts to constantly move between english and French). That Vijayan’s medium of creative expression in English is otherwise not fiction-writing, or poetry-writing, but political cartooning is again a unique feature which may be recalled in the context of analysing his attempts at translating his own fictional works into English. And of course as part of a wider scenario, his example has to be posited against the larger backdrop of bilingualism which has been a regular feature of the indian literary reality. Vijayan’s self-translation endeavours in this connection may have to be read as reflections of an on-going tendency to get works from regional languages translated into english. Given these multi-accented contexts, the analysis of the chosen texts (the Malayalam and english versions of the novel) promised to be challenging. Though, as a lay reader, i was enamoured of the english rendering no less than its Malayalam version, it took me many more readings to get a sense of the mechanics of Vijayan’s translation procedure. Finally, what helped the actual analysis was a close textual reading of the english piece in conjunction with the Malayalam text, keeping in view some theoretical frames given rise to by Steven Connor who had once examined Beckett’s self-translating strategies (1988). even before spelling out the details of those frames of reference, i would like to engage with the ideational planes of self-translation. it has been noted by critics that the self-translated text, unlike the text translated by someone else, is the expression of the encounter not with the other-as-Another but with the other-of-oneself. we may have to concede that there is a marked difference between translating another’s work and translating one’s own work, and that the latter involves the problematic sphere of the Self. The translator who is not the author, it appears, enjoys a different kind of freedom with the text than the author-translator. The non-author-translator is a readerinterpreter for whom the translation endeavour is an act of reading. And in many of the effective translations, as we know, what seeps through finally is the quality of critical reading which brings out the

O. V. Vijayan’s The Legends of Khasak b 23

self of the interpreter-translator. But, in self-translation the mechanics involved is entirely different. The author-translator cannot approach the source text as a reader-interpreter. or in this case, the reading becomes a reading of his/her own self at a particular point in time and space. what consequently demands a translation is not just the source text but a translation of the self embedded in the source text as well. The choice left to the author-translator seems to be this that s/he can vow allegiance to that self or choose to assert and forward a slightly different self that s/he presently wishes to project. Thus, grappling with multiple selves representative of different times and different spaces actually sums up the difficulty of the author-translator. The tussle with one’s own self becomes all the more pronounced whenever there is a huge time-gap between the text and its translation. This becomes clearer in writers like Vijayan in whom ideological shifts were apparent during the specified time-gap. Given this complexity, it is interesting to look at how Vijayan views his own translation. in his statements, Vijayan seems to be highlighting the difficulty of linguistic translation — translating a regional language text rich in dialectal overtones into a standard dialect of english. he laments the loss of the richness of the Malayalam language in the process of this transfer. he elevates the narrative potential of Malayalam to that of the imperial languages, and at a certain point during this defence, becomes conscious of his own decolonisation-rhetoric. in his ‘Afterword’ to the novel, The Legends of Khasak, o.V. Vijayan says: ‘no language, however physically confined, however historically deprived, is left without springheads of regeneration. There is as much narrative potential in Malayalam as in the imperial languages. Khasak has given that assurance to successor generations’ (1994c: 206). he continues, ‘i have strayed into the theory of post-decolonisation diglossia without intending to’. Vijayan is referring particularly to the rich play of dialects in the Malayalam version of the novel. he admits to having drawn some material and much inspiration from a backward village, Thasarak, situated in the Palghat district of kerala (Thasarak gets translated into khasak in the source text itself). And Thasarak, as Vijayan portrays it, is a place where time is in no hurry, where modernisation peeps in from time to time only to withdraw. But, the language of Thasarak as evoked in the Malayalam novel shows a rare density and variety. dense images of nature true to a place, unique in its isolated backwardness, folk customs that relate to a people whose deities are a mixture

24 a Chitra Panikkar

of Muslim prophets and hindu Goddesses, a pervading array of evil spirits and ghosts — both good and bad, caste differences and the baffling hierarchies therein — all these are evoked in the Malayalam text through the use of dialects. Many have said that Malayalam has never been the same again after Vijayan proved its narrative potential through Khasakkinte Itihasam. The author too seems to be all-tooconscious of this achievement and that is where he is compelled to lament the loss of ‘so much’ in translation. despite this consciousness, or precisely because of it, Vijayan himself translated this rich mine of dialects into The Legends of Khasak. Khasakkinte Ithihasam (1969) was born of a labour of love that lasted 12 years. The Legends of Khasak came out in 1994. True to the translator stereotype, Vijayan also goes apologetic while talking about the english: ‘So much has been lost, there was no way it could have been salvaged’ (1994b: vii). This tone continues, ‘i have tried to make the narrative depend on its own energy as much as possible and preserved the pace and rhythm of the original’ (ibid.). This authorial declaration takes us to issues related to translation activity as also to the specifics of self-translation as a process to be studied and examined in isolation. what appears to loom large in Vijayan’s apprehension however is the standard fear of the translator — a much talked-about fear actually — that the translation may not be true to the ‘original’, that the translation may emerge ‘unfaithful’ and so on. And in this realm, translation theory seems to have made major breakthroughs. As a consequence, what gets discussed now is not the anxiety of the translator to be true to the original but the anxiety of the original to be faithful to the translation.1 what then is the relevance of asking forgotten questions in relation to Vijayan’s voicing of his fears? As i said earlier, the process of self-translation is slightly more complicated than the usual method. Let us note that in all his statements, Vijayan seems to be projecting translation itself as plain linguistic transference. i suspect that the new sense and sensibility that informs his english translation is what is consequently underplayed by Vijayan. P. P. raveendran, in ‘Translation and Sensibility’ (1999: 177–86), n. S. Madhavan in ‘it’s dusk at khasak’ (2005) and e. V. ramakrishnan in ‘Translation as Literary Criticism’ (2002), have remarked on the change of sensibility in Vijayan’s english translation. i would like to elaborate on that and argue that Vijayan’s professed close adherence to the Malayalam version acts as

O. V. Vijayan’s The Legends of Khasak b 25

a cover and defers the possibility of a find related to the mechanics of his self-translation. i would also like to forward the thesis that Vijayan, while translating Khasakkinte Itihasam into The Legends of Khasak, has corrected himself or ‘right’ed himself at three levels: (a) aesthetically/ cosmetically; (b) in terms of tone and meaning; and (c) ideologically. But before these are detailed, let me concede that Vijayan is partially right about his efforts at trying to achieve verisimilitude. For instance, the episodes recounted in the chapters show a one-to-one correspondence between the Malayalam and the english versions. The outlining of these episodes is also accomplished in a rather meticulously ‘faithful’ manner. At this level, the major difference induced seems to be in the narrative style. A buoyant vigour is built into Vijayan’s english sentences as if to compensate for the non-use of the khasak dialects. The rustic vigour of a racy, pithy english punctuated with local propernames and borrowed items from eastern cultures show Vijayan’s clear mastery over the language which enables him to tame it to suit his needs. And it is Vijayan’s rare fortune that he has developed distinct effective creative styles of his own in both Malayalam and english. Let me give a few examples of this restless energy stored in words: l

l

l

l

l

l

l

Thithi-Bi saw her daughter growing up, maturing visibly each day, impatient and challengingly beautiful like no woman khasak had seen. (Vijayan 1994a: 24) The caption on nizam’s Beedi: ‘Makes you hungry, incinerates even putrid food stuck in the Gizzard’. (ibid.: 26) Local humour: (the tailor’s words) ‘i made these shirts roomy enough for them to grow up in’. (ibid.: 45) (not there in the Malayalam version; there is a subtle humour at play in the english Version.) The road was a thin spine of macadam with ploughed-up sides, yet it had the state’s majesty and freedom and the illicit drink was a merciless intoxicant. in a burst of delusion of power, kutappa threw a challenge, ‘Come on Pootham of Chethali, haunt my backside if you dare.’ (ibid.: 75) The Malayalam word for ‘endearment’, ‘kanne’ (eyes) translated as ‘my precious’. (ibid.: 153–54) on a tree stump sat a fat lizard in all his regalia, a scion of the vanished Saurians. (ibid.: 129) Garlands decorated the slender neck of Madhavan nair’s Singer Sewing machine. (ibid.: 135)

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in fact, Vijayan’s ease and sureness with english range from simple expressions like how ‘Mother scoops him up in a rejoicing embrace’ (Vijayan 1994a: 146), to forceful expressions like the transcription of the smallpox epidemic: The village was one vast flowerbed. Nallamma strung garlands of pus and death, she raised bowers of deadly Chrysanthemums. The men of khasak saw her and lusted, the disease became a searing pleasure in which they haemorrhaged and perished. Little children died as she suckled them in monstrous motherhood. (ibid.: 148)

if one goes for a literal translation of the Malayalam text, the last sample may read as: People of khasak lay like a garden decked up for a festival. They built flower-huts made of yellow pus-flowers. Nallamma plucked out those flowers, wore them on her hair, and danced. In fever and delirium, in semisleep, the villagers saw her and desired her. Like the sex-ritual, the disease changed into pure pleasure. And they died.2 (Vijayan 2011: 120)

The previous samples from the English text may definitely speak for themselves and project Vijayan as a forceful translator. whenever he has deemed it fit, he has chosen to delete, edit or add words, never letting the tempo of a smooth-flowing English suffer. We may therefore conclude that aesthetically he has not compromised. in fact, he has righted himself as best as he could, to choose the rhythm and style of the target language, carving his own stylistic niche within it while translating. But here, to help further analysis, i borrow a few ideational frames from the critic, Steven Connor (1988). Speaking in the context of Samuel Beckett’s self-translation, Connor forwards a few perceptive observations. These may be summarised as follows: (a) if there is a time-lag between the versions, there is a corresponding increase in disparity between the first and the second text; (b) omissions and additions often serve a cosmetic purpose; (c) entropic revisions (denoting drastic changes in attitudes) emphasise the intensive complexity of translation; (d) Sometimes, repetition (here Connor means repetition in the form of self-translation) is an attempt to ‘unsay’ what has already been said. i suspect these observations made in the context of Beckett, apply to Vijayan’s methods of self-translation as well. At this juncture, it may be useful to summarise the central thematic thread of Vijayan’s source text, Khasakkinte Ithihasam. one way

O. V. Vijayan’s The Legends of Khasak b 27

to approach this would be through the central character, ravi. The Malayalam text may be interpreted thus: ravi, the intelligent astrophysics student of yesteryears, for some unknown reason, leaves the path of a promising life and career, leaves his house, and settles in the remote village of khasak to teach at the primary Government school there. Village life in khasak, through its puzzling diversities, strange life-embracing formulae, and raw life-accepting patterns, intermittently punctuated with pleasure, death, disease and misery, ultimately renders ravi even more passive and indifferent; allowing him to slip into an invited death, perhaps recognising it as the beginning of yet another journey. even as the village and its life as also his own life close in on ravi, we are conscious of a ravi who is outside the purview of all these — maybe an honest outsider who submits unfeelingly, indifferently, maybe even smilingly to the call of life and death. The english text, The Legends of Khasak, however, underplays the absurd element in the source text, and characterises ravi as a definitive spiritual traveller. My thesis is that Vijayan in his translation forwards ravi differently and through that designs a different self for himself. For instance, it sometimes looks to me that critics of the Malayalam text have shaped Vijayan’s perception of his self. it was while going through the abundance of critical material on the Malayalam version that it struck me with renewed force that Vijayan’s purpose is predominantly a self-righting strategy. The translation of the title itself tells a story of self-righting. Khasakkinte Itihasam which till date surfaced as the history/epic of khasak is translated by Vijayan as The Legends of Khasak. itihasa has historical overtones; ‘legends’ are free from time. i feel that this is characteristic of Vijayan’s ‘righting’ through subtle but effective ways. Critics like n. S. Madhavan (1994), who questioned Vijayan’s delineation of the economics of khasak and blamed him for a wrong sense of history, were answered through the shift in title. n. S. Madhavan, who wrote an article on ‘The economics of khasak’, understood Vijayan’s portrayal of khasak’s history as a skewed one; blamed khasak’s ideology as one similar to those of colonial intellectuals; and criticised Vijayan’s facts as historically distanced from reality (Madhavan 1994: 21–36). in his ‘Afterword’, to the english translation, Vijayan remembers to handle these issues. he says: ‘Lots of people come now to Thasarak . . . if they come looking for the khasak software, they are bound to go back disappointed because the Legends is not the story of khasak’ (Vijayan 1994c: 208).

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it may also be remembered that Vijayan was accused by many critics for taking an existential stand on life. That the predicament of the modern man has been drawn along lines true to kafka, Camus and Sartre and not as true to the indian situation had been thoroughly voiced by his critics (Chelambra 1994 [1972]; Menon 1994). i suspect that Vijayan tries to counter this too by correcting or righting it in the english version of the text. Let us note that the blurb of the english version characterises ravi’s problem as ‘restlessness born of guilt and despair’ (Vijayan 1994a: back cover). The guilt is clearly spelt out in the english rendering which speaks of it in vivid terms, ‘it was in this house that he had sinned with his step-mother. he was at college then: he had come home for the holidays. That was ten years ago’ (ibid.: 91). The Malayalam version does not spell out the guilt; it leaves it ambiguous. it says: ‘This is where he had known his step-mother’ (Vijayan 2011: 77). By translating ‘known’ as ‘sinned with’, Vijayan has introduced into the English version a definitive moral stand. While the verb ‘know’ is free of the associations of guilt, the verb ‘to sin’ carries the weight of guilt. in the same way, in chapter 20 of the Malayalam text, while recounting the intimate rendezvous with his step-mother while the wheezing, paralysed figure of his father is in the next room, the text records a conversation between the two where ravi clearly declares that he does not feel that he has sinned, that he actually feels nothing. The english version carefully edits this exchange and says: ‘he asks her what remorse is. There, over there, she says, listen. it is the sound of his father’s wheezing as he lies paralysed and wheezing’ (Vijayan 1994a: 146–47). Thus, the english text seems to carry strong moral overtones which are not suggested by the Malayalam text. Since by the 1990s Vijayan had evolved as someone more inclined to spiritualism than materialism, and was busy proclaiming this new allegiance to the world, he would have been hurt by critics’ claims that his novel can only lead the youth to more waywardness and indecisive inertia (Chelambra 1994 [1972]: 125–37). he therefore rights himself in the english translation by describing ravi’s journey as a spiritual quest and characterises ravi as a spiritual traveller. The blurb says: ‘ravi is bewitched and entranced as everything around him takes on the quality of myth’ (Vijayan 1994a: back cover). ravi’s sexual encounters with the women when their husbands are away, which would be disapproved of as unbecoming of any spirtual traveller, are taken care of by Vijayan through an additional use of a non-commital twilight language in the english text. if ravi gets beaten up by Maimuna’s lover

O. V. Vijayan’s The Legends of Khasak b 29

for his clandestine affair in the Malayalam version, that episode is conspicuously absent in the english version. one gets the feeling that ravi experiences the consequences of his indulgences only in the form of a sweet internal unrest characteristic of the spiritual wayfarer. Vijayan has also taken care to remember the strong points of his first text as noted by some of the critics. Death and disease are evoked along stronger lines and for that, he seems to have taken critical cues from Sachidanandan and rajakrishnan, who appreciated these as the main strength of the Malayalam novel. Sachidanandan’s essay on the novel is titled Mrthiyude Oosharaccha-ayakal (hot Glades of death) (1994 [1971]). in this essay, Sachidanandan speaks about the novel poetically, explaining the potential of the death-metaphor used by Vijayan. ‘Death’ itself figures as a subtitle seven times in this critical response, and the essay closes with the observation that ‘after this great insight of release (where death is nirvana), it is impossible for this epic-writer (Vijayan) to feel or stay bound by anything’ (ibid.: 16–20). in a similar vein of appreciation, rajakrishnan’s article (1994 [1979]) on the novel titled ‘Flowers of illness’ underlines the power of death and disease in Vijayan’s Khasakkinte Itihasam. rajakrishnan notes how during the 12 years of its composition, Vijayan changed utterly from a believer in Marxism to one who lost his belief, to emerge bewildered. According to Rajakrishnan, it is a bewilderment that may find cruel and callous results. he remarks on the indifference that characterises ravi in his intimacies with the yogini, Maimuna, the 40-year old prostitute, and his step-mother. Finally, placing the suicide of ravi within the context of twentieth-century fiction as a whole, Rajakrishnan sees ravi’s movement as the heideggerian progress of the being towards death (ibid.: 50–57). The numerous references to death in the english version are noticeable, and many of these are additions. To give a few examples: l

l

Thangal Pakeeri refuses to give away his beloved grandchild’s dead body for burial. when Madhavan nair announces the commotion to Ravi, Ravi says: ‘Let us have some tea first, Madhavan nair’, to which nair says: ‘You are wise, Maash. There is no use racing with death’ (Vijayan 1994a: 155) (nair’s comment is an addition). in the Malayalam version nair says, ‘Yes, Maash, no use hurrying; now on, let’s take it easy’ (Vijayan 2011: 124). Again, ‘he laid down the beloved body amid the minarets of rock. he sat beside it and sang a lullaby of death’ (Vijayan 1994a: 156)

30 a Chitra Panikkar

l

(The second sentence is absent in the Malayalam version). The Malayalam version says: ‘he lay the body on his lap and guarded it’ (Vijayan 2011: 125). Chapter 26, which records the Molakka’s death, has this addition: ‘After the burial, the villagers went through the ritual bath to clean themselves for another encounter with death’ (Vijayan 1994a: 182). The Malayalam text stops short: ‘The burial was at dusk on Sunday. on that ground, nizam Ali erected sandal sticks. As the wind calmed, threads of smoke rose up in the air like strands of grey beard’ (Vijayan 2011: 145). in the Malayalam version, there is no near equivalent for the above english sentence on death.

Let us also traverse a few examples from the english version to reiterate my earlier point on Vijayan’s deliberate introduction of the spiritual streak in his narrative via self-translation: l

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The last sentence of chapter 22 says: ‘out of these infinities, a drizzle of mercy fell on his sleep and baptized him’ (Vijayan 1994a: 165). in the english version, from chapter 23 onwards, Ravi’s attitude is definitely more spiritually inclined than in the Malayalam version. it is as if Vijayan made ample use of the reference to baptism in chapter 22. Additions abound in the last chapters (chapters 23–26) (ibid.). The crisp translation in chapter 23 is noteworthy: ‘The wages, reckoned across this void, became a karmic debt’, says the english translation (ibid.: 169). The Malayalam version says: ‘As if sifting through the memory of a previous birth, Mollakka was trying hard to get clarified in his mind the five-rupee monthly wage he took for sweeping the frontyard’ (Vijayan 2011: 134). in chapter 23 of the english text, there is a dialogue addition: ‘Maash, Madhavan nair asked, “what is his illness?” “Existence, civilization — ” “Surely, you are not jesting?” “No” “What is the remedy?” The muezzin’s cry, Nizam Ali was making the prayer-call.’ (Vijayan 1994a: 170)

O. V. Vijayan’s The Legends of Khasak b 31

in the Malayalam text, ravi does not answer Madhavan nair’s question. he just defers it, ‘oh that . . . i’ll tell you’ (Vijayan 2011: 135), and then changes the subject. l

in chapter 24 of the english text, we have the addition: Mr. nair thought of blind kuppu Achan who had still not tired of seeing and of his Guru to whom blindness had given the vision of peace. Mr. nair could not solve the puzzle, he was content with the day and night. (Vijayan 1994a: 175)

The Malayalam text just says, ‘nair envied the peace that the blind enjoyed’ (Vijayan 2011: 139). Following this reference, in the same chapter, in the Malayalam text, after visiting the prostitute, ravi sarcastically imitates the Muezzin’s prayer-call, and laughs loudly at God. This laugh is deleted in the english version. Sometimes, dialogues are replaced by fresh, more mystical ones in the english version. For instance: ‘“what examination is this?” M. nair laughed — “The same class, the same teacher”, “Like human destiny isn’t it?” ravi observed’ (Vijayan 1994a: 183). These are not there in the Malayalam text. Chapter 27 records several such changes to arrive at ravi’s silence — ‘ravi spoke inside his own impenetrable silence . . . ravi answered from within his silence’ (ibid.: 193). The Malayalam text says: ‘ravi stood there, staring at its meaning. Stared and stared till the eyes ached, till eyelids reddened, till the eyes melted and became one with that’ (Vijayan 2011: 156). This indeterminacy in narration is what characterises the Malayalam text. The addition in the last chapter of the english text is interesting: ‘i intruded on this Sarai, said ravi, for too long, desecrating its primeval night with lamps and incense, while Time untamed and awesome, cried beyond the time-pieces, cried out as dark blue winds’ (Vijayan 1994a: 198). The Malayalam text says: ‘he had guarded this Sarai all this time with lamp and incense. outside, blind Time shrieked in the form of black and blue winds’ (Vijayan 2011: 159). what is perceived as ‘guarding’ in the Malayalam text is transformed into ‘intrusion’ in the english text. The indifference in ravi’s person is shaken in the english rendering, and metamorphosed into self-awareness verging on a self-conscious, almost self-accusing sensitivity. Likewise, we may also note that Appukili, already favoured by the readers and critics of Malayalam, is given more attention in the english version.3

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his responses always go recorded and the mysterious mystic depths of his existence as an uninvolved child-man, a free bird, nature’s freak (i.e., a cretin), are all explored and especially attended to in the english rendering.4 with such interpolations and elisions, readers of the english version, unlike his reader-critics in Malayalam, cannot accuse Vijayan of ‘the lack of an overall vision’ (Chelambra 1994 [1972]: 129). Vijayan has gone against his own declared aims of fidelity and ‘righted’ himself both morally and cosmetically without quite admitting this outright. his ideological drift to the right, in terms of strong religious inclinations at least, is apparent in the english version. Self-translation thus also connotes self-writing where self-righting carries two levels of signification: self-writing as autobiography, and self-writing as selftranslation — as offering a resistance to being written by others, or getting translated by others. As a coda to this attempt at analysing yet another form of translation, i invoke Steven Connor’s words on selftranslation. he says: ‘the translated text alludes all the time to its dependence upon the signifiers of the earlier text, even as it tries to curtail or reject that dependence’ (Connor 1988: 106). And hence, ‘the “final” text comes to seem less like an end-point than just a stage in the continuing process of self-division and self-modification’ (ibid.: 109). To wind up this case-study of a specific text, one may also have to invoke an important piece on the theme of self-translation, namely Mahasweta Sengupta’s article on Tagore titled, ‘Translation as Manipulation: The Power of images and images of Power’. in this study, Sengupta examines the self-translations of Tagore ‘to explore how he manipulated his own works to conform to the image of the east as it was known to the english-speaking world of the west’ (1995: 160). Sengupta convincingly argues that the demands of an english readership dictated the choice of matter and manner of Tagore’s translations of his own poems into english. She analyses Tagore’s self-translating strategies, locating the Bangla-into-english renderings of his own works within an orientalist-colonial paradigm. This study may however clarify that it may not always be possible to locate the practice of selftranslation from an indian language into english within a recognisable frame like the colonial reality. Vijayan’s self-translations may have to be read as symptomatic of unconscious projections of the mutable self of the writer-translator. The determinate spiritual traveller, ravi, in Vijayan’s english text is not a conscious tribute paid to the oriental stereotype as in the case of Tagore but an unconscious manifestation

O. V. Vijayan’s The Legends of Khasak b 33

of an inner ideological shift in the writer-translator. Thus, with every new case-study in this area, what gets interrogated would be traditional notions within Translation Studies like an immutable authorself, the sanctity of the original, loyalty to the Source Text, and the idea of the inviolable.

Notes 1. Lawrence Venuti’s work The Translator’s Invisibility, illustrates this inversion in the usual hierarchy of values. 2. The edition of the Malayalam novel Khasakkinte Itihasam used for this article is the 49th impression which came out through dCB in February 2011. All literal translations from Malayalam into english used in this chapter are mine. 3. See, for instance, T. ramachandran’s article, ‘Papabodhathinte Punyadhara’ (‘The Virtuous Flow of Guilt’), on the novel where he understands Appukili as one of the most powerful ‘disabled’ characters of our fiction. 4. There has been no published feminist reading of Vijayan’s attitude to women in the novel as yet, and one wonders whether its presence would have added yet another stroke to Vijayan’s self-righting techniques.

References Chelambra, Unnikrishnan. 1994 [1972]. ‘ithihaasaparihaasam’, in k. G. karthikeyan and M. krishnan nampoothiri (eds), Khasak Paddhanangal, pp. 125–37. kottayam: dC Books. Connor, Steven. 1988. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. London: Basil Blackwell. Madhavan, n. S. 1994 [1983]. ‘khasakkinte Sampadvyavastha’, in k. G. karthikeyan and M. krishnan nampoothiri (eds), Khasak Paddhanangal, pp. 21–36. kottayam: dC Books. ———. 2005. ‘it’s dusk in khasak’, Outlook Magazine. http://www.outlookindia. com/article.aspx?227073 (accessed on 4 September 2012). Menon, M. k. 1994. ‘khasakkinte itihaasam: oru Cartoon novel’ (1972), in k. G. karthikeyan and M. krishnan nampoothiri (eds), Khasak Paddhanangal, pp. 103–09. kottayam: dC Books. rajakrishnan, V. 1994 [1979]. ‘rogathinte Pookkal’, in k. G. karthikeyan and M. krishnan nampoothiri (eds), Khasak Paddhanangal, pp. 50–57. kottayam: dC Books. ramachandran, T. 1994. ‘Papabodhathinte Punyadhara’, in k. G. karthikeyan and M. krishnan nampoothiri (eds), Khasak Paddhanangal, pp. 73–78. kottayam: dC Books. ramakrishnan, e. V. 2002. ‘Translation as Literary Criticism: Text and Sub-Text in Literary Translation’, Translation Today 1(1). http://www.anukriti.net/ TT1/article-d/a1.html (accessed on 4 September 2012).

34 a Chitra Panikkar raveendran, P. P. 1999. ‘Translation and Sensibility: The khasak Landscape in english and Malayalam’, Indian Literature, 191: 177–86. Sachidanandan. 1994 [1971]. ‘Mruthiyude oosharacchayakal’, in k. G. karthikeyan and M. krishnan nampoothiri (eds), Khasak Paddhanangal, pp. 16–20. kottayam: dC Books. Sengupta, Mahasweta. 1995. ‘Translation as Manipulation: The Power of images and images of Power’ in Anuradha dingwaney and Carol Maier (eds), Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Vijayan, o.V. 1994a. The Legends of Khasak. delhi: Penguin Books. ———. 1994b. ‘Author’s note’, in The Legends of Khasak, pp. vii–viii. delhi: Penguin Books. ———. 1994c. ‘An Afterword’, in The Legends of Khasak, pp. 204–08. delhi: Penguin Books. ———. 2011. Khasakkinte Itihasam. Trivandrum: dC Books.

3 Singarevva and the Palace Translation across Genre Vijaya Guttal

recent translation studies have challenged the time-worn clichés and

gendered assumptions about translation as well as women’s writing. The identification of the status of the two is explicit in the popular label ‘Les belles infideles’, an old belief which implied that like women, translation must be either beautiful or faithful. But with the cultural turn in translation, the translational act is seen as mostly a political act that is governed by ideological issues. within the domain of cultural studies, translation stands as a metaphor for a crossing over between two worlds and the relocation not only of similarities but also of differences. within a conventional patriarchal framework, the status of translation and women may be seen as identical, with both being believed to occupy a secondary place. however, a change in this framework is evident in the growth of feminist translation in which there is an attempt to appropriate the translational mode to make inroads into patriarchy and facilitate a realignment of power structures. it is a well-known fact that politics operates in all acts of translation, and translation itself is transformed into a trope of literary activism. The twentieth century has witnessed the repositioning of translation from a state of secondariness to that of primariness at par with the source text. Susan Bassnett says, ‘it can clearly be seen that different concepts of translation prevail at different times, and that the function and role of the translator has radically altered’ (1991: 74). The cultural turn in translation studies has paved the way for a fruitful collaboration with feminist thought. it is in this framework that i am placing Laxmi Chandrasekhar’s translation of Chandrasekhar kambar’s kannada novel Singarevva and the Palace, and her adaptation of the novel into a solo performance in english and kannada. Feminists have begun to employ the agency of translation to break the oppressive silences and make it speak to us as well as for us across

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languages and cultures. The modern-day feminist translators are not a self-effacing presence anymore but make their presence felt in prefaces and find their names on the cover page along with that of the author. They have unearthed different strategies for the projection of gender perspectives. The ideology of feminist translation is at work in the deliberate choice of the text and the manner of translation. Sherry Simon says: The links of mediation are not automatic; they are not imposed or organized by some dispassionate cultural authority. rather translators are involved in the materials through which they work; they are fully invested in the process of transfer. (1996: 5)

Along with the choice of text, another significant strategy of feminist translators is that of intervention. Louise von Flowtow indicates that it operates through the techniques of supplementing, prefacing, footnoting and ‘hijacking’ (cited in rahman 2002: 37). if the supplementing technique makes woman visible by compensating for the differences of language, the forms of prefacing and footnoting are used by feminist translators to project their objectives. ‘hijacking’ is a more potent strategy which catapults the text to a domain for which it was not originally intended. Feminist translation activity has succeeded in destabilising traditional cultural identities and facilitating reformation of identities through ‘rewriting’. Apart from these, feminist translators have also resorted to the creation of neologisms, recovery of old words fallen into disuse and investing them with new connotations. As Brinda Bose comments, resistance remains the corner stone of feminist activism in contemporary india, while resentment and rebellion are read into representations that defy traditional gender norms (2002: xix). if resistant reading (resistance) may be considered as gendered intervention, Laxmi Chandrasekhar’s re-rendering of Singarevva and the Palace provides an apt illustration as it not only foregrounds the marginal gender positions but also interrogates female sexuality and the myth of sexual purity. Saugata Bhaduri points out: ‘There can be translation of resistance where, its repressive and hegemonic potential notwithstanding, translation can be subversively appropriated towards enablement’ (2008: xxiv).

Kambar’s Novel Singarevva and the Palace (1982) is a novel by Chandrasekhar kambar, a significant poet, novelist and playwright in Kannada. It has been

Singarevva and the Palace b 37

translated into english by Laxmi Chandrasekhar, a well-known actor, theater critic and a staunch supporter of gender issues. Although the novel bears strong overtones of a text that critiques and exposes the exploitation of the subalterns by the feudal masters, it also traces the decline of feudalism and the shifting of power centres. Another significant fictional motive implicit in the novel is the feminist theme of resistance. Singarevva, though a victim of feudal patriarchal oppression at the outset of the novel, is at the center of the novel as the title itself suggests and remains the muted symbol of resistance to patriarchy. Laxmi Chandrasekhar who had translated the original kannada novel into english later went on to re-translate it into a performance, a one-woman show where the feudal patriarchal text got converted into a pro-woman narrative that valorised resistance. She has given solo performances of the same where the patriarchal notions stand subverted. in the original novel of kambar, the decline of the feudal order paves the way for modernity and the novel ends with the suggestion of restructuring the social system. Chandrasekhar kambar, whose artistic imagination is deeply rooted in ‘desi’ traditions, returns to the theme of the breakup of feudal structure of the rural society again and again in his plays and novels. The novel is a narrative of the unequal power relations implicit in the feudal order, its decadence, cruelty and exploitation. Like the Malgudi of r. k. narayan, the village of Shivapura is a fictional location created by Kambar, which becomes the arena on which he dramatises his deepest concerns. on the one hand, kambar is preoccupied with the theme of the conflict between the feudal masters and their victims; and on the other, he equates the fertility of the land with female fertility and sexuality which reflect traditional notions of gender. in Singarevva and the Palace, the revolt of the subaltern is intertwined with the revolt of the woman against exploitation. Singarevva, the central character, is a victim of feudal and patriarchal oppression and the story of her exploitation commences when her own father, the Gowda of nandagavi, a greedy and unscrupulous man, marries off his only daughter who is still a child to the corpse of his sister’s son in the hope of appropriating the family property of his sister. The traumatic experience of such a marriage puts an end to the childhood of Singarevva and silences her totally. The entire Shivapura village condemns the Gowda for his greed and hardheartedness but only behind his back. The women of the house curse him silently. After a certain gap of time,

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on the pleading of his wife, the Gowda agrees to arrange a second marriage for Singarevva. This time he gets her married to Appasaheb desai of Shivapura who is already old and an epileptic. Singarevva’s second husband, Desai, is not a wicked man but a misfit in his world. he is a caricature in comparison to his ancestors who were landlords and held the grandeur of power. he is extremely proud of his heritage although he is burdened with heavy debts and has to live on borrowed money as there is nothing left except the palace he lives in. he has a passion for a form of folk drama called bayalata in which he always plays the role of a king because he finances it, and screeches Sa re ga ma pa, the scale of classical music, which had earned him the nickname ‘Sargam desai’. he ignores the beauty of his own wife and is infatuated by a prostitute-turned-actress, Chimana, who is periodically invited to play the female role in bayalata. he is a sick man and his sexual prowess is limited to falling into an epileptic fit the moment he sets his eyes on the bare thighs of a woman. The physical and spiritual bankruptcy of Appasaheb desai is symbolic of the bankruptcy of the crumbling feudal order. The impotent desai not only harbors a false family pride, he also reduces the existence of Singarevva to that of a prisoner without any freedom to move out of the palace without his permission. As motherhood for which she longs eludes her, her unscrupulous father, the Gowda, is ready to offer his own son for adoption with the hope of appropriating the property of desai as well. in a patriarchal society, woman is doubly exploited not only by those in power but also by those without it. right from his childhood, Marya an untouchable labourer in the house of the Gowda, has a fascination that later turns into infatuation for the beauty of Singarevva. Singarevva, with her desire for a child prepares to perform a ritual against the wish of her husband on the advice of huchchaiah, the priest of the village goddess kumudavva. when they are in the middle of the ritual, desai returns to the palace. in the process of hiding the priest, he is accidentally killed. Marya discovers the death and when he is requested to help bury the body, he blackmails and rapes her. The father on the one hand and the husband on the other, stand as typical representatives of patriarchal oppression and they exploit Singarevva for their own selfish ends. As against these feudal masters, there is Marya, the Gowda’s untouchable servant, who also exploits Singarevva. The plight of the woman in a patriarchal set up is even worse than that of the servant. The subaltern category finds her placed even below the male subaltern. The lecherous Gowda does not only

Singarevva and the Palace b 39

succeed in usurping the piece of land that belongs to Marya, but also succeeds in making Marya’s mother his mistress. Marya never forgets the humiliation and goes to the extent of murdering his own mother for joining hands with the scheming Gowda. Marya, who represents the voice of the subaltern, revolts against injustice and exploitation. The novel, trying to catch a glimpse of the changing times, implies a gradual tilting of the equation of centres of power. The beginning of the strengthening of the subaltern lies in the weakening of the forces of feudalism. Kambar’s fictional narrative underscores the resistance of the subaltern as a significant motif. Marya’s exploitation of Singarevva is part of his vengeance against hegemony and his rebellion culminates in the murder of the cruel and immoral Gowda. The anti-feudal stance of kambar projects the subaltern Marya as the agent of the destruction of the decadent feudal structure. As is evident from the previous summary, in spite of the title, the novel cannot be described as pro-woman though it is Singarevva, exploited from all sides, who stands at the centre of the novel. At the end of the novel when all her attempts to have a child fail, frustrated and humiliated by her husband’s shameful obsession for Chimana, she resorts to a desperate gesture of rebellion. She accepts the untouchable Marya, who had exploited her earlier, as her lover and gives birth to his child. This leads to the suicide of desai who leaves a death-note making her responsible for his end. Singarevva is arrested and put into jail. Coerced into submission and silenced all through her life, finally she is able to register her resistance by one significant gesture. The novel ends on a positive note with the palace, which longed for a child, being converted into a school resounding with the laughter of children. The democratic gesture of the last desai, the son of Singarevva, who converts the palace into a school, paves the way for modernity by marking the end of all vestiges of hegemony. Though the novel develops the almost parallel themes of the decline of the feudal structure and the endless oppression of women of which Singarevva is the representative, the fictional focus is more on the politics of power struggles. And it is conspicuous that it subscribes to patriarchal notions regarding women and sexuality.

Laxmi Chandrasekhar’s Rewritings Laxmi Chandrasekhar, who has been associated with the kannada theatre for the last 35 years, has created a niche for herself in the world of theatre. Besides being a talented actress, she was a lecturer in

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english at nMkrV College for women in Bangalore and is a wellknown translator. her translation of Singarevva and the Palace was published in 2002 by katha. She then went on to retranslate the same into a theatre version first in Kannada and then in English. She gave the first performance of her Kannada version in Bhumigeetha auditorium organised by rangayana on 11 november 2001 on the occasion of the national women’s drama Festival. She specialises in solo performances and being a committed supporter of women’s causes, she chooses plays with a feminist focus. with a desire to know the translational intentions behind the two different renderings of the same text by the same author, one across languages and the other across genres, i contacted Laxmi Chandrasekhar who readily shared her views with regard to the origins of the two translations (personal interview, 15 November 2011). She said that first of all, it was her high regard for kambar as a powerful kannada writer, and the feminist potential of the novel which had attracted her to take up the work of translation. elaborating on her intentions of converting the novel into a play, she said there were several reasons for it. First, when she was translating the kannada novel into english, she had recognised that there was a feminist text at the core of the novel which suited the solo-narrative theatre performance perfectly. Solonarrative theatre was her forté and she was excited about putting it on stage. Second, it was one woman’s moving story of exploitation and resistance narrated by another woman. As performer, she would be yet one more woman enacting the roles of Singarevva — the protagonist and Sheeningavva — the narrator. Third, as kambar was basically a dramatist, the novel Singarevva and the Palace is invested with highly dramatic elements and great dramatic possibilities. Laxmi Chandrasekhar felt that the text easily lent itself to dramatisation. Fourth, she discovered an element of universality in Singarevva’s plight that underscores a woman’s suppression by oppressive patriarchal codes and the story of her resistance and struggle to find freedom to fulfil her sexuality and motherhood on her own terms. But let us begin by looking at Chandrasekhar’s english translation of the novel. Commenting on this translation, Vanamala Viswanatha observes that the novel keeps a balance between deliberate ethnicisation and communicability. She has tried to capture the local colour and texture of the novel by retaining the kannada word order, sentence structure as well as speech rhythms

Singarevva and the Palace b 41 in the english translation. The translation has largely followed the original quite closely and the attempt could be described as minimalist with very few changes except for those necessitated by the linguistic distance between the two languages. (Viswanatha 2005: 8)

Singarevva and the Palace is deeply invested with the flavours of folk culture and tradition, a typical feature of kambar’s literary work. hence, the translation of his works into english is a challenge and requires a deliberate effort at intercultural transfer. The translator has employed various strategies to convey features of the source culture encoded in specific lexical items for which there are no equivalents in the receptor culture. Sometimes source language lexical items are imported with an inherent explanation and sometimes without, which carries the risk of the point being missed. The introduction of culture specific words makes a demand on the reader. On the whole, the English translation is terse, has a natural flow, and reads well. Laxmi Chandrasekhar confessed that the english translation initially did pose certain problems as english is a language which is associated with and spoken mostly by the educated and the elite classes in the indian context. having a servant of Singarevva speak english may not appear natural. So, she decided to use an english idiom which was neither standard nor really an indianised idiom of the language, but which was nearer to the kannada word order with a generous sprinkling of exclamations and questions. The play version of the translation was made more evocative by using an inbuilt glossary in order to reconstruct the sense of the original language and also reduce the sense of alienation. She pointed out that her main focus was communicability (personal interview, 2011). what is more fascinating in the translation process of this novel is that the translator, who has followed the original closely, goes on to attempt an experiment of a different kind, the like of which very rarely happens. Adapting the novel Singarevva and the Palace to the theatre is not the only transformation she negotiates. while translating the original, she recognises the feminist potential of the text. She appropriates a text that challenges the feudal hegemony into a feminist text that challenges patriarchal hegemony. Yet another experiment implicit in her theatrical performance is that it has been converted into a onewoman show, infusing it with a fresh perspective. The translation activity gains a whole new dimension by destabilising traditional cultural identities and providing an alternative understanding of reality.

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Laxmi Chandrasekhar’s attempt is translation activity with a difference and the translator here actively participates in the creation of new meaning. Although woman is at the centre of the novel, the underlying agenda of the original is to foreground the hegemonic/subaltern binary while there is no conscious attempt at representing the oppression of the doubly exploited woman. There is a certain romanticisation of female sexuality and the narrative conforms to basic patriarchal values. in the novel, Marya’s assault of Singarevva is seen more as a part of male oppression of the female even within the subaltern category whereas in the emphatic feminist politics of the solo performance, the role of Marya who stands for resistance to hegemony is played down in order to offset the motif of gender. The translational strategy is to appropriate the discourse of domination to the discourse of female resistance. The translator here employs the ‘hijacking’ strategy of feminist translation and becomes an active participant in the creation of alternative meaning. The performance text enables the conversion of submission into potential rebellion. Singarevva, beautiful but timid, conditioned by patriarchal value systems, is coerced into a marriage first with a corpse and later with a sick husband. Sheeningavva, the main fictional narrator in the novel, reflects the helpless position of women, ‘Where do women have the right to say i will or i won’t, yeppa?’ (Singarevva 2002: 44). Sheeningavva, who has accompanied Singarevva to her husband’s house, is not only the childhood friend and maid of Singarevva but also her alter ego. But the same Singarevva, realising the treachery and greed of her father, opposes his interference in her life and in desperation curses him when he is bent on exploiting her. her resentment against her impotent husband’s irresponsibility, indifference, false sense of prestige, and shameful behaviour pushes her to the desperate attempt at resistance by accepting Marya as her lover. This act of rebellion coincides with her desire to have a child. The performance version fully develops the themes of female bonding and sexuality. Singarevva had deep affection for her mother-in-law, an old woman who dies hoping to see a grandchild. The old woman keeps singing a folk tune in which she promises a gold waist-band to her daughter-inlaw if she gives birth to a grandson. Although Singarevva takes Marya as her lover, the internalisation of the patriarchal myth of female sexual purity torments her with a guilt complex which she tries to drown by drinking. Singarevva’s alliance with Marya may be seen as an act

Singarevva and the Palace b 43

of sexual transgression which is a reaction to the sexual suppression which she was subjected to. The four months she spends with Marya is a period which underscores the fulfillment of her sexuality. It is significant to note that the feminist perception foregrounds woman’s claim to motherhood. ‘during those three–four months Singarevva tasted happiness. That patre tree there, it sprouted then,’ said Sheeningavva. She continues: To sum it up for you in one word, have you seen the statue of rati, kamanna’s Rati in Holi Oni at Ghodageri? She looked like that. Her face too was filled with the same loveliness, the same contentment, the same joy. (2002: 190–95)

The traditional hindu notions of chastity, domestic passivity, and an asexual motherhood stand subverted here creating a definite space for female desire. The representation of female sexuality and an alternative perception of purity in the performative text is part of the gender politics of translation. Laxmi Chandrasekhar’s theatre version of Singarevva and the Palace may be read as a narrative that recognises the articulation of female sexual desire as a site of resistance in itself which has always been contained within the larger patriarchal order. it exploits the representation of sexuality which has always been subjected to moral and ethical codes of a patriarchal social structure and underscores resistance and rebellion against the dominant order. if the original novel, by virtue of being a patriarchal text, tends to accept the articulation of female sexual desire as an exception and not a norm, and naturalises the subsequent guilt complex, the performance text alerts the reader to ‘the political process by which such representation becomes naturalized in structuring woman’s self-representation’ (Bose 2002: xviii). The shift of focus from a hegemonic narrative to a gender narrative and thereby expanding the fictional scope is the achievement of the translator. Laxmi Chandrasekhar, who retranslated Singarevva and the Palace into a solo performance that valorises resistance, provides an illustration of the possibilities of feminist translation. Commenting on the different versions of Singarevva and the Palace, Vanamala Viswanatha says: Undoubtedly, the novel is woman-centric as the title itself proclaims and Singarevva’s plight is depicted with touching compassion. Undoubtedly, the novel is anti-feudal in showing up the cruelty and false vanity of the

44 a Vijaya Guttal feudal master. And yet, it also upholds the character of the untouchable Marya who wreaks violence on Singarevva. woman has always been used as a symbol of land/earth especially in a feudal society. Singarevva is initially owned by her upper caste father Gowda, and then by desai, the husband. Having her raped by the lower caste Marya is justified, almost romanticized in the novel as it serves the anti-feudal vision of kambar. But where is the woman in all this? how can we condone Marya when the express reason for choosing the novel was its potential for a progressive feminist politics? (Viswanatha 2005: 8)

The two translations of Singarevva and the Palace by the same translator provide an interesting illustration of different translational agendas. if the novel form of the translation mirrors the feudal power politics in its decadence represented in the figures of the Gowda and Desai, the performance provides an insight into gender reality. in the novel as well as the performance, once Singarevva realises the greed and treachery of her father the Gowda, she breaks her silence and gives vent to her rage. She curses him for destroying her life first by marrying her to a corpse and later to a sick husband in the hope of swallowing his wealth at the time of his death. She does not spare her husband who snuffs out the joy of her life in another way. She rebels when he humiliates her by his continued attentions to other women and his epileptic fit which denies her the pleasure of motherhood. Vanamala Viswanatha writes: even if Singarevva accepts Marya in the end, it is depicted in the play as a result of a conscious resolution to break out of the shackles imposed by an unfeeling feudal order — in rebellion rather than in submission. (ibid.: 9)

if the guilt she feels is made to appear natural in the novel, the play projects it as an outcome of the lifelong conditioning of patriarchal value systems. There are other features of the play which give it its own distinctive identity. The role of Sheeningavva is foregrounded as the main narrator where one woman narrates the story of another woman’s life with empathy and understanding. There has been a long tradition of male actors playing the female roles in the past. The soloperformance of Singarevva and the Palace has served the cause of women in another way in the sense that here the female actor plays all the major roles, both male and female, with a focus on the core aspects of their characters, envisaging a new trend.

Singarevva and the Palace b 45

Another feature of kambar’s creative vision is to identify woman with the earth and its fertility. But Laxmi Chandrasekhar refuses to accept this notion of identification and feels that a woman cannot be reduced to a mere metaphor. For her as a translator to the play version, resistance within the given context is the most valuable aspect. She subtly converts what was subdued in the original into the most striking feature of the play. At the end of the novel, Singarevva makes a conscious choice to have a child by accepting Marya as her lover as she knows her husband desai who takes voyeuristic pleasure in other women is in reality impotent. Laxmi points out that Singarevva does not conceive when she is raped by Marya, though she has a false hope. it is an act of violence forced upon her which fails to lead to fruition. it is her conscious choice which leads to the fulfilment of her sexuality and motherhood. But Singarevva is yet the product of a society which is dominantly patriarchal. The internalised patriarchal notions of female chastity torment her and in order to overcome her guilt consciousness she takes to drinking. She can experience the joy of sexuality only in a state of intoxication. it is the conflict within her that forces her to surrender herself to the police when desai, her husband, leaves a suicide note saying she is responsible for his death. She delivers her child while in jail and dies soon after, as if waiting for that alone. in a way, her death is the result of her guilt consciousness. Laxmi Chandrasekhar explains that in the novel, Marya, who represents the marginalised group, provides a contrast to the corrupt Gowda and the impotent desai, symbols of the declining feudal order. his role is romanticised to a certain extent and one could recognise an undercurrent of valorisation in the sexual violence to which he submits Singarevva earlier and his death which follows her own. Laxmi Chandrasekhar makes it clear that the play version deliberately underplays the role of Marya in order to offset the feminist focus and underscores the motifs of female bonding and resistance. The novel Singarevva and the Palace, and its dramatic version provide interesting instances of feminist reading of an androcentric text. Patrocinio Schweickart observes that in feminist texts: The story will speak of the difference between men and women, of the way the experience and perspective of women have been systematically and fallaciously assimilated into the generic masculine, and of the need to correct this error. (1988: 430)

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The play is the response of the woman reader to the androcentric representation of woman and it rescues a pro-woman narrative hidden within. The sexual politics of androcentric literature not only draws the woman reader into a complicity in the elevation of male difference into universality and denigrate the female difference into otherness but also draws her into a process where the denigration is naturalised. The achievement of the translator of the novel Singarevva and the Palace is that being an alert woman reader, Laxmi Chandrasekhar has successfully recovered the subtext of resistance and converted it into a dominant discourse. She seems to have been able to convey this feminist reading with remarkable clarity. She has already given successful shows in english not only in the major cities of karnataka, kolkata and Ahmedabad, in india, but also abroad in Leeds and London in the United kingdom, and houston and Los Angeles in the United States. She has performed it at the world women’s Theatre Festival at Los Angeles. After her performance in kolkata, one reviewer compared it to Aparajito in Bengali. Laxmi herself said that in Singarevva and the Palace she perceived a universal element in the theme of a woman hemmed in on all sides by a patriarchal system and her continued struggle to free herself from the oppressive shackles. She believes that in the representation of woman’s predicament, it can join the line of great works like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Lorca’s Yerma. These works tell the tales of women made desperate by the norms and conventions of the society they live in and function as critiques of those norms.

References Bassnett, Susan. 1991. Translation Studies. new York: routledge. Bhaduri, Saugata (ed.). 2008. Translating Power: Stories, Essays, Criticism. new delhi: katha. Bose, Brinda (ed.). 2002. Translating Desire: The Politics of Gender and Culture in India. new delhi: katha. Chandrasekhar, Laxmi (trans.). 2002. Singarevva and the Palace. new delhi: katha. kambar, Chandrasekhar. 1982. Singarevva Mattu Aramane. heggodu: Akshara Prakashana. rahman, A. (ed.). 2002. Translation: Poetics and Practice. new delhi: Creative Books.

Singarevva and the Palace b 47 Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. new York: routledge. Schweickart, Patrocinio. 1988. ‘reading ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of reading’, in david Lodge and nigel wood (eds), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, pp. 425–47. delhi: Pearson education Ltd. Viswanatha, Vanamala. 2005. ‘introduction’, in Singarevva. Bangalore: kriyative Theatre.

4 Graphic Adaptations/Textual Negotiations Reading Feluda in English Suchitra Mathur *

what is the relationship between translation and adaptation? Con-

ventionally, the difference between the two has been articulated in terms of the medium of the final product, with translation remaining within the literary realm while adaptation trans-codes texts (usually literary) into different media (such as films). However, Roman Jakobson’s elaboration of inter-lingual, intra-lingual and inter-semiotic as three kinds of translation problematises any such simple distinction between the two, seeming, in fact, to subsume adaptation within translation. And yet, vexed questions of fidelity and alleged inferiority do seem to distinguish adaptations from translations, making the two occupy significantly different positions within the cultural landscape. This chapter explores the politics of this difference in the realm of production as well as reception through a comparative study of two english versions of Satyajit ray’s Feluda stories. in 2009, with great fanfare, Satyajit ray’s Feluda appeared in the comic book format in english with the publication of A Bagful of Mystery and Beware in the Graveyard by Puffin Books, the children’s imprint of Penguin. others followed quickly, making six such Feluda comics available to readers in English by 2011. This, however, is not the first introduction to Feluda for the english-language reader. Starting with the publication in 1988 of The Adventures of Feluda (translated by Chitrita Banerji), Penguin india had already made all of Satyajit ray’s Feluda stories available to readers in English, collating them finally into a handsome two-volume edition in 2000. Publishing selected stories from the same canon in the comic book format about a decade later appears to be an attempt by Penguin india, through its children’s imprint, to cash in on the popularity of Feluda amongst a growing english-language readership by extending its market to include a much younger audience thought to respond better to the graphic format as

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compared to the traditional prose translation. read within this framework, the two english language versions of Feluda may be seen to function as two rungs on the same ladder with the more accessible graphic adaptation leading its young audience ‘naturally’ to the literary translations as they grow older and more mature as readers. As Subhadra Sen Gupta, the scriptwriter of the graphic adaptations put it, ‘kids who have not read Feluda before are being introduced to him and i hope they will read the novels next’ (Borpujari 2009). This strategy of packaging canonical works as ‘picture books’ that are seen to be more attractive and accessible to a young audience as a means of leading them on to more serious reading is at least as old as the 1940s Classics Illustrated series. Amar Chitra Katha first brought this trend into india in the 1960s with respect to classics of indian literature such as Shakuntala and Anandmath, while Campfire’s ‘classics’ and ‘mythology’ titles have given a new ‘indian’ visual garb to this tradition of graphic adaptations in the twenty-first century. In all such cases, the assumption is that the graphic adaptation acts as a simplified but direct introduction to the ‘source’ text, with the title of the work acting as the most immediate link between the two versions. interestingly, however, this particular link does not operate in any straightforward manner when it comes to the Puffin Feluda comic books whose titles do not match the titles of the stories as published in the Penguin translations. Through minor differences, such as The Criminals in Kathmandu becoming A Killer in Kathmandu, to complete disassociation, such as Incident on the Kalka Mail appearing as A Bagful of Mystery, the comic books’ titles prevent any easy access to their literary counterparts for the reader in english. The reason for this change, of course, is not far to find; the comic book adapters have used the original Bengali text as their source, and their title translations do not necessarily match those of the earlier english translations. however, for the reader in english who has no access to Bengali as a mediating langauge between the graphic adaptations and literary translations, the result of this mismatch is a breakdown of the assumed ‘direct’ mapping of the comic book onto its literary ‘source’. what, then, is the relationship between Puffin’s Feluda comic books and Penguin’s Feluda stories? how does a non-Bengali speaking audience ‘read’ these two seemingly parallel transpositions of a regional cultural icon into the indianenglish cultural landscape? While it is true that the mismatch in titles makes it difficult to move easily between the literary and graphic adaptations of specific stories,

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one could argue that the comic books provide an introduction to the Feluda canon as a whole, and as such do act as a stepping stone to the literary translations of the entire oeuvre. After all, the names ‘Satyajit ray’ and ‘Feluda’ both appear prominently on the covers of the two-volume collected edition of Feluda stories as well as all the comic books, making the connection between them amply clear. And yet, even if one looks just at these cover pages, what strikes one is the difference rather than the similarity. The two thick volumes of Feluda stories, reminding one forcefully of the standard two-volume editions of Sherlock holmes, have complex artwork on their front covers that is subtle and suggestive in its abstraction. The shadowy figures and open manuscripts create a sense of mystery that visually reinterprets the idea of ‘adventure’ in the verbal title, while the blurred images suggestive of motion captured by camera hint at the high-culture cinematic associations that necessarily accompany the name of Satyajit ray. The overall composition of the front covers packages the text as ‘serious’ reading meant for the pleasure of our little grey cells, an intellectual treat that would amply repay the careful perusal required by the sheer bulk of the two volumes. in radical contrast, the comic book covers sport brightly coloured clear-line drawings of the three main characters in dynamic visuals that redefine the ‘mystery’ mentioned in the verbal titles as action-adventure in the mode of Tintin or Asterix comics. Be it Feluda being pushed off a cliff in Danger in Darjeeling, forcefully punching a villian in Murder by the Sea, or leading a fast-paced chase in A Killer in Kathmandu, these cover pages of the relatively standard 40-page comic books are clearly packaged to thrill their audience with the action-packed exploits of the intrepid Feluda (the focal point of each cover page) and his two side-kicks. ‘Satyajit ray’ appears here only as the creator of Feluda, with cover-page credit being shared by Tapas Guha (artist) and Subhadra Sen Gupta (scriptwriter) who have transformed ray’s invention into this comic book hero. This sidelining of ray continues in the introductory pages of the graphic adaptations where ray appears alongside Guha and Sen Gupta, accompanied by a short biography that, while beginning with a reference to Ray’s illustrious film career, focuses mainly on his work for ‘a Bengali children’s magazine called Sandesh’, with specific focus on the ‘fascinating’ stories of Feluda that are ‘full of interesting information about places, as also cryptic puzzles, puns, and word games’ (Guha 2009). Interestingly, after the first two comic books, even this short introduction to ray is relegated to the end of the text, leaving only his name on

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the cover page. The introductory materials in the two-volume literary translation, on the other hand, pay full tribute to ray’s stature as a cultural icon, with a one-page bio-note on ray that provides an overview of his accomplishments both as a filmmaker as well as an author (not just of ‘children’s literature’), an ‘Author’s note’ by Satyajit ray, a Foreword by Bijoya ray, and a four-page introduction by the translator Gopa Majumdar. This is followed by a detailed bibliography of the entire Feluda canon, listing all the titles in Bengali alongside their english translations and providing their original dates of publication. This extensive introductory material, apart from clearly establishing the primacy of ray as the eminent author-creator of Feluda, also packages the stories themselves as textual participants in a canonical literary tradition, encouraging their appreciation within a larger historical context defined both by the genre of detective fiction (stretching back to Sherlock holmes) as well as ray’s own Bengali literary output over the second half of the twentieth century. how are we to reconcile the comic book Feluda with this sombre literary counterpart? To a certain extent, the difference between the two may be understood in terms of the perceived difference between ‘children’s literature’ and ‘literature for adults’. while the graphic adaptations are packaged for easy consumption by a young audience that may have heard of Satyajit ray but would be more familiar with action heroes from comic books and films, the two-volume Penguin edition is clearly meant for more mature readers ready to grapple with cultural heavyweights such as ray. within this framework of reading, it may be assumed that children first introduced to the action-hero Feluda of the comic books would mature into appreciating the more cerebral protagonist of the literary translation wherein Feluda’s physical prowess comes a distant second to his mental agility. Certain narrative variations between the two versions, thus, may also be explained through this difference in their intended audiences. in A Killer in Kailash (the literary translation of ‘kailashey kelenkari’), for example, the story begins with a long discussion between Feluda and Topshe about architectural wonders of the world, and their possible origins, based on the book, Chariots of the Gods that Feluda is shown to be reading at the time. This discussion, like many other similar ones in the Feluda canon, has no direct relation to the plot of the story which revolves around the stealing of ancient sculptures from indian temples for sale abroad. And yet, its very tangentiality adds a layer to the plot’s involvement with ancient temples, making them more than valuable heritage and

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investing them with an aura of architectural mystery that connects them with other heritage sites across the world. The graphic adaptation of this story, The Criminals of Kailash, on the other hand, begins with a depiction of the theft itself with all the visual suspense associated with night scenes of ancient temples in their isolated splendour followed by their violent violation as sculptures are hammered away and then sold for dollars to a foreigner. Mystery, crime, greed, the foreign hand — it is these Bollywood-ish action-adventure elements that are used to capture the reader’s attention in the comic book; Feluda enters only on page two when the crime is brought to his attention and he immediately begins his investigation. This focus on thrilling, fast-paced action in the graphic adaptation is evident not only in such narratorial changes but also in their visual composition. Towards the end of The Secret of the Cemetery (the literary translation of ‘Gorosthaney Sabdhan’), for example, we have this passage: Suddenly, complete chaos broke out in the room. william gave a giant leap, knocked down Pyarelal who was standing in front of him, and rushed towards the exit. Mr. Choudhury fired his gun, but missed him by a couple of feet. The bullet hit the dial of a standing clock and shattered it completely. To everyone’s surprise, the damaged clock immediately began to chime. (ray 2004: 720)

in Beware in the Graveyard, the graphic adaptation of the same story, this passage is visualised through a four-panel sequence. The first panel depicts william hitting Pyarelal, but then the perspective suddenly swings a full 180 degrees to put Feluda centre stage as he leaps across three panels to tackle william while, at the same time, dodging the bullet fired by Choudhury. The dynamic panel composition in this scene, wherein panel boundaries are disrupted by characters in motion, highlights Feluda as an action hero in a manner reminiscent of action-adventure comics clearly invoking an entire graphic novel tradition going back to Superman that is distinct from the literary detective fiction tradition invoked by the literary translation — ‘Ray had often spoken of his interest in crime fiction. He had read all the Sherlock holmes stories before leaving school. it was therefore no surprise that he should start writing crime stories himself’ (ibid.: x). The two english-language versions of Feluda, thus, invoke two distinct creative traditions.

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it is interesting to note at this point that in most reviews of the graphic adaptations, the only ‘influence’ that is seen to operate in the artwork is that of Tintin, and this ‘fact’ is acknowledged by the artist, Tapas Guha, himself: ‘i’ve been inspired by herge’s Tintin, the panels are clean, the page is neat and comes alive’ (quoted in Sircar 2012). Though the visual echoes of Tintin in the Feluda comics are undeniable, the latter exhibit a visual range that extends much further into the graphic novel tradition, drawing not only on various action-adventure series as mentioned earlier but also on recent indian graphic narratives such as the works of Sarnath Banerjee. The use of illustrations, photoshop and line drawings alongside each other to create a visually complex narrative that functions simultaneously at various evocative registers is a far cry from the uniform style of the Tintin comics. why, then, the insistence on the Tintin parallel? This may be understood in two ways — as an attempt to maintain a connection with the ‘source’ text where we have Topshe actually reading Tintin comics (for example, at the beginning of A Killer in Kailash), as well as a reiteration of these graphic adaptations being intended primarily for children who, like Topshe, would be familiar with Tintin-style comics. As Subhadra Sen Gupta put it: ‘our aim is to introduce the new generation to the genius of Satyajit ray by bringing his stories of Feluda, the professional detective with a super-sharp brain, in comic book form’ (dipal 2010). once again, the graphic adaptations are presented as an accessible conduit to their mature literary counterpart. And it is this imperative of accessibility that is also used by Subhadra Sen Gupta to explain the ‘updating’ of Feluda — ‘i have given him contemporary look. his clothes are 21st century . . . his nephew, Topesh, speaks like a modern-day teenager and the language is today’s’ (Mid-day 2009). i would argue, however, that this contemporised scripting, while undoubtedly serving the purpose of making the comic books more accessible, does so not through any purported ‘simplicity’ for the sake of its young audience, but by employing a different, albeit equally nuanced and complex, idiom that is more familiar (and not just ‘accessible’) to its intended twenty-first century audience, irrespective of its age demographics. The differences, in other words, between the graphic adaptations and the literary translations of Feluda into English are indicative of a significant cultural shift, rather than a mere demographic alteration, in their respective intended audiences. it is this cultural shift, and its political significance as a symptom of ‘globalised’ India, that will be my focus in the rest of this chapter.

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Let me begin by going back to Subhadra Sen Gupta’s insistence that the graphic adaptations are meant to act as an introduction to ‘the genius of Satyajit ray’. But which ‘Satyajit ray’ is this? As already described in the initial part of this chapter, the comic books do not really tell us much about ray. while the two-volume literary translation begins with an ‘Author’s note’ written by ray himself, followed by a foreword by his wife, Bijoya ray, before we get to the ‘introduction’, which finally introduces us to the translator Gopa Majumdar, the comic books present Satyajit ray as the owner of Feluda (as indicated by the possessive construction, ‘Satyajit ray’s Feluda Mysteries’), while the creators of the comic books are clearly seen to be Tapas Guha and Subhadra Sen Gupta whose names not only appear on the cover page but who also appear alongside ray in the one-page ‘authorial’ bio-notes available inside. Furthermore, while the literary translation foregrounds its relationship with its source text through a full list of corresponding Bengali and english story titles, the graphic adaptation not only makes no reference anywhere to any particular source text but also does not indicate that there is any linguistic translation involved in the whole exercise. Apart from a passing reference in the bio-note to the fact that ray wrote these stories for the Bengali children’s magazine, Sandesh, there is no explicit mention of the source language. There is, thus, no viable connection that a reader of the graphic adaptations may pursue between these comic books and the works of the Bengali cultural doyen. For this reader, therefore, ‘Satyajit ray’ becomes merely a name imbued with cultural value, but empty of any specific content. His name, in fact, acts as the brand logo of a franchise which has global validity without necessarily being identified with any specific local source or origin. ‘Satyajit Ray’s Feluda’ functions as a mobile commodity, almost like a Mcdonald’s burger — a commodity that is produced and consumed independently across the globe without any sense of its specific ‘foreign’ (in this case, regional, specifically, Bengali) origins since it is effectively ‘domesticated’ by a coating of the familiar.1 This idea is reinforced by the hybrid verbal language of the comic books, which effortlessly combines words/phrases in both Bengali as well as hindi with its predominantly english rendition of the narrative. Pepperings of ‘Sidhu Jetha’ (instead of the translated ‘Uncle Sidhu’, as found in the literary version) and ‘kya baat’, alongside the colourful ‘who the hell?!’, make these comic books read like a conversation overheard amongst a group of teenagers in Delhi, locating Feluda firmly

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in the contemporary north indian metropolitan centre, irrespective of the actual location of any particular story. And when any such specific regional location does appear in the comic books, it does so more as a tourist attraction rather than a lived reality. Be it delhi itself (in A Bagful of Mystery) or kathmandu (in A Killer in Kathmandu), their specificity is captured quickly and almost photographically through a series of panels depicting iconic landmarks, such as the Qutub Minar or the darbar Square, as sundry exotica meant for quick consumption. These locational snapshots, in fact, function in some ways as the visual counterpart of the sprinkling of non-english words in the verbal narrative — never enough to allow for any depth or immersion, but enough to create a surface that is variegated enough to have the sheen of cosmopolitanism. The implied reader of such a text, then, is a cosmopolitan globetrotter who is ‘at home’ everywhere, but appears to have no local habitation. This spatial rhizome effect is echoed at the temporal level by the graphic adaptation’s erasure of the past as a lived reality.2 Visually this is accomplished not only through the contemporary dress and settings for the characters but also through the deliberate static black-andwhite/sepia-tinted or even purely textualised depiction of the past whenever it does make an appearance within the narrative. while one may argue that some visual distinction is required between the past and the present, the deliberate freezing of any action in panels depicting the past, combined with the actual portrayal of some ‘past’ panels as framed photographs and/or purely text panels, reinforces the idea of the past as fossilised/textualised, as a distanced self-contained entity that has no connection to the present. And, this temporal compartmentalisation is enhanced through the contemporisation of the narratorial present wherein women in jogging suits and headphones run alongside young people talking on their mobile phones, making the graphic narrative appear coterminous with the reader’s time. Such ‘presentification’ removes any need for the reader to grapple with temporal distances, to create a bridge between the ‘reading’ present and the narratorial present, which is required by the literary translation. The comic book Feluda not only eschews the trademark jeans-kurta and Charminar cigarettes that so effectively invoke a 1970s india in the literary version, but also does not have to face excessive heat, incessant rains and resulting power cuts/outages that plague his literary counterpart who is stuck in the uncomfortable middle-class lifestyle of the pre-liberalisation era. The graphic adaptation’s rootedness in the

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present, then, is not merely a postmodern rhizomic effect; its depiction of this ‘present’ is structured by, and consolidates, a class-specific politics of globalisation. Both visually and verbally, the graphic narrative makes Feluda co-inhabit the space/time of its intended reader — the upwardly mobile ‘globalised’ indian — whose gated-community living is as neatly and comfortably packaged as the glossy covers of these Feluda comics. within this bond of familiarity between the consumer and the commodity, there is no place for any other india/indians; the colourful contemporary backgrounds in the comic book make the kurta-clad Jatayu a visual anomaly that is used to enhance the comic distance that separates Jatayu from Feluda and Topshe as well as the reader. Making this implied cosmopolitan indian reader of the Feluda comic books comfortable through focusing on the familiar, then, appears to be the driving force shaping the contours of these graphic narratives. And the creation of this comfort zone is not restricted to the visual and the incidental as outlined above; it extends at times to small but crucial elements of plot that significantly alter the thematic implications of the narrative. in A Bagful of Mystery, for example, the graphic narrative depicts a short three-panel sequence showing Feluda and his companions buying various things, including a suitcase, needed to replace the mysterious bag that has been stolen from them (Guha and Sen Gupta 2009: 25). in the literary version, however, there is a page-long description of how Feluda acquired the necessary lookalike suitcase, and this flashback is prompted by a question asked by Lalmohan Babu (aka Jatayu): ‘Tell me, Mr. Mitter, the dividing line between a brilliant detective and a criminal with real cunning is really quite thin, isn’t it?’ (Ray 2004: 314). It turns out that the specific bag needed was not available in any store, and so the only way Feluda could get one was to steal it from a person who did have an identical one through a clever ruse that allowed Feluda to interchange suitcases with this man. The literary version not only depicts Feluda’s cleverness and dexterity but also introduces these qualities of Feluda through a comment that raises fundamental questions regarding our definitions of ‘crime’ and the ‘criminal’. Though the story does not return to these questions, their being raised at this point are a vivid reminder of one of the central thematic concerns of detective fiction, placing this Feluda story within that tradition and raising questions that have no easy answers. in the graphic narrative, on the other hand, the very

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possibility of any such questions being raised is erased through the replacement of the Feluda swapping suitcases trick with the buying of a suitcase in a shop, where Feluda plays only a peripheral role since it is Topshe who finds the appropriate duplicate item. This narrative alteration, rather than condensation (which may be seen as a requirement of the graphic format) replaces uncomfortable questions about what constitutes criminality by a simple market economy where whatever is needed is available for sale. This slippage from the moral ambiguity of criminality to the amoral transaction of commodities is symptomatic of the shift to a neo-liberal worldview, making the graphic adaptation very much a product of, and a commodity for, the contemporary globalised consumerist cultural marketplace. The politics of globalisation, however, does not play out only in the marketplace. deeply insidious, it invades every aspect of culture, reshaping not only the present but also the past in its own image. This hegemonic power may be seen at play towards the conclusion of Beware in the Graveyard, which is the graphic version corresponding to the literary translation The Secret of the Cemetery. This complex narrative, like many of ray’s Feluda stories, interweaves the past with the present in a plot wherein the root of current problems is seen to lie buried in the colonial past. while this interweaving is undone through the employment of two distinct visual idioms used to depict the past and the present in the graphic adaptation (as described earlier), the narrative itself incorporates a few telling differences from the literary version that subtly alter this interrelationship instead of suppressing it (as done at the visual level). The smallest of these changes is the simple deletion of one line where, in the literary version, the english grandfather eventually forgives his english granddaughter for marrying an indian Christian. in the graphic adaptation, while there is a reference to the grandfather’s displeasure at this alliance, there is no mention of the subsequent reconciliation, leaving the ‘offense’ of cross-cultural marriage unforgiven. A very minor difference that makes no real difference to the plot, but it does raise the question of why these few words, which could so easily have been added without any detriment to the flow of the graphic narrative, have been excised from this version? Living as we do in a world of khap panchayats and the Shiv Sena acting as ‘moral police’ against any whiff of ‘westernisation’ amongst Indian women, this gender-specific difference does assume significance in terms of the cultural politics of contemporary globalisation

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wherein the privileging of a ‘modernity’ defined by consumerism is accompanied by an increasingly regressive gender politics. how clearly gendered this alleged east–west binary is, becomes explicit when we look at the other significant differences between the conclusions of the two versions. Let me begin with a short overview of the story that will provide the necessary background for this conclusion. The english grandfather, mentioned earlier, is Thomas Godwin, whose descendents form two distinct branches — the Biswas line from the cross-cultural alliance between Godwin’s granddaughter and the indian Christian, and the direct ‘unmixed’ Godwin line through Thomas’s eldest son. A rare Perigal watch gifted to Thomas by the nawab of Lucknow, is the object of contention; it was buried with Thomas, but then dug up by one of the Biswas brothers to sell to Mr Choudhury, a powerful local businessman who wants to acquire it at any price. it is the recovery of this property and its restoration to its ‘rightful’ owner that is Feluda’s task in this story. in the literary translation, Feluda, after declaring that the watch as an historical treasure is ‘state property’, takes the unilateral decision to re-bury it in Thomas Godwin’s grave, while the Biswas brother who stole it from the grave is taken into custody by the police. nothing happens to Mr Choudhury because, as Feluda says, ‘The Mahadev Choudhurys of this world are very difficult to keep down. Even the police can’t do anything. A man like him is like a hitler. he can buy people off whenever he wants’ (ray 2004: 723). in the graphic adaptation, on the other hand, there is no mention of the watch being ‘state’ property; it is assumed that it belongs to the Godwin descendents. And it is they, not Feluda, who decide that it needs to be re-buried in Thomas’s grave. Furthermore, the graphic narrative skips over any consequences for the perpetrators of the theft; the final revelation of who did what is followed immediately by a shift in scene wherein Feluda sums up the case for Topshe and Jatayu. Though the police are shown to have arrived on the scene before the revelations begin, they, along with Mr Choudhury, disappear from the scene during the revelations, leaving the reader with no indication of who, if anyone, they may have arrested. The notions of crime and justice are thus, once again, swept outside the comic’s purview which focuses, instead, on the property (the watch) and its ‘rightful’ owners. And even here, the final emphasis is on the Godwins, rather than the mixed-heritage Biswases; it is Chris Godwin who accompanies Feluda et al., to re-bury the watch. The last panel, in fact, depicts a happy foursome against the graveyard

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in the background, with the obviously Caucasian-looking Chris having the last word: obelisks, ghosts and grave. it’s a scary place i fear! here lies a famous chef, And a watch he loved to wear. Look out for that falling tree! At the Park Street cemetereee!!! (Guha and Sen Gupta 2009: 40)

The past and present, east and west, are thus happily reconciled following the ‘proper’ restoration of property, with no troubling/ thought-provoking questions regarding the colonial past and/or its relationship with the present. Contrast this with the closing of the literary translation: Dangling from Feluda’s fingers was the first reward bestowed by Nawab Sadat Ali on Thomas Godwin for this excellent cooking — a repeater pocket watch made by one of the best watchmakers in england, Francis Perigal. For two hundred years, it has lain buried underground beside the skeleton of its owner. Even so, as it caught the first rays of the rising sun, it glittered and dazzled our eyes. (ray 2004: 724)

The focus here is on the ‘property’, but in terms of its complex history, problematising any notion of its ‘rightful’ owner. At the same time, the reference to a ‘two hundred years’ history — a phrase often associated with the period of British rule in india — vividly evokes the colonial past, raising questions about its ‘value’ even as we are ‘dazzled’ by its heritage (the watch) while sitting on the banks of the Ganges. The past and present, the east and the west, are intertwined here too, but not easily reconciled in a simple doggerel that seems to bury the past to privilege a present unburdened by its history. Even if such ‘simplification’ is intended merely as a concession to its ‘young’ intended audience, it is nevertheless not only symptomatic of, but also complicit in, the neo-liberal cultural politics of globalisation that overdetermines the contemporary historical moment in india. The graphic adaptation, through its deceptively simple postmodern ‘reading’ of Feluda, interpellates a reader who is the privileged product of these forces of globalisation. And this reader, i would argue, is not easily collapsible with the implied reader of the literary translation who appears to be heir to the cultural politics of nehruvian socialism.

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The difficulty of mapping the graphic and literary incarnations of Feluda in english onto each other, then, is not only the result of two independent ‘translations’ of an ‘original’ source text intended for demographically distinct audiences, nor of their relative ‘fidelity’ to this source-language text. rather, it is their situatedness in different cultural moments, and their resultant interpellation of ideologically distinct readers, that makes them function as complementary products within the contemporary literary marketplace. Together they may be seen to exemplify the co-existence within the same historical/temporal moment of differing dominant and residual ideologies.3 it is in reading them side-by-side that one may not only track these ideological traces but also envision certain emergent possibilities that could point to a future beyond the binary of the ‘liberal’ past and the ‘neo-liberal’ present. exploring the speculative potential of such alternative readings, however, is the subject of another chapter.

Notes * i would like to thank rizio Yohannan raj and Mini Chandran for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 1. i am drawing here on Lawrence Venuti’s idea of ‘foreignization’ and ‘domestication’ as two distinct translation strategies. while Venuti is referring to the respective privileging of the cultural context of the source language or the target language in specifically linguistic translations, I would argue that the terms may be extended to describe the two ends of a spectrum in the negotiations between the local and the global in the processes of globalised commodity transference. 2. Amongst its various other features, the rhizomatic is characterised by Deleuze and Guttari as embodying multiplicity that is ‘flat’ without any relation to the ‘one as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world’ (1987: 8), wherein ‘the ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on a plane of exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations’ (ibid.: 9). it is this surfacing of reality, both spatially and temporally, that i am calling the ‘rhizome effect’. 3. i am borrowing the concepts of ‘dominant’, ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ from Raymond Williams who uses them to define ‘not only “stages” and “variation” but the internal dynamic relations of any actual [cultural] process’ (1977: 121). while he associates the ‘dominant’ with the hegemonic, he distinguishes between two aspects of the ‘residual’ — (a) the ‘experiences, meanings, and values which cannot be expressed or substantially verified in terms of the dominant culture’, and therefore exist in an ‘alternative

Graphic Adaptations/Textual Negotiations b 61 or even oppositional relation to the dominant culture’; and (b) the ‘active manifestation of the residual . . . which has been wholly or largely incorporated into the dominant culture’ (ibid.: 122). i see the literary translation of the Feluda stories as embodying and consequently privileging an implied reader representative of the ‘residual’ in both senses of the term, existing simultaneously, at some levels, in an oppositional relation with the dominant ‘globalised’ culture, while also, at other levels, being wholly incorporated within it. The relationship between the two kinds of readers thus posited for the two versions of Feluda in english, therefore, is not mutually exclusive.

References Borpujari, Utpal. 2009. ‘Spreading Feluda Fever’ http://utpalborpujari.wordpress.com/tag/subhadra-sen-gupta/ (accessed on 19 September 2012). Guha, Tapas (art) and Subhadra Sen Gupta (script). 2009. Beware in the Graveyard. New Delhi: Puffin by Penguin Books. ———. 2009. A Bagful of Mystery. New Delhi: Puffin by Penguin Books India. ———. 2009. Murder by the Sea. New Delhi: Puffin by Penguin Books India. ———. 2010. A Killer in Kathmandu. New Delhi: Puffin by Penguin Books India. ———. 2010. Danger in Darjeeling. New Delhi: Puffin by Penguin Books India. ———. 2011. The Criminals of Kailash. New Delhi: Puffin by Penguin Books India. deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Available online at http://danm.ucsc.edu/~dustin/library/deleuzeguattarirhizome. pdf (accessed on 2 September 2013). dipal. 2010. ‘Feluda in Comic Books’. http://feluda.wordpress.com/ (accessed on 19 September 2012). ray, Satyajit. 2004. The Complete Adventures of Feluda, Volume 1. Translated by Gopa Majumdar. new delhi: Penguin. Sircar, Arkaprabha. 2012. ‘Feluda Comics’, in Say What. http://arkasircar. blogspot.in/2012/01/feluda-comics.html (accessed on 19 September 2012). Mid-day. 2009. ‘Satyajit ray’s Famous Feluda in Comics’. http://www.mid-day. com/news/2009/aug/250809-satyajit-ray-feluda-in-comics.htm (accessed on 2 September 2013). Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. new York: routledge. williams, raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. oxford: oxford University Press.

5 On Adapting the Popular Meena Pillai *

The Popular, in fiction or film, is a discursive form which, while imagin-

ing a homogeneous audience and thus anticipating it, can nevertheless write heterogeneous and unanticipated viewers and readers into the horizon of its cultural codes and conventions. Thus, the popular taps into cultural imaginaries, social concerns, archetypes, and myths, as also the desires and anxieties of entire populations, all of which allow identificatory possibilities from multiple subject positions that might cut across time and space. While individually the novel or film, as cultural imaginaries, provides vital clues on how a cultural community articulates or represents itself, together they offer ‘vast networks of interlinking discursive themes, images, motifs and narrative forms that are publicly available within a culture at any one time, and articulate its psychic and social dimensions’ (dawson 1994: 48). The narrative and structural interrelatedness of the novel and film, as also their adaptiveness to the demands of heterogeneous audiences/readers and new markets, make adaptations one of the most viable forms of encoding the popular. Chemmeen (1956) is a novel written by Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, one of the social realist writers of kerala and a member of the Progressive Literature Movement. Though not his magnum opus, Chemmeen, as a romantic novel that pales in comparison to his masterpieces like Kayar, is yet by far one of the most popular of his novels, and one that attained him transnational fame, however ironic that might sound. it tells the timeless and classic tale of romantic love between Karuthamma, a fisher girl, and her childhood friend Pareekutty, a small time Muslim trader. The novel, tapping into a superstition that the safety of an Arayan’s (fisherman) life at sea was contingent upon the chastity of his woman at home, was, both in terms of narrative and ideology, antithetical to the social realist oeuvre of Thakazhi. Yet, the novel met with a resounding success and was translated into almost all indian languages and also into a number of foreign languages including

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French, German, russian, italian, Sinhalese, Arabic, Vietnamese, Slavic and Polish, to name just a few. It was the first Malayalam novel to profit from a rich harvest of translations and thus inaugurated a new era of the possibility of global circulation for regional literature. ramu kariat adapted the novel into a film in 1965 and this too became a resounding success in the box office. It won the National Film Award for the best feature film and also the Certificate of Merit at the Chicago International Film Festival. it soon acquired a popular classic cult status in indian cinema. Chemmeen, the novel, anticipates a film as no other novel in Malayalam has ever done. The novel taps into the mass cultural dimensions that are precisely the foundations of cinema as a mode of mass entertainment. human drama as populist spectacle underlies the spirit of the novel as the film. The mise-en-scène of the film bears very close resemblances to the imaginary frames of the novel and this proves interesting in view of the fact that in nearly half a century of its reception history many Malayalis might have seen the movie first and then read the novel, raising interesting conjectures about the possibilities of the superimposition of subsequently accumulated star value of actors such as Sathyan, Sheela, Madhu, and kottarakkara on to the characters of the novel they portray and the ways in which it could affect both the interpretation and aura of the original. Before the prolific appearance of new media or visual modes of mass diffusion Chemmeen was a narrative pregnant with the cinematic, dexterously negotiating the Malayali’s iconophobia and logophilia or the deep cultural prejudice against and stigmatisation of the visual arts and media, probably also stemming from an over-valorisation of the written word. What is often called the ‘essentially pornographic’ filmic image offers itself in the novel demanding our scopic gaze both literally and figuratively. In the novel for example, Karuthamma chastises kochumuthali begging him not to ‘look’ at her in ‘that’ manner. The ‘look’ and the ensuing ‘bashful realization’ of her breasts and single piece loincloth embody her in a fleshly materiality that is typical to or characteristic of the visceral pleasures of cinema. Conversely, one can find in the film the thematic and narrative persistence of the novel with an added novelty offered by the material variations offered by the cinematic apparatus. The very first shot of Karuthamma in the film marks the meaning she bears — her body is constructed as the object of the gaze — a multiple site of male pleasure. Thus the cinematic apparatus, always already compromised in the ideology of vision and sexual difference, has constructed, and cannot but construct, karuthamma

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as image, spectacle and the object of gaze. The taut body of Sheela’s karuthamma marks the transformation of the central female subject of a coastal community drama into an objectified erotic figure created on demand for the visual and erotic desires of a Malayali audience. even the big dark mole on the breast, in the movie, serves to accentuate active scopophilia. That both the novel and the film are fetishistic is beyond doubt. Nevertheless, the success of the film and its huge popular appeal is probably owing to the fact that it is able to tap much more into this fetishistic gratification using the image of ‘chemmeen’ or the catch from the sea as a fetish for the woman, the ‘catch’ from the land. The film creates a narrative enigma which is not as prominent or pronounced in the novel. karuthamma loves Pareekutty, but is given away in marriage to Palani in lieu of the fact that he is an able-bodied man whose sturdiness and willingness to labour are found useful by Chempenkunju, karuthamma’s greedy father. For Palani, karuthamma is a catch, just as for Chemepenkunju, Palani is a catch, thus creating a strategy of exchange and equivalence in the film. Often the fish or the ‘catch’ from the sea creates an ‘insistent impression of display in the mise en scène’ (Cowie 1997: 276), thus marking out a process of fetishistic substitution. it is karuthamma who becomes fetishised in this process of substitution. Throughout the film Karuthamma and the fish catch are in a ‘circulation of substitution and exchange’ where one can decipher ‘the palpable over investment in or excessive value on the visual within the image’ (ibid.: 268). Marcus Bartley’s camera captures the fishing boats coming in again and again to create multiple connotations of objects circulated and exchanged. For Thakazhi, the writing of the novel was impelled by an acute monetary need — to make money for building a house for his wife and children. This ‘desire’, so embedded in notions of the popular, gets translated into the lives of his characters like Chempenkunju and Palani. The adaptation too can be seen as another massive investment, fiscal, emotional and psychic, accommodating and replicating this act of desire and consumption within the representational form of cinema. Chemmeen, the catch from the sea, as the title suggests can also be thus seen as a palimpsest for the numerous acts of desire and consumption that mark the trajectory of the novel from its writing to its popularity, its numerous translations into different languages, as also its immensely successful screen adaptation and the awards, accolades and the popular cult status of both novel and film.

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The novel’s realism is a visually pliable one that happily yields to the film’s complex conventions of portrayal as also the cultural expectations of Malayali and pan-Indian audience alike. Thus, the film’s opening pan and long shots fix the locale and present the life of its fisher folk characters in the most innocently ‘realistic’ manner. Yet, the novel is Thakazhi’s attempt to shrug off the ideological burdens of the social realist tradition of the Progressive writers’ Movement. The novel’s rather superfluous realism, which is in contrast to Thakazhi’s earlier social realist mode of writing, offers itself to the regiming of representational realism that the film seeks to achieve. It is the brilliance of ramu kariat’s direction and the lucidity of S. L. Puram Sadanandan’s screenplay that create the aura of realism and humanism in the film. Thus, it has to be emphasised that what is fabricated by the narratives of both film and fiction as the real, authentic life of the Araya community is actually a logbook of the ideologies and ideological contradictions of the kerala society coming to terms with the idea of the conjugal family and attempting to contain the subversive potential of that social unit. Both Chempenkunju and Palani, at the heart of the bourgeois family, face social and emotional isolation signifying the crisis of masculinity trapped in a domestic interiority and struggling with new cultural codes appropriate to the male providers of the new family ideal. it is noteworthy that the split between the public space of production and the private, domestic, emotional space of reproduction is much more cutting in the film. The iconography of the film, its editing, and its visual vocabulary emphasise this divide very powerfully with the waves which act as a metaphor for the dichotomisation of the interior and exterior, private and public, sea and shore. Yet, the film latches on to only those conventions which register as ‘realistic’ with the Malayali viewing subject. Therefore Sheela as karuthamma, though most unlike in physical features to real fisherwomen (generating innumerable ‘academic’ critiques on Sheela as ‘Veluthamma’ referring to her fair skin), caters to popular audience expectations of how the heroine of a melodrama can plausibly be constructed on celluloid according to the aesthetic conventions of cinema, in the process becoming popularly accepted as realistic. As Colin Crisp points out, ‘emphasis on plausibility and credibility can lead even the most extreme fantasy texts being deemed realistic if they conform to existing social conventions of representation and/or to the operative generic conventions of representation’ (Crisp 1997: 242). It is the film’s conformity to the conventions of representation and its reproduction

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of dominant ideological perceptions of the audience that makes it realistic in effect, for these again erase the materiality of the processes of its representation. The film’s construction of the private space of marriage and its attempts to map conjugal happiness on to this space is at slight variance from the novel. Karuthamma, in the film, is more preoccupied with the ‘idea’ of a home and fashions herself in the aesthetics of this imagination. however, it is interesting that the novel, while initially trying to critique the politics of this self-fashioning, gives way to a gendered compromise of modernity it affects in the climatic episodes of the story. The most trenchant critique is offered through the characters of karuthamma and her mother Chakki who resist the materialist aspects of modernity which Chemabenkunju embodies, his overvaulting ambition to subvert the hegemonic structures of caste and class. Chakki is a corrective force in his life, his superego. That gradually however Chakki becomes the mouthpiece of the patriarchal ideological base of the novel is ironic. As the thrifty, prudent, suffering wife who is the ideal companion of her man, Thakazhi later pits her in contrast to the aesthetic sensuousness of the more cultured and refined Paappykunju who can never be the ideal wife. It is interesting to note that the film pushes this ideological premise further by making Adoor Bhavani, who in cinematic language can hardly be found to encode the beautiful or ideal feminine, don the role of Chakki, thus illustrating that the ideal woman ought to be ideally less beautiful. A significant point is that in the 1950s when the public sphere in kerala was registering a more popular and wider support for liberal, socialist, egalitarian values as a result of the social reforms and the communist movements, helping more women to step out into the paid labour force, the novel sought to entice women back home through the domestic ideal. one has to remember the Araya social, political activist Velukuttyi Arayan’s polemical pamphlet critiquing Thakazhi’s myth of kadalamma, the terrible Sea Mother as investing dangerous ideological dimensions, especially compromising the liberty of Araya women, on what he calls mere poetic speech and figurative language of the community (Arayan 1956). Gotz hoeppe has argued that: Pillai’s notion of katalamma was at the centre of the critique. Velukutti Arayan felt his caste denigrated by Pillai’s claim of their alleged worship of katalamma as a non-Sanskrit deity. he demanded that one should not take the concept of katalamma literally (as Pillai had done) and considered the

On Adapting the Popular b 67 alleged moral authority of katalamma as oppressive against women’s liberty. Velukutti Arayan did agree, though, that (in south kerala) in sea songs and other songs of valour the sea is ‘personified’ as sea mother, queen etc. just as a poet addresses trees and creepers. Thus, what in Pillai’s novel is a living force of moral authority is considered by Velukutti Arayan as mere poetic speech. (hoeppe 2007: 73)

It is indeed important to analyse how both fiction and film set the practice of imagining the modern family sans attempts to modernise gender relations. Thus, the casting of chastity as the defining virtue of women and materially grounding this in the women of the Araya community, where large numbers of women work in the public sphere, selling curing or processing fish, illustrates the gender blindness of modernity in kerala. This blindness is glaringly evident in the social movements that have acted as the harbingers of modernity in the state: An informed reading of the history of social reforms in the state from a feminist perspective suggests that while all social reformers have emphasized the importance of literacy, the proposed ‘emancipation’ of women has invariably been looked upon as an instrument that is to be used for the benefits of the family and society, not for the benefit of the woman as an individual in her own right. Literacy may even have been an instrument facilitating the process of internalization of that message. The message has clearly gone very deep in kerala society, for in terms of gender related issues in public life, Malayalee society continues to be very conservative. (Mukhopadhyay 2007: 15)

The novel even goes to the extent of portraying karuthamma’s feeling of ‘conjugal bliss’ when forbidden by Palani to venture out of her home for selling fish. Moreover, it validates Palani’s reiterated demand for karuthamma’s chastity in return for the economic and social security he provides her with as a husband, with karuthamma herself calling this demand if not a woman’s ‘need’, her ‘right as a wife’, a tangible proof of the husband’s love. it is the marked absence of the discourse of social reform which so clearly marks the social history of kerala in the mid-twentieth century that makes Chemmeen so much more of a moral fable or myth. if the novel attempts at creating a mystique around the conjugal imaginary that would nevertheless provide obstacles in the path of real Malayali women to access education and employment, the film is much more curt and ends the issue with a

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cryptic, matter-of-fact order from Palani forbidding karuthamma’s work forays into the public sphere which seems most natural in the circumstances. Yet, one can read into the text and recognise the beginning of the process of shaping the hegemonic masculine that would become the hallmark of popular Malayalam cinema at a later period in history. Cinematography by the Anglo-indian Marcus Bartley, music by the Bengali Salil Choudhary, another Bengali hrishikesh Mukherjee’s editing, and Manna dey singing the famous ‘Manasa maine varu’ — one sees how a pan-indian imagination strengthens the sign of the modern in the film. Thus, the film’s crew re-narrativises the regional from a renewed sense of the national where parochial/caste identities have to be refashioned in the new moulds of a national ‘secular’ self. The transition from the traditional to the modern is best effected through the imagining of the modern family and reallocation of new roles and models especially for women to emulate within the confines of this ideal. It is significant in this context to note how both the novel and the film valorise women’s social/national importance as keepers of eternal transcendental values of virtue and chastity, as is best illustrated by the choric songs themselves. Both the novel and the film, as discourses of modernity, capitulate to its project of constantly pondering over the woman question and in the process regulating female sexuality. It is also significant that the film is more discreet over the issue of caste conveniently doing away with karuthamma’s more protracted agonising over Pareekutty’s Muslim identity in the novel, the film apparently offering a safer habitus of secular modernity untainted in any significant or alarming manner by caste. In tune to the popular paradigm, the film displays a delicately poised ambivalence in affirming either traditional or modern assumptions of caste, erasing the un-ease and embarrassment of caste by what Vivek dhareshwar calls ‘freezing’ it as a social institution, by ‘disavowing it publicly and politically’ (dhareshwar 1993: 116). The novel as a popular bestseller and the film as a popular classic fall in the representational genre of melodrama, typical of mass and popular cultural entertainment, focusing on intensely emotional moments in a family drama and seeking to evoke similar powerful emotions in the audience. The movie adds on to the novel’s melodramatic narrative by using melodramatic techniques like lighting, colour and music (one of the first colour movies in Malayalam) which give a startling

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effect to the cinematic mise-en-scène and contributes to its box-office success. The intense emotionality as well as the interpellation of the audience as subjects of popular sentimental and moral codes, replicating the hegemonic and thus involving the viewer in the material and moral dilemmas of the protagonists in a highly dramatic fashion, is what imbues the film with its hugely successful melodramatic sensibility. From the earlier social realist mode Chemmeen marks a shift in Malayalam cinema to the melodramatic, consolidating its characteristic features as a focus on the family as a microcosmic site reflecting larger social crises, anxieties over the ideal of femininity, and the endless deferral of modernity especially with regard to gender. As karen Gabriel points out, ‘it cannot be stressed enough that a melodramatic displacement of narratives of the social is not merely onto the familial and the domestic, but more crucially into the more nebulous realms of gender and sexuality’ (Gabriel 2010: 70). however, it is to be credited that one significant difference between Chemmeen and the classic indian melodrama is that it radically topples the trope of the ‘sacrificing mother’, offering a moment of subversion when Karuthamma’s sexuality and desire triumph over her motherhood. Yet in the last run this theme is made complicit with the dominant ideology, marking her desire as transgressive and traumatic. That the melodramatic sensibility of the Malayali audience and readers had to be imbued in an ‘air’ of social realism provides interesting insights into the socio-cultural contexts of reception in kerala. Thus, Thakzahi’s Chemmeen while laying claims to the social realist oeuvre of the writer undermines it in favour of the metaphysical dimensions of the ethical, moral and sexual anxieties of the protagonists as well as the heightened emotional ‘effect’ that could be drawn out of this conflict, while the film melds all these into a spectacle. The film, more than the novel, borrows the melodramatic genre’s characteristic ambiguity towards marriage, simultaneously representing it as liberatory and repressive. The movie owes a large part of its popularity to its songs which formed its best advertising and marketing material too. The song and dance in popular cinemas in india unlike that in hollywood musicals where they cleared a representational space in which both characters and audience could indulge in flights of fancy, were and are used as ‘natural and logical articulations of situations and feelings emanating from the dynamics of day to day life’ (dissanayake 2003: 209). in Chemmeen the spectacle of the songs appears as obvious and natural,

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punctuating the emotional statements in the story and inhabiting almost the same continuous narrative space. Thus, the song interludes signify neither fantasies nor memories, neither pretending to access an inner psyche nor creating temporal or spatial ellipsis. what they do most powerfully, both visually and verbally, is to eroticise the sea and the quests/journeys on the sea in a manner as never before or after in popular indian narrative language. The ambiguity of the quest, the metaphorical implications that a journey on the sea has, would be best epitomised in the ‘Gulf Boom’ of the 1970s in kerala, a moment that the narrative of the song ‘Kadalinakkare ponore kana ponninu ponore, poyi varumbol enthu konduvarum’ (o you who travel across the seas, what will you bring on your journey back?) presupposes. The sea ‘imagined’ in the songs becomes an archetype of the innumerable journeys that would mark the social, cultural and economic history of kerala in the years to follow. Thus, the journey into the outer sea captured in frame after frame in the songs signify a foundational aspect of the Malayali imaginary and functions as a popular trope that would equip the Malayali to reckon with the experience of migration, within and outside the state as also beyond the nation, in both its personal and collective significance. It is the sea that maps the Malayali self and becomes a central metaphor in all modern attempts at cartographing this self on to national as well as global narratives. The huge popularity of the songs even in the subsequent decades after the release of the movie is partly due to this rather popular hermeneutics of the sea as a metaphor for Malayali migrations. All the songs in the film are diegetic, directly invoking the sea which adds to the power of its mythopoeia. it is interesting that the novel keeps on referring to the songs, both Parekutty’s mellifluous rendering of his love as well as the folk songs sung on the shores of neerkunnam, which we actually get to hear only in the movie. The novel’s understanding of the inseparableness of music from Malayali narrative traditions, and the way it grounds itself on a clear notion of the semiotic function of music in this tradition contributes significantly to the film’s use of music as an integral narrative agent, contributing to the creation of not only its mood or emotion but to its very mythopoesis. That the novel can foresee and invest in the mythical unconscious of the filmic audience speaks volumes about the folk base of the popular in india and the vast repertoire of oral traditions from which both novel and film draw their sustenance. Music thus having the ‘expressive equivalence to speech’ (Vasudevan 2000: 9), the indian audience

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do not feel the ‘artificial break’ which might be felt by the audience in the west when an actor bursts into a song (Beeman 1981: 83). Borrowing from the folk tradition it is interesting to note how singing is constructed as part of the daily life of the fishing community where instead of the protagonists, it is the ordinary and apparently sidelined characters who are foregrounded in the songs, where the ‘sing along’ nature of the songs constitutes a community and instills the film with its folk motif. The mesmerising allure of the lyrics of Vayalar ramavarma, by far the most popular lyricist poet in Malayalam, rests on the imagination of a mythic land of moonlight where nisagandhi blooms and mermaids frolic on the waves of the ocean of milk (palazhi), a land where beautiful women with shapely eyes like the pearlspot fish (karimeen kannal) take vows of chastity to ensure the safe passage back of their men from the turbulent seas. The folk idiom is set to panindian folk tunes by the magic of Salil Choudhary thus literally making the songs acceptable to mass audience as folk songs in tone, theme and tenor. The only song that stands out at a more individual level in contrast to the songs of the community is Manasa maine varu, but even there one can see the pervasive aura of the mythic seascape where the incessant waves become tropes of the untrammeled desires of the human heart. one must also take into consideration the interrelated tropes of kanaponnu (hidden gold), ponvala (golden nets) and chakara (huge catch of fish) that offer paradigms of the rarest of rare catches and treasures the migrant would bring back home, interpellating both actual and aspiring non-resident Malayalis as subjects in discourses of desire and home. Thus the narrative of the songs, while simultaneously drawing on pre-modern atavistic associations and spiritual connections with the sea, also attempt to construct it as a modern epic imaginary of contemporary struggles for labour, survival and subsistence. These songs have also played a crucial role as ‘migration narratives’ of Malayalis, buttressing claims for female chastity as men sail away to far off shores for amassing economic resources for the family. Three of the choric songs track back and forth to the constant setting out and movement of boats into the outer sea, symbolically linking kerala to the commodity chains of a global trade in human resources that would become the hallmark of its economy. But the evergreen popularity and appeal of Chemmeen, the film as also the novel, is in construction of a ‘keralan’ mythology, using indigenous symbols from this coastal strip of a state to imagine a

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‘Malayaliness’ that finds an echo in the hearts of Malayali readers/ audiences. The golden beaches, the swaying green palms, and in the background the rich and poignant beauty of the enigmatic ocean offer a symbolically lush landscape to the agonies and ecstasies of the romantic hearts on shore. in a land which according to popular myth arose from the sea, the sea is also mythologised as ‘kadalamma’. kadalamma is not only a benevolent goddess but also the terrifying mother who threatens symbolically to devour the fishermen if female chastity is not ensured at home, posing the threat of physical and psychic annihilation. karuthamma like kadalamma is linked to the primal fear of obliteration and loss of identity, of being swallowed up by the feminine. One of the shots in the film that cannot be found in the novel is the morning after the wedding night when a fisherman asks whether karuthamma has swallowed Palani — a prophetic statement of what is to follow. Palani is devoured by kadalamma in death as he is devoured by karuthamma in life. once again one can see here the anxieties of a society shifting from matrilineal to a patrifocal residency, the exigencies of strengthening the notion of the conjugal family and the fine tuning of the nature of relationship between the husband and wife hinging on notions of ‘security’ from man and ‘chastity’ from the woman. in the context of this shift it was considered a humiliating practice for a man to stay on in his wife’s natal home which is why Palani’s refusal to stay in karuthamma’s house is considered natural in the circumstances. The logic of the patrifocal nucleated family can be found in the motives for writing the novel. Thakazhi, in a prefatory note dated 31 october 1995 and titled ‘The Story of My Chemmeen’, states that he wrote the novel at a time when he was living in a thatched makeshift house with katha and his children. day and night katha and he dreamt of transforming the house into a ‘strong’, ‘solid’ one. Though he had written quite a few novels and stories by then, he had been unable to build a house. Therefore, the writing of Chemmeen had two causative factors: ‘a reply to the drumbeats of criticism raging around him; as also an airy, bright lit house built with wooden rafters and tiled roof’ (Thakazhi 2006: 10). Towards the end of the note he says he wrote the novel in three weeks and with its publication he had no difficulty in building the house ‘Sankaramangalam’. ‘Chemmeen was in high demand. rafters were made with wood. The home had a tiled roof and three or four additional rooms were also attached’ (ibid.: 11). in imagining and consolidating this relatively new social unit of the modern family, tradition and myth had to be necessarily invoked

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especially for mapping the dynamics of gender and representing/ containing sexualities. however, karuthamma is not entirely without agency and in the novel is bold enough to contemplate even conversion to islam (the discourse on dress in this context is highly significant), silently critiquing the chastity myth and seeking to validate female desire as normal and ubiquitous, both temporally and spatially. She pesters Chakki to steal from Chempenkunju, and mother and daughter try to pay back Pareekutty’s debt partly and covertly. These female-action-oriented scenes are entirely absent in the movie which represents her as more detached, her self-conscious ambivalence towards patriarchal mores poignantly brought out by Sheela in a superb performance. The complete disdain towards the system is brought out in the utter contempt with which she finally acknowledges her love for Pareekutty to Palani. This is so contrary to her reactions and body language in the rest of the movie that a feminist interpreter would not be able to resist attributing an extra-auteristic impulse (given the commodified representations of the feminine in kariat’s oeuvre), the manodharma of the actor as per indian performance traditions, a free play of imagination which helps her to triumph as ‘woman’ over the aesthetic and ideological perspective of the director. however her answer (that she loves Pareekutty), in the present tense as opposed to the past tense in the novel, inscribing the bold continuity of her love, asserts an apotheosis of the more gendered and revisionist readings of the novel in the nine years following its publication and before its adaptation. Thus while both the novel and the film exhibit a ‘non-synchronism’ characterised by disjunctures in the temporal and psychic, where the mythic might cohabit with the rational and the pre-modern with the modern, it is much more pronounced in the ending of the film where karuthamma suddenly awakens from her mythic maidenhood to a ‘modern’, ‘individualistic’, ‘feminist’ sensibility. Palani’s raised hands to strike his wife is lowered as his gaze shifts to his child but the question is reiterated in another form as, ‘is this child his?’ This anxiety over paternity is a modern anxiety in contrast to Palani’s own uncertainty of legitimate lineage. This question has to be contextualised in the relative flexibility of conjugality in Kerala in an earlier matrilineal tradition which was in a sense compromised for the fixity of the patriarchal institution of the modern family in the twentieth century. Thus the rights of the father started being privileged over that of the mother with a patrilineal shift in ownership of property, presupposing

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an over investment in conjugal fidelity and chastity and leading to a new centering of the father with the marginalising and sentimentalising of the mothers and daughters. This question of anxiety over paternity is significantly absent in the novel and pushes the argument of the non-synchronic nature of the film farther as we see in it the fuelling of ‘older’ anxieties by the more ‘modern’ impulses of women’s emancipation and sexual liberation, which have to be contained in the interests of the modern conjugal family and the transfer of paternal property to ‘legitimate’ children. it has been fairly proven that leftist development initiatives and social reforms have in effect augmented female seclusion in the state. Gender difference was at the very heart of modern caste identities in kerala, a legacy of the early twentieth-century social reform movements which projected patrifocal marriage as the natural and pre-eminent site of material relations in the private realm (eapen and kodoth 2003). Conjugality as the predominant marker of a woman’s identity is fraught with change from Chakki to Karuthamma as also from novel to film, as a further and further shrinking of the private space of women. This shift from the 1950s to the 1960s in kerala’s social fabric could probably be accounted for by the further transitions in the structure of the family from a broad-based production unit to an intensely private domestic unit primarily of consumption and reproduction (kodoth 2005). The novel can also be read as a nehruvian national allegory, where State Planning and economy had to ideally take stock of and preserve spiritual traditions embedded in the more private spheres of social life. At the same time, it also embodies the rise of new economic individualism and private enterprise in a post-independence india, which are at odds with the nehruvian ideals of democratic socialism with its ‘central’ planning solidarity economy and social cohesion. Thus, the private libidinal dynamics of Pareekutty, karuthamma, Chempenkunju, and Palani might ‘necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory’ where ‘the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third world culture and society’ (Jameson 1986: 69). Such a reading would also pose numerous questions as far as the translations of Chemmeen are concerned, critiquing the notion of an unproblematic accessing of the ‘national’, always already complicated by caste, gender and class and also their regional ramifications. Thus, one cannot read either novel or its adaptation without taking into consideration the national and

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historic contexts, the linguistic constitution of the regional, and the necessities of imagining that sub-national identity, the anxieties over what was the nascent state of kerala, the crisis of indigenous modes of livelihood facing the modernisation project of the nation, the persistence of feudal and neo-colonial forces in a postcolonial history, as also the dichotomisation of the private and public, and the processes of gendering the nation, all begging for more nuanced political readings instead of overly psychological ones. it is popular history parading as populist myth that one encounters in both novel and film. Yet from all the other elements in the novel, including its evocative setting, romantic plot and vivid characterisation, it is the myth and the mystification of women through this mythogenesis that is at the core of the filmic adaptation, offering a heady cocktail of visual and narrative pleasure combining the popular, the mythical and the musical in a mise-en-scène that is heavily coded and throbbing with severely repressed passions, and in the last run hybridising these with the market and mass culture. That the first Sahitya Akademy Award for Malayalam novel and the first National Award for Malayalam cinema came at the cost of re-presenting many karuthammas of kerala as compromised signs in the gendered commodified systems of exchange that popular ‘canonical’ literature and popular cinema often become, gives us important clues to reading the popular.

Note * This chapter is a revised version of ‘on Adapting Chemmeen: Myth as Melodrama’, published in Anita nair’s english translation of Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai’s Chemmeen, 2011. new delhi: harper Collins.

References Arayan, Velukutty V. V. 1956. Thakazhiyude Chemmeen: Oru Nirupanam. Thiruvananthapuram: kalakeralam Publications. Beeman, william o. 1981. ‘The Use of Music in Popular Film: east and west’, in Pradip krishan (ed.), India International Centre Quarterly, 8(1): 77–87. Cowie, elizabeth. 1997. Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Crisp, Colin. 1997. The Classic French Cinema, 1930–1960. Bloomington: indiana University Press. dawson, Graham. 1994. Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities. London: routledge.

76 a Meena Pillai dhareshwar, Vivek. 1993. ‘Caste and the Secular Self’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, 25/26: 115–26. dissanayake, wimal. 2003. ‘rethinking indian Popular Cinema: Towards new Frames of Understanding’, in Anthony Guneratne and wimal dissanayake (eds), Rethinking Third Cinema, pp. 202–25. new York: routledge. eapen, Mridul and Praveena kodoth. 2003. ‘Family Structure, women’s education and work: re-examining the high Status of women in kerala’, in Swapna Mukhopadhyay and ratna Sudarshan (eds), Tracking Gender Equity under Economic Reforms, pp. 227–68. new delhi: kali for women. Gabriel, karen. 2010. Melodrama and the Nation: Sexual Economies of Bombay Cinema, 1970–2000. new delhi: women Unlimited. hoeppe, Götz. 2007. Conversations on the Beach: Fishermen’s Knowledge, Metaphor and Environmental Change in South India. oxford: Berghahn Books. Jameson, Fredric. 1986. ‘Third-world Literature in the era of Multinational Capitalism’, in Social Text, 15: 65–88. kodoth, Praveena. 2005. ‘Property Legislation in kerala: Gender Aspects and Policy Challenges’, in eSocialSciences. http://www.eSocialSciences.com/ data/articles/document13182005150.493252.doc (accessed on 20 July 2011). Mukhopadhyay, Swapna. 2007. ‘Understanding the enigma of women’s Status in kerala: does high Literacy necessarily Translate into high Status’, in Swapna Mukhopadhyay (ed.), The Enigma of the Kerala Women: A Failed Promise of Literacy, pp. 3–31. new delhi: Social Sciences Press. Pillai Sivasankara Thakazhi. 2006. Chemmeen. kottayam: dC Books. ———. 2011. Chemmeen. Trans. Anita nair. new delhi: harper Collins. Vasudevan, ravi. 2000. Making Meaning in Indian Cinema. delhi: oxford University Press.

6 Othello’s Trave(ai)ls The Ways of Adaptation, Appropriation and Unlimited Intertextuality K. M. Sherrif

Adaptation Studies has done much to draw attention to the various

forms and modes of rewriting in literature and visual media during the last quarter of a century. however, the emergence of the discipline was actually a natural consequence of the work of translation scholars like André Lefevere, Susan Bassnett, Mary Snell-hornby, Theo hermans, and Lawrence Venuti, beginning in the mid-’80s of the last century, which positioned translation as a form of rewriting. André Lefevere’s ‘Beyond interpretation or the Business of (re)writing’ (1987) was a path-breaking essay. Julie Sanders’ monumental work Adaptation and Appropriation (2006) owes much to the work of these translation scholars. Although adaptation studies has concentrated largely on inter-semiotic rewritings, especially rewritings for the theatre and the screen, it has also tackled intra-linguistic rewritings involving such processes like (to quote, John Milton, one of the theorists of the discipline), ‘recontextualization, tradaptation, spinoff, reduction, simplification, condensation, abridgement, special version, reworking, offshoot, transformation, remediation, and re-vision’ (Milton 2009: 51). But, as Georges L. Bastin has pointed out, adaptation has a long history in the west, dating back to classical roman times (Bastin 2006 [2011]: 5). what the ‘rewriting-Culture turn’ in Translation Studies, which happened in the 1980s, and adaptation studies did was to give adaptation practices a theoretical foundation (Munday 2008: 127–31). Probably the two most important theoretical advances made by adaptation studies are: (a) drawing a distinction between adaptation and appropriation, and (b) shifting attention to intertextuality from the traditional binary of antecedent (original) text and rewriting. Julie Sanders draws a clear distinction between adaptation and appropriation (Sanders 2006: 17–39). Adaptation, however much it departs from

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the antecedent text in rewriting it, still refers to it, privileging it, in the way John Milton points out, as the text with ‘the original point of enunciation’ (Milton 2009: 51). An appropriation, on the other hand, is fundamentally the rewriter’s text which maintains only an intertextual relationship to the antecedent text without privileging it as the original point of enunciation. Julie Sanders also problematises the antecedent–rewriting relationship in the postcolonial context. Quite often, canonised texts from colonising cultures are privileged as points of reference even when they are drastically rewritten. The classic examples are Shakespeare texts which are probably the most telling instances of globalisation in rewriting of texts. Although skeptical of the ‘author is dead’ hypothesis (it negates the creativity of the adaptor/rewriter too), Sanders is more than willing to take it on board to destabilise the authority of the privileged antecedent text (Sanders 2006: 1–2, 17–18). Adaptation studies has focused on the intertextuality of texts rather than on the binary of antecedent–rewriting. Sanders has pointed out the ways in which many texts maintain intertextual relationships with a number of other texts through references and allusions which are often not straightforward invocations, but rewritings (ibid.: 1–14). in more precise terms, any text may adapt/appropriate more than one clearly recognisable antecedent text. Shakespeare’s King Lear, for instance, is only one of the antecedent texts of kurosawa’s Ran, which has also drawn extensively from Japanese folklore and from other texts like edward Bond’s Lear. referring to the work of robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo on film adaptation, Thomas Leitch points out how adaptation studies has opened up the notion of ‘unlimited intertextuality’ in which each text floats upon ‘a sea of countless earlier texts from which it could not help borrowing’ (Leitch 2008: 63). Allowing for temporal precedence, it may be both useful and interesting to look at antecedent texts and rewritings as inter-texts linked in a web of intertextuality, which is what i am trying to do here. The four inter-texts i have chosen are J. e. Taylor’s english translation (1855) of Un Capitano Moro (A Moorish Captain), the story of othello and Desdemona in the sixteenth century Italian fictionist Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio’s collection of stories Hecatommithi (Hundred Fables 1565), Shakespeare’s play Othello (1604), Sambasivan’s Othello (1964) as a kathaprasangam in Malayalam, and Jayaraj’s Malayalam film Kaliyattam (1997). The attempt is to unravel the ways in which the writers/rewriters construct the texts to make them conform to

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or subvert the predominant ideological and aesthetic paradigms of their cultures and adapt/appropriate texts in their transpositions across times, cultures, genres, and media. notions relating to the co-option of canonised texts for perpetuation of power structures; exposition of the asymmetrical relations between hegemonic and marginalised cultures in rewriting of texts (discussed in fine detail by Lawrence Venuti in several contexts); and the subversive potential of rewritings, shall be examined or interrogated along the way.

I Although Cinthio’s story is chronologically the first antecedent text in the set of intertexts we are looking at, it might have had its own antecedent texts/ur-texts in the form of popular folk narratives, as it employs the adulterous triangle which is one of the basic plot types in many literary systems. Cinthio might only have been giving a popular oral narrative ‘a local habitation and a name’. The possibility of ‘The Tale of the Three Apples’, one of the stories in The Arabian Nights, with a strikingly resembling plot (although the story begins more dramatically — with the Caliph haroun el rashid’s discovery of a chest thrown into the sea in which the dismembered body of the woman had been stuffed — and although the African in the story is the villain rather than the hero) serving as an antecedent text too cannot be discounted (Burton 1997: 62–66). what properly historicises Cinthio’s narrative are the references to the defence of Cyprus, which was occupied by Venice in 1489 and was lost to the ottoman Turks in 1571, six years after the publication of the story. readers are reminded here that from this point onwards the english translation of the story by Taylor is being looked at, and that, without the original italian text to fall back upon, it is taken as a close translation in which Cinthio’s plot or narrative sequence has not been altered. Unlike Shakespeare’s play, the action in the story does not begin in media res, which is natural for a story as distinct from a play. The rupture between othello and desdemona occurs not almost immediately after they are married, as in Shakespeare’s play, but after a considerable period of ‘peace and happiness’ in which ‘no word ever passed between them that was not affectionate and kind’ (Taylor 1855: 1). Cinthio’s othello, unlike his counterpart in Shakespeare’s play, does not have a lineage to boast of (‘i fetch my life and being from men of royal seige’). Again, he is not the kind of noble savage Shakespeare made him out to be, who can only deliver plain, unvarnished tales.

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The following quotations will give a clear picture of the Moorish captain as he is represented in the story: My pleasure at the honour i have received is disturbed by the love i bear for you; for i see for necessity one of two things must happen — either i take you to encounter the perils of the sea, or, to save you from this danger, I must leave you here in Venice. The first could not be otherwise than serious to me, for all the toil you have to bear and every danger that might befall you would cause me extreme anxiety and pain, yet were i to leave you behind me, i should be hateful to myself, since in parting from you i should part from my own life. The Moor in the fulness of his joy threw his arms around his wife’s neck, and with an affectionate and tender kiss exclaimed: “God keep you long in such love, dear wife.” (Taylor 1855: 1)

desdemona in the story is a stronger character than Shakespeare’s heroine and, despite her ardent love for othello, discloses her convictions about racial stereotypes. when othello, his sexual jealousy aroused, starts asking uncomfortable questions, she reacts along predictable lines (for an italian patrician): ‘nay, you moors are of so hot a nature that every trifle moves you to anger and revenge’ (ibid.: 2). it is iago’s infatuation for desdemona, not his anger at being slighted, that primarily leads to the tragedy. iago is a two-dimensional character, who lacks both the philosophical depth and the scheming shrewdness of Shakespeare’s villain. he is the typical rough-and-tumble ‘bad character’ of medieval tales of adventure and it would not be wrong to view Cinthio as Boccacio’s true successor in story-telling. iago and emilia have a three-year-old daughter, who plays an unwitting but significant role in Iago’s plot when Desdomona’s hugging and petting the child gives iago the opportunity to steal her handkerchief from her sash unoticed. Unlike in Shakespeare’s play, emilia is not involved in this ruse of iago’s. Again, interestingly, iago really suspects that desdemona is in love with the captain of the troops (who is not named). And it is iago, under othello’s instructions, who bludgeons desdemona to death and pulls down the rafters of the ceiling to make it look like an accident. desdemona’s murder in the story has none of the emotion and drama that Shakespeare constructed around it in his play. The story does not end dramatically, as it does in Shakespeare’s play, with othello killing himself and iago being arrested following emilia’s

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disclosure; instead, it rambles on. othello, as the days go by, begins to lose his sanity and searches for desdemona everywhere as if she were alive. he also develops a deep revulsion for iago and even thinks of killing him, but finally ends up depriving him of his rank. Meanwhile, iago teams up with the Captain of the Troops and convinces him that othello was behind the murderous attack which miamed him for life, and that he (othello) had murdered desdemona on suspecting her of having an affair with him (the captain). This garbled version is subsequently disclosed to the Signoria of Venice, the latent racism of which prejudices it into instantly believing iago’s account. othello is arrested and tortured. But as he stubbornly refused to confess, he cannot be convicted and has to be freed. The Signoria can only banish him and derive some satisfaction from his death in exile at the hands of desdemona’s kinsmen. it takes nemesis some time to catch up with iago. he dies of torture after being arrested on charges of conspiring in the death of a nobleman. ‘Thus did heaven avenge desdemona’s death’, the narrator concludes almost like an afterthought (Taylor 1855: 7). it is puzzling why it takes heaven so long to avenge desdemona’s death. retribution comes quickly in Shakespeare’s play — for Shakespeare was firm in his conviction that ‘there’s a divinity that shapes our ends’ (Hamlet V.ii.10). But scepticism was in the air in Cinthio’s italy; Galileo’s revolutionary discoveries about planetary motion were less than half a century away. one must also remember that Cinthio’s predecessor Boccacio had been irreverently agnostic in many of his stories two centuries ago.

II Cinthio’s othello is closer to a villain than a hero. Shakespeare constructs him as a tragic hero who is fundamentally different from an ‘anti-hero’ like Macbeth. Some of othello’s famous words — ‘loved not wisely, but too well’ (Othello V.ii.347) — cast him almost in the mould of classical tragic heroes. Yet, the charge that desdemona bluntly makes against othello, that his volatile temperament is in his genes, in Cinthio’s story sticks. it can be argued that the combination of medieval and nascent-colonial attitudes to racial minorities works like a lethal concoction in Shakespeare, an argument that is supported by both The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest. othello’s dramatic harakiri marks him out to be a loyal colonial subject. Yet, he is no Caliban. he is respected by the Signoria, the duke is not swayed by racial prejudice in deciding on Brabantio’s representation against othello, and he

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has the unstinted loyalty of subordinates like Cassio. The class mobility of nascent capitalism — in which the weight of your purse and the skills you have acquired count, not the colour of your skin — has already been set in motion. But, the construction of iago is probably the most remarkable thing that happens in Shakespeare’s play. By comparison, Cinthio’s iago is a colourless, third-rate villain, an ordinary ensign with wife and child who happens to get a virus into his system: an infatuation for desdemona. Shakespeare’s iago is not motivated by such elemental passion. what frustrates him is the slip of power between the cup and the lip, Cassio’s superseding him to the post of othello’s Lieutenant. his half-hearted suspicion that Othello has ‘twixt my sheets done my office’ can be attributed less to sexual jealousy than to a kind of defence mechanism against his sense of guilt (i.iii.393–94). Although he exploits roderigo’s infatuation for desdemona to the hilt, he has only contempt for ‘love’, or any sentiment for that matter. ‘it is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will’, he declares unequivocally (i.iii.333–34). The short lecture that iago gives roderigo on his faith in human reason and his espousal of amoral self-interest would have had ominous overtones even for an elizabethan audience before whom the forces of mercantile capitalism and colonialism had, like a ship coming ashore, only just appeared on the distant horizon. Living in the age of global capital, surely, we can understand iago better: o villainous! i have looked upon the world for four times seven years; and since i could distinguish betwixt a benefit and an injury, I never found man that knew how to love himself. ere i would say, i would drown myself for the love of a guinea-hen, i would change my humanity with a baboon. (i.iii.311–16)

For the stop-worrying-and-start-living pundits, iago is their own man: Virtue! a fig! ’tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners. (i. iii. 320–23)

Even when nemesis catches up with him in the end, Iago is fiercely unrepentant, and, what is more interesting, agnostic. when he stubbornly resists attempts to make him confess and declares, ‘From this

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time forth i never will speak word’, Ludovico wonders, ‘what, not to pray?’ (V.ii.307–8). Kathleen McLuskie is, of course, justified in calling Shakespeare a patriarchal bard (McLuskie 2003 [1985]: 88–108). As an elizabethan playwright writing for both the market and his aristocratic patrons, what else could he have been? But he has to be given credit for creating some of the most resolute and articulate women characters in British literature: ‘Unsex me here’ (which would translate as ‘un-gender me here’ in our times), Lady Macbeth prays as she plots duncan’s murder (i. iv. 144). it can easily be seen that it is emilia’s timidity, and the conventional wifely obedience that iago is able to extract from her that seals othello’s fate; but, emilia more than makes amends for it in the last scene of the play by exposing iago and paying for her moral courage with her own life. But this probably is not a mere impulsive act. There is a hint of what is coming in the previous scene where we hear emilia making a proto-feminist statement: Yet have we some revenge. Let husbands know Their wives have sense like them: they see and smell And have their palates both for sweet and sour, As husbands have. what is it that they do when they change us for others? is it sport? i think it is: and doth affection breed it? i think it doth: is’t frailty that thus errs? it is so too: and have not we affections, desires for sport, and frailty, as men have? Then let them use us well: else let them know, The ills we do, their ills instruct us so. (iV.iii.91–101)

Probably there is more to emilia’s transformation. in Cinthio’s story we hear of a child of iago’s and emilia’s who plays an unwitting part in the plot. There is no such child in Shakespeare’s play. From what iago says and does, it is reasonable to conclude that only power and money interest him.

III Kathaprasangam emerged out of the story-telling traditions of South india. in it, a single performer entertains an audience, often accompanied by a small troupe of musicians, with tales and anecdotes narrated in prose, but interspersed with couplets or quartets of verse,

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rhymes and occasionally whole songs, putting his story-telling, acting and musical skills to effective use. its precursor was the harikatha or kathakalakshepa, performed at temples, whose theme was essentially religious. The secularisation of the form in kerala is closely related to the socio-political movements in the region in the first half of the twentieth century which found the form effective for mass mobilisation.1 it is kedamangalam Sadanandan (1919–2008), a card-holding Communist and Sambasivan’s mentor, who is primarily credited with the politicisation of kathaprasangam. however, it was Sambasivan (1926–1995) who developed kathaprasangam into a professional art form. Though a card-holding Communist like Sadanandan himself, many of his kathaprasangams like Othello did not help much in popularising the Communist ideology. Sambasivan’s Othello, a one-hour audio text which begins with a homage to Shakespeare, described as a ‘master poet of the world’, is a rewriting of Shakespeare’s Othello as a kathaprasangam.2 Sambasivan’s obeisance to Shakespeare is symptomatic of the way classical Marxist cultural offensives, even in postcolonial societies, largely left ‘world classics’ like Shakespeare alone. Yet, Sambasivan’s kathaprasangam appropriates Shakespeare’s play in a number of ways. one of the most important shifts in Sambasivan’s rewriting is that iago, Shakespeare’s larger than life villain, is cut to size. This is done by both alterations in the plot and by making iago talk more like a runof-the-mill villain than like the ‘philosopher-villain’ of Shakespeare’s play. iago, for instance, shows low cunning, unlike in Shakespeare’s play, by quietly slinking away after rousing Brabantio so as not to overplay his hand. we do not hear from him the cynical pronouncements we heard from Shakespeare’s iago about love and self-interest. Othello too is a much altered figure in Sambasivan’s kathaprasangam. Sambasivan presents othello as a victim of something more than jealousy and political intrigue. departing from Shakespeare’s plot, Sambasivan presents othello as an upwardly mobile postcolonial. while in the former text he is only captured in war and sold as a slave, in Sambasivan’s text othello is a slave to begin with (without a lineage to claim, as the othello in the play has), being sold to several masters until, under his last master, he rises by sheer hard work to become commander of Venice’s armed forces. othello’s position as a postcolonial subaltern is highlighted by a brilliant twist in the plot in which Brabantio, in a last-ditch effort to alienate othello from desdemona, fabricates a conversation with desdemona, in which the latter

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chides him for allowing a ‘blackie’ like othello to frequent their home. Sambasivan’s othello is also more emotionally high-strung than Shakespeare’s — we hear about him passing out from the shock of learning about Desdemona’s infidelity from Iago. And, he does not fulminate against desdemona as much as Shakespeare’s hero does. Shakespeare’s othello can only deliver unvarnished tales. he is not romantic by instinct, so he does not have a graphic description of desdemona to offer. Given the history of graphic descriptions of heroines in poems and novels in Malayalam in the first half of the twentieth century, Sambasivan’s audience wanted more. So, desdemona’s image is considerably ‘varnished’ in Sambsasivan’s kathaprasangam. She is described as accomplished in music and ‘so like an angel’ by an ecstatic othello. There is also an elaborate description of the discreet manner in which desdemona summoned othello to her home without her father’s knowledge to reveal her love for him. Sambasivan has kept ribaldry and sexual innuendos at arm’s length. There is no mention of a black ram ‘topping’ a ewe (i.i.90–91), or of othello and desdemona ‘making the beast with two backs’ (i.i.113). Sambasivan goes as far as to make iago whisper Cassio’s account of his frolicking with Bianca in othello’s ears for fear of offending bystanders! he even thinks that the forceful scene where othello play-acts being desdemona’s lover and pretends to pay emilia for keeping her mouth shut, would be too much for his audience. As compensation, Sambasivan makes his othello accuse emilia of being desdemona’s accomplice in her affair with Cassio, which was all right with his audience who knew of such ‘maids of honour’. The kathaprasangam, at least overtly, had little to do with contemporary politics, but the bulk of Sambasivan’s audience had always been Communists or Communist-sympathisers. The early radicalism in issues of gender and sexuality associated with the Communist movements in many cultures (represented symptomatically in the Malayalam film Anubhavangal Paalichakal, directed by Thoppil Bhasi, a Communist cultural icon, in which a working class woman’s estrangement from her husband and her subsequent affair with her supervisor is taken as perfectly ‘normal’ by the local unit of the Communist Party), one must remember, evaporated with the Stalinist regression to tradition and conservatism. The elizabethans had relished bawdiness, and Shakespeare’s theatres were outside the London city limits — well out of reach of the Puritans. not so for Sambasivan’s kathaprasangam, which required a corresponding sanitisation as seen through the earlier examples.

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The elizabethan audience has also been described as ‘gluttons for the spoken word’ (harrison 2005 [1951]: 13). After Changampuzha, the most popular romantic poet ever in Malayalam, whose sense of music influenced generations of his successors, it would not be far off the mark to describe Malayalis in the mid-twentieth century similarly as gluttons for melodious verse. The mixed verse-prose narration of kathaprasangam gave Sambasivan ample opportunity to cater to his audience’s predilection for melodious verse. Sambasivan tried out dozens of popular tunes in Othello. But for him, music was not the legendary fatal Cleopatra, as this rewriting of othello’s speech in Shakespeare’s play shows: Bhadram urayilurangatte minnuma Ghadgangal manjil thurumbedukkum. Valinekkalethra sakthamanangathan Vardhakyam enne thaduthu nirthan keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them. Good signior, you shall more command with years Than with your weapons. (i.ii.59–60)

it was smooth, sonorous, alliterative verse, which Sambasivan’s audience was expected to lap up eagerly. inexplicably, emilia is marginalised in the kathaprasangam. As in the play, she does reveal the truth about desdemona to othello, but not in open defiance of Iago. And what we have described as her ‘protofeminist’ speech in the third scene of Act iV is also missing. Surely, one might wonder if mid-twentieth century kerala was not more patriarchal than elizabethan england.

IV Jayaraj’s film Kaliyattam is a self-proclaimed adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello. But like kurosawa’s Ran, which is an adaptation of King Lear only in parts, Kaliyattam resignifies only the outlines of Othello’s plot.3 The hero, kannan, is a performer of a folk ritual called kaliyattam, which belongs to the repertoire of rituals called theyyam, still widely performed with traditional trappings in many parts of north kerala. Theyyam performers appear in stylised costumes as gods (in fact the word theyyam is believed to be derived from deivam, ‘god’) or deified ancestors (filial piety and ancestor worship are deeply entrenched in kerala’s social matrix) to the accompaniment of chants called thottam

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and drumbeats. The theyyam speaks to the devotees, blesses them and delivers his prophecies. The performers belong to castes like Malayan (kannan is a Malayan), Vannan, Munoottan, Anjoottan, Velan, etc., which are positioned on the borderline between dalits and Thiyyas/Ezhavas in kerala’s complicated caste hierarchy. Unlike othello, therefore, kannan holds no political power except that, as an oracle, he is invested with divinity on the days of the performance and the ritual fasting (which requires complete abstinence from meat, fish, alcohol, and sex) that precedes it. Thamara, the girl he falls in love and marries, is a nair and the daughter of a landlord much above him in the caste hierarchy. in place of iago we have Paniyan, who is a villain and a clown rolled into one. Paniyan is actually kannan’s sidekick, a komalitheyyam, a kind of vaudeville artist who imitates the theyyam performer before the actual performance begins. he grows into more menacing proportions as the film progresses. Paniyan hates his job. His grouse is that despite his unstinted loyalty, kannan chooses kanthan, another performer, as his assistant, instead of him. For kanthan, the parallelism with Cassio does not end with his promotion. Like Cassio, kanthan too is unpredictable in his behaviour when he has had a drop too many. But unlike Bianca, the courtesan, damayanti is a typical country lass who is deeply in love with kanthan. The slavish (and quite ineffective, considering the differences of culture and medium), near-literal translations of certain dialogues from Shakespeares’ play, besides producing a jarring effect on an audience who have not been fed on rhetoric like the elizabethans, reminds one of Julie Sanders’ cautioning words about adaptations privileging antecedent texts. we shall see that there is more to this servility. A few instances (out of dozens) can be quoted here from the film: Ente panappetteede thakkolu polum ninne elpichu. Ennittum nee ichathi cheythoolo, Paniya (Kaliyattam) (i take it much unkindly that thou, iago, who hast had my purse as if the strings were thine, shouldst know of this). (Othello i.i.1–3) Ente mol, ente mol. Ole poyi. Marichuao Athe. Enikkavalu anganethanneya (Kaliyattam) (My daughter, oh my daughter. dead? Ay, to me). (Othello, i.iii.57–59)

88 a K. M. Sherrif Malaya, olu achane chathichola, ninneyum chathikkum (Kaliyattam) (She hath deceived her father, and may thee). (Othello, i.iii.292–93) Ee velicham njan anaykkatte, ennittaa deepavum keduthatte (Kaliyattam) (Put out the light and then put out the light). (Othello, V.ii.7)

in the last instance, the effect of the utterance is watered down by undermining the pun on ‘light’ by splitting it into two words, velicham (light) and deepam (lamp). Kannan, unlike Othello, is riven by the conflict between his ardent love for Thamara and his bitterness at her unfaithfulness till the end. At several moments in the film, he just wishes away his suspicions about Thamara and is reconciled with her. Unlike iago, it requires quite a bit of persistence on Paniyan’s part to convince kannan that Thamara is cuckolding him and to egg him on to murder her. it seems to be more correct for kannan to say, than for othello, that he ‘loved not wisely, but too well’. kannan is always conscious of the ugliness of his face which carries marks of the small pox he was stricken with in childhood and which had taken him almost to the doorstep of death. But, unlike othello who despite his dark complexion and ugliness (from a eurocentric perspective) had his lineage to fall back upon, kannan’s problem is more his caste than his pock-marked face. when kannan knew well that Thamara loved him not for his physical beauty but out of sympathy for the suffering he went through in life, and not less, for his gentleness, humility and his prowess as a theyyam performer, there can be no other explanation for his painful question to Thamara: how could you love a man with a face like mine? one possible (uncharitable) reading of Othello is as a tale with the moral that inter-racial marriages are headed for disaster. It is easier to find a similar moral in Kaliyattam: inter-caste marriages are headed for disaster. Thereby hangs a tale. One persistent criticism that can be directed at Jayaraj’s films is that they pander to the ideology of hindutva. in kerala’s volatile cultural scene, this is a serious charge to make against a filmmaker. But two of Jayaraj’s films — Desadanam, which unabashedly glorifies Brahminic traditions, and Karunam, which under the garb of a liberal, humanist critique of the inhumanity of old age homes, targets what is often constructed in mainstream (read ‘Savarna hindu’ or upper-caste hindu) Malayali psyche as the ‘philistine morality’ of kerala’s minority Christian community — i believe, easily bear out the charge. of course, thematically, Kaliyattam does not lend itself as easily to such a construction. But, there are tell-tale clues in the film. The first

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is Unni Thampuranan’s feigned fulmination against Thamara for having eloped with a man who had ‘no tradition or tarawad’. Anyone who has even a rudimentary knowledge of kerala’s history would realise that Unni Thampuran’s euphemism is jarring. Although its signification has altered considerably in recent times, tarawad was, till recently, a term signifying the ancestral home of an upper-caste hindu family/ clan, with all its associations of lineage, pomp and power. A Malayan like kannan would not have had a tarawad to call his own, even if he were rich. it would have been more natural for Unni Thampuran to have harangued Thamara for running away with a ‘low-caste Malayan’. notice that the c-word (caste) is not mentioned at all. it is even more unnatural on the part of the vazhunnor (the local chieftain) to take Thamara’s elopement in his stride considering the rigidity of kerala’s caste system. On the whole, the settings of the film are idyllic — the vast open spaces, the thatched huts, the quiet-flowing river, the flaming torches. But, one detail historicises the film startlingly — Unni Thampuran’s wrist watch. even in Britain wrist watches became popular only in the 1920s (Brozek 2004). however, the story cannot be placed at a date after 1947 as the institution of the vazhunnor did not survive the process of decolonisation. For the same reason the vermillion mark that Thamara wears on the parting of her hair looks obviously anachronistic. This vermillion mark common in north india for centuries, became popular in kerala only recently, promoted by the Sangh Parivar as part of its agenda of hindu consolidation. Then there is the scene verging on the comical, in which Thamara’s father, incensed at his daughter’s elopment with kannan, cools down considerably at the sight of kannan performing kaliyattam and even asks him (taking him for the oracle of the god) for a way out of his predicament. The servile literal translations of the dialogues in Shakespeare’s play, when juxtaposed with the drastic appropriation of the antecedent text by Jayaraj, mirrors the appropriation of western modernity in india (as in many other postcolonial societies) and the recently emerged alliance between neo-colonialism/global capital and the Savarna elite: I-phones are fine, but not civil marriages; biotechnology is great, but not dawkins; Shakespeare is a genius, but not hegel (Marx is simply unspeakable). A group of scientists at a space research centre can watch with straight faces as the director performs the traditional inaugural ritual of smashing a coconut and lighting a lamp (possibly

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accompanied by the chanting of mantras) on the launching of a fully indigenous satellite. James kavanagh’s essay on the appropriation of Shakespeare by both British literary criticism and British colonialism is one of the most important engagements in recent times with the implication of literary icons in ideology (kavanagh 2002 [1985]). what we have in Kaliyattam, a film released 12 years after the first publication of kavanagh’s essay, is the implication of a colonial literary icon in the ideology of a postcolonial elite.

Conclusion This overview of four inter-texts in three languages/cultures has, i believe, thrown some light on adaptation and appropriation of texts across ages and cultures. There was a fifth text which was only mentioned in passing and which i proposed as a possible antecedent text to Cinthio’s story. it is with a speculation centred on this text that i propose to end this chapter. The Arabian Nights could have become much more popular than Boccacio’s Decameron in Medieval europe — if the Turkish advance in the Balkans had not been halted and if the Arabs had not been decisively defeated in Spain. ‘The Tale of the Three Apples’ could well have become part of the repertoire of folk narratives in almost all cultures of europe. Both Cinthio’s story and Shakespeare’s play would have had drastically different plots (the authors wouldn’t probably have been named ‘Cinthio’ or ‘Shakespeare’). But history’s taking a different turn in europe would not probably have altered the destiny of Malayalis considerably. Colonialism by any other name can be as hegemonic. The foisting of literary icons comparable to Shakespeare on the colonised would have happened in any case. The rise of the cultural hegemony of the Left in kerala in the mid-twentieth century, its gradual erosion, and the rushing in of the Hindu Right to fill the vacuum look, on hindsight, almost like biological certainties. The emergence of a kathaprasangam performer and a filmmaker who would appropriate the text of a colonial literary icon in diametrically opposite ways — to the Left and the right — can only be considered a natural consequence.

Notes 1. For a detailed study of kathaprasangam in kerala, see Kathaprasanga Charithram (Sadanandan 2005). 2. All references are to Sambasivan’s Othello Kathaprasangam audio cassette published by the author in 1964.

Othello’s Trave(ai)ls b 91 3. All references are to the 1997 Malayalam film Kaliyattam, directed by Jayaraj and produced by k. radhakrishnan, with leading roles performed by Suresh Gopi, Manju warrier, Lal, and Biju Menon. The screenplay was written by Balram Mattannoor.

References Bastin, Georges L. 2006 [2001]. ‘Adaptation’, in Mona Baker (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, pp. 5–8. London: routledge. Brozek, John e. 2004. ‘The history and evolution of the wristwatch’. http:// www.qualitytyme.net/pages/rolex_articles/history_of_wristwatch.html (accessed on 25 August 2012). Burton, richard (trans.). 1997. The Arabian Nights. new York: Modern Library. Cinthio, Giovanni Battista Giraldi. Hecatommithi. Translated by J. e. Taylor. 1855. ‘A Moorish Captain’. http://swh.springbranchisd.com/LinkClick.aspx? fileticket=qdx0DG6RhD0%3D&tabid=16473 (accessed on 25 August 2012). harrison, G. B. 2005 [1951]. Shakespeare’s Tragedies. London: routledge. Kaliyattam. 1997. directed by Jayaraj, produced by k. radhakrishnan. kavanagh, James. 2002 [1985]. ‘Shakespeare in ideology’, in John drakakis (ed.), Alternate Shakespeares, pp. 146–68. London: routledge. Lefevere, André. 1987. ‘Beyond interpretation or the Business of (re)writing’. Comparative Literature Studies, 24(1): 17–39. Leitch, Thomas. 2008. ‘Adaptation at the Crossroads’, Adaptation, 1(1): 63–77. McLuskie, kathleen. 2003 [1985]. ‘The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: king Lear and Measure for Measure’, in Allan dollimore and Stephen Greenblatt (eds), The Political Shakespeare, pp. 88–103. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Milton, John. 2009. ‘Translation Studies and Adaptation Studies’. http://isg.urv. es/publicity/isg/publications/trp_2_2009/chapters/milton.pdf (accessed on 25 August 2012). Munday, Jeremy. 2008. Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications. London: routledge. Sadanandan, kedamangalam (ed.). 2004. Kathaprasanga Charithram. Thiruvananthapuram: kerala kathaprasanga Akademi. Sambasivan. 1964. Othello Kathaprasangam. Audio Cassette. Self-published by the author. Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: routledge.

7 In the Marketplace Publication of Translations in Regional Indian Languages Mini Chandran

Translations are undertaken and published on a large scale in india

today. indian Literature in english Translation (iLeT) has become a significant presence not only in the Indian literary scene but the world over. Books like Litanies of the Dutch Battery (the english translation of n. S. Madhavan’s Malayalam novel Lanthanbatheriyile Luthiniyakal translated by rajesh rajamohan) found a place in the longlist of the Man Booker prize. it was again one of the three translations that were part of the final five recommended for the 2012 Hindu Literary Award — along with U. r. Ananthamurthy’s Bharathipura (translated by Sushila Punitha) and Sunil Gangopadhyaya’s The Fakir (translated by Monabi Mitra). Publishing houses like katha and Macmillan had conscientiously brought out translations which were representative of the multiple linguistic groups in india, and today translations constitute a significant part of the books published by oxford University Press and Penguin books. Parallel to this groundswell in the practice and publication of translation is the academic interest which is marked by an upsurge in translation workshops and conferences across the country and the inclusion of Translation Studies in the syllabi of prominent indian universities. André Lefevere, who pioneered the formal study of translation, envisioned a happy marriage of theory and praxis in the field when he stated that the purpose of translation studies was to ‘produce a comprehensive theory which can also be used as a guideline for the production of translations’ (quoted in Bassnett 1998: 7). is this applicable to the recent spurt in the practice and theorising of translation in contemporary india? Translation Studies in india today by and large tends to focus on the political aspect of translation, conceiving of it as a postcolonial site of resistance, a means to mainstream

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‘othered’ literatures. An academic study of the publication statistics of translation reveals an interesting story of unequal relationships among languages and the aspirations of relatively minor languages of india; however, is the practice of translation guided by the same concerns? how does translation theory engage with the practice and publication of translation in an indian language? To understand the picture better, i take Malayalam as a representative indian language with heavy translation activity, both into and from the language, along with publication information collected from dC Books, a leading publishing house in kerala. This is supplemented with information about the applied art of translation from M. P. Sadasivan, a practising translator into Malayalam, and A. J. Thomas who translates from Malayalam into english.

History of Translations in Malayalam Malayalam is and has always been an eager receptor of translations, which in terms of translation theory makes it an ideal target language. Thunchathu ramanujan ezhuthachchan, who lived around the sixteenth century, considered to be the father of the language and the first notable author in Malayalam, was primarily a translator, considering the fact that Adhyatmaramayanam, his retelling of the ramayana, was a creative translation of the Sanskrit Adhyatma Ramayanam. ezhuthachchan’s style nourished the origins and nurtured the evolution of modern Malayalam. with the advent of printing in the colonial times, the first Malayalam book to be printed in Kerala was a translation — Cherupaithangalkku Upakarartham Englishilninnu Paribhashappeduthiya Kathakal (Stories Translated from english for the Benefit of Little Children) published in 1821 by the CMS Press in kottayam. The Malayalam translation of the entire holy Bible was published in 1824 (the Malayalam translation of the new Testament was published in 1811 by the Courier Press in Bombay). The Bible translation had made considerable additions to the lexical base of Malayalam and proved to be a major influence in the evolution of the literary style of many later writers. The translating bent of mind continued with the years, as we see that foreign language works, especially english, had a decisive role to play in the rise of the Malayalam novel. in fact, Chandu Menon, the author of the first Malayalam novel Indulekha (1889), had famously stated that the purpose of the novel was to entertain people like his wife who could not read english and that his novel was modelled on

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disraeli’s Henrietta Temple. Another work that played a seminal role was nalappatt narayana Menon’s Paavangal (1930), the translation of Victor hugo’s Les Miserables. The rise and spread of Communism in the state also led to the widespread translation and reading of russian fiction, mostly novels. Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Malayalam translation sold much more than a Malayalam author. Malayali readers were already familiar with him when he got the nobel Prize in 1981 because dC Books had published Ekanthatayude Nooru Varshangal (One Hundred Years of Solitude), and Shalvy, the owner of a small publishing house called Shikha, had published an anthology of Marquez’s stories in translation. Before the establishment of dC Books in 1974, translations had been published by the Malayalam writers’ cooperative called the Sahitya Pravarthaka Cooperative Society (SPCS) since its founding in 1945. These were of mainstream works mostly written in english. Prabhat Book house, the publication wing of the Communist Party of india, brought many russian books to Malayali readers. Also popular were translations of Bengali writers like Bimal Mitra, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyaya, Tarasankar Banerjee, and Ashapurna devi brought in by leftist publishers like Prabhat Book house and deshabhimani Books. Malayalam today has a range of publishers that publish translations — prominent names are dC Books, Current Books, Mathrubhumi Books, Poorna Publications, and Chintha Publishers; Green Books, olive Publishers, rainbow Books, etc., are medium-level publishing houses, and there are small-time publishers like women’s imprint and Shikha. however, all of them maintain quality in terms of printing, layout and design. This rosy picture is not sustained by Malayalam when it becomes a source language in translations into english and other indian languages. According to the Kerala Bhasha Institute’s figures for 1994, the number of Bengali works translated into Malayalam till that year was 196 while the reverse flow into Bengali was just seven (Sadasivan 2008: 89). in the case of translation into english, Malayalam fares better than most other Indian languages in terms of numbers but this figure hardly matches the number of works translated from English. One of the first works to be translated into english was Indulekha (1889) by Chandu Menon. it had the ‘distinction’ of having been translated by an englishman, John w. F. dumergue, the collector in Malabar then, because he felt the novel ‘was of far more importance to the ends of administration

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than all the monuments of archaic ingenuity which we read and mark and leave undigested’ (devasia 2005: xiv). other works that were translated later were done by Malayalis who felt the need to bring those works to the attention of the reading public in india. Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai’s Chemmeen has been the most translated of all the authors/texts that have been translated from Malayalam. it was translated into Arabic, Japanese, Vietnamese, etc., besides english, as part of the UneSCo translation series. Another ‘successful’ writer is k. Satchidanandan whose poems have been translated into many other indian languages besides english. The feeling persists that Malayali writers are not well known outside the confines of their language because of the dearth of good translations. M. P. Sadasivan who is himself a translator into Malayalam notes: Most of the good texts in indian languages are published in Malayalam . . . But it is a fact that Malayali writers who can compare with the best world writers — eg. Vasudevan nair, Thakazhi, Basheer, kumaranasan, Madhavikutty, oV Vijayan — do not get the recognition they deserve among lovers of literature in other languages. The only reason is that their works are not translated in a way that retains their essential appeal in those languages. (Sadasivan 2008: 93, translation mine)

But rita kothari maintains that Malayalam fares better than languages like dogri or Manipuri. She attributes this partly to the fact that it entered the ‘official roster’ of scheduled languages under the Constitution earlier, and mainly due to the ‘marketability’ of the english translations of Malayalam works (kothari 2006: 71).

DC Books Going by the publication figures of DC Books, translations would account for 15–20 per cent of the total books published in Malayalam today. dC publishes about 600–700 new titles in a year out of which about 80–120 are translations, making these about 15 per cent of its total publication. Literature constitutes 70 per cent of translations while non-literary works like self-help books and motivational books comprise about 30 per cent. From the purely commercial point of view, it is much more profitable to sell non-literary works as they sell more and therefore fetch more revenue. According to ravi deecee, about 50 per cent of the translated literary works that are published fail to sell (Personal interview, kottayam, 25 october 2011).1

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Barring a few exceptions like the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Paulo Coelho and A. P. J. Abdul kalam, it is original Malayalam works that sell more than translations. But ravi deecee points out that dC Books brings out Malayalam translations of literature on a regular basis primarily because it needs to publish more literary titles if it is to be acknowledged as a serious literary publishing house. it is instrumental in introducing many non-indian writers to the Malayali reader. This, according to dC Books, is because Malayalis who buy and read original Malayalam works also tend to read translations. The widely circulated contemporary magazines like Mathrubhumi, Samakalika Malayalam, Kalakaumudi, Madhyamam, etc., regularly carry reviews and discussions of these translations, making it easier for the discerning Malayali reader to exercise her judgement in the purchase of books. These publication statistics give a fair picture of the translation scene in kerala. other publishing houses like olive, Green and Poorna also bring out translations. Thus, translations have a central position in the literary scene of kerala. does this indicate the ‘bargaining’ position of the target language? in other words, do the reading preferences and cultural background of the Malayali reader determine the choice of text in translation? Strangely, ravi deecee says that the reading preference of the target culture is not a decisive factor in the matter of text selection for translation. This is reflected in the fact that certain works by nobel-winning authors like Mario Vargas Llosa (In Praise of the Stepmother and Don Rigoberto’s Notebooks) and elfride Jelinek (The Piano Teacher and Lust) with their explicit contents are not exactly suited to the rather conservative moral attitudes of the average Malayali. According to ravi deecee, only those texts with literary merit are selected for translation. decision-making in the choice of text to be translated rests with an editorial committee within dC Books, which also seeks external advice from writers and scholars. This committee meets once a week to brainstorm ideas and discuss them extensively; one member of the committee is entrusted with the job of locating titles that have the potential to be translated into Malayalam. works that have been critically acclaimed are identified and handed over to one of the translators on a panel without necessarily considering if the work is suitable to the Malayali taste or not (Personal interview 2011). in this translational hierarchy, Malayalam is the passive recipient which does not question the suitability of the donor text for the receptor culture. An individual translator can undertake a specific

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translation to further her agenda of undermining this hierarchy but it would be extremely difficult to put it successfully into circulation. For instance, dC very rarely encourages proposals for translation from individual translators; to phrase it differently, individual translators hardly get a chance to send in a proposal because dC would have preempted him/her in the matter. Ravi Deecee insists that profit has never been the motivation for publication of any book let alone translations by dC Books. even in the early days of publication, dC Books had sought to bring classics home to the Malayali reader and that too of non-mainstream authors which did not, and still do not, sell in large numbers (Personal interview 2011). Publication figures of literary texts appear to validate this statement. however, the self-help motivational books like those of Stephen Covey, robin Sharma, etc., have done exceptionally well in translation. in literature, Paulo Coelho is an author who has attracted a substantial number of Malayali readers in kerala. english remains the strongest source language in terms of the number of titles that are translated from it. As ravi deecee puts it: we choose works mainly from english, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Turkish. kerala readers are particularly interested in Latin American literature and culture. we have translated and published the works of Latin American masters like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jose Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, Paulo Coelho etc. (Personal interview 2011)

however, translations from the original language are rare in the case of languages like Spanish, Portuguese or Turkish. They are translated from English translations of the original, mainly because of the difficulty in finding translators who can translate directly from Spanish or Turkish into Malayalam. This is true in the case of indian languages also except in the cases of hindi, Bengali, Marathi, or Tamil. in fact, DC Books finds it difficult to translate from other Indian languages because very few of them get translated into english! So the linguistic and cultural diversity that are apparent in the titles that are translated are actually camouflages for texts available in English translation.

Strategies of Translation This also complicates matters for the translator in terms of the translation strategy that can be adopted. The source language (SL) that she translates from is not reflective of the source culture, or being

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ignorant of the SL she is unaware of the finer nuances of the source culture. Most of the translators therefore merely transpose words in one language with the other, belying the Sapir-whorf hypothesis of translation being an act of cultural exchange. The One Hundred Years of Solitude that is read by the Malayali reader is a translation of Gregory rabassa’s translation-interpretation of Marquez and not the Latin American Colombian culture that Marquez depicts. dC Books has recently taken to attempting translations directly from the original, but that is from european languages like French and German. The main obstacle is the lack of bilingual translators who are equally at home in both French or German and Malayalam. in the case of indian languages, there were M. n. Satyarthi, nilina Abraham and Leela Sarkar who translated from Bengali; V. d. krishnan nambiar and Sudhanshu Chaturvedi from hindi; and Attoor ravi Varma from Tamil. even this tribe is dwindling, as most of these translators are either deceased or already well past their prime in terms of age and creativity. The Malayali translator is also generally a ‘faithful’ translator as very few of them take liberties with the source text. Modern translation theory that interrogates the idea of the sanctity of the original has not influenced the practice of translation in Malayalam. Ravi Deecee says that most foreign publishers insist on the fidelity of translations and do not take kindly to the license shown by an occasional translator. The literary agents of the authors also play a crucial role in this matter. deecee had an interesting example to show which was that of Bishop desmond Tutu’s collection of biblical stories for children titled Children of God. The translated text was titled Bible Stories and a few changes were made in the text. The South African agent who checked the manuscript with a Malayali in South Africa was not pleased with the translation of the title or the language used. The manuscript was sent back with the directive to translate the title literally and not to meddle with the language (Personal interview 2011). in fact, dC’s recent attempt to translate directly from the source language is rooted in the author’s/agent’s dissatisfaction with translations in various languages. it was this dissatisfaction that prompted Milan kundera to commission fresh english translations of all his major works, including The Unbearable Lightness of Being. These translations, like the new translation of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time instead of the older Remembrance of Things Past, are indices of the author’s/agent’s obsession with ‘good’ translations where the criterion of ‘good’ is defined not by the

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translator but the author/agent. The rigid intolerance of translatorial freedom is augmented when the translation is from a powerful european language to a relatively minor language like Malayalam. Translations into Malayalam are therefore invariably source-oriented in terms of language and culture.

The Translator M. P. Sadasivan, a translator who has regularly undertaken translations for dC Books and other publishers, however, insists that the main criterion of a good translation is its readability — ‘it should not read like a translation. The reader should feel that it is a work originally written in Malayalam’ (Personal interview, Thiruvananthapuram, 2 March 2012). But this does not mean that Sadasivan domesticates his translations; on the contrary, he advises the golden mean between foreignisation and domestication.2 As a translator, he never uses footnotes or glossary which he feels are out of place in a literary work and belong only to technical works. Although Sadasivan gives high priority to fluency and smoothness of the translation, he also admits that he does not try to edit or distort the source text in any way. in fact, two of his recent translations are of the much-translated Anna Karenina and The Hunchback of NotreDame; the publisher’s rationale for requisitioning them is that the earlier versions which were not translated by Sadasivan were ‘edited’ and did not contain chunks of matter that were considered to be obstructive of the story (for instance, the extensive description of the political situation of pre-revolutionary France in Hunchback). So Sadasivan does manage to tread the fine line between foreignisation and domestication; he is averse to word-for-word translation that would essentially foreignise (which is why he frowns on glossary and footnotes that would hinder smooth reading) but neither does he cater to the target reader by making the text completely devoid of culturally specific aspects. interestingly, a different view is presented by A. J. Thomas who translates from Malayalam into english. Although he says that he never has a target reader in mind while he is translating and does not believe in domestication, his next statement appears contradictory: ‘if they (the translations) are expressly for international publication, then i may add some explanatory notes to the glossary i may provide for some very culture-specific terms. I do not believe in even italicizing or foot-noting’ (e-mail correspondence 8 April 2012).

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The obvious fact that Thomas cannot discount the ‘international’ factor in readership is also reflected in his translation strategy of providing a glossary. This does not usually happen in translations from english into Malayalam, where the expectation is that the target reader will know even culture-specific source language references. however, domestication is also by and large the translation strategy of the translator translating into Malayalam. According to Lawrence Venuti, this makes for fluent translations which render the translator invisible; an aspect that is true of translators in kerala. it is only an observant Malayali reader who might know stalwarts like M. n. Satyarthi, nilina Abraham, Leela Sarkar, V. d. krishnan nambiar, ravi Varma, Arzoo, etc., who made Bimal Mitra, Ashapurna devi and Premchand very familiar to Malayali readers. There are one or two exceptions to this, as was recently seen in the acclaim that Priya A. S. got for her translation of Arundhati roy’s The God of Small Things (published by dC Books). There was extensive press coverage for the launch of the book in Malayalam, where roy shared the dais with her translator; this included interviews with both roy and the translator. Priya, who is herself an author, spoke with an assurance that no other translator has ever shown before, possibly because of confidence in her creative abilities. Another welcome move to make the translator visible was taken by Kalakaumudi weekly which published the translation of Chandrasekhara kambar’s Shikhara Soorya (in serialised form in Malayalam as G K Masterude Pranayakatha, in Kalakaumudi [weekly], 15 January–11 March 2012) by publishing the photograph of the translator Sudhakaran ramanthali along with the author’s photograph giving equal prominence. M. P. Sadasivan, who is a practising translator today, is however not happy with the recognition given to a translator who he believes should be as creative as the writer himself: A mere knowledge of both languages is not enough. The translator should have the creative abilities of an original writer. he should have wide reading and have a general awareness. he should be able to write good Malayalam in a good style. Basically he should be a good reader and a good writer. (Personal interview 2012)

The list of qualities appears formidable, and the question arises if the recognition that the translator gets is commensurate with the qualities she is supposed to possess.

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Sadasivan feels that it is not. he is happy with the minimal recognition he has got in terms of fellowships from the Central Ministry of Culture, and other awards including the kerala Sahitya Akademi Award. he has also a record to his credit of having translated the most number of books (107 books) and has already found a place in the Limca Book of records. his next aim is an entry in the Guinness Book of world records (Personal interview 2012). But it is an undeniable fact that Sadasivan is not as well known as the writers he translates even when his translation has outsold the original. T. n. Seshan’s Degenerating India sold about 3000 copies in english while Sadasivan’s Malayalam translation sold about 20,000 copies. A. J. Thomas, who has literally ‘studied’ his way through translations (his MPhil and Phd dissertations were on translation), is quite happy with the awards he has got — the katha Award in 1993 and the Crossword Prize in 1997. These awards make him more ‘visible’ than Sadasivan at the national level because he translates into english which offers a broader arena. He cannot claim spectacular sales figures like Sadasivan’s for the simple reason that translations of Malayalam works do not have as many readers, but perhaps he is better known as a translator by prominent publishing houses like Penguin or harper Collins. The writer and translator do not share an equal footing in terms of payment either. while many english-language publishers in india pay equal or nearly equal amount as royalty to both author and translator, publishing houses in kerala do not follow that practice. dC Books pays a flat rate to the translator on completion of the work and does not believe in royalty. Ravi Deecee points out that this is financially more beneficial to the translator as translations rarely have more than one edition (which could be between 1,000 to 3,000 copies). The chances for a translation to sell more than 2,000 copies are few, and the translator, if paid royalty, eventually gets less than the amount that she is paid one time. deecee also observed that some translators undertake translations as a sort of mission and are rarely interested in the money involved. he recalls the instance of the late V. k. Unnikrishnan whose brilliant translation of Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera added to the Marquez effect in Malayalam. Unnikrishnan took leave from his office, rented a room in a lodge in a small town, and worked feverishly for a month and a half. The effort paid off only in literary terms because what he got was a mere pittance, much less than his monthly salary (Personal interview 2011).

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That the translator takes a different view from the publisher is evident from Sadasivan’s obvious disagreement with the mode of payment for the translator today. His argument is that royalty is definitely financially more beneficial to the translator, as was his own translation of Arabian Nights. The book was published in 1993 and was based on richard Burton’s translation of the work which meant that there were no copyright issues involved. he was paid a reasonably handsome amount at the time (`25,000) and also the promise of a free copy of every subsequent edition. The book is in its fifteenth edition today, with each edition selling about 3,000 copies and each copy priced at `175 (Personal interview 2012). Sadasivan does have a point when he argues that it would have benefitted him financially if he had insisted on royalty rather than a single down payment. his example belies the publisher’s claim that translations rarely sell more than 2,000 copies; Paulo Coelho, Seshan and Abdul kalam are other authors translated by Sadasivan who have done extremely well in translation.

The Translator’s Freedom Besides the matter of payment is the question of the translator’s selfesteem and freedom. A. J. Thomas feels that ‘compared to translators of great authors, like Gregory rabassa of Garcia Marquez, our translators are like the serfs of the writers, who are like lords’ (e-mail correspondence 2012), and that he is able to retain his individuality and dignity because he is a non-professional translator who translates ‘only those works i love, or, the works of people i love, which they lovingly persuade me to translate’ (e-mail correspondence 2012). Sadasivan, on the other hand, says that he has never submitted a translation proposal to any publisher and that all his translations have been done as per the publisher’s request. he enjoys most of the works he has translated and perhaps that is another reason why he has never engaged himself seriously with the question of payment. however, he has had to translate works he was quite unhappy with because, in his own terms, ‘of the compulsion of publishers’ (Personal interview 2012). one example is Paulo Coelho’s Zahir, which he felt was worthless trash and also Zeruya Shalev’s hebrew novel, Love Life. he had refused to translate both but the publisher insisted on them because they had paid an exorbitant sum for the copyrights. Sometimes the publishing house sets unrealistic deadlines for translators; Sadasivan recalls that he had completed the translation of former President k. r. narayanan’s Insights in just seven days so that the publisher could get the book launched by

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narayanan himself when he came to kerala. Sadasivan was paid for his efforts but what he values more is the copy of his work that was autographed by narayanan (Personal interview 2012). This does not mean that the translator does not have the right to refuse. however, as Sadasivan also points out, a refusal would have meant displeasing the publisher (dC Books in this particular case) which is not pragmatic for a practising translator in Malayalam. dC Books handles almost 90 per cent of book publication in Malayalam today and it is difficult to survive as a successful translator without their support. There is nothing preventing an individual translator from translating a text that is close to her ideological beliefs and getting it published by a small-time publisher. But, small-time publishers have no choice but to depend on big publishers like dC to distribute their books. Their books are displayed in the showrooms of publishing houses like DC or Mathrubhumi. In short, it is extremely difficult, if not practically impossible, for a translator to translate and successfully market a text of her choice. As Sadasivan points out, book publishing is a profit-oriented business that focuses only on the commodity that sells (Personal interview 2012). despite dC’s avowals, it is a fact that literary merit in the ordinary sense of the term is not the single decisive factor in the production of books and translations. The publisher who pays huge amounts of money as copyright hires translators who do not haggle for payment. Publishing houses also take advantage of the fact that most translators are driven by a passion for the work and it can safely be claimed that at least in kerala there is nobody who subsists solely on the income from translation. even Sadasivan, who translates more out of interest in the activity rather than money or fame and considers it a hobby rather than profession, finds it difficult to defy a publisher who has a brutal monopoly over the publishing business in kerala. however there is an area where the translator has relative autonomy, which is that of the prepared manuscript of the translation. This is stressed by Sadasivan who points out that publishers have never interfered with a translation he has undertaken (Personal interview 2012). A. J. Thomas also concurs that he has ‘complete freedom’ over the translation that he undertakes. he says: The translator is really the creator of the TL [target language] Text; only that he has to perform according to the original script. it’s like an actor

104 a Mini Chandran acting out a play, or a conductor conducting a piece by a great composer. only that the translator uses words in interpreting the SL text, in the TL text. (e-mail correspondence 2012)

Significantly, the freedom that both Sadasivan and Thomas claim for themselves is qualified by the source text, which effectively means that the realm over which they assert sovereign power is but a principality already limited by the terms and conditions laid down by the source text or the publisher, and their freedom is largely illusory.

The Theory–Practice Disconnect it is obvious that publication and circulation of translation in Malayalam are pointers to the larger politics implicit in linguistic exchanges today. The vibrant translation activity in Malayalam cannot be read as the attempt of the decolonised language to appropriate what was once the coloniser’s linguistic territory but as the re-colonisation, dictated by a ruthless neocolonial discursive system, of a minority language. The fact is that english still rules over the linguistic hierarchy, borne out by the fact that there are more translations into Malayalam from english than out of it; and also the other often unacknowledged or unnoticed fact that even works in non-english languages get translated into Malayalam from their english translations. ravi deecee underlines this unfortunate aspect by admitting that this is true even of indian language works (Personal interview 2012). So the so-called egalitarian society of languages ushered in by increased translation activity is but a masquerade for the demonic autocracy of one superlanguage which is english. Malayalam and similar languages by default become what Michael Cronin terms ‘minority’ languages not necessarily in terms of the number of its speakers or reach of its territory but because of its influential power in the financial and political world today (Cronin 2003). in such terms, Malayalam and Mandarin would be on a similar footing. in the world of translation, english language works cascade into minority languages like Malayalam while a few minority language works trickle out into the vast ocean of english. drawing a parallel between the speakers of minority languages and Count dracula who cannot see his image in the mirror, Cronin says: ‘Speakers of minority languages looking into the disciplinary mirror of translation studies can also experience the troubling absence of the undead’ (ibid.: 139).

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however, these academic western-oriented observations seem to go awry when we try to apply them to the ground realities of translation practice in india. while academics debate strategies of translation and the task of the translators, practising translators and publishers of translations are not even aware of the theories, a fact testified by Sadasivan. i would like to make a distinction between the academic translator and the professional translator here: the academic translator is aware of the theoretical issues underpinning the act of translation, and her translation (if at all she translates) is a deliberate and selfconscious act that highlights the agony and ecstasy of the process; Gayatri Spivak and A. k. ramanujan are the glamorous representatives of this class. The professional translator whose tribe is increasing day by day translates more or less mechanically, governed by the exigencies of the ‘boss’ she is immediately answerable to, which in most cases is the publisher (as we have seen in the Sadasivan–dC Books example). They can also be seen as exemplifying the two approaches to translation, as described by Lawrence Venuti, the ‘instrumental’ and the ‘hermeneutic’; the former being focused on the practical aspects of translation as a communicative process, while the latter being more concerned about translation as a process of interpretation (Venuti 2000: 5). Cronin underlines the peril of ignoring this vast majority of invisible ‘instrumental’ translators (of the literary and mostly nonliterary kind) who constitute the base of commercial enterprises today (Cronin 2003: 2). The worlds occupied by these two classes move tangentially to each other; rarely do the twain meet, at least in india. r. radhakrishnan, who can be considered to be part of the academictranslator fraternity, articulates the frustration, petulance and helplessness that mark the translatorial position in the endeavour of translating from a ‘minority’ regional indian language into english: i now come to a personal predicament i faced when i translated into English fiction by such contemporary Tamil writers as Ashokamitran and Jayakanthan: writers who should, but never will be candidates, leave alone recipients of the nobel Prize. why do i even want to translate them into English? Who the hell cares anyway? I would be filled with visceral rage and indignation that as the translator i would have to meekly “introduce” these authors to the world. They are already in the world, right? So, why this ostentatious charade of introducing them to a world where they already have made such a mark, such a difference? (radhakrishnan 2011: 64)

he goes on to assert, ‘no translator with a conscience can even begin to translate without having thought through the geopolitical implications

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of her project: in other words, there are no innocent or disinterested translators’ (radhakrishnan 2011: 84). radhakrishnan’s observations however fail to resonate with Sadasivan who is a good representative of the professional translator (i consider Sadasivan to be a professional translator not because it is an income-earning profession for him but because his translations are mostly dictated by publishers’ demands). however, Thomas who is an academic and non-professional translator agrees whole-heartedly with radhakrishnan and says that he is ‘partly’ influenced by translation theory, admitting: ‘My policy of not italicizing or footnoting is a direct result of my being captivated by the politics of translation’ (e-mail correspondence 2012). one obvious reason for this is that radhakrishnan and Thomas are primarily academics who are motivated by non-professional concerns to translate into english while Sadasivan is a professional, which would make their purpose and strategy of translation dissimilar. Thomas translates with a mission — of presenting a writer to the world — for a readership that is informed by the translation issues at hand, while Sadasivan translates under external mercantile interests for a readership that would not like to know that they are reading a translation. Apart from this is the more important reason that they occupy almost watertight compartments that have no bearing upon each other. Sadasivan is not plagued by the questions that assail radhakrishnan or Thomas in the process of translation. he acknowledges that the choices of source text and translation strategy are dictated purely by the commercial interests of the publisher, a practice that bears a marked resemblance to the practice of translation in the Anglophone world. This is in contradiction to Venuti’s claim that the emphasis on the smoothness and fluency of translations is the hallmark of Anglocentric translations. Venuti’s definition of fluency has a direct bearing on the practice of translation into Malayalam: A translated text, whether prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction, is judged acceptable by most publishers, reviewers, and readers when it reads fluently, when the absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes it seem transparent, giving the appearance that it reflects the foreign writer’s personality or intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text — the appearance, in other words, that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the ‘original’. (Venuti 1995: 1)

Venuti’s observation obviously fails to take into cognisance the commercialisation, irrespective of language/culture, of the practice of

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translation when it is engineered by the business interests of big-time publishers. The publishers insist on fluency not because of the blinkered arrogance of Anglophone culture but because, irrespective of powerful or minority language and culture, they like to ensure the marketability of the commodity they sell. This would mean that, contrary to the claim of publishers like dC Books, the target reader is king when it comes to translations. or, it could indicate the converse of this statement where the salability of the commodity is determined by the publisher while the target reader is taken for granted by translators like Sadasivan, who even while maintaining fidelity to the source text, assume that the target reader will pick up the culture-specific references, and pay attention to not disrupt the seeming fluency of translations with obvious intrusions like glossary or footnotes. Translation theory, which is oriented to the metropolitan academic world, does not synchronise with translation as it is practised especially in the geographical south. For instance, according to itamar even-Zohar’s polysystem theory, there are three situations in which translated literature would maintain a primary position within the literature of a particular language: (a) ‘when a literature is young or in the process of being formed’; (b) ‘when a literature is weak or peripheral’; and (c) ‘when a literature is facing a crisis’ (cited in Venuti 2000: 194). Susan Bassnett later conceded the limitations of this theory, pointing out that terms like ‘peripheral’ and ‘weak’ are ‘evaluative terms’ which are purely subjective (Bassnett 1998: 127). More importantly, this theory that attributes the centrality of translations in a particular language to the inferiority of the target language literature cannot be seen to have much merit in the case of indian languages like Malayalam. The very concept of a polysystem is difficult in the case of Malayalam or any indian language because they are part of a rather nebulous system called the indian polysystem, which does not necessarily belong to any language. Considering literary statistics (five Jnanpeeth awards, including the very first one, make Malayalam the recipient of the largest number of Jnanpeeths), and the large number of works that get translated into english in india, Malayalam cannot be described as having an inferior status within the indian polysystem. how then do we explain the extensive translations into Malayalam? Ravi Deecee rather flippantly attributes it to the sense of inferiority of Malayali readers who feel that literatures other than Malayalam are superior to theirs (Personal interview 2011).

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The heavy import of works into Malayalam is comparable to that of english, but i hesitate to put the two languages in the same bracket because the nature of translation activity is very dissimilar. english is the ‘desired’ target language of many source languages in india because it is the lingua franca of the contemporary globalised world; the receptor culture of english hardly ‘desires’ to know other languages or literatures. This partially supports and contradicts Venuti’s statement in The Translator’s Invisibility that english (Anglo-American world) rarely translates from other languages/cultures. According to the figures he quotes, translations accounted for a mere 2.4 per cent of total book production in england in the 1990s while it was a marginally better 2.96 per cent in the US (Venuti 1995: 12). The report of a survey conducted in 2011 by the Global Translation initiative in the Anglophone world put the figure even below this; 1.5–2 per cent of books published in the UK were translations, while the figure was 2–3 per cent for the US (dalkey Archive Press 2011: 17–18). however, these figures are not valid for India where the number of translations into english far exceeds that of translations into indian languages. By extension, Venuti’s argument — that the low rate of translations into english indicates the lack of interest that the Anglo-American world has in non-Western literatures — can be seen to be flawed especially in the indian context. if this argument is true, its converse that the high rate of translations indicate the interest of the target language/ culture in ‘other’ literatures should also hold good. But, an english translation in the indian context is not an indicator of the enthusiasm of the Anglo-American world for indian literatures but an index of the status assigned to English in the language hierarchy. It is also difficult to assign a specific culture to the target language of English in India. The translation of indian literatures into english is but a pragmatic measure that ensures wider readership and marketability within the country and not an indication of the interest of the target language. extensive translation into the target language of Malayalam on the other hand can prima facie be attributed to its desire for acquaintance with other literary cultures. But this simplistic assumption also needs to be closely examined. ravi deece himself agrees that although many translations are published, they sell only less than 1,000 copies. if so, do the publication figures for translations into Malayalam — that they constitute 15 per cent of the total number of books published — indicate the average Malayali reader’s interest in literatures of other languages? in other

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words, is there a synchronisation between the publication figures of translations and the reading pattern of the Malayali reader? i would hesitate to answer positively. i have in mind another unexplored aspect of book publication and circulation in kerala, which is the relatively large buying capacity of the library network in the state. The government allots grants to libraries that are spread out in every municipal corporation, panchayat, school, and college in kerala which ensure that books are bought by these institutions. There is no guarantee that these books get read; a fact that ravi deecee expresses: The libraries are active in the sense that they get grants. But i doubt if they are actively promoting reading. Usually there are only four or five people who decide on the books to be bought for a library. They just buy books at random without taking readers or their literary preferences into account. it is also a question of their capability — there simply aren’t enough people who have the literary sensibility to select good books. (Personal interview 2011)

in short, there is money to be made for people who sell books (because libraries are secure markets) and those who buy (they get money out of each purchase order). it is a win-win situation for everybody concerned; even the reader who is the least important, if nonexistent, component of this process cannot be hurt by books which do not interest her. So it would be better to view the publication details of translations in Kerala with circumspection; the dry figures might not have a direct correlation with the actual reading habits. Translation theory in india fails to encompass these purely ‘commercial’ aspects of translation in practice. The report of the Global Translation initiative, that studied the problems of literary translation in the Anglophone world, illustrates that this is not a problem particular to india. The study, which was based on extensive survey among translators and academics, concludes: overall, collected responses have suggested a lack of dialogue and consultation between sectors of the translation community in general, each sector tending to act according to its needs only — be they commercial, nonprofit, educational, etc. — despite the interdependence of their work. This lack of communication and of exchange of information has led to disjointed actions, notably in the academic field (Dalkey Archive Press 2011: 55).

The report goes on to emphasise the importance of synergising these various aspects of translation. Given the fact that the choice of text,

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purpose of translation, and translation strategy are all determined by mercantile interests that sacralise the source text, how relevant or viable is the discussion on equivalence or resistance translation strategies? it is admittedly bad taste to interrogate the relevance of theory that is dissociated from empirics, but this issue remains paramount in the field of translation which is basically a functional process. Translation Studies in india needs to take the special nature of translation with all its attendant challenges into account if it has to develop theories of translation which are relevant to the indian context.

Notes 1. All the publication statistics for dC Books is up to 2011. 2. Foreignisation and domestication are concepts propounded by Lawrence Venuti. ‘domestication’ is the strategy that makes the translation read smoothly without making the reader aware that it is a translation. The opposite of this is ‘Foreignisation’, a translation strategy that retains the essential foreignness of the source language reminding the reader that she is reading a text in a foreign language. while the former is ‘easy’ for the reader, the latter makes the reader ‘work’ in adjusting to the unfamiliar aspects of the source text. Foreignisation was advocated by the eighteenthcentury German philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher as a translation strategy that would enhance the linguistic and literary potential of the target language.

References Bassnett, Susan. 1998. ‘The Translation Turn in Cultural Studies’, in Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (eds), Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation, pp. 123–40. http://www.staff.amu.edu.pl/~przekladnia/ materialy/Bassnett.pdf (accessed on 18 August 2012). Bassnett-McGuire, Susan. 1998. Translation Studies. London: routledge. Cronin, Michael. 2003. Translation and Globalization. London: routledge. dalkey Archive Press. 2011. ‘research into Barriers to Translation: A Study for the Global Translation initiative’. http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/ wp-content/uploads/pdf/Global_Translation_initiative_Study.pdf (accessed on 18 August 2012). devasia, Anitha. 2005. ‘Preface: Translating indulekha’, in Indulekha by o. Chandu Menon, pp. xiii–xviii. new delhi: oxford University Press. devy, G. n. 1995. ‘Multiculturalism’, in In Another Tongue: Essays on Indian English Literature, pp. 13–19. Madras: Macmillan. even-Zohar, itamar. 2000. ‘The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem’, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader, pp. 192–97. London: routledge.

Publication of Translations in Regional Indian Languages b 111 kothari, rita. 2006. Translating India: The Cultural Politics of English. delhi: Foundation Books. radhakrishnan, r. 2011. ‘why Translate?’, Journal of Contemporary Thought, 63–86. Sadasivan, M. P. 2008. Bhashayum Paribhashayum. Thiruvananthapuram: kerala Bhasha institute. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: routledge. ———. 2000. The Translation Studies Reader. London: routledge.

8 Scripting Language, Scripting Translation Sowmya Dechamma All translations are made at the instigation of a linguistic community’s instinct for self-preservation. — karl Vossler

This chapter attempts to further the arguments of walter Benjamin’s

seminal essay The Task of the Translator where he talks about the intended effect upon the language in question. Although Benjamin speaks in and about a different con‘text’, this is quite relevant to how we understand translation in a diverse and hegemonic linguistic situation like ours in india. The effort and effect of the translation, according to Benjamin, is never so much ‘directed at the language as such, (as) at its totality, but solely and immediately at specific linguistic contextual aspects’ (Benjamin 2004: 79). The specific linguistic, contextual aspects that this chapter addresses belong to the realm of the relationship between dominant languages and the languages of the minority. The language in question is kodava, also known in its anglicised version as Coorg (or in popular parlance as Coorgi). what this chapter tries to address are questions that are varied yet connected. what are the ways in which we can understand translation in languages like kodava that are oral in nature? Can we understand the ‘scripting’ of a minority oral language as translation? what are the strategies used in such a translation? how does this process negotiate with questions of power between languages and cultures? how can we comprehend this scripting/translating as moving beyond the communication of meanings to encompass political inscription? how can a textbook meant for children of primary level introduce a language that is marginal in the public sphere, yet challenge the dominant language norms of that essentialised relationship between linguistic, political and cultural identity? At one level, this chapter considers a language-learning text meant for children as a

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children’s text; at another, it considers this very process of introducing a spoken language in a written form and its associated political/ cultural nuances as translation. relating closely to the idea of translation as representation, as construction of meaning, as enactments of linguistic and cultural identities, the chapter attempts to understand how dominant ideologies of language, power and identity can be negotiated, manipulated, resisted, or transformed. especially because the written form of kodava uses the kannada script, the script of the language that is dominant, this chapter ventures to analyse the possibilities of appropriation of the dominant, not to assimilate but to question, resist and differ. Although i consider a variety of methods and texts for its analysis, the focus largely will be on an intertextual analysis of Kodava Barati, a Language Primer meant to be introduced in schools across kodagu. Kodava Barati was brought out jointly by the karnataka kodava Sahitya Akademy,1 Madikeri and the Central institute of indian Languages, Mysore, in 2007, in an effort mainly focused on strengthening the kodava language in all aspects. As mentioned, kodava is mainly an oral language and is spoken by a number of minority communities in the district of kodagu, in south-west karnataka.2 Being ethno-linguistic minorities, both in terms of numbers and in terms of power-relations among dominant languages and communities, kodava is termed as a language of the minority.3 with the number of speakers hovering around 166,187, the UneSCo lists koda(gu) (kodava) as a language that is ‘definitely endangered’. The administrative language in Kodagu has officially been Kannada from the times of the Haleri Kings who were from the north of karnataka and ruled kodagu from the early 1600s. The British government which took over kodagu as a separate province under the Madras Presidency in 1834 did successfully introduce english while simultaneously maintaining the status of kannada as its official language. Kodagu was a separate C grade state after India’s independence in 1947 until 1956 when it was merged with the erstwhile Mysore State, now karnataka. Throughout, kannada has been the official language of the region. Linguistically speaking, kodava belongs to the dravidian family of languages and is said to be one of the oldest spoken languages in South india (emeneau 1970). Being a language associated primarily with people whose knowledge base revolved around small-scale agriculture, hunting and gathering, thus not requiring the knowledge of the written word, kodava has primarily remained an oral language without the

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necessity of a script. The oral tradition in the language is rich like in any other language. Since the times kannada has been imposed as the official language, Kodava uses the Kannada script in its written form whenever required, which has been rare. Two weekly newspapers, Brahmagiri and Poomale, have to an extent been successful as the written kodava word. Apart from these weeklies, the kodava Sahitya Akademy and the more recent kodava Takk Parishad (kodava Language organisation) publish in the kodava language. These publications have always used the kannada script and, as observed, have been largely read by the middle-aged and older generation, while the younger generation, whenever required (usually on the internet or other means of communication), uses the roman script.4 But, to this day, all public domains in kodagu conduct their business in kannada while, like the majority of small languages, kodava is largely relegated to the private sphere of home and family.

Linguistic Minorities, Shifting Languages and Translation Before venturing further, let us briefly discuss the issue of linguistic minority: (a) who is a linguistic minority? (b) how can we contextualise translation and children’s literature within the framework that encompass a linguistic minority? According to the Council of europe Commission for democracy through Law, for the purposes of Linguistic human rights: A minority is a group which is smaller in number than the rest of the population of the State, whose members have ethnic, religious or linguistic features different from those of the rest of the population, and are guided, if only implicitly, by the will to safeguard their culture, tradition, religion or language. (Skutnabb-kangas and Phillipson 2009: 211)

in the indian context, Articles 29 and 30 of the indian Constitution treat linguistic minorities to be collective individuals residing in the territory of india or any part, thereof having a distinct language or script of their own. A linguistic minority at the State or Union Territory level means any group of people whose mother tongue is different from the principal language of the State/Union Territory. The Supreme Court of india rules that linguistic minority refers to a linguistic group that is in a numerical minority in the State/Union territory not in the country as a whole (Tyagi 2003: 6). One has to note that the definition of a linguistic minority is not restricted to numbers alone but also takes

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into consideration the factor of dominance of ‘principal’ languages and their cultures. To a large extent, the issue of rights of linguistic minorities has been framed by sides that are pro-linguistic minority and antilinguistic minority. Canagarajah points out that while the pro-group connects language to the identity of the minority and treats linguistic rights as non-negotiable, the anti-group argues that linguistic rights perpetuate group identities that are sentimental therefore binding the individual’s/community’s economic and social mobility. Following Canagarajah’s argument that scholars need to negotiate language politics without cynically sweeping aside minority language rights or unduly romanticising them (Canagarajah 2009: 236), i attempt to contextualise the linguistic rights of kodava as non-negotiable while arguing for practices that are empowering both for the individual and the community to which s/he belongs. one cannot avoid the sentimentality of belonging to a linguistic minority because almost all such languages are endangered. This not only points to the dangers of an increasingly homogenised world but also to the threatened lives and worldviews of a good many number of people. As nancy dorian argues: [T]he phenomenon of ancestral-language abandonment is worth looking at, then, precisely because a good many people, especially those who speak unthreatened languages, are likely to have trouble imagining that they themselves could ever be brought to the point of giving up on their own ancestral language and encouraging their children to use some other language instead. (dorian 2009: 219)

Let us now look at two narratives to note how well these definitions accommodate the large canvas of linguistic experiences in india. The kannada writer, U. r. Ananthamurthy, writing about globalisation and languages, mentions an anecdote of his meeting with da ra Bendre, a Jnanpeeth awardee, saying: he spoke Marathi at home, wrote in kannada. i asked him, “how long have you been using these two languages?” “Until i was 12 or 13, i did not know i was using two languages.” when he said it, his daughter-in-law had come to say something in his ear. he talked to her in Marathi, without thinking he was speaking in Marathi and he was speaking to me in kannada. (Ananthamurthy 2009: 51)

My five-year-old son, when asked how many languages he speaks, says he knows five languages. He is fluent in Kodava, his mother tongue,

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in Telugu, his father tongue (and the dominant language of the State we live in), is okay in english, which inhabits the University space where we live, and can follow kannada and hindi to some extent. he even translates between kodava, Telugu and english to people who he knows don’t follow any of the three languages. This is not something unusual because i know many children with a minority language as their mother tongue, and growing up in regions outside their tongue’s territory, who are fluent in more than four languages by the time they are four years old. These narratives clearly demonstrate the complexities of defining a linguistic minority. Bendre belonged to what was then called Bombaykarnataka, where Marathi was/is the native tongue for many. Although Marathi, unlike kodava, is not an endangered language or language of a minority, its status within karnataka is that of a minority language. My son speaks kodava in hyderabad, a region that is much too alien for the language. what we need to note is that while both Marathi and kodava remain the language of the household, within the sphere of the private, Marathi does have a dominant public presence in Maharashtra, while kodava’s public/institutional presence in kodagu is next to none. Obviously, this in no way reflects the plight of hundreds of minority languages in india that belong to disadvantaged adivasi communities which are subsumed within the dominant language of the state (like the erukalas and Chenchus in Andhra Pradesh). This also does not include experiences of language communities who are double marginalised, who are a minority within a minority (Gondi in Madhya Pradesh, Garo in relation to khasi in Meghalaya, erava in kodagu, and many such). The problem with the definitions of linguistic minorities, as framed by the european Council and the indian Constitution, is that they see linguistic minorities as organic communities but not as dynamic. The definitions also try to minimise the socio-cultural and political threat of national and other dominant languages on the languages of the minority. The personal narratives contradict the institutional definitions and urge us to deal with linguistic culture not as a fundamental model, ‘but rather as an interaction of cultures, (that) can perhaps only speak as translation’ (Sehyan 1996: 417). This points to an increased need for looking at cultural translation as a process of the need to understand communities who speak minority languages as being in a constant shift and not locked in a fixed state of primitive linguistic means.

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While this is just to note the complexity involved in defining the field of linguistic minority, for purposes of this chapter, by linguistic minority i mean a community which is not only a minority in terms of its small numbers but also minority in terms of power-relation with other communities. The factor of dominance is considered numerically, linguistically, socio-culturally and politically. kodava, the language in question in this chapter, is considered a speech community, that is a numerical minority, that faces the threat of endangerment; as a community its political and social status is upwardly mobile but nevertheless dominated and seen as lowly by the upper-caste kannadaspeaking communities (often because of the kodava pork-eating culture).5 My analysis takes into consideration how kodava, despite its threatened status in karnataka, is in a dominant position in relation to other minor languages within kodagu. I find Ananthamurthy’s observation (un)consciously carrying a dominant linguistic bias. his observation that Bendre was constantly shifting between languages, comes with a surprise that is characteristic of majoritarian, monolingual arrogance. Both the experiences narrated above are of shifting between languages. This constant shifting between languages is translation of an important kind. The translation between languages that is part of the linguistic minorities’ lived experience needs to be critically examined within and beyond the framework of cultural translation. As harish Trivedi (2005) notes, cultural translation is limited in its present framework because it most often than not represents a culture in its erased/reduced/lower form. This representation is usually mediated by monolingual, monocultural, homogenised elites for whom cultural translation becomes a vehicle to introduce newness to their decaying world. what should concern linguists and scholars of translation is that this kind of a fluid translation is more often than not characteristic of linguistic minorities because speakers of dominant languages are in no way required to learn languages belonging to the minority. A casual observation of hindi speakers in india establishes this fact. how many hindi speakers we know are conversant in any other language of india except may be english? or, how many kannada speakers make the effort to learn kodava, Tulu, konkani, or even Urdu? But, the minority cannot be complacent about the languages they need to know. For reasons ranging from education, economic mobility, socio-cultural acceptance, pressures of nationalist/ political loyalty, combined with the perceived lowly/‘uncultured’/ knowledge-less-ness of their own languages, it becomes necessary for

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linguistic minorities to be conversant in the dominant languages of the region. Multilingualism and associated translation go unrecognised. The already invisible translation becomes doubly invisible when the languages concerned are oral in nature and belong to the minority. This, as Boldizar acutely observed in the context of literature, is a oneway street that only the minorities have to traverse. he notes: Translation has been largely a one-way street; the small nations hasten to translate all that is worthwhile of the great nations’ literature into their own language but not vice-versa . . . small nations cannot afford to be parochial and ignorant, while the great, it seems, can. And do. (Boldizar, quoted in Jaffe 2009: 27)

Children’s Text and Translation How do we contextualise children’s literature within this fluid translatability of minority languages? Cronin notes that in the minority languages of the industrialised western world, most of the children’s literature is translated from the dominant languages. Using the examples of irish and Tlingit (from Alaska), he discusses how these languages have used translation as a mode of self-preservation and development in the process appropriating/manipulating the very languages that have dominated them (Cronin 2009: 7). Although the same cannot be said of kodava and other minority languages in india, it is accepted knowledge that every language and culture has its share of songs and stories for children. Again, this depends on the status of the language in its written or oral form. Poomale, the kodava weekly, has carried a translation of the epic Mahabharata (in serialised format) although the epic does not carry any religious or cultural significance to the community. This again proves Boldizar’s argument regarding small culture’s perceived requirement of translating all that is worthwhile of the greater culture. As mentioned earlier, my focus is Kodava Barati, a language primer meant to introduce kodava to children. The text introduces kodava language to both new learners and children who are familiar with the spoken language. it initiates language learning by listing out the alphabets, each alphabet accompanied by a word that begins with the corresponding alphabet. This is followed by gunita aksharas and word formations of different kinds.6 The second section has small lessons in a few sentences each that talk about general things in the kodava life and society. The third section has songs meant for children.

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This includes songs from the traditional lore and new compositions largely based on nature, day-to-day happenings, food kodagu people eat, and so on. Section four has a glossary of words and the fifth lists all the 42 kodava alphabets in one place.7 how does a children’s text produce meanings that can only be understood by interconnecting discourses, especially because children’s texts are an amalgam of discourses including cultural and political ones? how this text translates kodava by scripting its orality, and what are the strategies used by the text to counter the hegemony of kannada are questions that concern the rest of this chapter. Laws, at both the international and indian level, make room for education in the languages of minorities at the primary level, and provisions for linguistic minorities to establish their own educational institutions to promote and safeguard their interests (Skutnabb-kangas and Phillipson 2009; Sridhar 1996; Tyagi 2003). The three-language formula of indian education also provides for school children to have at least a choice in the matter of learning their mother tongue. not providing this choice when there is no provision for teaching a particular tongue is an offence. This like many other right-based provisions in the constitution remains unimplemented in practice. in karnataka, like in most other states, what gets taught is kannada, the principal language of the State, as the first language, English as the second and hindi as the third language. what comes with this language teaching is the associated power and chauvinism of kannada, which is projected as ‘our’ language that has a written history of nearly two millennia. This, for children of linguistic minorities, establishes identities that do not connect with the culture they belong to. it also gradually constructs the notion that their own language is ‘lacking’ in script, in a rich tradition to boast of, in a written heritage, and so on. This corresponds to the strategies discussed by Skutnabb-kangas and Phillipson, through which linguicism and minoriticism is reproduced. These are: (a) Glorification of the majority language, lifestyle, laws, level of development, culture, tradition, norms; (b) Stigmatisation of the minority; (c) rationalisation of the relation between majority and minority through notions like ‘doing good’, ‘help’, ‘support’, ‘modernize’, ‘civilize’, ‘aid’, ‘integrate’, ‘give rights’, and so on (Skutnabbkangas, Tove and Phillipson 2009: 210).

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The establishment of kodava Sahitya Akademy is proof of ‘helping’ the minority. But this help, without any other institutional support and public awareness, at large restricts the development of the language rather than carrying it forward. The kind of linguistic-cultural nationalism that prevails among most principal regional languages of india makes strong connections with loyalty to the nation/state, which the minority has to work doubly hard to prove. But, this nevertheless does not establish that the experience and acceptance of dominance is uniform. For, ‘we should not assume that the social reproduction of relations of inequality involves or requires perfect consensus’ (Thompson, quoted in Jaffe 2009: 23). it is in this questionable space of consensus that we can locate the efforts of Kodava Barati. As Stephens convincingly argues: writing for children is usually purposeful, its intention being to foster in the child reader a positive appreciation of some socio-cultural values which, it is assumed, are shared by author and audience . . . Since a culture’s future is, to put it crudely, invested in its children, children’s writers often take upon themselves the task of trying to mould audience attitudes into ‘desirable’ forms, which can mean either an attempt to perpetuate certain values or to resist socially dominant values which particular writers oppose. (Stephens 1992: 3)

Scripting Translation, Scripting Resistances and Hegemonies John Stephen’s understanding of children’s literature can be seen as largely true for Kodava Barati, a text intended to be introduced in school. The text makes this clear in its preface, saying that it intends to ‘impart very important/special information regarding kodagu and kodava customs (environment)’ to the children along with basic grammatical skills, stories, songs, and so on (Yadurajan and Poovaiah 2007: ix). Moreover, it is important to note that the process of language acquisition and translation are inseparable. Language acquisition is a simultaneous process of learning something, of translating something ‘in’, and of unlearning something, of translating something ‘out’. Because, in the case of kodava, the norms of the language that is being acquired is already assumed to be familiar to learners in its spoken form, learning the written rules and grammatical functions of the language necessarily displaces the dominant norms of Kannada that has defined Kodava norms for long. Translation here is nothing but displacement and shift in the functions of languages. This translation allows us to see the

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asymmetrical relations and pressures in the languages/cultures of the dominated and the dominant. especially since oral systems are seen as defective and as ‘lacking’ a script, scripting the language and thereby translating it to the written form is seen as filling deficiencies and gaps. Carrying forward Annie Brisset’s argument that translation creates languages by forming a standard among the dialects, by creating a written among the spoken, as in the case of German and French which were formed from the many available languages, we can see that in the case of kodava both these happen simultaneously (Brisset 2004). when applied to the scripting of kodava, we further notice that it changes the relation of the linguistic forces at the institutional and even at the symbolic level (Brisset 2004: 339). This makes it possible for the ‘local’/vernacular language (kodava) to take the place of the referential language (kannada).8 Although the Preface does not mention how the text needs to be taught in relation to the dominant kannada or english, by asserting kodava’s difference, it involves in politics of a subtler kind. Practically speaking, Kodava Barati could not replace kannada with kodava at the institutional level, but it did so at the symbolic level. Scripting of a language is seen as a proof that a language exists. Teaching it in schools is more proof of the language’s growing importance and pride which emerges with the consciousness of a rising middle-class and its intelligentsia. Scripting not only gives meaningful function to the language but also helps in making sense of ourselves in what produces identity. But, as is evident from the failure of Kodava Barati in its institutional implementation, what minority languages require is a network of political and cultural set-up that can help the language realise the potential. This realisation is also restricted to the utopian community built around the cultural discourse of the text. Since kodava is not taught in schools, introducing it in schools not as a compulsory subject but as something which ‘interested’ children can learn as an option was thought to be empowering in itself. As of now, there have been efforts to teach Tulu in schools in the coastal districts of karnataka, where Tulu is native (again, among other languages like Are-bhashe, Havyaka, Bairy, Konkani, etc.). But, the official nod to teach kodava in schools is hard to come by. Public opinion in the matter of introducing kodava in schools is also divided because of its ‘limited’ uses in socio-economic mobility, its perceived lowly status, its ‘lack’ of script, and so on. it is in this context that we need to appreciate the kodava Sahitya Akademy’s efforts to publish a language text aimed

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at gradually strengthening kodava in all aspects, an effort that began with some amount of institutional support (from the Central institute of indian Languages, Mysore). dotty Poovaiah, the then President of the Akademy, spoke about how these efforts failed not only because they lacked larger institutional support (obviously controlled by the kannada chauvinist lobby) but also because they lacked the support of kodava speakers themselves (Poovaiah 2011). The legitimacy that was intended to be built for the language by introducing it in schools never took off. But, the text in itself stands as a proof of resistance to the socio-cultural and grammatical norms of kannada.9 how has this resistance taken shape? kodava, as mentioned, is a spoken language that has had no requirement of a script until recent times. Kodava Barati stands out because it put the spoken to the written and translated the oral to the scripted. what is interesting is that the scripting takes place in kannada, the language that is largely responsible for its marginalisation. The kannada script gets translated to suit the needs of kodava. At once, the language of the other can serve a double purpose: it may be the arena for confrontation and resistance to the other, but it may also be a means of self-liberation (Mehrez 1992: 123). editors of Kodava Barati have consciously noted differences in scripting leading to resistance: this is an experimental text. when any language is learnt newly in a classical/formal manner, or when accepted norms are taught newly, there are possibilities of differences creeping in and possibilities of deviation . . . we have struggled to retain the special features of kodava language while preparing this text in kodava using the kannada script. when the script of one language is used to write another, it becomes next to impossible to bring forth the nuances of the spoken to the written. The representation of the spoken in the written requires the introduction of many signs and sub-signs. This leads to the fear that the written form may unnecessarily be lengthy and complicated. keeping both these things in mind, we have taken care to bring out this book without lengthening it, or complicating it while simultaneously retaining the special features of kodava language. (Yadurajan and Poovaiah 2007: xii)10

The first note of difference for the text was to identify Kodava alphabets in the manner it is spoken. The text identifies five extra vowels that are used in kodava (extra in relation to kannada) and uses diacritical marks to distinguish them and omits two vowels from the kannada list. This appropriation of the dominant language by the minor one

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can be seen not only as translation but also as consciously identifying and institutionalising difference — a difference that marks a distinct language and culture, a difference that replaces the dominant and the act of replacing cannot be anything but translation. This process of writing, of translation as contributing to formation of newer knowledge systems is important because it helps us ‘conceptualize processes of cultural transmission . . . [and] because we recognize that it participates in many different ways in the generation of new forms of knowledge, new textual forms, new relationships to language’ (Simon 1992: 160). not only does writing give rise to newer forms, but it also gives legitimacy to the minor language. writing empowers the language and takes it forward to another level despite erasing certain knowledge systems of the oral. Contrary to Cronin’s observation, with regard to irish and english, that minority languages ‘that are under pressure from powerful major languages can succumb at lexical and syntactic levels so that over time they become mirror images of the dominant languages’ (Cronin 2009: 3), the translation of kodava from its oral to written form has defied norms of the dominant Kannada. If the recognition of the phonetic system as different is one example, the other is identifying that kodava unlike kannada (and other sanskritised language systems) does not require consonants with breadth (mahaprana).11 This puts the number of alphabets as listed by Kodava Barati as 42 (including the five extra vowels) as against the 52 of Kannada. The title page of the book stands testimony to this translation of mahapranas to alpapranas (consonants without breadth). Bharathi in kannada becomes Barati in kodava; Bhashe in kannada is Bashe; Abhivridhi is abivridi; and so on. it is also interesting to note that all these words ‘requiring’ mahapranas are loan words from Sanskrit even in kannada. The scripting of this grammatical norm is discussed in the preface to the text. The text aims at ‘writing certain special words in kodava correctly, using diacritical marks at appropriate places so that it facilitates reading . . .’ (Yadurajan and Poovaiah 2007: ix). Contrary to unconsciously imbibing the dominant language, which Cronin calls ‘translation as reflection’, this appropriation of Kannada is ‘translation as reflexion’ which is a ‘critical consideration of what a language absorbs and what allows it to expand’ (Cronin 2009: 6). how does translation/scripting create a language for children as a singular norm? Although we can term the creation of a text in the language of minority as resistance, it cannot ward off exclusionary

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practices because there is some need of standardisation and normalisation. Scripting of a language therefore creates a new language while simultaneously replacing and excluding others. in the case of kodava, the main dialects of the kodava language are spread across its northern, central and southern regions. The northern dialect is known as ‘Surlabbi Takk’, takk means language/speech/bol, the central dialect is known as ‘Mendale’, which is the most powerful culturally and socially given its proximity to the chief town of kodagu, Madikeri is the dialect that has been used as the standard. Mendale Takk has almost replaced the kiggat and Surlabbi dialects even in its spoken form. The kiggat dialect is spoken in southern kodagu. Both Surlabbi and kiggat Takk are considered uncultured by Mendale speakers, and over recent times this has been internalised even by native speakers of kiggat and Surlabbi Takk. Mendale is the dialect used for all purposes of writing, publishing and speaking in public spheres. Kodava Barati, despite its resistance to kannada, its cultural politics, its grammatical norms, and its struggle against ‘one set of linguistic and cultural hierarchies’ (Venuti 2004: 329), has unconsciously installed hierarchical practices that are equally exclusionary. By adopting Mendale Takk as its choice for the written word, Kodava Barati’s idea of the kodava language excludes the Surlabbi and kiggat Takk. The text uses the Mendale standard in all its sentences and in its choice of words uses the Mendale variety. For example, while introducing alphabets with their corresponding words, the text uses words like dadde (sow) which is palle in kiggat, and irupu (ant) which can be urupu or erpu. To a large extent, pa in Mendale variety becomes ha in kiggat and the intonation and suffix of verbs change. Therefore, sentences like avu bus-l pochi (‘They went by bus’) will be avu bus-l hoyana/poyitana in kiggat (Yadurajan and Poovaiah 2007: 2, 8, 85). Since translation is commonly perceived as choosing the most appropriate equivalent, this too openly points to the risks of such a choice. Choosing between words and dialects in itself is translation. Scripting new words while simultaneously excluding others is a conscious choice of translation where equivalence no longer signifies equal relationships but a skewed power-relation not only between dominant and minor languages but also between dialects within the language of the minority. This illuminates the cultural and political risks (that revolve around a cultivated sameness and homogenisation of the minority identity) taken by minority languages that have made efforts to introduce practices

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of writing/reading/translating for self-preservation and development (Venuti 2004: 329). while the choice of the kodava dialect for scripting the kodava language homogenises the language and its associated identity of the kodava speaking people, the choice of kodava language is also exclusionary and hierarchical when seen in relation to other minor languages within kodagu. kodava stands low in relation to kannada, Malayalam and english, but when compared with other languages native to kodagu like Are-Bhashe, kodava Mapale, erava, and kuruba, it stands high on the pedestal. Muzaffar Assadi (1997) points out how the separatist movement in kodagu and kodava chauvinism gathered steam after liberalisation of the indian economy, after coffee prices reached a new high, thereby increasing the socio-economic status of a small but powerful section of land-owning kodavas. he also argues that this movement for a separate state for kodagu, based on the lack of developmental initiatives from the karnataka government and also the distinct language and culture of kodagu, is not inclusive of nonkodavas in kodagu and categories of peoples/communities who do not belong to the dominant kodava community but speak the kodava language as their mother tongue (ibid.: 3114). historically, any language in its written form creates a normalised form. This normalised and standardised form of writing is seen as a pre-requisite for writing. According to Lewis, ‘normalized language is usually a pro-duct of nationalist movements and based on the “central fiction” that people of one nation speak one language’ (Lewis 2005: 20). what this highlights is that translation of the identities of people through the scripting of their languages carries the burden of hegemony of minority within the minority. while kodava children in schools and in sociocultural spheres are constantly made aware of their language’s lowly status, texts like Kodava Barati project a carefully cultivated, translated identity for all people of kodagu thus erasing choices in translation of dialects, languages, people, and identities within their limited domain of influence. This elevation of the Mendale Takk to the written, textual and standard form, as a cultural signifier of the language and its people, corroborates with Annie Brisset’s observation of the politics of language, translation and cultural identity of the Quebecois people in Canada: translation becomes an act of reclaiming, of recentering of the identity, a re-territorializing operation. it does not create a new language, but it

126 a Sowmya Dechamma elevates a dialect (or a minor language) to the status of a national and cultural language. (Brisset 2004: 339)

it is therefore important that translation studies venture into the power relationships between languages that reflect historical consciousness of the given social moment. As Cronin notes, the power nexus between languages is constantly shifting, and translation relationships have to be endlessly calibrated. Moving away from foundational notions of translation, it will be in a conception of translation as a ‘world of continuous relational adjustments’ that minority languages will finally have a major role to play in the discipline of translation studies. (Cronin 2009: 19–20)

while the effort to institutionalise kodava as evidenced by Kodava Barati did not materialise, owing to reasons discussed earlier, the text nevertheless manipulated the dominant to resist; to form new systems of knowledge; to consciously ‘create’ a textual language, thereby intending to imbibe certain values in children who use the text. Kodava Barati symbolically translates and elevates Kodava first by scripting its orality and then by displacing the dominant kannada.

Notes 1. karnataka kodava Sahitya Akademy which, as the name suggests, is a branch of the karnataka Sahitya Akademy (which is again a part of the Central Sahitya Akademy) was established along with Tulu and konkani Sahitya Akademies in 1994 by Veerappa Moily the erstwhile Chief Minister of karnataka, who was a Tulu speaker and litterateur. 2. The communities native to kodagu that speak the kodava language as their mother tongue include kodavas, Amma kodavas, Peggades, Panikka, hajamas, Airies, Malayas, kudiyas, kembatties, and others. There are also other linguistic minorities in kodagu including erava, Bettada kuruba, Jenu kuruba, among others. 3. According to the 2001 Census of india, the number of kodava speakers was about 166,187. interestingly, there has been a gradual increase in the number of speakers of kodava since 1971 until 2001 (language data for the 2011 Census was not out at the time of writing this chapter). The increase in number of speakers of kodava is as follows: 1971 (72,085); 1981 (92,678); 1991 (97,011); 2001 (166,187). 4. Like most linguistic minorities, kodava speakers in the last 25 years or so are dispersed and are now largely concentrated in Mysore and Bengaluru, the nearest cities to kodagu. The link: http://www.censusindia.gov.in/

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5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

Census_data_2001/Census_data_online/Language/Statement8.aspx gives details of statewise dispersal of kodava and other languages. i have elsewhere discussed how the kodava community, despite culturally not belonging to the Hindu fold, has been classified as belonging to the other Backward Community (see dechamma 2010). in kannada the akshara (alphabet) with inherent vowels are called sarala akshara; the akshara with ligature rules for vowels are called gunita akshara; and consonant clusters, ottakshara (nag 2007). interestingly, the text though asserting kodava-ness in most aspects has its illustrations — dress of men, women and other cultural markers — in stereotypical kannada ways, not kodava. This might be the contribution from the Central institution of indian Languages, located at Mysore (known as the ‘cultural capital’ of karnataka). Brisset quotes henri Gobard’s useful categorisation of language: (a) Vernacular Language is local, spoken spontaneously, which can be considered mother tongue or native tongue (kodava for our purpose), (b) Vehicular Language is national or regional, learned out of necessity, to be used for communication in the city (kannada), (c) referential language is tied to cultural, oral and written traditions and ensures continuity in values by systematic reference to classic works of the past (again, kannada because most ‘primary’ regional languages of india act as vehicular and referential languages), (d) Mythical language functions as the Ultimate recourse, verbal magic, whose incomprehensibility is considered to be irrefutable (Sanskrit in case of india, despite debates between indo-Aryan and dravidian supremacies) (Brisset 2004: 339). interestingly, this corresponds roughly to the categorisation U. r. Ananthamurthy makes as mane mathu (the language of the home; beedi mathi (the language of the street); and attada mathu (language of the elite [atta literally means attic]) (Ananthamurthy 2009: 57–58). The chapter does not juxtapose kodava learning to english because most kodava speakers (for reasons that are rooted in the interesting colonial history of kodagu and for reasons of mobility) associate themselves closely and with pride to english. henceforth in this chapter, all quotes from Kodava Barati are my translations. Tamil consciously got rid of mahapranas, claiming that they were a Sanskrit influence during the peak of the Dravidian movement.

References Ananthamurthy, U. r. 2009. ‘Globalization, english and “other” Languages’, Social Scientist, 37(7/8): 50–59. Assadi, Muzaffar. 1997. ‘Separatist Movement in Coorg’, Economic and Political Weekly, 32(49): 3114–16.

128 a Sowmya Dechamma Benjamin, walter. 2004. ‘The Task of the Translator: An introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens’, trans. harry Zohn, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader, pp. 75–85. new York: routledge. Brahmagiri Kodava Weekly. Madikeri: Ulliyada Poovaiah. Brisset, Annie. 2004. ‘The Search for a native Language: Translation and Cultural identity’, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader, pp. 337–68. new York: routledge. Canagarajah, A. Suresh. 2009. ‘dilemmas in Planning english/Vernacular relations in Post-Colonial Communities’, in nikolas Coupland and Adam Jaworski (eds), Sociolinguistics: Critical Concepts in Linguistics, pp. 236–64. new York: routledge. Cronin, Michael. 2009. ‘The Cracked Looking Glass of Servants: Translation and Minority Languages in a Global Age’, in Mona Baker (ed.), Translation Studies: Critical Concepts in Linguistics, Vol. iV, pp. 3–21. new York: routledge. dechamma, Sowmya. 2010. ‘is There a kodava Cinema?’ in Sowmya dechamma and Sathya Prakash (eds), Cinemas of South India: Culture, Resistance, Ideology, pp. 190–215. new delhi: oxford University Press. dorian, nancy. 2009. ‘western Language ideologies and Small-Language Prospects’, in nikolas Coupland and Adam Jaworski (eds), Sociolinguistics: Critical Concepts in Linguistics, pp. 219–35. new York: routledge. emeneau, M. B. 1970. ‘kodagu Vowels’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 90(1): 145–58. Jaffe, Alexandra. 2009. ‘Locating Power: Corsican Translators and Their Critics’, in Mona Baker (ed.), Translation Studies: Critical Concepts in Linguistics, 4: 22–46. new York: routledge. Lewis, r. Anthony. 2005. ‘Language and Translation: Contesting Conventions’, in Paul St-Pierre and Prafulla C. kar (eds), In Translation: Reflections, Refractions, Transformations, pp. 15–24. new delhi: Pencraft international. Mehrez, Samia. 1992. ‘Translation and the Postcolonial experience: The Francophone north African Text’, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology, pp. 120–38. London: routledge. Ministry of home Affairs. Government of india. 2001. Census data. http://www. censusindia.gov.in/Census_data_2001/Census_data_online/Language/ Statement8.aspx (accessed on 2 december 2011). nag, Sonali. 2007. ‘early reading in kannada: The Pace of Acquisition of orthographic knowledge and Phonemic Awareness’, Journal of Research in Reading, 30(1): 7–22. Poomale. 2012. Kodava Weekly, April–May. Virajpet, kodagu: Ajjinikanda Mahesh. Poovaiah, dotty. Telephonic interview. 2 december 2011. Seyhan, Azade. 1996. ‘Lost in Translation: remembering the Mother Tongue in emine Sevgi ozdamar’s Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei’, The German Quarterly, 69(4): 414–26.

Scripting Language, Scripting Translation b 129 Simon, Sherry. 1992. ‘The Language of Cultural difference: Figures of Alterity in Canadian Translation’, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology, pp. 159–76. London: routledge. Skutnabb-kangas, Tove and robert Phillipson. 2009. ‘Linguistic human rights, Past and Present’, in nikolas Coupland and Adam Jaworski (eds), Sociolinguistics: Critical Concepts in Linguistics, pp. 179–218. new York: routledge. Sridhar, k. kamal. 1996. ‘Language in education: Minority and Multilingualism in india’, International Review of Education, 42(4): 327–47. Stephens, John. 1992. Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction. new York: routledge. Trivedi, harish. 2005. ‘Translating Culture vs. Cultural Translation’, in Paul St-Pierre and Prafulla C. kar (eds), In Translation: Reflections, Refractions, Transformations, pp. 251–60. new delhi: Pencraft international. Tyagi, Yogesh. 2003. ‘Some Legal Aspects of Minority in india’, Social Scientist, 31(5/6): 5–28. UneSCo. http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/index.php (accessed on 2 december 2011). Venuti, Lawrence. 2004. ‘introduction to 1990s’, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader, pp. 328–30. new York: routledge. Yadurajan, S. S. and Ulliyada dotty Poovaiah (eds). 2007. Kodava Barati — 1. Mysore: Central institute of indian Languages and Madikeri: karnataka kodava Sahitya Akademy.

9 Of ‘Breaks’ and Continuities TV Advertisements as Multimodal Translations Nikhila H.

The commercial break on television is often a cue for channel switching.

As we surf through this terrain of Babel, we often see the same faces speak to us in different languages or the same exhortation being made by different people in different languages. Shah rukh khan chides a boy for using a girl’s fairness cream in hindi on one channel, in kannada on another, just as it is conveyed in different languages that every friend is indispensable, and so is the Airtel mobile network; if Surya romances with Malaika Arora to convince us of the magic of Zandu Balm in hindi, Junior nTr serenades her in Telugu to impress upon us the power of the balm. while it is quite usual to come across different language versions of TV advertisements of the same product, we notice that there are not only linguistic or verbal differences among them but also many instances of differences in the images or non-verbal content. The present chapter is a study of these variations in images as well as verbal content under the rubric of translation. The TV advertisements can be seen as translations in the sense that they are versions of a prior TV commercial script or ad copy from which these advertisements are made or translated. The written script or ad copy may be predominantly a verbal text, which is then transformed into a multimodal text. TV advertisements are multimodal in the sense that their ‘production and interpretation relies on the combined deployment of a wide range of semiotic resources or “modes”’ such as language, image, music, colour, and perspective (Baker and Saldanha 2009: 13). The transformation of an ad copy into a screen advertisement, that is the translation from one semiotic system (predominantly verbal language) into other semiotic systems (predominantly audio-visual) would come under the purview of intersemiotic translation (Jakobson 1959: 233). however, in this chapter, i am not looking at this kind of transformation from

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script to screen. instead, the source materials for this study are parallel advertisement versions in different languages. i look at these versions as multimodal translations, considering their differences in language, colour, dress, music, gaze, gesture, proxemics, narrative, etc.

Multimodality and Translation Studies The second edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (2009) has, among other additions, an entry each on advertising, audiovisual translation, commercial translation, and localisation, all absent in the earlier 1998 edition and also in the e-version that followed the 1998 edition. The additions could be taken as a sign of the expanding repertoire of sources coming under investigation in Translation Studies, as also a shift in the meaning of the term ‘translation’ to include a whole range of transformations and transfers across languages. however, we often see that even when audio-visual texts are considered under screen translation or audio-visual translation, the concern is largely still with linguistic change and its impact on different media forms. For example, eithne o’Connell’s discussion of ‘Screen Translation’ in A Companion to Translation Studies (2007) focuses mainly on the study of dubbing, re-voicing, and the more recent phenomenon of subtitles. The questions that a study of screen translation would take up according to o’Connell would be, ‘To what extent can we expect the mediated material we view to reflect the source texts upon which it is based?’ and ‘in what ways can screen translation methods be used to deliberately alter or censor audio-visual material?’ (ibid.: 121). even though the questions asked here have the potential to broaden the scope of translation to look at a variety of transformations, screen translation as discussed by o’Connell, concerns itself with how linguistic change impacts the meaning of the source visual or image. in her discussion titled ‘issues in Audio-Visual Translation’, in the Routledge Companion to Translation Studies (2009), delia Chiaro also refers to the visual dimension but looks at only verbal changes as translation. in this chapter, i therefore prefer to use the term ‘multimodal translation’, though there are some overlaps and continuities with what is studied under screen translation and audio-visual translation. The term ‘multimodality’ that i employ in this chapter is discussed under the entries ‘Advertising’ and ‘Audio-visual Translation’ in the Routledge Encylopedia (Baker and Saldanha 2009). Besides being multimodal, audio-visual texts are also described as being multimedial, ‘in so far

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as [the] panoply of semiotic modes is delivered to the viewer through various media in a synchronized manner, with the screen playing a coordinating role in the presentation process’ (Baker and Saldanha 2009: 13). The Gambier and Gottlieb edited book (Multi) Media Translation (2001) is one of the early and seminal books in the field of media translation. Aline remael’s essay in the book ‘Some Thoughts on Multimodal and Multimedia Translation’ goes on to discuss multimodal texts in the context of translation. Citing the example of a TV movie, she says that in this instance television is the medium and it would ‘disseminate a text that makes use of various aural and visual modes to construct aural-verbal, aural non-verbal, visual-verbal and visual non-verbal messages’ (Remael 2001: 14). She proposes a working-field which would involve: the study of [translated] texts that do have a verbal constituent, but in the study of which special attention is paid to their multimodal functioning, and to the transformations this might undergo due to the transfer from a source to a target context. (ibid.)

in his recent book, Multimodality (2010), Gunther kress, discussing multimodality in the context of intercultural communication and translation, says: Until recently [translation] has focused on language alone . . . But what about a translation of a movement, an action, a gesture that is entirely understood in one society and either entirely misunderstood or not understood in any way in another? we simply can no longer assume that the reach of modes is the same across different societies and their cultures. Modes occupy different ‘terrains’ from one society to another. we have to begin looking at the field of meaning as a whole and see how meaning is handled modally across the range of modes in different societies. (ibid.: 11)

Theoretical Background to the Study of TV Advertisements as Translations if we consider the script or ad-copy as source text and the TV advertisement as target text, it would mean that the script as source text would in itself be incomplete; it needs to be realised in/as target text, i.e., the TV advertisement for a target audience. Also, TV advertisements may have coeval versions (versions in different languages made around the same time, but not simultaneously); multiple language

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versions (versions shot simultaneously); dubbed versions; re-shot versions (remakes for a different target audience at a different time), etc., which would mean that we would often be contending with not just one source text and one target text but many, and also target texts may often become source texts for subsequent versions. The ‘incompleteness’ of source text, and the ‘multiplying’ of source texts with target texts means that we may have to look at the notion of ‘text’ itself closely here. ‘Text’ here would be a process-in-the-making rather than a finite entity or a finished product transmitted from place to place. This notion of text-as-process is discussed among others in the context of editing and authorship of literary texts by hans walter Gabler who says, ‘A stance in theory recognizing texts as open and indeterminate . . . would needs also foreground texts as by nature processual’ (1987: 126). if we take this understanding to the realm of multiple versions of TV advertisements, we would see each version not as an attempt to transmit an original or source meaning, but as an attempt to keep the (source) text open; to rewrite the script each time a version is made in a different language; and to make for new meanings. This process of keeping a text ‘alive’ in/through translation is reminiscent of walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘afterlife’ — ‘The life of the originals attains in them [translations] to its ever-renewed latest and most abundant flowering’ (2000: 17). Further, in the case of TV advertisement translation, the criterion for judging this translation would not be fidelity or equivalence to a source text, as much as how effective it is as a target text for the target audience. This kind of downplaying of source text and the upholding of the skopos or purpose of target text is reminiscent of the skopos theory in Translation Studies, one of the functional theories of translation. According to one of the defining aspects of skopos theory, ‘the TT [target text] must be translated in such a way that it is coherent for the TT receivers, given their circumstances and knowledge’ (Munday 2001: 80). Rather than fidelity to the source text, what is considered more important is the internal coherence of the target text so that it is intelligible to receivers in the target culture. if the relation between texts in TV advertisement translation is not one of equivalence, we could say, as the deconstructionists do, that the relation between text and its after (texts) is characterised by intertextuality: The ‘translation theory’ discussed in deconstruction . . . is not a theory in a traditional sense — it is not prescriptive, it does not depend upon some

134 a Nikhila H. notion of equivalence between source and target text, nor does it propose a better model of communication. instead, it suggests that one think less in terms of copying or reproducing and more in terms of intertextuality, of exploring the limits of language. The act of ‘de-constructing’ or interpreting a text is not seen as recovering some deeper ‘given’ objective meaning which controls and unifies the text’s structure, but as exposing what is usually suppressed, namely the infinite possibilities, the ‘free play’ of meanings. each deconstruction, each interpretation, opens itself to further deconstruction . . . This of course means that, instead of being seen as reproductions of an exact meaning, translations are seen as texts in their own right which are always in the process of modifying, deferring and displacing the original. (wallmach 1999: 571)

i have rehearsed here some of the discussions in Translation Studies that are crucial for my study of TV advertisements as translations. From these, three points important for what follows in the remaining sections could be summarily made: (a) Text is an unbounded, unfinished process; (b) Translation is an activity governed by skopos or purpose; (c) relationship between different existing versions is intertextual, i.e., the versions refer to each other.

Sources for this Study Here some clarifications with regard to the corpus that I am looking at are in order. My source for the TV advertisements put together for this study is Youtube. in some cases the date or year of making of the advertisement is available, and is mentioned, while in a couple of cases, i have had to adopt an approximation relying on memory of seeing the advertisement on TV combined with the date of uploading the advertisement on Youtube. in some cases the advertisements are simultaneous versions, while in some others they have been made after a gap of some months or even a couple of years. while in the case of some of the advertisements, it is possible to identify a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ text, in other instances, i have no clue to identify their sequentiality. The study considers two sets of parallel advertisements; the first set consists of two Parachute hair oil advertisements in Tamil and hindi; the second set consists of six kalyan Jewellers advertisements, two in Malayalam, two in Tamil, and one each in kannada and Telugu. The first set of Hair Oil advertisements, featuring actress Diya Mirza

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and a model in the hindi version, and actress Asin and a model in the Tamil version, played on TV between 2006–08. These Parachute advertisements were created for the Marico Company, which owns the Parachute brand by the advertising agency McCann erickson (india) Ltd. The agency has its India head office in Delhi, with Prasoon Joshi, the well-known lyricist and dialogue-writer for many Hindi films, as its chairman. The second set of advertisements is part of the kalyan Jewellers Trust Campaign, in which one of the Malayalam versions and the Tamil version were made in August and november 2009 respectively. The kannada and Telugu versions were made simultaneously in June 2011. The new Malayalam version was made in August 2011. The new Tamil version was made in october 2011. The advertising agency nethra PUSh Advertising of Palakkad, kerala and Bengaluru handled this advertising campaign for kalyan Jewellers.

Message and Claim of the Advertisements if we look at the message of the Parachute oil advertisements and the mode of communicating the message, the message would be ‘all it takes for beautiful hair is a massage with Parachute oil one hour before washing off with shampoo’; and this message is conveyed in the form of a tip from one woman to another, more specifically, from a film star whose profession demands that she looks good to a photographer whose business is to make people appear beautiful through her clicks but who does not know how to make herself beautiful. The results of following the film star’s advice are instantaneous and palpable, as the film star catches the photographer looking at her own picture with her now beautiful crown. The advertisement is sequenced as noticing a lacuna in oneself in comparison to another; getting advice-cumfriendly tip from the other; trying out the advice; and seeing the results for oneself. in other words, the primary function of this advertisement is to create a user-image. it holds out the promise of an enhanced selfimage by using the product. The message that the kalyan Jewellery advertisement wishes to convey is that it is trustworthy (because gold-buyers are concerned with the purity of the gold they are purchasing), and the mode of conveying this message is in the form of defining what form trust takes within a family setting, particularly between a father (or father-figure) and a daughter. in each of the versions, the advertisement, employing a dramatic mode of narration, brings a potential moment of crisis and

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then the resolution of the crisis through trust. except for the last two, all the other four advertisements in this campaign begin by explicating the predicament of a girl in love with a boy; her father’s (or fatherfigure’s) love for the girl which creates the conflict in the girl’s mind and influences her course of action; and the resolution of this conflict through trust. in other words, the primary function of this advertisement is to create a brand image, a specific and recognisable quality to differentiate it from its competitors. By defining what trust is, the advertisement substitutes a value (trust) for the product (jewellery) at kalyan’s. Comparing the two sets of advertisements in terms of their claim, we could say that the Parachute hair oil advertisement makes the claim that ‘you (the user) will look better if you use our product (than that of our competitors)’, while the kalyan Jewellery advertisement makes the claim that ‘we are more trustworthy (than our competitors)’. So, while the former set of advertisements primarily distinguishes the user of the hair oil (ostensibly from users of other hair oils), and by implication defines the brand, the latter set of advertisements primarily distinguishes the brand from its competitors, and by implication defines the user.

The Two Sets of Advertisements as Two Strategies of Translation As the hair oil advertisement appears in different languages, the task for the advertiser is to find equivalent users in different languages whose word about its effectiveness can be trusted. Thus, while actress diya Mirza appears in the hindi version, another actress, Asin appears in the Tamil version. So one user is substituted for another, just as in translation one word is substituted for another, where equivalents or near-equivalents are found and substituted. The principle governing this substitution is one of identifying who or what would be most effective in carrying the message across to the target audience. But in the kalyan Jewellery advertisement, the attempt of the advertiser in each language version is not necessarily one of finding equivalents (whether equivalents are available or not), but one of modifying and making better or improving upon the earlier version. This would give rise to questions such as, why an advertisement would need to be improved; what the marker is of ‘failure’ or ‘lack’ in an advertisement; what would constitute ‘improvement’ in an advertisement rather than, say, just change or transformation. The answers to some of these questions may lie in the reception of the advertisements.

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Here some clarifications about reception are in order. Though commercial advertisements are meant to promote sales of a product or service, in many instances it may be difficult to calibrate the success of a commercial and the corresponding sales. That is to say, the response to a TV advertisement is not necessarily linked to viewers turning into buyers, but to how arresting the viewers find it; how offended they are by it; and how much they sit up to take note of the advertisement, in the midst of all the traffic on television. A primary aim of the advertisers then would be to ‘grab the eye-balls’. however, in a highly competitive market, any adverse discussion of the advertisement might be feared as impacting, if not the sales certainly, the perception of the product, brand or company. in such a situation, the changes made in the advertisement could be seen as attempts at improving the advertisement. re-making/improving the advertisement in a different language could be an attempt at not only expanding its market in a new linguistic territory, but a quest for righting the image of the product, brand or company. So, though languages are incommensurable, the first set of Parachute advertisements seems to work on the principle of attempted substitution, but the second set of kalyan Jewellers advertisements plays upon the incommensurability by attempting to improve upon it, to make each successive version better than before. what are the implications of these two strategies of translation? The rest of this chapter looks separately at the two sets of TV advertisements to address this question.

Parachute Hair Oil Advertisements it is possible to classify the visual and verbal components of any TV advertisement in the following way: (a) Visual presentation of verbal signs (e.g., visual presentation of the name of the product or tagline); (b) visual presentation of non-verbal signs (e.g., the visual presentation of people, objects, setting); (c) acoustic presentation of verbal signs (e.g., dialogue, lyrics); (d) acoustic presentation of non-verbal signs (e.g., background music, other background sounds). Translation of the TV advertisement by dubbing transforms (c), whereas parallel or remake/reshot versions transform (b) and (c), but they may also transform (a) and (d).

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The hindi and the Tamil versions of the Parachute hair oil advertisement appear to be based on the same ad-script, but are not dubbed versions. They are reshot or parallel versions, and there are differences in the way the script is visualised. Besides the obvious differences in the two people in the advertisements, Asin and a model in the Tamil version, and diya Mirza and a model in the hindi version, some of the prominent differences between the two versions according to the previous classification are listed here in this table: Table 9.1: Differences in Visual and Verbal Aspects in the Two Parachute Hair Oil Advertisements Parameters

Hindi ad with Diya Mirza

Tamil ad with Asin

Visual presentation of verbal signs

only name of the product — name of the Product and a ‘Parachute’ appears repeatedly. tagline in Tamil stating ‘apply oil just an hour before shampooing’.

Acoustic presenta- 1) Closing line — ‘to one hour 1) Closing line — ‘madam, oora tion of verbal champi kiya?’ (‘So did you vechchitingla?’ (‘Madam, did signs soak/massage for an hour?’) you soak [your hair] for an hour?’); 2) Seamless transition from dialogue to voice-over, changing the tone from personal tip to general advice in between; 3) Song in the background in male voice singing about how the hair will grow and roots will be stronger — connoting that having long hair will also make one culturally rooted. Acoustic presenta- Background Music, low tion of non-verbal humming and clicking sound of signs the photographer’s camera — reinforcing the photographer doing her work. Visual presenta1) no. of Shots — nine in tion of non-verbal 28 seconds — unhurried signs pace;

Background Music only.

1) no. of Shots — 14 in 22 seconds — rapid cuts give impression of fleeting glamour;

Parameters

Hindi ad with Diya Mirza 2) Mostly point-of-view shots, and use of two-shot and over-the-shoulder-shot to establish both photographer and diya in studio;

Tamil ad with Asin 2) Third person camera view, as if camera is eavesdropping on a conversation between two women;

3) opening shots focus on diya’s 3) opening shots focus on Asin’s hair, her white shiny dress face in the background of arc a contrast to the dull bluelights, her beige-brown gown green background, and use of illuminated by the lights, giving a frame within frame for diya sense of glamour, and shiny hair for capturing her beauty; an accessory for creating glamour; 4) Use of medium close-up 4) Photographer is only partially shot of photographer with visible in the two-shot giving the camera, giving photographer sense that the photographer is equal importance; unimportant, as she does not have what Asin has; 5) opening remarks — ‘lovely hair, lucky ya’ is made looking at diya;

5) opening remarks of photographer — ‘lovely hair, lucky ya’ is made looking at the photograph of Asin that she has clicked, casting an envious look at the image;

6) Closing line ‘to one hour champi kiya?’ is made directly looking at the camera, as if addressing the viewer with the question;

6) Face of photographer in shadow as if clouded by self-doubt and uncertainty after listening to Asin;

7) Gestures and body language 7) Use of frame within frame for of diya — uses hands to show photographer towards the end disagreement, hands over of the ad — Asin catches her off the Parachute bottle to the guard as she is capturing herself, photographer, hands on as if Asin has caught her in a hips — gives an impression of secret act, but this time the images friendliness. of the photographer in the mobile phone cameras are glamorous; 8) Closing line ‘Madam oora vechchitingla?’ is made looking at the picture of the photographer in the mobile phone addressing her as ‘madam’ mockingly, playfully, as an equal, now that she has the glamour (and the spectator still doesn’t and is therefore not addressed); (Continued )

140 a Nikhila H. Table 9.1: (Continued ) Parameters

Hindi ad with Diya Mirza

Tamil ad with Asin 9) Asin uses facial expression — confident, curious, I-knowyou-don’t facial expression, headshake, and laughter — body language indicates that she is enjoying the glamour and envy.

Overall impression Advice or tip from one professional to another.

Overall impression A woman who revels in her beauty sharing the secret of her beauty with another (envious) woman.

Source: Prepared by the author.

Generally, variations across languages in advertisements are explained in terms of cultural differences (see, for example, Sidiropoulou 2008) and localisation (for example, Gambier 2006). is it possible then, to explain the differences in the Tamil and the hindi versions of the Parachute hair oil advertisement in terms of distinctive cultural identities and differential needs and expectations of viewers in the Tamil and hindi context? Could the advertisements be taken as indications of how the Tamil viewer or the hindi viewer is conceived? For example, let us take the instance of the background song present in the Tamil version which gives an added dimension of meaning to the hair oil advertisement by linking growing long hair with deepening cultural roots. it seems here that the Tamil viewer is conceived as someone concerned about cultural roots. Long hair could connote being both fashionable and traditional at the same time; or rather, one could say that if the image of the glamorous modern girl aroused anxiety in the Tamil viewer, the background song about how the roots could be stronger by the use of the hair oil, would offset that anxiety; or if oily hair is seen by today’s young women audience as not fashionable, then seeing a style diva using hair oil, but only conveniently just an hour before shampooing, could indicate that oiled hair need not come in the way of a Tamil girl’s aspirations to become fashionable. what does the absence of this dimension of meaning of long hair and deepening cultural roots in hindi connote? does it connote the absence of the association of long hair with not being fashionable for a hindi viewership, or the absence of anxiety around women’s cultural roots among Hindi viewers? Or is it the difficulty of defining a

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homogeneous hindi viewership for the advertiser? or is it the deliberate attempt to distinguish a Tamil viewer from the hindi viewer by attaching a specific cultural value to the product in the Tamil context? Could any or all of these (or some others) be the reason as to why the hindi advertisement is just concerned with passing on the message of convenience of oiling hair an hour before shampooing, by a user who has experienced its benefits, to others who have not yet done so? It is difficult to speculate, in the absence of any concrete data, about viewers at this point in time. But, what we can say with some certainty is that the difference between the two versions is more than just linguistic difference; here, ‘Tamil-ness’ gets defined and constituted vis-à-vis ‘hindi-ness’ in particular ways. Further, the Tamil advertisement presents a woman whose confidence comes from what she supposedly has (long, beautiful hair), and in being envied for what she has. The facial expressions of the star rapidly change from fleeting doubt, to seeking affirmation, to growing self-confidence, while the photographer looks admiringly and enviously at the star; according to John Berger, it is the look of envy that sustains glamour (1973: 132–33). The camera and the gaze of the other woman, that is the photographer, work to mystify femininity in the Tamil advertisement. Though on the surface the advertisement may seem like demystifying femininity and the aura or glamour by making beauty accessible to all in the form of a hair product (the photographer at the end of the advertisement certainly has beautiful hair), Asin’s mocking and condescending tone towards the photographer at the end indicates that she still lacks Asin’s glamour which arouses envy. instead, now one can see the photographer getting hooked to the pursuit of glamour, as she would now use Parachute and whatever else it takes to possess that elusive glamour. This point will become clear if we contrast it with the hindi advertisement. The hindi advertisement seems to reach out of the circle of envy surrounding the women, establishing a more equal relationship between the two women and also with the spectator-buyer. This is quite evident if we take into account the tone and the look of the women with respect to each other and also with respect to the viewer. So, though the ad-script might be the same, the look of the models; the camera angles and frames; the setting; the gestures and body language; the song, all create different effects in the two advertisements. By juxtaposing the two advertisements then, and closely studying the differences in signs and modes between them, it is possible to see how ‘woman’ gets constituted differently in

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the Tamil and hindi contexts. en-gendering through translation works here as a way of marking the languages, Tamil and hindi, in particular ways. rather than seeing translation as simply taking a message across already-existing, inert language spheres, we see that translation here is constitutive of these differential language spheres.

Kalyan Jewellers ‘Trust-Campaign’ The kalyan Jewellers advertisements have a story, a dramatic narrative which builds up to a climax. They have adopted the look and iconography of cinema, using film stars in the Tamil, Kannada and Telugu versions. The Tamil versions have the actor Prabhu playing the role of the father, and Saranya playing the role of the daughter (2009 version), while the Telugu and Kannada versions have film stars Nagarjuna and Shivarajkumar respectively, playing the role of the brother. The 2009 Tamil version and the kannada and Telugu versions have several shots of the men and women in the advertisements clad in gold jewellery, with the village fair being a common backdrop for the family to showcase its wealth of gold. while in all the versions the advertisement has a common verbal tagline that roughly translates to ‘kalyan Jewellers: Trust is All’, there are variations in the visualisation of what constitutes trust and who or what is trustworthy, and the visual signs have had to change each time to anchor the verbal sign more firmly and unambiguously. Let us see the narrative in the advertisements that has been grouped into four sub-sets: (a) 2009 Malayalam version (60 seconds): A modern young girl is seen leaving her home and getting into a bus, while a modern boy seems to be waiting elsewhere near a taxi. The two seem like college-going youth. inside the house, which looks like a comfortable upper middle class home, when her mother goes to a room looking for her daughter, she finds a note and cries out loudly for her husband, who reads it and crushes it. Meanwhile, the girl in the bus sees a passenger in the bus with a baby and recalls her father’s love and upbringing of her, which is presented in flashback. Then, as the mother is consoling the father, we see their daughter outside the door of the house. She has made her way back home, and as she comes into the house slowly, while the boy continues to wait elsewhere, her father’s fist is clenched as if to strike her, but she breaks into sobs and goes into his arms and he embraces her, as the voice-over

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comes on to say in Malayalam ‘kalyan Jewellers: Trust, there’s all in it’. (b) 2009 Tamil version (58 seconds): A girl is telling another girl in a temple, at the time of some fair or festival, that she believes that her father will give his consent to her love, to which the other girl responds that he will kill her, and so asks her to run away in the car in which Suresh (her lover) is waiting. The mother overhears this conversation and anxiously runs to her husband to tell him that their daughter is thinking of running away. But the father calmly replies, ‘She is my daughter’. Then we have a series of shots showing the father putting flowers in his daughter’s hair; and in another instance, putting his foot on a slushy place to ensure she does not step on it and can cross it stepping onto his foot, while the mother watches anxiously as to what will happen and the daughter is worried and confused. The father is reassuring, as he calmly greets others at the fair, and appears to be a well-respected man, probably a rich landlord, with men accompanying him, and one holding up an umbrella for him. when they all come near the vehicle and the lover beckons her from inside the car, the music rises to a crescendo and the girl lets out a sigh of resolution as she walks past the waiting lover in the vehicle. even as he rolls down the window glass and watches her in disbelief, she walks ahead and holds her father’s hand firmly. Then her father puts his arm around her and asks her to tell the boy to bring his parents for their daughter’s hand, and the girl happily goes into her father’s arms, as the voiceover says in Tamil ‘Trust is the Basis of Life: kalyan Jewellers, kamaraj road, Pondicherry’. (c) 2011 kannada and Telugu versions (60 seconds): A girl is telling another girl in a temple, at a village fair, that her brother who is like her father will consent to her love, but the other girl tells her that he will kill her and that she should run away with raju who is waiting for her in the car. The brother’s wife overhears this and goes to report to the brother about his sister, but the brother stops her saying, ‘She is my sister’. Then we have a series of visuals such as the brother shooting a balloon with his gun and then lovingly caressing his sister’s cheek, even as the boy raju is present in the background as if exhorting the girl to run away. The brother is accompanied by several other men, one of whom is holding an umbrella over his head, and

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as he passes through the fair greeting people, we can see that he is a man of considerable wealth and power. when she nears the vehicle, the anxiety of her brother’s wife and other family members, who are following her, heightens even as the music rises to a crescendo. But, she walks past the vehicle in which her lover is waiting and clutches her brother’s hand while he is walking ahead. The brother then puts her hand to his heart and tells her that if she likes him so much, she can ask him to send his parents over to see him. hearing this, she falls into his arms in relief and happiness; and as the brother and sister embrace, a tear rolls down the brother’s eyes. The voice-over comes on to say in kannada/Telugu, ‘kalyan Jewellers: Trust is All’. (d) 2011 Tamil and Malayalam versions (60 seconds): A man brings his car to a stop near a house and suddenly remembers that earlier in the day, as he was at work in his office, he had received a phone call from his little daughter who had called to ask him to get a Barbie doll. he then turns the car back while the daughter waits for him inside the house. As he drives along the road late in the night, he finds shops downing their shutters (in the Tamil version, as the father tries to cross the road, dramatically jumping over the road divider, the shop-owner locks up the shop, and drives away). Then, getting the address of a shop owner, he goes to the shop-owner’s home, brings him back to the shop, picks up the Barbie doll that his daughter had asked for, and the next shot shows him beside his daughter and her happiness at receiving doll. The voice-over comes on to say, ‘For Those Looking Forward with Trust: kalyan Jewellers, Trust is All’. when the kalyan Jewellers 2009 Malayalam advertisement was aired, it was much discussed in kerala. My postgraduate and research students, who are from Kerala, first drew my attention to this advertisement and the discussions going on among the youth regarding the advertisement. it was particularly criticised for the girl’s betrayal of the boy for her parents, as she went back home leaving her lover waiting for her. when i visited the Youtube site where this advertisement had been uploaded, there were five pages of responses to the advertisement including a few that compared the latter Tamil version with this one. i offer a somewhat arbitrary sample of the responses here, which have been posted on Youtube over the past two years. i have also retained the spelling and grammatical forms used by the

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respondents on the website, though i have removed the names or Youtube ids used by the respondents. The responses are: (i) this add [sic!] is well made but please understand that that boy is also human, he also have [sic!] a heart, its as fragile as the heart of the girls parents. i would have recommended an add [sic!] where no one is hurt! (ii) hmmmmm even the guy is leaving his home n coming i guess . . . he is standing next to a Taxi with luggage packed on it . . . So i guess both of them are leaving their home together . . . So now one of them quits is it not betrayal of trust. n if the girl comes back to her parents to keep that trust alive . . . She could even be sensible enough not to run away from her home. if she believed in the trust that time she would have chosen to speak to her parents and convince them rather than betraying the guy . . . :d (iii) This version is a little more realistic than the Tamil version. no fool will try to run away with a girl from a crowded temple . . . if someone does that, he may not survive . . . :) whoever produced the ads knows the taste of Tamilians and keralites! i loved the Tamil version more than this as it is more colorful and filmy . . . (iv) The father in this ad lives in an ancient century . . . (v) so you are now agreeing . . . that this is for conservative narrow minded people . . . think the person with whom you decide to spent [sic!] rest of your life is as important as your parents . . . and i don’t think trust completely depends upon time . . . (vi) Sorry to dis-agree with most of you, i feel this is one of the badly directed ad’s. A man who loved and trusted a girl has become a laughingstock, then how can you preach trust is everything? (vii) superb add [sic!] . . . this gives values for relations . . . and more than that the words say everything . . . Viswasam athalle ellam . . . somethings get etched in mind . . . becomes hard to erase . . . this add [sic!] is one of those . . . just because . . . its [sic!] the truth . . . ViSwASAM AThAneLLAM . . . (viii) Superb ad . . . But i must say it had a big mistake . . . But the boy is neglected . . . remember that he too is a human being . . . love

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is not a crime or a wrong . . . Its [sic!] natural . . . & it needs to be seen with ease . . . not tease . . . (ix) thank you for your comment but it was not a mistake and was done purposefully. we thought that the 20 year relationship is always greater than a one or two year relationship (x) The advertisement could have been made a success by just ending with a marriage with the concurrence of the parents. This will augur well to the younger generation. (xi) but . . . he trustd her [sic!] . . . but she cheat him . . . that also “vishwasam”. These sample responses are indicative of the general tenor of responses to this advertisement, especially among the youth in the kerala context. while the advertisement has garnered some appreciation and also generated some debate, the majority of the respondents have criticised the advertisement for defining ‘trust’ only from the point of view of the parent–daughter relationship, and not from the point of view of the boy and girl in love. Much of the discussion has been on the ‘resolution’ of the conflict in the narrative, and many respondents have pointed out that the advertisement is ambiguous or one-sided as it resolves in favour of the father. These responses could be seen as representative of the internet-savvy generation of youth, but we need not see these as the only kind of response to the advertisement, though i have access here only to these responses. Further, these responses need not be taken very seriously by kalyan Jewellers, as the youngsters who are mostly articulating their criticism are not necessarily those with gold-buying power. So these responses alone need not be considered as the yardstick for pronouncing the advertisement as a failure. what however beats the logic in the advertisement is that the plot does not culminate in marriage. in terms of the product that it is trying to sell, jewellery, if the resolution does not end in a marriage, or promise of marriage, then it would be negating the very occasion for gold jewellery shopping, which is for weddings. So even while the advertisement defines ‘trust’ in terms of returning to the parental fold, it unwittingly undermines the occasion for buying jewellery, and the loving union of the couple in marriage. Further, as one does not find the iconic presence of jewellery in the advertisement, there seems to be a distance, if not a dissonance, between the visual and the verbal message: the visuals show no ‘outcome’ of the trust in the form of gold

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jewellery, while the verbal message exhorts us to trust the jewellery brand or company. while the Malayalam advertisement was made in August 2009, the Tamil version was made in november 2009. The Tamil version and the Telugu and kannada versions that follow also showcase all the main actors, men and women in the advertisement clad in heavy gold jewellery, making up for the iconic absence of gold in the earlier version. Further, these versions end with a promise of marriage with the father/brother consenting thereby implying the setting up of the occasion for buying gold jewellery. Also, if we take the responses provided earlier as indicative of the general tenor of discussion around the Malayalam advertisement, we can see that the Tamil version seems to have ‘corrected’ what was seen as problematic by many young people in the earlier version, that the girl leaves her lover high and dry. The responses are not as many, nor as elaborate as they are for the Malayalam version. here is an unedited sample from the website: (a) And they corrected the mistake they did in Malayalam version. But this version is a sentimental crap [sic!] . . . x-( (b) Much better than the malayalam version . . . (c) really Fantastic video . . . Super thinking . . . i luv u dad if the Tamil version clearly distances itself from the earlier Malayalam version by offering a different resolution, the Telugu and kannada versions, that followed two years later in 2011, distance themselves from the previous versions by replacing the father with the brother of the girl. The brother’s role is played in the kannada and Telugu versions, as i have mentioned earlier, by kannada star Shivarajkumar and Telugu star nagarjuna respectively. The new versions are even more cinematic than the earlier Tamil version for they tap on what is generally referred to as ‘brother–sister sentiment’, which is quite common in many South Indian-language films (there is no corresponding father–daughter sentiment widely prevalent in contemporary films in these languages). For example, Shivarajkumar has played the doting or sacrificing brother to his sister in several films such as Thavarige ba Thangi (Come to the parental home, sister 2002), Anna Thangi (Brother, sister 2005), Thavarina Siri (The wealth of the parental home, 2006), and Devaru Kotta Thangi (God-given sister 2009). The advertisement seems to be alluding to such films to claim legitimacy

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for itself, as if saying that the narrative is not what kalyan Jewellers offers but what has already been seen and endorsed by the kannada and Telugu viewing public earlier. if the Tamil advertisement is criticised for not being realistic (‘a girl cannot run away with her lover in a crowded village fair under her father’s eye’, as one of the respondents on Youtube says), in the kannada and Telugu versions the attempt is not to make it more realistic, but to make it more fictional and cinematic so that the viewers enjoy it only as a story with their favourite heroes in it, and not as a moral message regarding marriage that the advertisement endorsed. The Malayalam version too is cinematic in its use of the narrative technique of flashback, and the weaving of the advertisement around a plot (with a conflict and its resolution). The Tamil version dramatises the conflict through music and melodramatic acting. Yet, we would not connect the Malayalam and Tamil versions to any particular genre of cinema. But, the kannada and Telugu versions refer to the films made by the respective stars. It is important to note here that Shivrajkumar and nagarjuna do not come into the advertisement as simply brand ambassadors exhorting viewers to buy gold at kalyan Jewellers; instead, they come in as stars and actors performing a role which they have performed earlier with aplomb. Expanding the web of intertextuality to include these film texts seems to me to be an attempt to suppress or downplay the earlier advertisement versions, and the ambiguity that they have generated with respect to the notion of ‘trust’. Rather than positing a ‘new’ definition of ‘trust’, the kannada and Telugu advertisements simply claim to draw on already existing notions/ideas of trust in kannada/Telugu cultures, as visible in cinema. This is a strategy of improvement in/ through translation, in the sense that the anticipated criticism would then be deflected not at the brand or company, but at the culture in which ‘trust’ is claimed to be a value, which the viewers themselves have endorsed earlier in the cinematic medium. The kannada and Telugu versions have drawn no comments, adverse or otherwise, on Youtube probably suggesting that the ghost of the earlier ‘failed’ version has finally been buried. But, kalyan Jewellers’ tryst with ‘trust’ has not ended. The recent Malayalam and Tamil versions (2011) have completely dropped their controversial take on the choice of a lover by the girl and its endorsement or otherwise from the elders in the family. instead, they deal with a little girl’s trust in her father to bring the doll that she wants

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when he comes back home, and the father’s fulfillment of that trust. If the earlier versions posited a conflict involving divided loyalties and claims of allegiance, the 2011 versions completely do away with conflict, substituting nostalgia for conflict. During the girl’s childhood, the father is not a figure demanding allegiance from his daughter, as is the case in her youth, but a hero ready to fulfill her every wish. This father, or at least the memory of this father, would be more universally loved and acceptable. If the first Malayalam version played on the father figure and his punitive hold on the daughter, the subsequent versions in Tamil, kannada and Telugu tried to improve the appeal of the advertisement by underplaying and undermining the image of authority of the father (by making him more loving and gentle in the Tamil version; by turning him into a caring brother in the kannada and Telugu versions). Though the conflict fizzles out in the end in the Tamil, Kannada and Telugu versions, the potential for conflict certainly exists (at least in the mind of the girl). Just as in the first Malayalam version, the father that the girl remembers is the father nurturing her in her childhood, so is the father in the 2011 Tamil and Malayalam versions. he takes great pains to buy her the doll, and by extension and implication we could say that he would go any length (and unconditionally) to get her the jewellery or whatever she wants when she grows up. What we saw in flashback in the 2009 Malayalam advertisement of the father lovingly bringing up his daughter, now becomes the main narrative; and in that sense we can say that the ‘Trustcampaign’ goes a full circle endorsing the special relationship between the father and daughter. So, what begins as a problem in the first Malayalam version — the basis for a father commanding allegiance from his daughter in the face of her desire for choosing the course of her own life in today’s times — is resolved by endorsing the father’s role as provider. rather than seeing the last two versions as different advertisements, i.e., different from the previous versions in terms of plot, narrative, etc., my contention is that they continue the saga of the earlier versions. if anything, they are a kind of prequel to the story begun by the first Malayalam and Tamil advertisements. If the girl’s choice in the first Malayalam advertisement did not seem sufficiently justified, then the subsequent versions could be seen as successive attempts to come up with better justifications. These attempts are made not in one language but sequentially and successively in many languages, as

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each language version affords the opportunity to undo or downplay the previous versions, wipe out and remove the traces of conflict and ambiguity, and arrive at a consensual and fixed meaning. It is in this sense that i look at the translation strategy used here as one of improvement.

Conclusion in the Parachute hair oil advertisements, the script/ad-copy, which is the basic idea on which the two versions are based, is quite the same. But, the differences between the two versions result from different ways of realising what looks like the same script, in tune with what a Tamil or a hindi viewer might want to see. in the process, translation constitutes ‘Tamil-ness’ and ‘hindi-ness’ in particular ways. But in the kalyan Jewellers Trust campaign advertisements, the basic script itself seems to be transformed in each instance of translation, so that each version appears to want to improve upon the problems or lacuna in the earlier versions. here, the different languages become sites for trying out newer resolutions, seeming to admit the inadequacy of previous resolutions, forged elsewhere, in another tongue. it is in this sense that i see the impetus to translate as an attempt at improvement. in the process of translation discussed here, we can see that: (a) Languages do not just distinguish themselves from each other in terms of sound and script, but there are also visual aspects to the differences between or among languages, i.e., languages constitute themselves in terms of look or iconography, especially in/through the visual media; (b) Variations tried out in different languages become attempts to seek resolutions in/through cultural texts to problems in social relations/ institutions. instead of seeing the advertisement versions in different languages as discrete or separate, they are seen here as deriving from and referencing to each other, connecting the texts in a network of intertextuality.

References Baker, Mona and Gabriela Saldanha (eds). 2009. Routledge Encylopedia of Translation Studies. new York: routledge. Benjamin, walter. 2000. ‘The Task of the Translator: An introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens’, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), trans. harry Zohn, The Translation Studies Reader, pp. 15–25. London and new York: routledge.

TV Advertisements as Multimodal Translations b 151 Berger, John. 1973. Ways of Seeing. London: BBC and Penguin Books. Chiaro, delia. 2009. ‘issues in Audiovisual Translation’, in Jeremy Munday (ed.), Routledge Companion to Translation Studies, pp. 141–65. Abingdon and new York: routledge. Gabler, hans walter. 1987. ‘The Text as Process and the Problem of intentionality’, TEXT, 3: 107–16; reprinted in Ecdotica 6 (2009): 126–35. http://lmumunich.academia.edu/hanswalterGabler/Papers/1122228/The_Text_as_ Process_and_the_Problem_of_intentionality (accessed on 6 december 2011). Gambier, Yves. 2006. ‘Multimodality and Audiovisual Translation’, MuTra — Audiovisual Translation Scenarios. http://www.euroconferences.info/ proceedings/2006_Proceedings/2006_Gambier_Yves.pdf (accessed on 12 october 2011). Jakobson, roman. 1959. ‘on Linguistic Aspects of Translation’. http://www. stanford.edu/~eckert/PdF/jakobson.pdf (accessed on 2 August 2011). kalyan Jewellers (Malayalam) August 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=haJBJjrSg3k (accessed on 28 July 2011). kalyan Jewellers (Malayalam) october 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=htrjyi5uma0 (accessed on 7 november 2011). kalyan Jewellers (Tamil) november 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=MvG2gdALiy8 (accessed on 28 July 2011). kalyan Jewellers (Tamil) october 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=z7oiVskTArU (accessed on 7 november 2011). kalyan Jewellers (kannada) June 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=ioSxykQvZc8 (accessed on 28 July 2011). kalyan Jewellers (Telugu) June 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4wf YD34INE&feature=related (accessed on 28 July 2011). kress, Gunther. 2010. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. London and new York: routledge. Munday, Jeremy. 2001. Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications. London and new York: routledge. o’Connell, eithne. 2007. ‘Screen Translation’, in Piotr kuhiwczak and karin Littau (eds), A Companion to Translation Studies, pp. 120–33. Clevedon and Toronto: Multilingual Matters. Parachute hair oil (hindi). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br4udzsBuwi (accessed on 20 September 2009). Parachute hair oil (Tamil). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ9aYF6nJ9g (accessed on 20 September 2009). remael, Aline. 2001. ‘Some Thoughts on the Study of Multimodal and Multimedia Translation’, in Yves Gambier and henrik Gottlieb (eds), (Multi) Media Translation: Concepts, Practices and Research, pp. 13–22. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamin’s Publishing Company.

152 a Nikhila H. Sidiropoulou, Maria. 2008. ‘Cultural encounters in Advertisement Translation’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 26(2): 337–62. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ mgs/summary/v026/26.2.sidiropoulou.html (accessed on 12 october 2011). wallmach, kim. 1999. ‘“Get Them Lost just as in the narrow Streets of the Casbah”: Metaphors of resistance and Subversion in Translation’. pp. 568–87. http://www.pala.ac.uk/uploads/2/5/1/0/25105678/wallmach. pdf (accessed on 21 november 2011).

10 Cricket, IPL and Cultural Mobility The New Cosmopolitan Idiom of Sport Pramod Nayar

The indian Premier League (iPL) is thus far the shortest version of

that haloed game, cricket. it is also, easily, the most publicised, sexedup, media-ted version in the history of the game. From the whiteflannelled 11-on-each-side battling it out for five days, the game has metamorphosed into a purist’s nightmare with auctioning of cricketers to ‘slogging’ from Ball 1. Governed by the Board of Control for Cricket in india (BCCi) (an organisation that itself is a metamorphosis, or a postcolonial translation, from the Calcutta Cricket Club of British india), the iPL is now a cash-rich media event. it marks, as sports historian Boria Majumdar notes, ‘the reality that the nerve centre of the game has firmly shifted to the subcontinent’ (Majumdar 2009: 240). IPL is one more step in the ongoing saga of globalisation. Modelled on the english football league and American baseball, and including within its highly stylised event that quintessential American act — cheerleading — iPL not only represents the apotheosis of the subcontinent’s cricket-mania but also the irreducible market/mediaproduced nature of the game today. The amount of capital and spectatorship involved offers an insight into the industry that iPL has become. in 2008, eight newly created teams were auctioned to industrialists and Bollywood stars for $724 million (£ 366.5 million). They then sold the TV and promotional rights for more than $1 billion for 10 years to world Sport Group, a Singapore-based company, which sold them on to Sony entertainment Television. in 2008 iPL league attracted a record total TV viewership estimated at more than 200 million in india and 10 million overseas compared with 150 million for the english Premier League. in addition, an estimated 4 million people would have attended its 59 games in eight cities (Leahy 2008). iPL is projected as a brand and therefore seen to possess intellectual property rights. This in itself emphasises that we are looking at a

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clearly capitalist venture (disparagingly and despairingly described by some as the commercialisation of cricket). The iPL 2011’s Brand and Content Protection Guidelines make this feature of the new form of cricket very clear: Any event such as the iPL is made possible through the commercial participation of sponsors, partners and broadcasters that are each granted certain exclusive rights and privileges by the iPL in consideration of their support. As a result, it is vital that the iPL names, iPL Marks and iPL Footage are protected and managed by the iPL. if anyone could use the iPL names, iPL Marks and iPL Footage for free, or could create or suggest an association with the iPL, there would be no incentive for sponsors, partners and broadcasters to invest. The iPL must prevent unlicensed third parties from undertaking unauthorised activities that damage or dilute iPL sponsors’, partners’ and broadcasters’ exclusive rights. Also, in order to maintain the integrity of the iPL brand and to protect against dilution and damage to its reputation and prestige, it is vital that the iPL retains careful control of the iPL names, iPL Marks and iPL Footage and their uses. (BCCi 2011)

iPL’s rhetoric speaks of the ‘integrity of the brand’ even as incensed fans of traditional cricket complain about the loss of integrity of the game. iPL as brand, as Amit Gupta argues, is one of india’s many attempts to indigenously create global brands, along with infosys, Corus, Jet Airways, ranbaxy (Gupta 2009: 208). Boria Majumdar agrees with this when he writes that IPL ‘was India’s first truly global sporting export and helped create India’s first international sporting brand’ (Majumdar 2009: 176). what we can see right away is that the language in which cricket is to be described has altered. Adopting the register and rhetoric of commerce and the market, the BCCi refers to ‘brand iPL’. This in itself is a translation, from the language of commerce into the language of sport writing. This chapter addresses the question of the changed nature of the game by seeing iPL as a translation, or more accurately, as embodying cultural mobility. while terms like ‘cultural translation’ have been current for some time now, i would like to retrieve the notion of the mobile and mobility to speak of iPL-as-translation. But before this, i would like to situate iPL within a history of similar sporting cultural mobility. The consequences of these sporting cultural mobilities are, of course, very different when we look at iPL in the late twentieth century.

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Sport, Translation and Cultural Mobility The oldest meaning of ‘translate’, dating back to around the fourteenth century, from the Latin translatus (‘carried over’), signifies mobility: ‘to remove from one place to another’. it is etymologically linked to ‘transfer’ as well. ‘Trans’ suggests a ‘beyond’, ‘across’ or ‘over’, and ‘latus’ means ‘borne’ or ‘carried’. There is, therefore, a strong sense of something being carried across, as well as a sense of physical movement involved in the use of the word ‘translation’. A significant model of cultural mobility, as Stephen Greenblatt points out, was the translatio imperii, the ‘translation of power and authority from the Persians to the Greeks, from Greece to rome, and then from imperial rome to a succession of ambitious regimes in nascent nation states’. The symbols, regalia and the trappings of roman imperial power were often, Greenblatt notes, physically carried by its conquerors to the new sites of domination. That is, signs and materials of roman authority (symbols, and also slaves, arms, jewels) were taken away from the roman kingdom to new places (Greenblatt 2010a: 7–8). what was truly mobile was the transfer of cultural norms from the capital to successors and heirs (ibid.: 11). This form of cultural mobility and translation is commonplace in imperial histories around the world. Thus, in British india, as i have argued elsewhere, the grand durbars of 1877 appropriated Mughal customs of the spectacle. This spectacle enabled the empire to incorporate the natives as subjects into the symbolic hierarchies of the raj, and the english themselves into an imperial sensibility of ownership and shared destiny. in the case of the delhi durbar, what i have called ‘imperial improvisation’ was made possible through the participatory nature of the spectacle where the native princes and aristocrats, by participating in the durbar, implicitly endorsed it, accepted it as ‘indian’, and located themselves within the imperial structure (nayar forthcoming). Cricket, born in england in the nineteenth century, was carried over, as historians have shown, as a visible sign of imperial power into the colonies, including india (Guha 2002; Mazumdar 2008). Sport was always a component of the imperial structure, whether as football for disciplining and hardening boys for the empire (diMeo 2004) or cricket and polo on the maidans of Calcutta. Cricket was perhaps the most glamorous and prestigious of these imperial spectacles, which i treat as translatio imperii — being borne from ‘imperial centres’ such as Lords and the playing fields of Eton and Harrow into the colony. indeed, the enthusiastic appropriation of cricket by the colonies

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suggests a translatio imperii that begins to lose its ‘imperial’ shine, but still retains enough to impose its authority and dominance on the newcomers to the game. Cultural mobility here is the translation and transplantation of norms, behaviour, strategies, equipment of the game into the colony, but as a marker of Britain’s civilisational authority. Sport was seen as a means of improvement, a means of ‘moral training’, as J. A. Mangan calls it, and therefore neatly fitted into the larger project of the civilising mission whereby the natives would be taught the noble game (Mangan 2010). i shall illustrate this sporting cultural mobility’s imperial aims with just one example. C. e. Tyndale-Biscoe, the headmaster of the Srinagar Boys School (a school under the Church Missionary Society), begins his work, Character Building in Kashmir by stating unequivocally that the natives have to be civilised and made into ‘men’, defined thus (he is referring to the sport of rowing, which he aimed to introduce in kashmir): [w]e mean by men true men, i.e. those who combine kindness with strength. For we have all met the half-man specimen, the kind fools and the strong brutes. The perfect man is after the pattern of the Man Christ Jesus. The paddles stand for hard work and strength. The heart-shaped blade for kindness. The paddles are crossed to signify self-sacrifice, and remind us of the one great Sacrifice for all on that Cross of shame which is now an emblem of salvation, sacredness, and service. (Tyndale-Biscoe 1920: 16–17)

Such Christian men, Tyndale-Biscoe is very clear, make better citizens: The jelly fish type has gone, not to live again, and young citizens are gradually coming into being, led by teachers who were once jelly fish, but have since grown backbones and muscle which are being used not in sports for sport’s sake, but for the benefit of the city. (ibid.: 20)

here is the translatio imperii at work: sport is translated into a native context, all for the greater good of the empire. The spread of a sporting culture must be read as the indigenisation of a western cultural form (the sport) and ideal (physical grooming and discipline), where the western practice was ‘planted’ (translated) into a new context.1 That is, european food, clothing habits, housing, and even morality acquired new political significance in the colony: they became markers of native progress. A game carried across continents into a new culture and society served to ‘improve’ the natives on western lines, modelled

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after western ideals of physical and moral improvement. i am proposing here that sport constituted an excellent example of what Greenblatt identifies as the translatio imperii model of cultural mobility because it served the imperial purpose of subjugation and domination (Greenblatt 2010a). Cricket represented, then, not only imperial authority but also england’s moral superiority, its cultural norms and its codes of behaviour. The entire translatio imperii of sport incorporated the natives into an unequal cultural citizenship through this process. There was an imperial translational element in the cultural mobility of sport, sportsmen, sporting norms, where english players could determine where and how the natives would play the game. imperial London had its own Lords and history of cricketing. here, in india, it carried its insignias, norms and uniforms as a visible and mobile iconography of power. This was an act of translation-as-cultural mobility, centered around sport. it is this form of sporting cultural mobility that is undermined and reinvented by the iPL.

IPL, Cultural Mobility and Cosmopolitanism Thus far i have argued that cricket in india and the colonies constituted in its very history a translatio imperii, serving an imperial purpose through the mobility and mobilisation of the game for domination, acculturation and the civilisational mission. in the twentieth century the translatio imperii begins to wane in the domain of cricket as newer centres, modalities and structures of power like neo-imperialism — as examined in scrupulous detail by hardt and negri — emerged (2000). More diffused and deterritorialised than the empires of the earlier age, the new empire is unmappable. Globalisation effects its own configurations within and with this deterritorialised Empire as flows of capital, people, ideas, and cultures reorder the world (Appadurai 1996). More importantly, through a process termed ‘post-westernisation’ the traditional centre for control of the game (London, england) has shifted to dubai (the headquarters of the international Cricket Council) and india, and the format from test cricket to one-day (rumford 2007). Arjun Appadurai, writing on cricket speaks of its indigenisation, where cricket moved away from its Victorian-english values and formats into ‘yet another, post-national phase, in which entertainment value, media coverage, and the commercialization of players’ is the focus (Appadurai 1996: 108). non-western nations have not only begun to

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dominate the game but also influence the financial and marketing economies, of which the iPL is the newest and most brazen form (Gupta 2004). Chris rumford declares: india is the focal point for both the globalisation of cricket — a new focus for generating cricket finance through massive TV audiences and administrative leadership — and for the post-westernization of the game. (rumford 2007: 203)

What IPL Represents is a Translatio Cosmopolitania The world Cup saw national teams from various countries competing for cricket’s most prestigious trophy. The national pattern of competition remained the model for all such similar events. Formerly colonised nations — Sri Lanka, Pakistan, india, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, the west indies — have become cricketing powers, even as they contribute some of the most vibrant and dynamic fan-base and audiences for the game. having acquired a cultural mobility across races, geographical boundaries and national barriers, cricket has assumed the status of an ur-culture. newer teams, from Bermuda, Canada, Bangladesh, and the USA join the ranks of west indies, england, india, Australia, and Sri Lanka. Cricket, as the contemporary hype and rhetoric goes, is a global unifying force (often at the cost of, say, badminton or golf). nations and cultures all acquire a cultural citizenship through such participation and competition. There are two aspects of this global cultural citizenship i want to focus on. First, the negotiation of cultural citizenship on a global scale involves connecting with multiple cultural forms and practices, hierarchised or not. it suggests a cosmopolitanism of cultural experience. Cosmopolitanism involves experiencing multiple transnational geographical locations, acculturation, travel and displacement, the co-existence of multiple cultures/identities, and an absence of nostalgia for lost homelands. Second, this global cultural citizenship and cosmopolitanism is inseparable from the project of translation. The new cosmopolitan ‘moment’, as Gerard Delanty defines it, ‘occurs when context-bound cultures encounter each other and undergo transformation as a result’ (quoted in Cronin 2006: 23). This encounter is the moment of translation. Michael Cronin proposes that we think of translation as ‘a way not only of thinking but of being and acting in the world’ (ibid.: 10). within the frames offered by iPL, we see a whole new register emerging in a recognised international game.

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Sport, i propose, is a domain in which this cosmopolitanism-throughtranslation might best be visible today. Cultural mobility requires a literal travel and displacement before it can serve as a metaphor (Greenblatt 2010b). iPL entails the physical travel of a large number of people from different races, places, cricketing cultures, countries, and cricket clubs. in the case of all earlier formats of the game (except the kerry Packer series2), players remained within the ambit of their national team. we could say that earlier forms of cricket were characterised by a filiation, with nation-state offering the chief identity for and to the player. in the exact same way as globalisation loosens up the boundaries and bonds of the nation, iPL’s very structure demands a loosening up of this filial bond. Players in the IPL, auctioned to the highest bidder, demonstrate instead a shifting affiliation. As a characteristic of cultural mobility, the new imperium of sport calls for a translation of filiation as affiliation — a matter of choice (bidding, sale, cross-team movements) rather than chance (citizenship by birth and therefore identity). in the globalised economy of cricket there are no filiations, and all bonds that generate identity have been translated into associations that produce identifications. The travels of a star player — for example Adam Gilchrist from Australia to deccan Chargers to King’s Eleven Punjab — constitute a shifting series of affiliations and a physical mobility. Varied salaries and bidding means the players shift affiliations entirely from financial needs. Addressing this issue Paul kelso noted in The Guardian: it [iPL] has exposed the iCC’s commercial limitations, strained relations between member states, underlined the deficiencies of the overcrowded international calendar and, by offering staggering annual salaries for six weeks’ cricket, threatened the bond between players and national sides. (kelso 2008)

Adrian Pritchard noted: ‘After only one year, iPL teams’ ties to “home cities” are already weak. Teams do not own their grounds but rent them from the cricket associations and this also increases flexibility’ (Pritchard 2011: 164). Mobility and displacement, loose bonds and shifting affiliations seem to be built into the very structure of the iPL. Contact zones are central to cultural mobility. The iPL offers spaces where multiple languages, cultures, even styles of cricket meet. The iPL is also a space where these styles and cricketing cultures get subverted

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and overturned. Caribbean flamboyance — embodied in the 2011 edition mainly in Chris Gayle’s extraordinary batting — exists side-by-side with the kind of cricket royal Challengers Bangalore has traditionally had: in the 2010 edition, it had the technically perfect, but clearly not a player for the shortest version of the game, rahul dravid. Teams are of course made of varied talents and styles. however, teams do develop, due to consistency and collective effort, a character. iPL prevents this by the constant changing affiliations of players so that at any point the style of cricket played by a team can change. There will be a measure of tension, in cultural mobility, between individual agency and structural limitations to this mobility. reminiscent of the controversial kerry Packer series of the 1980s, iPL simultaneously restricts and facilitates individual mobility across and between teams. iPL restricts individual mobility in the sense that national affiliations carry little meaning here; one does not always travel with one’s national team-mates any more. indeed, iPL encourages players to move from team to team with every season, thus ensuring a continuous flow of players across the IPL terrain. The shifting nature of one’s team-membership means alliances, loyalties and the tacit understanding that characterise, say, a pair of regular batsmen, or spin-bowler and wicket-keeper in national teams, are rendered null and void. iPL thus instantiates mobilities of particular kinds. it is possible in cultural mobility that there might be a sense of rootedness. Cricket is the ur-narrative which, in a minimal way, is its own rootedness. what we see now is the branching out, the rhizomatic proliferation — cricket’s own cultural mobility — of this original game. This proliferation and dissemination into multiple formats and styles — the five-day test, the one-day international, the day-night matches, the introduction of the kookaboora bat, coloured clothing, the white ball for the night-games, the kerry Packer mode, the duckworth-Lewis system of computing targets in one-days, and now the T-20 — across countries and cultures has resulted in the imperium of cricket, but an imperium without a centre. england is no more the haloed capital of cricket; test cricket is no more the standard format of the game; national teams are not the only possible identities a player can possess. in the process of cricket moving across cultures, it has acquired different shades and hues. while on the one hand you could think of this as a globalisation of a capitalism-driven game, it is also possible to see it as an instantiation of cosmopolitanism made possible by translation and cultural mobility.

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new registers of cricket — from the extremely shortened version of iPL to the controversial cheerleader squads in iPL — constitute a cultural mobility that might also be treated as translation indicative of a cosmopolitanisation of the game. The frames in which the game is played — the dug-outs, the loud music, the trumpeting and the general air of entertainment — offer a different identity for the game. Cultural mobility is ultimately a question of this identity. Cricket’s meaning, i propose, has changed from mere game or sport to mass entertainment (often called ‘cricketainment’) and spectacle. Purists might (and do) complain that traditional skills are lost in this shorter version. But, that is the case with any sport or skill-set in history. Meanings of terms and words change when the empirical objects move across cultures. interpretation of the law of wide deliveries, for example, has changed due to the shortened nature of the iPL. The sight of Adam Gilchrist offering batting tips to Paul Valthatty instantiates cricket’s cultural mobility as well. These constitute, ostensibly, just batting tips from a great player coming from a different cultural context (the highly professionalised Australian one with a much greater emphasis on fitness), while also sharing a context where the game shapes national identities: Australian identity, especially in its relations with england; to a considerable extent, indian identity and Indo-Pak relations; and even who within the IPL has been affiliated to a different team before this. And yet, the Gilchrist endorsement of Valthaty’s batting extends the argument i have made earlier regarding player mobility: there is no national team-spirit here. what we see is just a shared expertise and love of the game, within the irreducible togetherness of the IPL team, which somehow defines IPL — Gilchrist as one of the most devastating players ever to have walked the cricketing grounds of the world acknowledging a rising star because he has batted with him in the same team, irrespective of where they come from. The little interaction and praise might justly qualify, purists’ protests notwithstanding, for that worn cliché ‘the spirit of cricket’. it suggests a certain globalisation of the spirit and culture of cricket, necessitated by the new version of the game. iPL represents a new set of coordinates of cultural mobility. we can isolate three of these.3 The first is the reinterpretation of the very tradition of cricket. The second is the defining role of language. The third is political and social power relations of the time. The culture of media-ted cricket telecasts, the convergence of various forms of reportage, entertainment and sport all contribute to a reinterpretation

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of what cricketing tradition means today. with iPL, the Bollywoodisation of cricket is complete. The merging of two of the ‘three Cs of indian infotainment’ culture — cricket, cinema and crime, as daya Thussu calls them (2007: 104) — in iPL alters the very nature of the sport, as it alters the nature of Bollywood.4 The increasing inflow of foreign finance into both Bollywood and IPL has been one of the most significant parts of the globalisation of cricket. iPL’s transformation here must be seen, to adapt rajadhyaksha’s arguments (2008) about the Bollywoodisation of indian cinema, as opening up the game of cricket to ancillary industries and activities, many of which are based or work out of global cities like London. Look at the list of Indian and foreign industries and companies that first appear on the iPL opening menu: dLF india, hero honda, Vodafone, Volkswagen, Karbon Mobiles, Citibank, Nimbus, Sony, MAXX, Kingfisher. Like Bollywood, iPL has acquired and attracted extensive foreign institutional and financial interest. IPL’s professionalisation and corporatisation are akin to Bollywood’s. The proliferation of Bollywood in iPL is also visible in the amount of Bollywood material connected to the game and event: shows, news, commentaries. Cricket was a ‘gentleman’s’ sporting event to be played on green grounds in well-attended stadia. iPL makes a rupture here. Concomitant with the rise and burgeoning popularity of the format (and the depletion of crowds at test matches) is the expansion of cognate media industries and processes: online live-streaming video, SMS uploads of scores, opinion polls, and contests. From a sporting event confined to the playing field, cricket, as IPL, is translated into entertainment writ large across media, time-zones and geographies. indeed, cricket is only one small constituent of what iPL is — a media entertainer. iPL is, in other words, a culture industry. it becomes part of a whole new media universe, running alongside reality TV contests, online gambling, cinema, and participatory programmes on TV and on the internet. iPL causes cricket to take on the shape, size and character of these other processes because people view, gamble, download, follow it, and participate in it across media and devices, just as they would do a film trailer or the fortunes of people inside the Big Boss house. what we are looking at here, in short, is a convergence of traditional cricket with various entertainment formats and genres. Voting and opinions from the viewing audience are telecast on the screens as the game progresses, thus making the feedback a part of the production and telecast itself.

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The language of commentary, discourses and the style of umpiring have also changed radically.5 The demands placed due to player commentary — where the players on the field wear wires — also determine the nature of the language used, which is very different from the staid commentaries some of us remember from the 1980s and even the 1990s. The focus of even the commentators seems to be on the entertainment value of a shot: ‘that is a dLF maximum’ (delivered in a rising pitch), followed by a statistical measure of how far the ball flew once it left the bat. The commentary box and the people interviewing the players, also include non-specialists. Asking Shahrukh khan (Srk) for his opinion on the game suggests that the event is one that draws everybody in, and makes specialists of us all. in umpiring, think of Billy Bowden, that most entertaining of umpires, famous for some unusual signalling actions while giving his decisions. in traditional cricket, Bowden would raise quite a few eyebrows as a maverick, but in iPL he seems to fit right in with the pageantry to raise the fun quotient. His ‘out’ signal is delivered with a crooked finger which has become famous as the ‘crooked finger of doom’. No longer is the umpire the grim, unsmiling referee — he is also one of the entertainers. Finally, the most determining coordinate of this sporting cultural mobility is the power-nexus of Bollywood-industry–BCCi. Film stars — Preity Zinta, Shilpa Shetty, Shah rukh khan — own franchises along with industrialists like Mukesh Ambani and Vijay Mallya. we are seeing here the emergence (and not just convergence) of a conglomerate of corporations that will determine the nature of the game.6 Cricket is no longer the domain of the BCCi alone. it is also important to note that iPL represents a shift from national ownership and control to privatised management and ownership of players, a factor that determines tournament schedules, player transfers and, surely, policies as well. And, above all these conglomerates is the international media coverage the event attracts with websites, TV channels and newspaper reports of the extravaganza. The media-savvy commentators — not always known for their passion for or expertise in cricket (Mandira Bedi being an example) — are hired for their screen-value quotient, and therefore completely change the media presentation of the event. Boria Majumdar writes that ‘the stunningly attractive Bedi’s conversion to cricket commentary proved decisive in the TV rating wars’ (Majumdar 2011: 180). And, of course, with SRK and assorted film stars in the stands, the cameras are equally divided between them and the game.

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what we are witnessing here is the convergence of two kinds of celebrity culture as well of the sporting celebrity who is a star for performing certain kinds of visibly tiring actions in full public view and the film/TV celebrity who performs staged, choreographed roles for the screen. if the former seems more ‘authentic’ it is entirely because we can see the perspiration, hear the grunts and record the sheer physical effort that Tendulkar’s small frame experiences as he hits a cricket ball better than anybody in human history, as opposed to the made-up glycerin-ed and ketchup-ed heroes and heroines (this is not to belittle the labour of actors — just that we, as the audience, are less aware of the effort while viewing actors on screen). By bringing the two forms of celebrities together, iPL endorses one for and with the other. Adopting American-style presentation, the sexed-up, sporting mega-events of the european football, iPL is translatio cosmopolitania, where the norms, practices and stylisation are all a heavy mix of the global and the local registers (percussionist Sivamani accompanying the Chennai Super kings is an example, as also are the classical dancers seen as the indian equivalent to cheerleading). Translatio cosmopolitania is the reformatting of cricket into a global, media-driven, revenue-rich, entertainment that makes different demands on players, organisers, cricket Boards, umpires, commentators, spectators, and sponsors. Cutting across media, time-zones, continents and styles, the game is mainly an abbreviated but no less intense — and this is important — entertainment. in its three coordinates, as noted above, iPL represents heteroglossia of forms of entertainment, languages of commentary, presentation styles (the shiny, slithery and fashionable uniforms of the players contrast with the all-white uniforms of earlier eras and versions of the game), all rolled into one. From the staid english commentary, staid umpiring, correct techniques of traditional cricket, we now see witticism, puns, hinglish, dressy umpires, commentators and players with innovative ways of hitting a ball (the ‘helicopter shot’, the ‘upar-cut’, the ‘dil-scoop’) all for the greater entertainment of the public. it is not simply about the game but, as Majumdar writes, about ‘widening the ambit of cricket spectatorship’ (Majumdar 2011: 182). Cricket, always a popular sport in india, is now part of the global popular through this media-ted entertainment scheme.7 if the trans-medial popularity of cricket manifested as iPL is any indication, we are in the midst of a wider, diffuse social bond being forged — fans across the world logging on, viewing and voting — through mediated cricket.

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with such heavily monitored and mediated content, new transnational zones of meaning of cricket are beginning to emerge. The historical semantics of cricket have been altered because the contexts of production and interpretation have changed. Cultural mobility, as one can see, results in new forms and languages of the game. iPL therefore calls for a transnational sport scholarship.

Resisting the Global Popular As noted above, iPL offers a global popular. Admittedly, this diffuse global popular has its hegemonic contexts and role (for instance, in the controlling of finance or media by corporate interests), but this does not negate the social and communitarian linkages that iPL forges. The role of the translatio cosmopolitania is precisely this tension of the global popular that on occasion generates internal/local dissension where the iconography of the global popular contests locality, or local grammars of the game. Local interpretations of such totalising icons such as iPL, with all its paraphernalia, often lead to the dramatic tensions that characterise all globalising moves. The local, often value-laden and vituperative, even violent, reception of iPL and its ways offers us an insight into the ways in which cosmopolitanism and sporting cultural mobility often come up against local concerns that might, in some form or the other, affect the nature of this cultural mobility. The most hyped-up version of this local concern over the forms of a cosmopolitan sporting cultural mobility was the protest over the cheerleading that has become a part of iPL.8 itself an American institution, which in the iPL represents cultural mobility, the cheerleading act became the target of a host of attacks. during the 2008 edition of iPL, The west Bengal BJP’s state secretary rahul Sinha asked: ‘why do we have to use scantily-clad women brought from europe and America? if we have to have entertainment, we can always have indian dances by local artistes’ (Sinha 2008). And Congress MLAs protested in the delhi Assembly, with one MLA complaining: ‘what happens in a night club is now being seen in the stadium’ (Daily News and Analysis 1 April 2010). There are several acts of translation that interpellate the cultural mobility of the game and the cheerleading in these statements. in the BJP’s view, indian dances by local artistes would be adequate for the act of cheerleading since American forms of the same are performed by ‘scantily-clad women’. Local translates into respectable in a semantic sleight of tongue even as foreign translates

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as obscene. Anti-Americanism, which has always been at work in the objections to cheerleading (Tom 2010), is the frame within which the interpretations we see above are performed. The local versus foreign binary invoked here poses the immediate antithesis to the cosmopolitanisation via cultural mobility of both American cheerleading as well as the iPL version of cricket itself. in the Congress statements, on the other hand, it is the translation of nightclubs as obscene that frames the interpretation of the cheerleading on the IPL field. By situating the nightclub as the very antithesis of the stadium, the statement performs a resistance to cultural mobility in a verbal-linguistic act. The change in the cultural practice of cheerleading, that we see in the 2010 and 2011 versions of the iPL, seems to validate my claim earlier that reception determines and delimits the nature of cultural mobility. The cheerleaders (from season two), wearing far more clothing than in the American version, and not doing the traditional American modes of the ‘split’, are examples of the attention to local sensibilities, but which as a result do not at any point serve cheerleading’s original purpose — of bolstering local identity. in iPL cheerleading remains just an appurtenance that comes in from another culture, devoid of the baggage from that culture, but still trying to adapt to the receiving culture’s sensitivity to women, femininity, clothing styles, and sports-entertainment. it is now, one can safely say, impossible to import American cheerleading modes directly into the iPL without some attention to such local concerns. This in itself is a mode of translation in its equating of cheerleading with (American/foreign) obscenity. A final comment about this appropriation of and resistance to sporting cultural mobility: IPL first represents the incorporation of an American cultural icon, the cheerleader, into an originally english game (though debates rage about this) that is now more or less a global one. The cheerleader performs a cultural function, and is now a cultural institution in America, with issues of regional/local and even national identity woven into it (Adams and Bettis 2003). Cultural mobility in this case causes the local audience to ignore the cultural function of the institution. Further, the assimilation of this act into a ‘respectable game’ — as opposed to the nightclub — calls upon it to perform its original cultural function, but in a different semantic context. Cultural functions, as we know, are locale- and locality-specific. Cheerleading in the IPL, however, seeks to do away with this specificity because it

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assumes that cricket itself being cosmopolitan, the appurtenances that go with it in this version of the game can also be cosmopolitan.

Conclusion At no point can this sporting cultural mobility and the consequent translatio cosmopolitania be divorced from capitalism, media-work and cultural aspirations. what iPL represents is a cosmopolitanisation of the game, but with strong local underpinnings. in the run up to the 2011 edition, the TV adverts for iPL-iV announced a ‘Bharat Bandh’ for 51 days through April and May 2011.9 Using a vernacular term to describe the enormous popularity of this newest TV-driven version of cricket, marks yet another instance of the localisation of the game. it translates a global game, and brands it as indian. it calls upon greater mobility, global financing and global media-marketing on a scale no indian brand (even infosys) has been able to achieve. Translatio cosmopolitania, as i have demonstrated, marks a shift in power centres but also in the cultural meanings of the game as iPL becomes this indian smart, sexy, media-ted, and hyped-up mass entertainment. A new idiom, a new register and a new language are now available that rework the entire grammar of both sport and cricket.

Notes 1. on this theme, see Stoler (2002). 2. kerry Packer, the Australian media magnate, launched the world Series Cricket in 1977. he managed to lure several top players, including Tony Greig, the england captain to the wSC, even as many of the players who joined were barred by their national cricket boards from ever representing their country again. Part of Packer’s aim was to secure televising rights, of course, and all this well before iPL was even thought of. 3. i am adapting Meyer-kalkus’ (2010) framework here (118). 4. Given that with Lalit Modi, match-fixing accusations about Sri Lanka, Pakistan and murky deals involving Shashi Tharoor, Sunanda Pushkar and the kochi Tusker auctions, one isn’t sure that the other ‘C’ — crime — hasn’t had a role either. 5. The peculiarly english game has generated its own transnational idiom. when for instance, we say ‘it’s not cricket’ to refer to anything vaguely unfair or unsporting, it has translated a game into a metaphor and a linguistic act. 6. Most of the franchises are owned by corporations, see Pritchard (2011); also see http://www.cricketpulse.com/iPL/iPLFranchises.asp.

168 a Pramod Nayar 7. i strongly believe that the mass media has a major role to play in the very formation of the popular. The grammar of the popular — from fashion trends to celebrity styles to eating habits — is constructed for us through the mass media. hence, the trans-medial nature of iPL could be readily seen as a space where signifiers that then forge a global popular are produced. 8. Cheerleading itself has acquired a global cultural mobility ever since 1997 when the sports channel eSPn began to telecast cheerleading competitions. The competition now involves participants from, in addition to the USA, Australia, england, and several european and Scandinavian nations. The Cheerleading world Championships (2011 version at, incidentally, hong kong) is an index of the global nature of the sport. 9. ‘Bandh’ being that ubiquitous political strategy through which everyday life is brought to a halt by any protest.

References Adams, natalie Guice and Pamela J. Bettis. 2003. Cheerleader! Cheerleader!: An American Icon. new York: Palgrave-Macmillan. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. BCCi. 2011. ‘indian Premier League 2011 Brand and Content Protection Guidelines’. http://www.docstoc.com/docs/95912268/indian-Premier-League2011-Brand-_-Content-Protection-Guidelines (accessed on 15 September 2014). Cronin, Michael. 2006. Translation and Identity. London: routledge. Daily News and Analysis. ‘Congress MLAs protest against dance by iPL cheerleaders in delhi’, 1 April 2010. http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_congress-mlas-protest-against-dance-by-ipl-cheerleaders-in-delhi_1366173 (accessed 25 June 2011). diMeo, Paul. 2004. ‘“A Parcel of dummies”? Sport and the Body in indian history’, in J. h. Mills and Satadru Sen (eds), Confronting the Body: The Politics of Physicality in Colonial and Post-Colonial India, pp. 39–57. London: Anthem Press. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2010a. ‘Cultural Mobility: An introduction’, in Stephen Greenblatt, Ines Županov, Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus, Heike Paul, Pál Nyíri and Frederike Pannewick (eds), Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, pp. 1–23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2010b. ‘A Mobility Studies Manifesto’, in Stephen Greenblatt, ines Županov, Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus, Heike Paul, Pál Nyíri, and Frederike Pannewick (eds), Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, pp. 250–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guha, ramachandra. 2002. A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport. new delhi: Picador.

Cricket, IPL and Cultural Mobility b 169 Gupta, Amit. 2004. ‘The Globalization of Cricket: The rise of the non-west’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 21(2): 257–76. ———. 2009. ‘india and the iPL: Cricket’s Globalized empire’, The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, 98(401): 201–11. hardt, Michael and Antonio negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: harvard University Press. kelso, Paul. 2008. ‘After Spending $42m on Players in a Frenzied day, Cricket’s new Princes take Aim at a Global Fan Base’, The Guardian, 21 February 2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/feb/21/cricket.indianpremierleague1 (accessed on 26 May 2011). Leahy, Joe. 2008. ‘indian League Breaks Game’s Boundaries’, Financial Times, 31 May 2008, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ada8d1a0-2eac-11dd-ab55000077b07658.html#axzz1QLBo9QZ4 (accessed on 26 May 2011). Majumdar, Boria. 2009. ‘opiate of the Masses or one in a Billion: Trying to Unravel the indian Sporting Mystery’, in k. Moti Gokulsing and wimal dissanayake (eds), Popular Culture in a Globalised India, pp. 239–51. London and new York: routledge. ———. 2011. ‘The indian Premier League and world Cricket’, in Anthony Bateman and Jeffrey hill (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Cricket, pp. 173–86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mangan, J. A. 2010. ‘Soccer as Moral Training: Missionary intentions and imperial Legacies’, Soccer & Society, 2(2): 41–56. Mazumdar, Boria. 2008. Cricket in Colonial India, 1780–1947. new delhi: routledge. Meyer-kalkus, rienhart. 2010. ‘world Literature Beyond Goethe’, in Stephen Greenblatt, Ines Županov, Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus, Heike Paul, Pál Nyíri, and Frederike Pannewick (eds), Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, pp. 96–121. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. nayar, Pramod k. Forthcoming. ‘empire Communications, inc.: nineteenth Century imperial Pageantry and the Politics of display’, Journal of Creative Communications. Pennycook, Alastair. 2007. Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. London and new York: routledge. Pritchard, Adrian. 2011. ‘Caught Between a Base and a Foot Place: The First Year of operation of the indian Premier League’, International Journal of Sports Marketing & Sponsorship, 11(6): 153–66. rajadhyaksha, Ashish. 2008. ‘The “Bollywoodization” of the indian Cinema: Cultural nationalism in a Global Arena’, in Anandam P. kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar (eds), Global Bollywood, pp. 17–39. new York: new York University Press. rumford, Chris. 2007. ‘More than a Game: Globalization and the Post-westernization of world Cricket’, Global Networks, 7(2): 202–14.

170 a Pramod Nayar Sinha, rahul. 2008. ‘BJP protests against iPL cheerleaders in kolkata’, The Times of India, 26 April 2008. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/200804-26/india/27775642_1_bjp-protests-cheerleaders-bjp-leader (accessed on 25 June 2011). Stoler, Anne Laura. 2002. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. Berkeley and London: California University Press. Thussu, daya. 2007. News as Entertainment: The Rise of Global Infotainment. new delhi: Sage. Tom, emma. 2010. ‘Flip Skirt Fatales: how Media Fetish Sidelines Cheerleaders’, PLATFORM: Journal of Media and Communication, pp. 52–70. Tyndale-Biscoe, C. e. 1920. Character Building in Kashmir. Salisbury: Church Missionary Society.

About the Editors Mini Chandran is Associate Professor of english at the indian institute of Technology kanpur. her research interests are translation studies, literary censorship, and indian literature and aesthetics. She has published scholarly articles in journals including Translation Today, Economic & Political Weekly, Journal of Literature and Aesthetics, and Indian Literature. She is a practising translator between Malayalam and english. Suchitra Mathur is Associate Professor of english at the indian institute of Technology kanpur. She works in the areas of postcolonial feminist theory and popular culture studies, with special focus on the politics and practice of adaptation in Indian English fiction, graphic narratives and hindi cinema. She has published articles on texts ranging from Satyajit ray’s Feluda stories to Gurinder Chaddha’s Bride and Prejudice.

Notes on Contributors Sowmya Dechamma teaches at the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of hyderabad, india. Apart from teaching Comparative indian Literature and Cultural discourses in Contemporary india, her research interests include indian literature, minority discourse, kodava language and culture, and gender and ecological studies. She has co-edited Cinemas of South India: Culture, Resistance, and Ideology (2010, with elavarthi Sathya Prakash). G. N. Devy is literary critic, cultural activist and founder of the Bhasha Centre at Baroda and the Adivasi Academy at Tejgadh. he received the Sahitya Akademi Award for his book After Amnesia. Vanaprasth, written in Marathi, received six awards including the durga Bhagwat Memorial Award and Aadivaasi Jaane Chhe, in Gujarati, was given the Bhasha Sanman Award. he won the Linguapax Award of UneSCo (2011) for his work on the conservation of threatened languages. Vijaya Guttal has taught at Sardar Patel University, Gulbarga University and karnatak University. her areas of interest include classics, women’s writing, and translation. She translates from english into kannada and vice versa. her translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia into kannada won the State Translation Academy Award. She has translated selected poems of Kavafi and Odysseus Elytis as well as other modern Greek poets into kannada. Nikhila H. is Associate Professor at the department of Film Studies and Visual Communication in the english and Foreign Languages University, hyderabad, india. She has completed her Phd from Bangalore University on ‘Communalism and women’s writing in independent India’. Her current areas of research are gender studies and film and media studies, particularly focusing on various kinds of inter-textual and inter-medial transformations. Pramod Nayar teaches at the department of english, University of hyderabad, india. his recent books include Posthumanism (2013), Frantz Fanon (2013), Writing Wrongs: The Cultural Construction of Human Rights

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in India (2014), Colonial Voices: The Discourses of Empire (2012), besides essays on indian travellers in South Asian Review, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, on posthumanism in Modern Fiction Studies, human rights and narratives in Ariel. Chitra Panikkar currently teaches at the department of english, Bangalore University, india. her areas of interest include theory, translation studies, and indian literatures. A practising translator, she has translated profusely from Malayalam into english and vice-versa. her recent research has been in the area of gender minorities in South india. Meena T. Pillai is director, Centre for Cultural Studies and School of english and Foreign Languages, University of kerala. her publications include Women in Malayalam Cinema: Naturalising Gender Hierarchies (2010) and a chapter on Malayalam cinema in the Handbook of Indian Cinemas (2013). She was awarded the Meenakshi Mukherjee Memorial Award for her essay on the early Malayalam novel in the South Asian Review. K. M. Sherrif writes in Malayalam and english and translates between Malayalam, english, hindi, Tamil, and Gujarati. his published works include Ekalavyas with Thumbs, the first selection of Gujarati Dalit writing in english translation, Kunjupaathumma’s Tryst with Destiny, the first study in English of Vaikom Muhammed Basheer’s works, and a collection of poems Po Mone Derrida (Get Lost, derrida). Sherrif teaches english at University of Calicut, kerala, india.

Index Abraham, nilina 98, 100 Adaptation and Appropriation 77, 90 adaptation 77–78 Adhyatmaramayanam 93 Adventures of Feluda, The 48 advertisements: kalyan Jewellers TrustCampaign 134, 137, 142 –50; message and claim of the 135–36; of Parachute hair oil 134, 137–42, 150; strategies of translation 136–37 Amar Chitra Katha 49 Anandmath 49 Ananthamurthy, U.r. 92, 115; Bharathipura 92, 115, 117 Anglocentric translations 106 Anglophone translation theory xi Anna Thangi 147 antecedent texts 78–79, 89 Anubhavangal Paalichakal 85 Aparajito 46 Arabian Nights, The 79, 90 Arabian Nights, translation of 102 Arayan, Velukutti 66–67 Arzoo 100 Ashokamitran 105 Assadi, Muzzafar 125 audio-visual translation 131 author-translator 22–23 Bagful of Mystery, A 48–49, 55–56 Bandopadhyaya, Bibhutibhushan 94 Banerjee, Sarnath 53 Banerjee, Tarasankar 94 Bangla-into-english 32 Bartley, Marcus 64, 68 Basheer 95 Bassnett-McGuire, Susan xiii, 11–12, 35, 77, 92, 107 bayalata 38

Beckett, Steven Connor 22, 26 Bendre, da ra 115–17 Benjamin, walter viii, 112, 133 Beware in the Graveyard 48, 52, 57 Beyond Interpretation or the Business of (re) Writing 77 Bhaduri, Saugata 36 Bhartṛhari 14–15 Bhasi, Thoppil 85 Bible (The holy Bible) 3, 16, 93; translations of 3–4, 93 Boldizar 118 Bond, edward, Lear 78 Bose, Brinda 36 Brahmagiri 114 Burton, richard 102 Campfire, and graphic adaptation 49 Canagarajah, A. Suresh 115 Catford, J. C. 9, 14 Chandrasekhar, Laxmi xv, 36–37, 39–46; rewritings of 39–46; theatre version of Singarevva and the Palace 43; translation of kambar’s Singarevva and the Palace 35 Chattopadhyay, Sharatchandra ix Chaturvedi, Sudhanshu 98 Chemmeen xv, 62, 64, 67, 69, 71–72, 74, 95 Cherupaithangalkku Upakarartham Englishilninnu Paribhashappeduthiya Kathakal 93 children’s literature 51, 114, 118; John Stephen on 120; text and translation 118–20 Chitre, dilip 2, 19 Choudhary, Salil 68, 71 Cinthio, Giovanni Battista Giraldi, Othello 78–83, 90 Coelho, Paulo 96–97, 102

Index b 175 colonial translations 18 colonialism 3–4, 18, 82, 89–90 communication xii; translational aspect of xii comparative literature 4, 10 comparative studies xv, 9–10, 48 Connor, Steven 22, 26, 32 Covey, Stephen 22, 26, 32, 97 creative transposition 7 Criminals in Kathmandu, The 49 Criminals of Kailash, The 52 Cronin, Michael 104–5, 118, 123, 126, 158 cultural mobility 153–61, 163, 165–67; practice ix; practice, of cheerleading 166; translation 116–17, 154

even-Zohar, itamar, polysystem theory of 107 ezhuthachchan, Thunchathu ramanujan 93

Danger in Darjeeling 50 das, kamala. See Madhavikutty dC Books xv, 93–101, 103, 107 Decameron, by Boccacio 90 deecee, ravi 95–98, 101, 104, 107, 109 Degenerating India 101 delanty, Gerard 158 derrida, Jacques ix, 12–15 Desadanam 88 devi, Ashapurna 94, 100 devy, G. n. xii, xiv, 1–2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18 dey, Manna 68 dolet, etienne 11 domestication xii, 99–100 dubbing xii, 133, 138 dumergue, John w. F. 94 durkheim 9

G K Masterude Pranayakatha 100 Gabriel, karen 69 Gambier, Yves 140 Gandhi, Mahatma 18 Gangopadhyaya, Sunil 92 gender politics 43, 58 Global Popular 165 –67 ‘global south’ xiv globalisation vii, xi–xii, 56, 59, 78, 115, 153, 160–1; politics of 57 God of Small Things, The, by Arundhati roy 100 Goethe 4 graphic adaptation xv, 49–55, 57–59 Greenblatt, Stephen 155, 157, 159 Guha, Tapas 50, 53 ‘Gulf Boom’ 70 Gupta, Amit 154 Gupta, Subhadra Sen 50

Ekanthatayude NooruVarshangal 94 english: to indian languages 16–17; institutionalisation of english literature 17; language xiv–xv, 16, 49, 104; translations 21, 24, 27–8, 30, 41, 49, 51, 79, 92, 97, 104, 108; translations from 17; translations of Vijayan 28 enlightenment 3 european: languages 4, 98–99; translations 4

Fakir, The 92 Feluda xv, 48–51, 54, 57 female sexuality 36, 42–43, 68 feminist translation 35–36, 42–43 FitzGerald, translation of 3, 4 Flood, Finbarr vii Flowers of Illness 29 Flowtow, Louise von 36 foreignisation xii, 99 Fuentes, Carlos 97

haider, Qurrutulain 21 hills Miller, J. 2 hindi ix, xii–xiii, 54, 97–98, 116, 119, 130, 138, 142 hindi-ness 141, 150 hoeppe, Gotz 66–67 homer 4; poems of 3 Hunchback of Notre-Dame, The 99

176 a Index In Search of Lost Time by Proust 98 indian languages 2, 16–18, 32, 62, 93–95, 97–98, 107–8; translations from 18 indian Literature in english Translation (iLeT) 92 indian Premier League (iPL) xii, xvi, 153–54, 157–67; Bollywoodisation of 162; cheerleading in 153, 164–66; Cultural Mobility and Cosmopolitanism 157–58; rhetoric and integrity of the brand 154; as Translatio Cosmopolitania 158–65 Indulekha 93 inter-lingual synonymy 8 interpreter-translator 23 intertextuality vii, 13, 77–78, 133–34, 148, 150 Jakobson, roman vii, xiv, 6, 48 Jayakanthan 105 Jayaraj 89 Jelinek, elfride 96 Jnanesvari 17 Jones, Sir william 3, 10, 18 Kalakaumudi 96, 100 Kaliyattam, of Jayaraj 78, 86–90 kambar, Chandrasekhara: ShikharaSoorya, translation of 36–39, 100 kannada xv–xvi, 35–37, 39–41, 113–17, 119–26, 130, 134–35, 142–44, 147–49 kariat, ramu 63 karnad, Girish 21 karnataka kodava Sahitya Akademy 113 Karunam 88 kathaprasangam xv, 78, 83–86 kavanagh, James 90 kelso, Paul 159 khandekar, V. S. 18 KhasakkinteIthihasam xv, 21–22, 24–27, 29 Killer in Kathmandu, A 49–51, 53, 55 Kodava Barati 113, 118, 120–26 kodava language xvi, 112–25 kodava Sahitya Akademy 114, 120 kodava Takk Parishad 114

kodava, Surlabbi Takk 123 konkani 117, 121 kress, Gunther 132 krishnan nambiar, V.d. 98, 100 kumaranasan 95 kundera, Milan 98 kurosawa, Ran 78, 86 language: acquisition 9, 120; of commentary 163; foreignness of viii; system 6–8 Lanthanbatheriyile Luthiniyakal 92 Lefevere, André 77, 92 Legends of Khasak, The, o.V. Vijayan on 23 Les Miserables, of Victor hugo 94 Levi-Strauss 9–10 Lewis, normalised language of 125 linguicism 119 Linguistic Minorities 114–18, 119; Boldizar on 118 Linguistic: theory of translation, A 9; translations 5, 23, 54 Litanies of the Dutch Battery 92 literary: history 4, 6, 10–11; movement, styles of 10; traditions 2, 17 literary translation vii, ix, xv, 1–2, 10– 11, 13–14, 16, 49–53, 55, 57–59, 109; western studies of 11 literature as linguistic activity 11 Llosa, Mario Vargas 96–97 Love in the Time of Cholera, translation of 101 Madame Bovary, by Flaubert 46 Madhavan, n.S. 24, 27, 92 Madhavikutty (kamala das) 21, 95 Madhyamam 96 Maharabharata 118 Majumdar, Boria 154, 163–64 Majumdar, Gopa 51, 54 Malayalam ix, xiii, xv, 21–25, 31–32, 63, 68, 71, 78, 85–86, 93–100, 103–4, 106–8, 125, 134, 143; fiction 22; history of translations in 93–95; publish-

Index b 177 ers 94, (see also under separate names); translation 93–94; translations of literature 96 Malayali/Malayalee(s): cultural politics xv; migration narratives of 71; readers 72, 94, 96–98, 100, 107–9; society as conservative 67; translators 98; writers 95 Marathi ix, 16–17, 97, 115–16 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia 94, 96–97 Mathrubhumi 96, 103 McLuskie, kathleen 83 medieval translations/renderings 18 Mehlman, Jeffrey 13 melodrama 65, 68 Menon, Chandu 93–94 Menon, nalappatt narayana 94 Milton, John 77–78 minoriticism 119 minority languages xvi, 104, 107, 116, 118, 121, 123–24, 126 Mitra, Bimal 94, 100 Mitra, Monabi 92 modernity 3, 37, 39, 58, 66–69; in kerala 67 mother tongue ix, 1, 17, 114–16, 119, 125 Mukherjee, hrishikesh 68 Mukherjee, Sujit 2 Müller, Max 18 Multi Media Translation 132 multimodal translations 130–32 nair, M. T. Vasudevan 95 narayan, r. k. 37 nemade, Bhalchandra 2, 16 nida, eugene, typology of 12 o’Connell, eithne 131 Of Grammatology 13–14 One Hundred Years of Solitude, The 98 orientalism 4, 10 Othello 78–82, 84–88; of Cinthio 81; by Sambasivan 78, 84–85; of Shakespeare 84–86

Paavangal 94 Phillipson, robert 114, 119 Poomale 114, 118 Poovaiah, dotty 122 Prabhat Book house 94 prescriptive translation theory 12 Pritchard, Adrian 159 Priya, A. S. 100 Progressive Literature Movement 62 Progressive writers’ Movement 65 publishing houses 92, 96, 101, 103; of kerala 96 rabassa, Gregory 98, 102 radhakrishnan, r. 105–6 rajadhyaksha, Ashish 162 rajakrishnan, V. 29 ramakrishnan, e. V. 24 ramanthali, Sudhakaran 100 ramanujan, A. k. 2, 105 ramavarma, Vayalar 71 raveendran, P. P. 24 ray, Bijoya 51, 54 ray, Satyajit xv, 48, 50–51, 53–54 regional languages xiii–xvi, 22 renaissance 3–4, 10 revivalism 18 rewritings 36, 77–78, 84, 86 ribeiro, Joao Ubaldo 5 Routledge Companion to Translation Studies 131 Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies 131 royalty 101–2 rumford, Chris 158 Sadanandan, kedamangalam 84 Sadasivan, M. P. 93–95, 99–107 Sahitya Pravarthaka Cooperative Society (SPCS) 94 Sahni, Bhisham 21 Samakalika Malayalam 96 Sambasivan 78, 84–86 Sanders, Julie 77–78, 87 Sandesh 50, 54

178 a Index Sanskrit Adhyatma ramayanam 93 Sanskrit ix, 2–3, 10, 17–18, 123 Saramago, Jose 97 Sarkar, Leela 98, 100 Satchidanandan, k. 95 Satyarthi, M.n. 98, 100 Saussure, Ferdinand de 8, 10, 14 Schleiermacher, Friedrich vii–viii, 12 Schweickart, Patrocinio 45 screen translation 131 Scripting Translation 120–26 second language learning 9 Secret of the Cemetery, The 52, 57 self-righting 21, 27, 32 self-translation xv, 21–26, 30, 32; Samuel Beckett and 26 Shakespeare xv, 17, 78–87, 89–90 Shakuntala 49 Sharma, robin 97 Sherlock Holmes 50–52 Shikhara Soorya 36–37, 100 signs: system of 6–8; systems of verbal 8 Singarevva and the Palace xv, 35–37, 40– 41, 43–46 Sivasankara Pillai. See Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai Skopos theory 133 source language (SL) 1, 6, 9, 12–13, 15– 17, 54, 94, 97–98, 104, 108 Source Language text xv, 12–13, 21, 23, 27, 33, 35, 49, 53–54, 98–99, 104, 106–7, 110, 131–33 sphota theory 14 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 13, 105 spoken language 17, 113, 118, 122 sports, translation and cultural mobility 155–57 Steiner 12 Stephens, John 120 structural linguistics 6–7 Superman 52 synonymy 7, 9–10 Tagore, rabindranath 18, 32, see also self-translation Tale of the Three Apples, The 79, 90

Tamil xii–xiii, 97–98, 105, 134–36, 138, 140–45, 147–50; writers 105 target text 132–34 Taylor, J. e. 78–81 Telugu xii, 116, 130, 134, 148–49 Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai 62, 64–66, 95, ‘The Story of My Chemmeen’ 72 Thavarigeba Thangi 147 Thavarina Siri 147 Thomas, A. J. 58, 93, 99–103, 106 three-language formula 119 Tintin 50, 53 target language (TL) xv, 1, 6, 9, 12–13, 15– 17, 26, 96, 103–4, 108 Topshe 51, 53, 56–58 trans-cultural style 10 translating: consciousness 3, 8–9, 19; literary works 2, 6, 95; Sanskrit texts 17 translatiocosmopolitania xvi, 158, 164–65, 167 translatioimperii 155–57 Translation as Manipulation, by Tagore 32 translation enterprise, of renaissance 3 translation vii, xi, 9–12; beauty in 11; Boldizar on 118; as crisp 30; defining 8; from english 17, 100; as intertextual exercise 13; into english 94, 108; into Malayalam 99, 104, 107–8; as means of self-correction xv, 7; as metaphysical enigma 3; objectives of 7; as one-way street 118; practices of xiv–xv, 9, 13, 19, 93, 98, 105–6; redundancy in 7; in reverse order 15; strategies of xiii, 97–99, 100, 106, 110, 136, 150; studies vii, xi, xiii–xiv, xvi, 9–11, 21, 33, 35, 77, 92, 104, 110, 126, 131–34; of theory xi, xiv, 1–3, 5, 7, 9, 12–13, 15, 17, 24, 93, 98, 106–7, 109, 133; theory– practice disconnect in 104–10 translational relationships xiv translator x–xii, xv, 1, 3–4, 8, 11, 11–12, 22, 24, 35–36, 40–46, 93, 95–103, 105, 107, 109; creative abilities of 100; freedom of 102–4; payments of 101 Trial, of kafka 1 Tulu 117, 121 Tutu, Bishop desmond, Children of God 98

Index b 179 TV advertisements xiv, xvi, 130, 132–4, 137; and Translations 132–34 Tyndale-Biscoe, C. e. 156 Tytler, Alexander Frazer 12 Un Capitano Moro 78 Unbearable Lightness of Being, The 98 Unnikrishnan, V. k. 101

Vakyapadiya 14–15 Varma, Attoor ravi 98, 100 Venuti, Lawrence 77, 79, 100, 105–6, 108, 124–25 Vijayan, o.V. 21, 23, 28, 95; english use of 25 Yerma, of Lorca 46

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