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Hindu Two front doors: Why take such extreme steps for a language?

Translation today is an attempt to reclaim the lost legacy of creative crossovers.

NINETY years ago, in a grand and morbid gesture, Edmond Larforest, a writer in Haiti, tied a French Larousse dictionary around his neck and jumped off the pier to a watery death. He dramatised, fatally, the artistic drowning of Haitian language and culture in a powerful and hegemonic tradition. Half a century later, a young man named Chinnasami walked into the Tiruchi railway station, poured kerosene on himself, lit a match, and burned to death shouting "Tamizh vazhga" (long live Tamil) over and over again. He too was protesting against an imposition: Hindi in Tamil Nadu.

Why? Why take such extreme steps for a language?

Natural connections

Language is an integral part of ourselves, vital to a sense of identity and therefore to our emotional health. There is a natural connection between the language spoken by a social group and that group's self- image. From this citizenship or membership, the group draws a distinct strength and pride, social importance, and a feeling of belonging in a historical space. The closer you move to your mother tongue, the deeper you move into the safety zone of a sense of self.

But what if we hobble home thinking and feeling Indian and speaking and writing in English? This article is for that section of Indians who are "language orphans"; people who are losing their grip on their mother tongues and living with a foster-language, people who go home to find that their house has two front doors. The educational patterns that prevailed ? and continue to ? in the modernisation of India has created this body of at least three generations of Indians who speak one or two Indian languages fluently but do all their reading in English. They are in some sense, homegrown exiles, living like refugees in their own homes. Yet, the paradox of history is that it is for this group of Indians that publishers have created a phantom literature that is neither English nor an indigenous Indian language: a third literature that is both beautiful and problematic ? India translated.

Narratives without boundaries

In our markedly oral culture there have always been movements between one Indian language and another, leading to narrations that blithely ignored the nature of the source language from which they picked up a text while recreating and improvising in another. These crossovers made India a huge mela of retellings (including from Persian and Arabic traditions), until the arrival of the English language with its moving camp of dictionaries and printing presses. With this world came a set of norms from a monolingual vision ? and the installation of the sacred "original" as a goal to be achieved by anyone who set out to capture it in another language. The idea of an "original text" became overpowering, further strengthened by the nexus between cultural politics and literacy; and when printing raised walls in an oral/ aural tradition, it also cast a shadow on the Indian genius for modifying and "adjusting". Gone were artistic flourishes like Mahavishnu appearing in Shakespeare's play to bring Romeo and Juliet back to life to end things on a happy note as scripted by a Kannada translator in 1910. Transplanting and translocating withered; unbounded freedom to reinterpret creatively from memory slowed disastrously.

All communication depends on interpretation and many sociological and even political compulsions called for an opening up of our complex knowledge systems through renderings in English. Indian law, philosophy, religious texts, literary compositions, whole libraries were ransacked in this on-going venture of transfer. The shadowy form of the modern translator appeared, limping up the rough and unrewarding road to publishing.

The fact is that the translator is the originator of a new text because as far as the readership in the target language is concerned, the translator is the writer. This assertion is especially necessary when we have Indian translators performing the stupendously challenging task of moving texts from their mother tongues into a language which did not originate here. It is a language that we Indians ? natural polyglots and the world's greatest mimics ? have ingested, python-like, a filter-language we are using to decode literary voices from outside our country into our multiple mother tongue readership, and to encode our literature for those who can manage only English.

Translation is no longer done by people who have nothing better to do. It is a determined and collective attempt to reclaim our literary heritage from a multi-lingual legacy unbelievably rich, possibly a literary historian's nightmare because the singular characteristic of the Indian tradition is that past and present are not divided into historical fragments but are an integral and intimate part of the same timeflow.

Two worlds

The translator's consciousness inhabits two worlds at the same time, each trying to ignore the power of the other, afraid of contamination and of being dominated. Collaborating closely with editors and resource persons, the translator creates a text in which elegance and precision are necessary allies. Finally, translation is not about moving between two dictionaries as a lot of people think it is, but between two encyclopaedias. To translate is to live dangerously as a literary nomad, celebrating the restoration of texts and ensuring the continuity of the writers in our national languages.

How fortunate that a literary and commercial exercise is also a patriotic one.