Amitav Ghosh: Uncertain Translation and Transnational Confusion

Abstract

In a piece on Amitav Ghosh’s 1992 travelogue, In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveller’s Tale, Claire Chambers foregrounds an idea on which I draw throughout this chapter: translation. Ghosh ‘challenges the claims to definitiveness of academic discourses’, confronting ‘the many different types of translation that the ethnographer has to tackle in attempting to explain another culture’; the author thus challenges the 1980s and 1990s claims of ‘New Anthropologists’, who showed a ‘curious disregard of anthropologies emanating from the third world’ (Chambers, 2006, 2, 3). Chambers aligns In an Antique Land with the mid-1980s anthropological work on translation of Talal Asad and John Dixon, who described ‘a prevailing trend for the language of dominated cultures to accommodate to the demands and concepts of the dominating culture’: translation ‘tends only to remake non-Western languages, while powerful European languages remain virtually untouched by their encounter with other languages and concepts’ (1985, 171). My argument in this chapter, developing the ideas of Chambers, entails three points. First, Ghosh is fascinated with the idea and practice of translation to a degree that suggests he has a great deal invested in the concept, beyond the basic impulse to understand the other culture in which he has immersed himself.

Far from being a transparent reflection of how other people live [...] ethnographic writing translates, selects, and fashions its subjects. [...]

In an Antique Land grapples with related questions surrounding the role of the ethnographer as translator. (Chambers, 2006, 5)