Conversation with Satya 10

From Indian Literature to World Literature:
A Conversation with Satya P. Mohanty

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar and Rajender Kaur

Anyway, when Paul St. Pierre and I first became involved in the project, the early draft of the translation we saw was very rough but it captured fairly well the multi-layered Bakhtinian rhythm and tone of Senapati’s book – and this was understandable, since it reflected the interpretation Rabi Shankar Mishra had already provided in essays he had published in both English and Odia (that draft of the translation was done by Mishra jointly with Jatindra Nayak). Our goal was to revise that draft rigorously to make it as accurate a rendering of Senapati’s Odia as possible, while keeping it fairly easy to read — in terms of idiom and style. But we also decided to keep some words untranslated, partly because some of them (“nabata” is an early one, for instance) don’t have English equivalents, although what they refer to would be clear from the context. Then there were words – for instance “kos,” which is roughly two kilometers – that we left untranslated because these were common terms in Senapati’s time but are no longer in use (many contemporary Odia speakers would not understand them), and we wanted to emphasize the historical distance between Senapati’s time and ours. Finally, of course, we had to find terms that would have resonance for non-Indian readers of English. So the word for the “charita” genre was rendered allusively, and we translated “Ramachandra Mangaraj Charita” as “The Life of Ramachandra Mangaraj,” the capitalized letters pointing subtly to the Lives of Saints genre in the West. The narrator is being ironic there, we know, and readers would miss the irony if we translated “charita” more literally as biography.

Some things had to be translated and explained through detailed footnotes, which I worked on at the very final stage of the translation, together with Rabi Shankar Mishra, with helpful suggestions from our copyeditor at the University of California Press. The allusions to the Nyaya school of Indian philosophy are more pervasive than had initially appeared to us, and we needed to draw attention to that allusive layer without annotating every single reference to Nyaya, which would have been pedantic.

It can be argued that the interpretation I provide in my introduction to the novel is also a form of translation. Rabi Mishra had provided an interpretation in his 1991-92 essays, as had Paul St. Pierre, who wrote about the novel from the perspective of translation theory. I wanted to show, in addition to the centrality of the narrator, what I call the “metaphorical subtext” of the novel, the allusive intertextual level that reveals, much more richly than the plot alone can, the radical subaltern values of the novel. So in a way, the work of translation can be perceived in stages, along a continuum—beginning with the choice of diction and syntax, then through explanatory footnotes, and finally through interpretive essays that revise or challenge the contemporary reader’s assumptions about what an Indian novel is, and especially what a novel about village life is supposed to be like. Translations, much like essays in interpretation, are always a critical engagement with our own times. As we readers question our assumptions and revise our views, our prejudices and resistances, translations need to be updated, since more of the relevant details can be appreciated. Complex texts like Six Acres teach us how to be better readers. They produce their readers, gradually, over time. And this process by which we learn to be better and more sophisticated readers is not narrowly “literary,” since it involves the broader culture – including our entrenched habits, beliefs, and ideological investments. In the case of Six Acres, one of our ideological investments that is unearthed and challenged is our babu-like faith in the inherent superiority of urban perspectives over rural ones, and of writing over orality.

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Essays in this Forum

Rethinking the Global South
by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

From Indian Literature to World Literature: A Conversation with Satya P. Mohanty
by Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar and Rajender Kaur

Asia in My Life
by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

The Global South and Cultural Struggles: On the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization
by Duncan Mceachern Yoon

The Fault Lines of Hindi and Urdu
by Sanjay Kumar

Reframing Colonialism and Modernity: An Endeavour through Sociology and Literature
by Gurminder K. Bhambra

Varieties of Cultural Chauvinism and the Relevance of Comparative Studies
by Tilottoma Misra

Literature to Combat Cultural Chauvinism: A Response
by Shivani Jha

Is There an Indian Way of Thinking about Comparative Literature?
by E. V. Ramakrishnan

Modernity and Public Sphere in Vernacular
by Purushottam Agrawal

West Indian Writers and Cultural Chauvinism
by Jerome Teelucksingh

Oral Knowledge in Berber Women’s Expressions of the Sacred 
by Fatima Sadiki