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

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar and Rajender Kaur


To go back to something you say, I should point out that my emphasis on the narrative styles, techniques and modes is certainly not a denial that objective social reality is important for the realist novel.  All I am saying is that in literature the representation of objective reality is not achieved by holding a mirror up to nature, by describing all the minute details we see; as the novels we are discussing show us, the “how” of representation is often laden with epistemic significance.  Indian and African novels, as well as the traditional – folk – forms they drew on, need to be analyzed with this in mind.

Q: Let’s turn to the subject of translation, especially your collaborative translation of Chha Mana Atha Guntha.  Were there occasions when the four of you, the translators, got stuck in the difficulty of rendering in English the deliberately uneven and bumpy allusive surface of Senapati’s novel? Did you forge strategies for translating the oral, performative and gestural dimensions of the novel – most notably the range of tonalities adopted by the narrator from mock deferential, openly or obliquely skeptical or coy refusal to make judgments? Your introduction offers some clues about the translation zone. For instance, you describe in the introduction how the passage on the village pond and women’s conversations at the pond is itself a parodic translation of an Orientalist anthropological account by Reverend Lal Behari Day. We wonder then if the processes of translation led you and your fellow translators to the notion that the realism of early realist novels in 19th century India is not a solid and stable surface but a series of tectonic layers of translations of texts of a number of languages.

SPM: Yes, of course we often got stuck while translating this novel, as you can imagine.  The process was far from easy.  Given the layered nature of Senapati’s language, which includes everything from the most familiar peasant speech to upper-caste Sanskritized versions of Odia, from Persian-inflected diction to direct echoes of English and Sanskrit as languages of power and authority, not to mention the unexpected shifts of tone from the plain and straightforward to the ironic and parodic, we knew that any English translation would necessarily involve a considerable amount of flattening.  (The earlier translation into Hindi is excellent, by the way, and so, I am told, is the Telugu one.  Some readers of the Bangla translation have complained to me that much of the tonal range is lost in it, perhaps because the dominant literary dialect of Bangla is the high Sanskritic “purified” or “sadhu” form of the language.)

Since we wanted the final version to reach a wide audience, to be read by all interested readers and not just academic specialists, we decided to provide only the most essential footnotes, with a glossary at the end.  Our editor at the University of California Press, Linda Norton, had told me that my introduction needed to address the world-wide non-academic audience that would be encountering this book for the first time, and I am glad I had that in mind in thinking about how to pitch the discussion.  The only thing I would do differently now is to say, even more bluntly, “Do read this novel at least twice.  You will most probably focus on the story the first time and not quite get what is most interesting about the book.”

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