Project description

(a) Context and aim of the programme.

The monolingual, and mostly Anglophone, focus of "postcolonial Indian literature" restricts its usefulness for exploring the multicultural and polyglot context of literary production in postcolonial South Asia; and it often fails to understand translation as other than an institutional practice that nurses "vernacular" literatures. The proposed network will develop an in-depth collaborative study of contemporary writing in Bengali, English, Hindi, Malayalam, and Tamil, in order to identify models of "postcolonial translation" as a way of understanding South Asian literature as a multi-lingual corpus of texts. Various aspects of translation have been explored in postcolonial studies with particular emphasis on colonial India: as a "metaphor" of the colony, as a mode of transaction, as a "supplementary" site of culture, and as "epistemic violence". Our aim is to interrogate critically such claims in the context of postcolonial South Asia and to pose translation as a complex site for literary production. The problem faced by many Indian writers is that the twin aspirations to write in one's mother tongue and to build a national literature often enter into conflict, compounded by an ambivalent relationship to English as a colonial/global language. This network aims to examine various sites of translational practices in South Asia and to explore their involvement in the multidimensional field of literary production. One of the specific processes we aim to shed light on is the construction of a national literary canon in India. The Sahitya Akademi and the National Book Trust are important institutional sites dedicated to translations from and between Indian languages. , it is generally felt that the status of Indian literature, despite the many translations and anthologies, is uneasy, and that even after decolonization, English has played a major role in shaping a pan-Indian canon, also due to the increasing hegemony of English-language publishing. Against Salman Rushdie's astonishing dismissal of non-Anglophone Indian literatures, we aim to emphasize the intertextual links between Indian English writing and the multi-lingual production of Indian literature.

The overarching frame for this exploration is to document the mutual transactions between different languages and literary traditions. The relationship between Indian languages and literatures is evident in pre-independence Indian literatures. The first novel in Malayalam, "written after the English fashion", was an important literary model for subsequent Indian fiction. The influence of the Bengali writers Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, and Sarat Chandra Chatterjee on various Indian literatures including Tamil and Hindi has been well documented, as has the impact of the prominent Tamil writers Subrahmanya Bharati, and Kalki on other languages, or of the Hindi writer Premchand on Tamil – all of these contributed to the project of constructing modern India. However, the intricate relationships among modern and contemporary Indian literatures have so far not been explored in any depth, in spite of the fact that these literatures address common issues (gender, class, caste, ideology, poverty, etc) and their mutual indebtedness. Tamil writers like Asokamitran, Jayakanthan, C S Lakshmi, and Bama have had an important impact on other literatures in India. This is also true of Bengali authors like Samaresh Basu, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Mahashweta Devi, and Salina Hussain, who have written on diverse pan-Indian issues like partition, historiography, tribal rights, women's rights, communalism, influencing other literatures of the subcontinent. These very issues are prominent in the work of Indian English writers, such as Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Vikram Seth. Thus the situation is that many Indian language writers are in conversation with writings in English and other Indian languages, with translation playing an important mediating part. The aim of our network is to explore that role systematically and use it to develop further the notion of translation as a theoretical construct.

This project is particularly timely, since South Asian literature has achieved a global literary status, moving beyond the confines of national literature. In order to reach our aim, the network will address the following 5 objectives:

1. It will identify the role of translation in the development of South Asian writing: in what ways do bilingual Indian writers constantly negotiate between languages and cultures? How can one write a national literature in a regional language? How is this aspiration, and multi-lingualism in practice, given expression through narrative techniques, linguistic experiments, thematic choices?

2. It will investigate the connection between gender, writing, and translation : how does the concept of gender change when translating "regional" language narratives into "national" languages (e.g. Hindi and English)?

3. It will identify the impact of anti-colonial movements, and nationalism , on South Asian literary writing of the twentieth century; how and why is the status of the nation as a political and discursive category different in English and other regional languages?

4. It will examine the politics of reception: how does the reception of South Asian texts determine their "reading effects"? What are the differences between Western and South Asian readerships of the same text? Who reads in English in India? Who reads in Bengali in the UK?

5. It will address the relationships between secularism, religion, and cultural difference : how do Indian English writers represent these different perspectives in their writing? How do Bengali and Tamil authors tackle it? Does the choice of language relate to different understandings of spirituality, secular nationalism, cross-cultural identity?

Our methodology will involve:

• Comparing different examples of literary translation practices between languages. Workshops, focusing on each of these languages, will be led by the network partners: Orsini on Hindi writing, Lal, Bhaduri, and Bhattacharya on Bengali, Prasad on Tamil, Menon on Malayalam, and Srivastava on English.
• Exploring the reception of the most often-translated texts in the various language fields of the project
• Relating translation theory to actual translational practices: how do Western theories of translation fit with the tasks faced by translators of Indian languages?
• Applying literary theory to the construction of literary canons in South Asia. Theories of the literary field will be used to examine the relationship between English and Indian languages within the regional, national, and international field; i.e., English may work differently in Kerala or Tamil Nadu, Bengal and the Hindi area.

In order to reach our objectives, we will:

• Create a network of scholars between the UK and India
• Establish a website for the network, as a support base for the workshops, inclusive of a discussion board for all participants, online resources and materials.
• Organize a conference at the end of the three-year collaboration
• Produce an edited collection of papers coming out of the workshops, that will serve as a handbook to translation theories and methods of South Asian languages and literatures.

(b) Description of the institutions involved (normally up to a maximum of seven institutions).

Newcastle University, UK

The School of English at Newcastle University has strengths in postcolonial and South Asian literature, Bengali language and linguistics, and translation studies. The Postcolonial Research Group organizes inter-disciplinary seminars and collaborations among researchers in English, Linguistics, Social Sciences, and History, and will offer an important support base for the proposed network.

The Department of Languages and Cultures of South Asia at SOAS is devoted to research and teaching in the languages, literatures and cultures of the Indian subcontinent and it has the greatest concentration of scholars of pre-modern and modern South Asian literatures and film in the UK. The research interests of the Department's staff members include: Islam in South Asia; nationalism and linguistic identity; modern fiction, poetry and biography; postcolonial studies; the South Asian diaspora; and literary translation, among others.

University of Delhi, India

The University of Delhi is the premier university of the country. The English department has internationally recognized scholars on its faculty, and has research strengths in the fields of Indian literature in English, postcolonial theories of translation, literary theory, comparative studies between European and South Asian literature, and women's writing. The library at Delhi has large collections in many Indian languages. Delhi also hosts the National Archives, The Nehru Memorial Library and The Sahitya Akademi library (The National Academy of Literature).

Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.

JNU is a leading Indian university in terms of research and innovation. The School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies is a nationally and internationally recognized centre for teaching and research in Indian languages and literatures, comparative studies, and translation. The Centre of Indian Languages does teaching and research in Translation Studies, Hindi, Bengali and Tamil. The library is well-equipped with a varied range of texts in Urdu and Hindi and canonical texts in most other modern Indian languages, including Bengali and Tamil. The Centre for English Studies, which deals with the interface between English studies and Indic thought, have well-stocked archives in the area of Translation Studies.

(c) Significance of the programme, emphasising the crucial requirement for the specific collaboration proposed.

It will be essential for our research objectives to bring together scholars working in different Indian languages, so that they can share their domain-specific linguistic and literary expertise and theoretical approaches. The workshops will set up an innovative method of comparison between different theories and practices of translation, as well a crucial comparative perspective between literary canons in Bengali, English, Hindi, Tamil, and Malayalam. Our aim can be best pursued by examining the various facets of translation in events where all the network participants can create a multi-directional exchange of practice and theory.

No international network for the study of postcolonial translation in South Asia exists so far. In fact, there is a general lack of dialogue between UK and Indian universities in the field of literary and cultural studies, and this is one of the issues that we will address through the network. We therefore believe that this network will serve an important purpose in furthering reciprocal knowledge of different academic practices in diverse cultural settings, as well as contributing significantly to the study of South Asian literature, especially in terms of its multi-lingual and multicultural characteristics.

d) Description of arrangements for the interchange, including proposed numbers of scholars involved, the exchanges and workshops planned, the selection procedures for scholars and suggested length and purposes of scholars' visits.

The project will involve seven scholars, selected on the basis of their international recognition, their expertise in one or more Indian languages, and their experience as translators. GJV Prasad (JNU) is an expert of Indian writing in English and Tamil, and translation studies. Saugata Bhaduri (JNU) works in cultural theory, Indian aesthetics and folk cultures. Malashri Lal (Delhi) works on gender studies and women's writing in South Asia. Dilip Menon (Delhi), who will be collaborating in the Delhi workshops, works on Malayalam writing, cultural history of South India, and caste and communalism. Francesca Orsini (SOAS) works on Hindi language and literature, the Hindi public sphere, Indian fiction in translation and world literature. Neelam Srivastava (Newcastle) works on secularism and language in Indian English writing. Baidik Bhattacharya (Newcastle) works on postcolonial theory and Indian literature (especially Bengali).

We envisage a total of 5 one-week-long meetings among the lead network partners, in Delhi and Newcastle in turns. The purpose of the scholars' visits will be to discuss the theory and practice of translation of literary texts between Indian languages, and into English. Each meeting will be structured in small working groups focusing on one language, and plenary workshops focusing on the more general issues, and will involve:

• Selecting key Indian texts in different genres and time periods that influenced other Indian literary production
• Analyzing translations of a text among scholars sharing the same languages
• Comparing translations of the same text in Bengali, English, Hindi, Malayalam, and Tamil, and examining the different techniques and theoretical approaches involved
• Discussing cross-linguistic issues such as translation theory, gender, anti-colonialism, reception, and secularism, and their impact on literary production.

The international conference in the final year will disseminate our findings throughout the wider community of scholars and sharpen them further in the ensuing debate and discussion.
We are also requesting financial assistance to build up a library of essential reference texts, including South Asian literary texts in the original languages and in translation, as well as one relevant journal in the area. This provision will be crucial in supporting the work in the seminars, especially in Newcastle, where library holdings on South Asia are still relatively small.