Response by Trivedi to “Betraying Empire: Translation and the Ideology of Conquest”

“Betraying Empire: Translation and the Ideology of Conquest” by Vicente L. Rafael hits many historical-political nails bang on the head and makes perfect “postcolonial” sense. By way of engaging with it, one could pick on little details or broad issues. For example, one may express reservations generally about such belated efforts in the Western academy to acknowledge and lament the sins of the past, on the grounds that such “compensation” (even in the specific and limited sense in which this term is used in translational theory) may seem too little and too late. One may point out that what Rafael somewhat aggrandizingly calls “the US Empire” was (before the present neocolonial age) virtually confined to the USA assuming control over the Philippines in 1898, a one-off act which Kipling promptly hailed, exhorting the USA at last to “Take up the White Man's Burden” which poor little Britain had until then shouldered all by itself. Or one could note that, unlike Tagalog, not all the languages of the colonized world were first grammared and dictionaried by the Western conquerors. Sanskrit, for example, had a fine grammar of the language codified in nearly 4,000 sutras or aphoristic rules as early as in the fifth century BCE (which Saussure studied and on which he partly based his dissertation in the 1870s), and the authoritative dictionary of Sanskrit was composed (in verse) in the seventh century CE, before the English language was a gleam in anyone's eye.

In fact, there are numerous instances of the history of both translation and conquest lying beyond the ken of Spain and the USA which find no resonance at all in Rafael's article, and understandably so. Therefore, not so much to refute Rafael but more constructively to complement and enhance the picture he presents, I sketch below competing narratives of translation history from some other countries and contexts so that we may collectively arrive at a fuller theorization and a richer comprehension of the issues.

But first let us complicate the terms. “Translation”, like “politics”, has undergone such a wide expansion of meaning in the last couple of decades that the traditional sense in which it has long been used, of rendering a text in one language into a corresponding text in another language, is now just one of the many semantic options available. (For example, the new phenomenon of “cultural translation” often involves neither text nor language; see Trivedi 2007.) And even within the older frame, translation may not only involve book-length textual transactions, but, as Thomas M. Hunter points out in the specific case of Southeast Asia (which is the site where Rafael locates his argument), it may operate both at the micro level “in terms of lexical incorporation into Austronesian patterns of morphological organization” and at the macro level in terms of “transcultural processes” which may help us understand “the status of translation as a text-building strategy” (2011, 125–126). Hunter says this in relation to the Sanskritic influence in Southeast Asia, a theme and a civilizational movement which is often ignored in translation studies and to which I return below.

Regarding “conquest,” the other key term that runs through Rafael's argument, it may suffice to point out that not all transnational translational transactions in history have been undergirded by military conquest, and that there is no reason to think of translation as conquest merely by guilty association. Nor has translation always been a handmaiden of religious conversion. It is only in the singular history of the imperialist expansion of the West that this (un)holy alliance was at work, and, as soon as we step out of this Christian/colonial paradigm that has dominated our understanding of anything and everything for a couple of centuries, we shall encounter other worlds with their own different cultural orders. One of the postcolonial theories of translation that has gained currency lately suggests that cannibalism in some places in South America was a decisive act of double resistance to Spanish conversion and conquest. But this sensational, unconscionable and rather thoroughgoing practice was, of course, far from universal and there were other natives elsewhere, many of them vegetarian, who may have found this act of resistance no less repugnant than conquest itself, and for whom propagation through translation was rather more like organic vegetational growth (see Bassnett and Trivedi 1999, 4–5, 9). In fact, some natives in India refused to convert to Christianity because its British proselytizers preached this new faith through mouths that were polluted, “for they eat flesh” (quoted in Bhabha 1994, 103).

Actually, what may provide a comprehensive counterpoint to the trajectory of translation as conquest traced by Rafael is an account of the inter-Asian and pan-Asian linguistic and cultural transactions over the first millennium of (what is rather hopefully called) the Common Era, before the rise of the West. This account may be divided into two parts, of which the first was the vast translation project of Buddhist texts, both scriptural and literary, from Sanskrit into Chinese. The journeys to “the West” (i.e. India) undertaken by questing Chinese monks beginning in the fourth century CE, for example, and the exchange of royal embassies between the respective emperors of India and China in the seventh century, constitute a history which is yet to be fully recovered, but the work now being attempted gives us some idea of the magnitude of the project (see especially Cheung 2006 and Zhang, forthcoming).

The translation of a huge corpus of Sanskrit texts into Chinese cannot even remotely be characterized as any kind of conquest even though it served to introduce a new religion to China, where it made willing (i.e. in no way coerced or even incentivized) converts, who coexisted happily with followers of other indigenous faiths. Buddhism travelled from India to China along the Silk Road and via the maritime routes that lay through Southeast Asia, and, though it was accompanied by trade and commerce, there was no suggestion of any expansionism on the part of India except of a peaceful cultural kind. Moreover, though some renowned translators of mixed Indian-Chinese parentage – such as the legendary Kumarajiva, who was born in Kucha (on the Silk Road) – played a seminal role in these translations, by far the larger segment of translators were Chinese pilgrims who ventured out to India and came back with horse-loads of manuscripts which they spent the rest of their years translating, as the no less legendary Xuanzang did at the Great Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi'an, built especially for him by the Chinese emperor. The point to note is that India did not go marching into China to force Buddhism down Confucian throats; it was a trail of dedicated Chinese seekers who came to India to undergo enlightening instruction at ancient universities such as the one at Nalanda (fl. fifth to twelfth centuries). The mountain of Indian Buddhism did not move to China to overshadow it; it was the Chinese Mohammad (if one may mix religious metaphors almost sacrilegiously) who went walking over and across the highest mountains in the world to acquire the new faith. That China felt far from conquered by Sanskrit or Buddhism is confirmed by the fact that, through its history, more than one emperor banned Buddhism altogether and confiscated the monasteries.

The second translation narrative, partly overlapping with the Indian-Chinese one but in many ways quite distinct, concerns India and Southeast Asia. Again, from about 300 CE for the following 1000 years, Sanskritic religions and culture had a deep impact on the whole region and, again, this huge transformation was effected without a single sword being raised. In Sheldon Pollock's magisterial account of the phenomenon, the “Sanskrit Cosmopolis” ranged in space from “Kashmir and Purusapur (Peshawar) in the foothills of the Western Himalayas eastward to Champa (central Vietnam), Prambanam on the plains of central Java, and even beyond in the further islands of today's Indonesia” (2006, 115). It extended also to the Philippines, where a version of the Sanskrit epic Ramayana titled Maharadia Lawana was composed/finalized as late as sometime between the middle of the seventeenth century and early nineteenth century. In fact, there is hardly a major language in all of Southeast Asia in which a version of the Ramayana does not rank as a classic.

Besides such translations, adaptations and retellings, Sanskrit in Southeast Asia was also used as Sanskrit – not in translation but in the original, so to say – in the poetic form of the prashasti, i.e. a panegyric to the king composed for public inscriptions. Far-flung places in the region were known by pure Sanskrit names, such as Kambuja (Kampuchia/Cambodia), Bali (still Bali, of course), Suvarnadvip (the golden island, from which comes the word for happy discovery, serendipity) and Suvarnabhumi (the golden land, an ancient appellation which was chosen to be the name of the new airport in Bangkok in 2006). Two of the most magnificent temples of Indian religions are located not within India but in “translated” lands: Angkor Wat in Cambodia and Borobudur in Indonesia. The current royal dynasty of Thailand has had nine successive kings so far all called Rama, beginning with Rama I (1782–1809) and running up to the present ruler Rama IX (r. 1946–), and it may be thought to be a translation within translation that though named after the Hindu God Rama they have all been Buddhists. This accurately reflects the correlation between Hinduism and Buddhism in the land of their origin, India, where they were never seen as distinct religions in the Western sense; indeed, if Buddhism disappeared from India around 1200 CE, it was not because it was conquered by Hinduism or driven into the sea (though it had been launched across the seas, of course) but because it was peacefully absorbed back into the ocean of Hinduism from which it had arisen in the first place.

This is a whole cosmos of far-reaching translation and profound transformation that has felt no need of conquest, and has no record even of any kind of armed conflict. Before the New World was discovered or even heard of, this Old World order prevailed for a millennium or more and influenced the lives of a large proportion of the population of the known globe. It was based on translation, or carrying across, of philosophical notions, values and daily practices not by conquest and coercion but by quiet persuasion and imperceptible permeation, working through a process of voluntary assent and participation so harmonious that even to call it “hegemonic” in the Gramscian sense may constitute an act of “epistemic violence”.

Even when the West burst upon these Eastern shores in the middle of the second millennium CE, its conquest of a place such as India was hardly a cultural or translational conquest. Before the British translated their emblematic Book, the Bible, into any Indian language, they had in the last quarter of the eighteenth century already translated several Sanskrit books into English, including the core Hindu scripture the Bhagavad-Gita and an outstanding literary classic, Sacontala (as the translator William Jones spelt the name), dating from the fourth century CE (Trivedi 2006). The cultural impact of these early translations upon Europe was so great that it has been designated by Raymond Schwab, in the title of a book, as “The Oriental Renaissance”. For a half-century or more at the beginning of British rule in India, from c. 1775 to 1835, it might have seemed that it wasn't Britain that had conquered India but the other way round – if one went by translations alone.

Of course, none of this invalidates the story Rafael narrates of how the West conquered the Rest, using translation too, besides other more lethal traditional means of conquest, as a “weaponized” auxiliary instrument. In fact, such is the insidious ubiquity of the reality (and metaphor) of conquest than even the entirely non-combatant process of the spread of the Sanskrit cosmopolis is (unwittingly or at least incongruously) described by Pollock in a chapter title as the “World Conquest” of Sanskrit (2006, 115)! “Conquest” vincit omnia – though I have my doubts if that tag, when translated into Sanskrit, would make much sense, to say nothing of it coming anywhere close to conquering Sanskrit.

Note on contributor

Harish Trivedi is former professor of English at the University of Delhi, and was nominated the 19th CETRA Professor of Translation Studies in 2006. He is the author of Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India (Calcutta 1993; Manchester 1995). He has co-edited with Susan Bassnett Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (1999) and with Theo Hermans a special issue with “Focus on Translation” of Wasafiri (Winter 2003), and has contributed to The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 4 (2006) and vol. 5 (forthcoming). He writes in both English and Hindi, and translates both ways between the two languages.