Paper short abstract:

This paper seems to explore the conceptualization and practice of translation in modern Tamil literary culture. Focusing on a debate in the pages of the Tamil literary review, the Manikodi it argues that translation as a self-conscious literary practice emerged in the 1930s.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seems to explore the conceptualization and practice of translation in modern Tamil literary culture. It argues that translation as a self-conscious literary practice emerges only in the 1930s. In the late nineteenth-century, essays and stories were translated for pedagogical and edificatory purposes. Writings from English were adapted without acknowledgment. It was not uncommon for such translations to carry no reference to the original author, and the 'translation' itself showed little fidelity to the form, structure, style or even lexicon. This was an accepted practice and was not considered to be plagiarism.

A recognizably modern concept and practice of translation emerged in the inter-War period. This moment was inaugurated by the arrival of the popular novel which borrowed heavily from the penny-dreadfuls of Victorian England. In the 1920s such borrowing came in for criticism.

I focus on an important debate in the pages of the Tamil literary review, the Manikodi In this debate, 'Thazhuvala, Mozhipeyarpa' (adaptation or translation) eight important writers and critics debated the question of the nature of translation. I argue that it was through this debate that adaptation (both acknowledged and unacknowledged) was constituted as inferior, and a translation faithful to the original was recognized as a valued literary practice. Underpinning this was the conception of a self-conscious author who created an original text that was situated in a specific time and place. Through an analysis of this debate this argument is fleshed out.

Paper short abstract:

My presentation will focus on several hagiographical accounts written in Telugu and Kannada during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in an effort to understand the relation between a text’s language, its devotional vision, and its reception in its original language and in translation.

Paper long abstract:

The Śivabhakti tradition of the Kannada-speaking regions, known today as "Vīraśaivism" and "Liṅgāyatism," has produced throughout the centuries devotional literature in several languages. In addition to writings in Kannada, which includes the Vacanas, collections of saints stories, and theological tracts, we can also find original literature written in Sanskrit and Telugu that is associated with Kannada Śivabhakti. In this presentation, I shall present two competing accounts about the twelfth-century Kannada saints: the early thirteenth-century Śivaśaraṇara Ragaḷegaḷu, written in Kannada, and the mid-to-late thirteenth-century Basava Purāṇamu, written in Telugu. I will argue that the two texts are different not only in their language and other poetic choices, but also in terms of the authors' understanding of what it means to be a Śiva devotee in their respective milieus. I will then turn to consider the significances of the appearance of the translation of the Telugu Basava Purāṇamu into Kannada in the middle of the fourteenth century, and explain why the original Telugu text was marginal in the history of Telugu literature, its Kannada translation gained an immense popularity in the Kannada devotional audience. Finally, by building on the successful reception of the Kannada translation of the Telugu Basava Purāṇamu among Kannada devotional communities, I will suggest considering a textual translation in premodern South Asia as a literary event that opens up new possibilities in terms of the original text's themes, form, and its potential appeal for new audiences.

Paper short abstract:

The paper seeks to explain the use of the genre marker purāṇam in Tamil literature on Islamic themes, arguing that the term purāṇam served as a signifier for a narrative originating in Arabic or Persian discourse, thereby highlighting the narrative’s origins outside South India.

Paper long abstract:

Beginning in the late sixteenth century, poets and religious scholars created a sizeable and diverse corpus of texts that rendered Islamic narratives and scholarly discourse in Tamil language. The most important works in this corpus are a set of more than a dozen long, narrative poems, consisting of several thousand stanzas each, that tell events from the lives of Muslim prophets and saints. Strikingly, a sizeable share of these poems are designated as purāṇas, a term more commonly associated with Hindu and Jain texts than with Muslim discourse. It is therefore hardly surprising that scholars have generally perceived in the use of the term purāṇam a movement towards localization and rooting of 'foreign' subject material in a Tamil-Hindu environment, an explanation that fits squarely with a wider academic propensity to stress the local character and supposed vernacular embeddedness of Islamic Tamil literature. However, I aim to demonstrate in this paper that the use of the term purāṇam by Tamil Muslims was not meant to make Islamic themes somehow less 'foreign', but on the contrary signaled the translated-ness of a text, thereby emphasizing the Tamil text's origin in Arabic or, rarely, Persian discourse.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at translation as the mode of the shift of the Muslim public sphere to the Malayalam script and polity in late nineteenth century in the south Indian state of Kerala.

Paper long abstract:

The Muslim population of the south Indian state of Kerala traditionally employed a script called Arabi-Malayalam, a script which was Arabic but with inflections to denote the additional sounds in Malayalam. Thus though the spoken language was a dialectal variation of what would later become standard Malayalam, the script was starkly different. The shift of the Muslim public sphere to the Malayalam script began in the late nineteenth century, under the influence of the religious scholar Sanaullah Makthi Thangal (1847-1912) who was also a British government official. A polyglot well versed in English, Tamil, Hindi, and Malayalam, Makthi Thangal exhorted the Muslims to shift to the Malayalam script to counter the Christian missionaries whose literature was proliferating, and thereby participate in the religious debates between the various interest groups. This act of talking back in the emerging public sphere necessitated more than translating between scripts , forcing metaphorization of the language of theology, history and memory of the communities. Celebrated as the moment of Muslim Renaissance of Kerala, this moment is crucial in forming a Malayalee public sphere which established Malayalee as a regional rather than a caste identity, and in which the Muslims would claim equal representation in the coming decades. This paper will lay out the cultural actors of the period, and the process of multiple translations in the configuration of the language polity as crucial to understanding language politics in South Asia.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will discuss bi-lingual (Persian and Hindi/Bengali/others) legal documents from 17th-19th century India, in order to explore a specific area of language use (legal documentation) and translation practices therein.

Paper long abstract:

A pet hatred of language activists of all hues in mid-19th century India was the "impure" written language(s) of offices and courts, which failed to live up to the literary standards of re-discovered classical literatures, sported notoriously "mixed" vocabularies abounding in administrative Persian, and were written in a variety of scripts and hands that came to be increasingly condemned as illegible and susceptible to various forms of corruption. This paper will look beyond that historical indictment and will examine the material on its own terms. Despite what we know about the adoption of Persian for administrative purposes in late-16th century Mughal India, my recent research on Indo-Persian legal documents from the 17th century onwards (including a variety of deeds, associated administrative orders and records of adjudication) has revealed to me a world of legal documentation rife with bi- and multi-lingualism. This paper will discuss a sample of such documents in which Persian is combined with other South Asian languages (mainly Hindi, but also Bengali and possibly another) commenting on the possible purposes of such language use. It will then move on to considering some features of the much-maligned vocabularies of the languages used in these documents, reflecting on key terms, formulae and concepts considered equivalent and/or complementary in the two relevant languages. This will lead on to some tentative conclusions about the process and agents of legal and linguistic standardization and evolution from early modern to early colonial India.

Paper short abstract:

How are the Arabic poetics of love, separation and devotion translated in a multilingual context, and what forms do these translations take? This paper will examine these questions in the context of 19th century Indian commentaries and translations of canonical Arabic poems.

Paper long abstract:

Canonical Arabic poems such as Kaʿb b. Zuhayr's Suʿād has departed (7th century) and al-Būṣīrī's Burda (13th century) continued to enjoy popularity in 19th century North India, and were significant in the articulation of cultural and linguistic identities among Muslim elites as well as being incorporated into popular devotional practice. Both poems draw on familiar idioms of Arabic love and separation to articulate devotion to the Prophet, and enjoyed a quasi-scriptual status. Unsurprisingly, manuscript copies of both poems abound, and printing technologies in the 19th century allowed for their further circulation beyond small scholarly networks.

Different 19th century reproductions of the poems follow distinct strategies to convey meaning to the audience, whether that strategy be single language commentary, interlineal glosses, or freer versified translations in Persian and Urdu such as those printed in several editions in Lucknow from the 1870s onwards. This paper will examine these strategies as modes of translation, whereby multilingualism is either obscured or textualised, and it will ask what we can conclude about the relationship between different cultural productions of the same texts and their audiences. Furthermore, the paper will consider the mechanics of translation, and how the idioms of Arabic love and devotion are rendered beyond the poems themselves. When we step outside the Arabic language, how are we to understand its poetics? After all, who is Suʿād, and why do we care that she has departed?

Paper short abstract:

This paper endeavors to raise questions about the translation of rhetoric theory from Arabic to South Asia; about the translation of this theory into practice; and about translation as an aesthetic dimension of Islamic sermons in contemporary Bangladesh.

Paper long abstract:

Religious speech is one important site among the multilingual configurations of South Asia. Reflections about it as laid out in rhetoric theories are themselves shaped by processes of translation. The paper will in a first step shed light on the adoption of Arabic 'hermeneutical rhetoric' in South Asia, which involves translations, transcriptions and new relationships to other parts of rhetoric. It is argued that despite normative instructions on certain aspects, a lot of room is left for a rhetoric practice which can adopt to different linguistic surroundings. The example of contemporary Bengali sermons shows how this space is used for what might be termed 'sonic translation' and 'melodic dramatization'. In a last step, some questions about the relationship between translation and sonic aesthetics are discussed.

Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses a 19th century Marathi text that allegedly translates a Bengali narrative describing a Hindu Brahmin woman’s conversion to Christianity. The text seeks to produce a social category of modern and emancipated women, who can serve as an experiential blueprint for Indian women.

Paper long abstract:

A noted Brahmin Christian convert from 19th century Pune, Rev. Sheshadri, produced a text in the year 1868 that he termed as a translation of the narrative of "Bala Sundarabai Thakur" (English version: Bala Sundree Tagore) from Bengali into Marathi. Strictly speaking, the text cannot be viewed only as a translation, since it is replete with explanatory para-texts, exhortations made to Marathi Hindu women to reform their ways and step out of their religious morass to follow in the footsteps of Sundarabai, and additional comments observing the remarkability of Sundarabai's steadfast love for Jesus Christ that even surpassed devotion to her husband. Sheshadri wrote the text with the alleged aim of unifying Indian women and their journey towards a singular path of modernity. Sheshadri noted how the recent possibilities to gain western education had led to the potential of women's emancipation, which in his view had provided women far better opportunities than were available to Sundarabai, who had paradoxically performed better. He expressed greater hope that modern women would relinquish their superstitious ways, unify against Hindu traditions, convert their religion from Hinduism to Christianity and tread in the experiential blueprint provided by upper caste stalwart women such as Sundarabai (who shouldered the responsibility of maintaining social status-quo as Brahmin women) in order to strive ahead towards a common and unified path of women's modernity in India. Sheshadri's text therefore exemplifies the deployment of translation as an act of exerting social status, political authority and agency in the religious arena.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the function of translation as a pedagogical tool in nineteenth-century India in realigning existing linguistic boundaries and forms of knowledge. This ability to translate introduces new measures of competencies capable of launching young men across varied career paths.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the significance of the introduction of translation for pedagogical purposes in early nineteenth-century India. I will focus on two distinct contexts of 'learning' where translation played a significant part: the learning of 'Oriental' languages by British civil servants and missionaries in the Madras Presidency aspiring to a career in colonial administration or mission field and the training of Indian catechists aspiring to church ordination in the Bombay Presidency. Despite a complex multi-lingual cultural history, which entailed translation in various guises, the ability to translate had not yet featured as an important criterion by which to learn languages or to measure competence in any field. The introduction of translation as a formal pedagogical tool, serving to effectively teach and examine candidates in a variety of fields of knowledge—from language acquisition and administration, to training in divinity—I argue, has two consequences. One, translation as pedagogy introduces important new conceptions of what 'translation' is and of how languages function and relate to each other. I suggest that the pursuit of commensurability through academic translation exercises both produces different ways of knowing as well as introduces new measures of competencies in the real world. Two, by serving to separate those who could translate accurately from those who could not, it offers an effective mechanism by which young men, British and Indian, could progress within the structures of powerful colonial institutions: the power to translate accurately translates into successful career paths in either administering the civic body or the soul.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how 19th century colonial discourses furthered and complicated existing relationships between already inequal languages by translating notions of modernity into the sphere of language.

Paper long abstract:

What is it that makes languages capable of being translated to modernity? What are the characteristics that mark languages that inhabit various spaces and institutions of modernity? Drawing from Richard Bauman and Charles L Briggs's Voices of Modernity, I argue that these characteristics and categories point to inequalities between languages, furthered by existing discourses on languages inseparable from the people who speak them. Taking the case of India, specifically the case of Kannada, the dominant language of the South Indian State of Karnataka and Kodava, a language belonging to the ethno-linguistic minority of Kodavas within the state of Karnataka, I seek to explore how while certain languages and language forms are translated into modernity, certain others remain in the realm of 'tradition', 'not developed', being 'scriptless', 'oral', in the realm of 'private', and as untranslatable into the sphere of modernity. How does the 'lack' of historiographies, literary and of community, belonging to minorities, get articulated in such processes? I shall examine these questions among others through a study of 19th century ethnographic writings on Kodavas. This I hope will help us map ways in which 20th century discourses have juxtaposed, categorized and translated languages sharing contiguous spaces, their implications to the newly emerging public sphere and to the larger network of contexts involving languages, communities and identities.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the changing conceptualization of translation in the context of Protestant missions in southern India between the 18th and 19th centuries.

Paper long abstract:

Protestant missionaries who came to southern India in the early 18th century enthusiastically engaged with the vernacular of the people they sought to convert, and quickly produced translations of Christian texts. Later generations criticized their 'naive' approach and felt the need for a more comprehensive understanding of translation. This paper investigates changing attitudes towards translation among Protestant missionaries in the 18th and 19th centuries. I argue with Foucault (1966) that there occurred a paradigm shift in how translation was conceptualized: In the early 18th century, the main quality of language was seen in its capability to represent ideas. Translation thus meant to establish a corresponding representation in another framework. The understanding of language as a multilayered repository of the collective spirit of a people, which emerged towards the end of the 18th century, had consequences for the translation practice of the missionaries. Compared to earlier times, the act of translation was considered more complex and demanding since it had to be informed by a variety of cultural dimensions. Moreover, because language was conceptualized as a vehicle to leave an imprint on the spirit of potential converts, translation became the key to the hearts in the hands of the missionaries.