Hello everyone
This task is in response to the task assigned by professor Dilip Barad sir as part of a thinking activity in which I would like to share my understanding of the article.
The book is by Tejaswini Niranjana, in our syllabus only the first chapter of that book is there. She mainly discusses how the history of translation is , how people look at the concept of translation and How William Jones looks at India as an inferior country. Object of the article is to not translate the book but how the translation happened and what is the purpose behind the translation of any work. In the article to criticise western ideas she used Western Theories to criticise that culture or way of looking. What is our history of translation and how it is changing and how people see it today. Chronology of translation became important in the article of Tejaswini Niranjana.
Article divided into three parts:-
She started her book with interesting thing,
The passion for English knowledge has penetrated the most obscure, and extended to the most remote parts of India. The steam boats, passing up and down the Ganges, are boarded by native boys, begging, not for money, but for books.... Some gentlemen coming to Calcutta were as- tonished at the eagerness with which they were pressed for books by a troop of boys, who boarded the steamer from an obscure place, called Comercolly. A Plato was lying on the table, and one of the party asked a boy whether that would serve his purpose. "Oh yes," he exclaimed, “give me any book; all I want is a book." The gentleman at last hit upon the expedient of cutting up an old Quarterly Re- view, and distributing the articles among them.
In a post-colonial context the problematic of translation becomes a significant site for raising questions of representation, power, and historicity. The context is one of contesting and contested stories attempting to account for, to recount, the asymmetry and inequality of relations between peoples, races, languages. Since the practices of subjection/subjectifi- cation implicit in the colonial enterprise operate not merely through the coercive machinery of the imperial state but also through the discourses of philosophy, history, anthropology, philology, linguistics, and literary interpretation, the colonial "subject" constructed through technologies or practices of power/knowledge is brought into being within multiple discourses and on multiple sites. One such site is translation. Translation as a practice shapes, and takes shape within, the asymmetrical relations of power that operate under colonialism. Translation depends on the Western philosophical notions of reality, representation, and knowledge. Jacques Derrida suggests, the concepts of metaphysics are not bound by or produced solely within the "field" of philoso- phy. Rather, they come out of and circulate through various discourses in several registers, providing a "conceptual net- work in which philosophy itself has been constituted." Translation functions as a transparent presentation of something that al- ready exists, although the "original '' is actually brought into being through translation. Paradoxically, translation also pro- vides a place in "history" for the colonised.
Her concern here is to explore the place of translation in contemporary Euro-American literary theory using the name of this "discipline" in a broad sense through a set of interrelated readings. She argues that the deployment of "translation" in the colonial and post-colonial contexts shows us a way of questioning some of the theoretical emphases of poststructuralism.
Chapter 1 - She outlines the problematic of translation and its relevance to the post-colonial situation. Reading the texts of different kinds of colonial translators.
In chapter 2, She examines how "translation" works in the traditional discourse of translation studies and in ethnographic writing. Discussing the last two, which are somewhat marginal to literary theory, may nevertheless help us sharpen our critique of translation.
In chapters 3, 4, and 5, her main focus is the work of Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Walter Benjamin, an earlier critic who is becoming increasingly important to post-structuralist thinkers. Her analysis shows how translation functions as a "figure" in all three thinkers, becoming synonymous or associated with a major preoccupation in each: allegory or literature in de Man, the problematics of representation and intentionality in Derrida, and the question of materialist historiography in Benjamin. Pointing out the configurations of translation and history in Benjamin's work, She describe the kind of reading provided by de Man and Derrida of Benjamin's important essay "The Task of the Translator." Her argument is that Walter Benjamin's early writings on translation are trapped in significant ways into his later essays on the writing of history, a trope that goes unrecognised by both de Man and Derrida. She uses trope to indicate a metaphorizing that includes a displacement as well as a re-figuring. The refusal of these major proponents of deconstruction to address the question of history in Benjamin suggests a critical draw- back in their theory and perhaps indicates why deconstruction has never addressed the problem of colonialism.
In the final chapter, with the help of a translation from Kannada, a South Indian language, into English, She discusses the "uses" of post-structuralism in post-colonial space. Throughout the book, her discussion functions in all the registers- philosophical, linguistic, and political-in which translation "works" under colonialism.
Translation As Interpellation
As translator and scholar, Jones was responsible for the most influential introduction of a textualized India to Europe. Within three months of his arrival, the Asiatic Society held its first meeting with Jones as president and Warren Hastings, the governor general, as patron. It was primarily through the efforts of the members of the Asiatic Society, themselves administrators and officials of the East India Company's Indian Government, that translation would help "gather in" and "rope off" the Orient. And he declared that, "to know India better than any other European ever knew it."
His works were carefully studied by the writers of the age, especially the Germans-Goethe, Herder, and others. When Jones's new writings reached Europe, the shorter pieces were eagerly picked up and reprinted immediately by different periodicals. In Jones's construction of the "Hindus," they appear as a submissive, indolent nation unable to appreciate the fruits of freedom, desirous of being ruled by an absolute power, and sunk deeply in the mythology of an ancient religion. The idea of the "submissive" Indians, their inability to be free, and the native laws that do not permit the question of liberty to be raised are thus brought together in the concept of Asian despotism.
The glorious past of India, according to Jones, is shrouded in superstition, "marked and bedecked in the fantastic robes of mythology and metaphor", but the now "degenerate" and "abased" Hindus were once "eminent in various knowledge." The presentation of the Indians as "naturally" effeminate as well as deceitful often goes hand in hand in Jones's work.
As a Supreme Court judge in India, Jones took on, as one of his most important projects, the task of translating the ancient text of Hindu law, Manu's Dharmasastra. In fact, he began to learn Sanskrit primarily so that he could verify the interpretations of Hindu law given by his pandits. Even before coming to India, Jones had formulated a solution for the problem of the translation of Indian law.
The Question Of History:-
Her central concern here is not to elaborate on the battle for "history" now being staged in Euro-American theory but to ask a series of questions from a strategically "partial" perspective that of an emergent post-colonial practice willing to profit from the insights of post-structuralism, while at the same time demanding ways of writing history in order to make sense of how subjectification operates.
She uses the word historicity to avoid invoking History with a capital H, her concern being with "local" practices or micro practices as Foucault calls them of translation that require no overarching theory to contain them. We may also find useful Louis Althusser's critique of his- toricism, which leads him, in Jameson's words, to formulate the notion that "history is a process without a telos or a subject," "a repudiation of... master narratives and their twin categories of narrative closure - telos and of character.
The most profound insight Derrida's work has afforded to post-colonials is the notion that origin is always already heterogeneous, that it is not some pure, unified source of meaning or history. What Derrida is claiming is that there is no primordial "presence" that is then represented. The "re-" does not befall the original. It is the concept of representation that suppresses the difference that is already there in the so-called origin and grounds the whole of Western metaphysics. Derrida's critique of representation is important for post- colonial theory because it suggests a critique of the traditional notion of translation as well. In fact, the two problems have always been intertwined in Derrida's work. He has indicated more than once that translation perhaps escapes "the orbit of representation" and is therefore an "exemplary question." The point is not just to criticise these characterizations as "inadequate" or "untrue"; one should attempt to show the complicity of the representations with colonial rule and their part in maintaining the asymmetries of imperialism.
Conclusion:-
Clearly, the notion of hybridity, which is of great importance for a Subaltern critique of historiography as well as for a critique of traditional notions of translation, is both "ambiguous and historically complex." "To restrict "hybridity," or what she call "living in translation," to a post-colonial elite is to deny the pervasiveness, however heterogeneous, of the transformations wrought across class boundaries by colonial and neocolonial domination. This is not to present a meta narrative of global homogenization, but to emphasise the need to reinvent oppositional cultures in non essentializing ways. Hybridity can be seen, therefore, as the sign of a post-colonial theory that subverts essentialist models of reading while it points toward a new practice of translation.
Video Recording of the article presentation:-
word count:-1645
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