Response

In “Universalism in Translation Studies”, Andrew Chesterman speaks from a definite and defined location of formal, institutionalized and professionalized translation. I speak from a landscape where, by and large, no stable and equivalent meaning of translation exists (see Trivedi 2006) and the authority that texts represent for people takes precedence over authorship (see Hawley 1988). This makes the edifice of language and text somewhat shaky. Save to a miniscule number of translation theorists, it matters little whether a series of operations carried out through languages people sometimes understand, sometimes “adjust”, go by the name of translation in some part of the world. Obvious though it may be, it is important to remind ourselves that translation theory in the West as also its professionalization emerge from the formation of the European nations and its consequent synonymies between languages and civilizations. The fundamental paradigm of a “source” in both language and text also arises from a certitude that boundaries of a language and text are definable and sealed, and that translation as well as original compositions are necessarily in the written tradition. On the other hand, multilingual societies such as India (and I am not implying that that is the only example of multilingualism in the world) have a protean and mobile source, constituted through translation, not merely preceding it. The chronological relation between the original and translation needs to be interrogated in the Indian context, where imitation is not a twice-removed violation of the original, but constitutive of the originals. Translators of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, as of other well-known texts, have been honoured as poets without incurring the anxieties of an original. Moreover, the interaction between languages, especially in the oral contexts, and that constitutes the majority, is a robust communication where one of its many manifestations may be “translation”. To start with, I wish to underscore the contextualization and relativization of not only what we consider as “translation”, but also the imagination of language and linguistic difference.

A multilingual nation

In what I consider a déjà vu moment, a panel on “Dilemmas of Translation” held at a Goa Arts and Literary Festival in December 2012 began with the moderator underscoring the need for translation in a multilingual society. The understanding of multilingualism in this context is recent – the coexistence of multiple languages within the vast space called “India”. This spatial and horizontal vision of multilingualism informs ways in which the Indian nation state, following the 1950s, was given a federal structure and according to apparently homogenous linguistic units. Such an imagination does disservice to a long-standing tradition of multilingualism inhabiting the same text, person and region. Colonial technologies such as The Linguistic Survey of India by G. A. Grierson (1903–28) brought to the multilingual landscape a Herderian synonymy between language and civilization, and paved the path towards linguistic ethnology in the twentieth century. Scholars such as Sumathi Ramaswamy and Lisa Mitchell show how the idea of “mother-tongue” and its conflation with space and territory came to be constructed in the cases of Tamil and Telugu respectively (see Ramaswamy 1993; Mitchell 2009; and, for a European context, Yildiz 2012). For another example, the state of Goa needed to foreground the distinctness of the Konkani language in order to claim statehood.

If we understand multilingualism in such geographic terms, an imagination undoubtedly shaped by the linguistic organization of various states, translation appears to be very important, in fact the only route to communication between languages. This also implies that languages that form the basis of such geographical divisions do not otherwise comprehend each other. However, there has been, through history, no dearth of writers and thinkers who knew several languages, and we would be hard put to confine them within a one-language-one-literature boundary. The fourteenth-century Sufi poet Amir Khusrau's verses were a mixture of Persian and Braj. A vast body of Buddhist and Jain literatures are preserved in Pali, Ardh Magadhi and Sanskrit. Who is to tell, for instance, whether the famous Bhakti singer Meera composed in Gujarati or Marwari (Das 1991, 5–6)?

What happens when languages in a given society, unlike village and city boundaries, are not clearly marked off from each other, as in a geographically demarcated landscape, but rather shade off into one another (Kaviraj 2010, 142)? Are the speakers then aware of a “carrying over”, a burdensome self-conscious act by which meaning is made to move from one discrete entity called language X to another called language Y? Would those speakers be merely making adjustments in their repertoire of speech-acts depending upon the interlocutors they speak with, or are they unselfconsciously involved in translation practice? How do we understand translation when what appears as “Hindi” by some gets labelled as “Urdu” elsewhere? Is that the same “thing” but with different labels and therefore not in need of translation? On the other hand, Urdu and Hindi are polarized along political ideologies and seek mediation that foregrounds their common roots, an act made possible by both translation and interpretation. Similarly, in the far corner of Western India where the Indo-Pak boundary divides India from Pakistan, one language is “Kutchi” and another “Sindhi”, both laying claim to a common syntax and vocabulary, but becoming different by choosing to be so. Perhaps these appear as a series of “case studies” from a local society which must ultimately respond to a “universal” hypothesis imagined here, or elsewhere – for origin, says Chesterman, does not matter.

Provincializing translation studies

Chesterman cautions us against “naive relativism” and “naive universalism”. The first he explains as a situation “where all we see is differences, and similarities are ignored” and the second as “where all differences are ignored”. Instead, he argues for a “general theoretical framework that can describe and explain translation in its widest sense”. The binary between “relative” and “universal” appears, this time in the context of translation studies; its earlier avatars have appeared in philosophy and literature, dating back to Aristotle. A hypothesis, Chesterman suggests, could be from any culture of origin; it is the validity of a hypothesis that matters. He illustrates how translation theories such as those proposed by Nida or Skopos emerge out of specific conditions in the West. Rightly so, he asks how can we know of a fixed origin when hybrid histories dislodge the philosophical notion of an origin?

The plea for employing a hypothesis to test how universal or relative it is, whether it speaks to certain “local” (read non-West) conditions, is, on the face of it, fair. However, the calm reasonableness glosses over the fact that the claim to universalism often stems from hegemonic contexts of knowledge. For instance, “modern” medicine needs no qualifier of location, while Ayurveda and homeopathy must be located and termed “indigenous” or “alternative”. The lure of hegemonic knowledge is such that despite a fundamental difference in what may be the first principles, translation scholars in India and China are found paying (save a few exceptions) a continuous homage to fixed ideas of “source” “text” “language” and equivalence, and to unproductive employment of binaries such as “foreignization” and “domestication” that do not address the complex linguistic-philosophical landscape in which “sources” and “texts” are protean and “language” fixities a construction. Whether such a landscape must produce its own theoretical constructs (must it?) is not the question I wish to discuss here, but it indicates the provincialism of Western theories of translation. I am relying here on Dipesh Chakrabarty's formulation of “provincialising Europe” (2007) that brilliantly exposes the inequality of knowledge systems at work in a discipline such as history.

As I write this piece, at a construction site next to my house labourers from different states such as Bihar, Orissa, Rajasthan and Gujarat interact in multiple languages. The supervisor speaks a mixture of Hindi and Gujarati; the labourers understand him, although among themselves they may be using a different language. Interactions across what are now positioned as different languages continue to obtain in an informal space where multilingualism is not simply the presence of many languages, but a relationship between many languages in a given event. What these stories tell us is how language in a multilingual nation is not a “given”, but rather a discursively formed “source” disrupting thereby the most fundamental given-ness of translation paradigms in the West. The difference between this non-Western context from the paradigmatic West (if there is such a homogenous phenomenon) is not a variation of the theme, a relativism to the universal, but rather a condition that begs its own theorization, perhaps rooted in language. These are not “local” and “non-Western” theories, existing by opposition, or as anecdotal appendages to the presumably “universal” (read Western) theories, but practices of thought emerging from lived conditions of a multilingual nation. They do not need to be “incorporated” into translation studies – a patronizing thought – but rather invoked to provincialize it. Conferences and books on Asian translation traditions, for example, represent this moment of churning, an exploration of unexplored archives of translation. It is premature to say as yet what this churning might lead to; whether it would allow an extension of existing theories or overhauling. That said, an equivalence of contexts at least for now cannot be assumed, for translation is larger than a cognitive transfer. Meanwhile, as we begin to understand the myriad practices, and the emic categories that define them, we would know if there is indeed another philosophy equivalent to what the West considers as “translation”.

Note on contributor

Rita Kothari is the author of Translating India: The Cultural Politics of English; The Burden of Refuge: Sindh, Gujarat, Partition; and Memories and Movements: Borders and Communities in Banni, Kutch. She has translated extensively from Gujarati and Sindhi into English and co-edited books with Rupert Snell and Judy Wakabayashi.