Abstract
This essay argues that the field of South Asian literary studies needs to train its gaze more sharply on the process of translation. It examines the development of a distinct genre, the ‘subaltern autobiography’ that is encoded as a product of translation practices in India, practices that differ distinctly from the Western context. The reasons for this are, firstly, because in India the role of the translator is a much more visible figure, and secondly, because translation assumes a political function in fostering alternative canons, and can be linked to the development of a politicized identity across languages. In particular, this essay focuses on a number of Indian autobiographies by subaltern authors translated from Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, and Bengali into English, in which the importance of the author versus translator is often inverted through the unequal power relations inherent in the two languages involved. Through focusing on these autobiographies, Srivastava examines some trends in translational practices in India in order to look at how certain genres have migrated across languages, and become part of an increasingly problematic ‘global’ canon.
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Notes
- 1.
These two terms, of course, are by no means equivalent. I am speaking here of texts by writers whose access to literary authorship has been unimaginably difficult, because of their social conditions and their life situation. Many Dalits have now attained a position within the Indian middle class, especially in urban areas where more social mobility is available to them than in the villages. Paradoxically, the autobiography has become a privileged genre for them to write in, as Sarah Beth Hunt points out: ‘Hindi Dalit writers in the “autobiographic” literary field have gradually acquired high levels of mastery over middle-class cultural practices, even to the extent of valuing particularly literary genres (such as autobiographies, short stories and literary criticism)’ (2014: 16).
- 2.
See, among others, Raj Kumar (2010); Christi Merrill (2010); Laura Brueck (2014); Sarah Beth Hunt (2014); Sharmila Rege (2013); Gyanendra Pandey (2013); Toral Jatin Gajarawala (2011, 2013); Pramod Nayar (2011); and the excellent prefaces and forewords by the translators of the autobiographies discussed here, Arun Prabha Mukherjee, Lakshmi Holmström, and Maya Pandit.
- 3.
Around 1946, Ambedkar wrote a letter to the famous African American philosopher W.E.B. Dubois, saying that ‘I have been a student of the Negro problem and have read your writings throughout. There is so much similarity between the position of the Untouchables in India and of the position of the Negroes in America that the study of the latter is not only natural but necessary’ (Ambedkar 1946).
- 4.
The term ‘pariah’, now universally used to indicate someone who is cast out from their society, is a term derived from the Tamil and which indicated a specific untouchable community, the Paraiyar, literally ‘the people of the parai’. The parai is the drum used by untouchables in the ritual orchestras formed in villages in Tamil Nadu each year (a traditional occupation for many untouchable castes was that of musician, performing in the villages at festivals and other religious occasions) (Viramma et al., 1998: 310). This is another example of a regionally specific term that translates into a term indicating a wider condition of societal ostracization.
- 5.
The novelist Amit Chaudhuri, drawing a contrast with fiction in the bhashas, remarked that it was only in the Indian novel in English that readers were confronted with ‘the idea of India as a recognizable totality’ (2001: xxvi). As we shall see, the subaltern texts I look at rarely explicitly address a ‘national’ community of readers, and rarely concern themselves with the representation of ‘India’.
- 6.
On the other hand, the Tamil Dalit female author Bama’s renowned autobiography, Karukku (2011), registers a tension between the collective and individual voice. In her preface to the second English edition, Bama implicitly widens the scope of her readership beyond the Dalit community. Bama’s framing of the text offers it to the English reader as a testimony to a collective suffering; it universalizes the condition of Dalits so as to speak to other groups that suffer oppression. The text can be read both as an individual autobiography and as a collective biography, also due to its structure of witnessing—and at times there seems to be a deliberate obfuscation of the ‘I’ in order to privilege the ‘we’, the putative protagonist of her ‘Dalitized’ life story.
- 7.
R. Azhagarasan (2011) claims that the term ‘Dalit writing’ is more inclusive than the term ‘literature’, as it includes interviews, speeches, and political writings. Azhagarasan and Ravikumar’s Oxford India Anthology of Tamil Dalit Writing (2012) is divided into relevant genres such as fiction, poetry, autobiography, and ‘prose’ (which includes speeches and articles by Dalit intellectuals). The anthology covers 100 years of the Dalit movement, and in this sense, can be seen as a history of Dalits by Dalits, and how they became part of a wider society.
- 8.
See, for example, Timothy Brennan (2013: 76).
- 9.
As Tom Langley (2015: 27–28) argues, ‘While this insistence on philological care is intended largely as a call for informed and nuanced readings of Gramsci’s texts, rooting this principle so deeply in his own work might also serve to fetishize Gramsci’s own practice of reading, and in turn blind us to the moments in which he is a surprisingly promiscuous reader, willing to read texts against the grain and even occasionally to re-invent them to suit his needs. The point here is, of course, not to take Gramsci to task for a lack of textual respect, or to undermine the need to treat his own works with such critical attention, but rather to recognize that his own practice of reading was often inventive.’
- 10.
Ranajit Guha, the founder of the collective, is keen to remind us that their project ‘was an organic product of its life and times, a participant in the world to which it belonged, and not just a detached academic observation post’ (Guha, 2011: 290–291).
- 11.
In 1998, Gautam Bhadra and Partha Chatterjee edited a volume in Bengali entitled Nimno Borger Itihas (1998), featuring translations of iconic essays by Subaltern Studies historians, including Shahid Amin, David Hardiman, Veena Das, and Gyan Pandey. Mallarika Sinha Roy kindly supplied me with this information.
- 12.
Gramsci was interested in setting up a methodology for the study of the history of subaltern social groups in terms of an anti-foundationalist history (one based on discrete monographs rather than overarching grand narratives, as I explain below). The subalterns were defined as such because they were subordinated to the dominant classes and at different moments in history revolted and rebelled against the hegemonic order, but these instances of rebellion, Gramsci felt, were not easily susceptible to systematization, and could offer themselves up only as fragments of a complex, occluded history of subaltern insurgency (Gramsci, 1975: 2283).The following passage from the Notebooks has been central to the methodology of the Subaltern Studies collective in their historiographical project regarding the Indian nationalist movement; and indeed the collective has produced a series of monographs, rather than more ‘foundationalist’ works such as all-encompassing overviews of Indian history. ‘The history of subaltern groups is necessarily fragmented and episodic. There undoubtedly does exist a tendency to […] unification in the historical activity of these groups, but this activity is continually interrupted by the activity of the ruling groups […] Subaltern groups are always subject to the activity of the ruling groups, even when they rebel and rise up: only “permanent” victory breaks their subordination and that not immediately. […] Every trace of independent initiative on the part of subaltern groups should therefore be of incalculable value for the integral historian. Consequently, this kind of history can only be dealt with monographically, and each monograph requires an immense quantity of material that is often hard to collect’ (Gramsci, 1971: 55).
- 13.
- 14.
Pramod Nayar (2011) has analysed Bama’s Karukku in terms of the genre of testimonio, a form used by indigenous South American activists to tell the story of their own oppression and exploitation/expropriation by the dominant communities.
- 15.
Mukherjee finds instructive the decision taken by Columbia University Press, the American publisher of Joothan, to change the title in this way, which was done without her consultation, though she had translated the text into English. ‘I assume they did it because they felt that Americans know enough about “untouchables” to be attracted to an “untouchable” writer’s book. Certainly, two unknown, “foreign” words in the title would not have helped book sales’ (Mukherjee et al., 2006: 4).
- 16.
S. Anand (2003: 16) has debated the issue of who publishes Dalit writing, and he himself founded a publishing house, Navayana, dedicated to printing Dalit writing also to avoid its entrance into textual canons as merely an ‘addition’ to majoritarian versions of Indian literature being published by major transnational conglomerates such as HarperCollins or Random House India.
- 17.
According to Gajarawala, ‘Dalit texts may be labeled as such not only on the basis of identity but through a different narrative structure, one that aspires to a solidarity rather than a sympathy’ (Gajarawala, 2013: 53).
- 18.
See for example James Freeman, Untouchable: An Indian Life Story (1979); and Viramma, Josiane Racine, and Jean-Luc Racine, Viramma: Life of an Untouchable (1998). In the production of Dalit life stories there is a noticeable shift from Untouchable, in the third person, told to the American ethnographer, James Freeman to Viramma, in the first person, told to the anthropologist Josiane Racine, to the taking-over of the narrative by the subaltern author herself. This seems to suggest that the cultural gatekeeping of the Dalit life story for Anglophone or Western readers then shifts from the anthropologist, who presents the story of the untouchable as an artefact in the field, to the publisher/editor/translator, who ‘finds’ the author and then enables their publication and subsequent translation into a hegemonic language (as mentioned earlier, the English translator’s name is always notably prominent on the cover or frontispiece of the book: Urvashi Butalia for A Life Less Ordinary, Arun Prabha Mukherjee for Joothan, Maya Pandit for The Prisons We Broke, Lakshmi Holmström for Karukku).
- 19.
The coming of Ambedkar’s message to the community is a frequent motif in Dalit autobiographies, especially Marathi life-writing, as in Uma Pawar’s The Weave of My Life (2008), another important text that helped to define the canon of this genre.
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Srivastava, N. (2017). A Multiple Addressivity: Indian Subaltern Autobiographies and the Role of Translation. In: Ciocca, R., Srivastava, N. (eds) Indian Literature and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54550-3_5
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