Looking for Portia: Archives, Translation and the Politics of Language

Abstract

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are filled with male translators, particularly civil servants, translating Shakespeare into Indian vernacular languages. These translations have been archived in repositories like the British library and the Shakespeare memorial trust library owing to the archiving projects of the British colonial administration. In looking at the archive, searching for translations of Othello, Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice – I finally found my elusive Portia, a woman translator of Shakespeare – “Arya.” “Arya” translated Merchant of Venice into Hindi as Venice Nagar ka Vyapari in 1888. This paper tells us a two-fold story. The first is my archival journey and the attempt to piece together the persona of “Arya.” The second is to think about what it means to read the past from the present through an analysis of the translated text which seeks to place Arya and her text within the sexual and language politics of her time.

Keywords:

• Shakespeare
• translation
• archival research
• Hindi nationalism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For example, on 13 September 2019, the Home Minister of India Amit Shah, tweeted the following to mark the occasion of Hindi Diwas (Hindi Day). He wrote, “Bharat vibhinn bhashaon ka desh hai aur har bhasha ka apna mahatva hai parantu pure desh ki ek bhasha hona atyant aavashyak hai jo Vishwa me bharat ki pahchan bane. Aaj desh ko ekta ki dor me bandhne ka kaam agar koi ek bhasha kar sakti hai to vo sarvadhik bole jaane vali Hindi bhasha hi hai.” (India is a country of many languages and each language has its own significance however it is extremely essential for the entire country to have one language which can become its identity globally. If there is a language today which can do the work of tying the country in the string of unity, it is the most spoken language – Hindi) (Chakraborty 2019). Even though he later walked this statement back, key here is the idea that a language can help project a unified identity that is globally legible and recognized.

2 As Krishna Kumar notes in the mid-nineteenth century there was still a “sense of freedom to utilize the Urdu tradition and scholarly acquaintance with its Persian heritage” (Kumar 1990, 16).

3 For Ann Laura Stoler, “Describing this archival space is not an attempt to define its outer limits, all that it includes and excludes and all that I have left out. My interest is not in the finite boundaries of the official state archives but in their surplus production, what defines their interior ridges and porous seams, what closures are transgressed by unanticipated exposition and writerly forms” (Stoler 2009, 14).

4 British Library UIN: BLL01003522950.

5 See, for instance, Tejaswini Niranjana’s work (Niranjana 1992). In a similar vein, Jenny Sharpe discusses the role that William Jones played in the construction of “India” through his translation of Sanskrit law. Translation was an integral part of the daily lives of civil servants in British India. As she notes, “the task of translating Sanskrit law thus fulfilled both the duty of the civil servant and the desire of the Orientalist” (Sharpe 1993, 35).

6 The content and tone of this preface reflect Arnold’s patronising attitude towards Nundy and her translation. For instance, he notes that it is a “faithful prose transcript” despite not being “sufficiently proficient in Hindi”. As Thea Buckley (2019) notes, he also seems to discredit her as a woman of colour when he says that “I think she might, indeed, very fairly prefix to her translation her own passage beginning “मेरे से न which opens Scene I of Act II: – ‘Mislike me not for my complexion,

The shadow’d livery of the burnish’d sun.

To whom I am a neighbour, and near bred.’”

At the same time, for my purposes he also emphasizes her gender by using female pronouns and calling her “authoress” thus in some ways dispelling the possibility that it is a man using “Arya” as a pseudonym.

7 Jenny Sharpe also suggests the same when she notes that “Nineteenth-century Indian nationalists discovered the plotting for a national myth of origins in the pages of Orientalist writings. The idea of a superior conquering Aryan race was invoked for sanctioning upper-caste Hindu privilege, while the British production of a singular Hindu culture could be deployed in the service of a “nationalist” Hinduism that was decidedly middle class” (Sharpe 1993, 44–45).

8 While Arya does not Indianize the Merchant of Venice, in Act III, scene ii, when Bassanio talks about “the beauteous scarf/Veiling an Indian beauty” (III.ii.100–101), Arya translates Indian beauty as “ sundari aryastriyon” (Nundy 1888, 45). India is imagined as a/the land of Aryans.

9 Literary educator

10 “All quotations from Shakespeare’s play are from the Folger Online edition.”

11 He goes on to add that, “This parallel was consciously perceived by contemporary Samajists. When Lajpat Rai, for example, commented on public access to Samaj services he said that ‘anybody can come into the Church of God and occupy whatever seat he likes’ (1992, 157). This church-like structure constitutes a material articulation of the ārya samaj as an alternative framework of authority in Hinduism” (Zavos 1999, 67).

12 R.S McGregor (1972) and later Alok Rai (2000) talk about the role that Bengalis played in the development of Hindi as a language. Alok Rai talks specifically about the role of the Bengali intelligentsia who migrated to other parts of North India. He writes that, “in response to a combination of push and pull factors, significant numbers of educated Bengalis moved upriver in quest of livelihoods for the newly educated. The active presence of educated Bengalis in the early Nagari/Hindi agitations was frequently noted by contemporary observers” (Rai 2000, 53).

13 Perhaps as an indication of what is to come, in Act 3 scene 2 line 193, Gratiano in a translation of “gentle lady”, addresses Portia as “ sati swamini” (Nundy 1888, 48).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Center for Asian Studies and the School of Humanities, University of California Irvine as well as the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Diversity Predoctoral Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology10.13039/100006919.

Notes on contributors

Anandi Rao

Anandi Rao has a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Irvine. Her dissertation titled, “In the Name of Shakespeare: (En)Gendering India through Translation” lies at the intersection of Shakespeare studies, translation studies, postcolonial studies and gender and sexuality studies. She is a Global Perspectives on Society postdoctoral fellow at NYU Shanghai in the academic year 2020–2021.