If one of our unexamined practices is pointed out to us, and if we see it as a sloppy or lazy habit we have lapsed into that we wish to correct, we may respond by trying to improve our practices. Another response is to consider the matter and adjust our understanding so that it suits what has in fact become our normal practice.

Suppose it is pointed out to us that we make no sense when we describe English newspapers in India as the national press and Indian language newspapers as the language press. But these long-established descriptions do say something about how we tend to conceptualize the nation and its counterpoints.

In this argument, I propose to take these descriptions seriously in the context of the idea that India is not a nation-state, but a transnation-republic, and that translations between English and the Indian languages play a crucial role in keeping this republic going. My emphasis here does not express the view that India is not a nation-state, or that Indian languages exist only as a counterpoint to English. Of course not. What is being examined here is the logic of the terms “national press” and “language press”. It is of course important to note that in Bangla, for instance, no journalist would dream of using such terms as “jaatiyo sangbaadpatro” or “bhaashaa sangbaadpatro” – they would make no sense at all; the point of view discussed here is an Anglophone one.

I begin by very quickly sketching a “transnation argument”. The reasoning begins by asking what the modern nation-state means, and by working with the initial answer that such an entity must rest on a consultative democratic process. But when we follow that logic through, we find that we have tarried too long at a station on the way, and that we have to hurry to get to the next point, which is not the nation-state but the transnation-republic. There is only one difficulty. We have no idea how to get there. No problem; we often rush towards destinations whose addresses we do not know. Please do not let that stop us. Even without knowing quite what it is we have to do, our community does have to take this politically and epistemically crucial step now. This involves recognizing the substantive and not merely formal role of translation and other ‘cultural boundary-crossing’ practices, a mouthful for which I shall substitute the simple term translation from this point onwards.

The transnation argument in and of itself is reasonably compact, and I propose here only to state it, not to expand its steps. Please do not complain about its opacity — it is supposed to be opaque. What comes right after this formulation, however, draws a picture of translation that emphasizes the asymmetry between translation from English into regional languages and vice versa. I shall argue for a new take that does not simply lament the asymmetry, but recognizes that it reflects the different purposes of the two directions of translation traffic. Recognizing these differences involves working with substantive tools that do not homogenize all translations by normative fiat. These tools help situate each subtraffic in a historically and functionally specifiable niche and offer a reasonable map of the interrelations between niches in the cognitive ecology of the traffic as a whole.

First, let us have a look at the transnation argument itself. The argument can be usefully broken down into the following steps:

(1) Definition: Assume that a transnation is a republic based explicitly on a recognition of ethnic multiplicity and on the constitutive use of translation within the republic. Distinguish republic as arena from state as apparatus.

(2) Location: Consider the case of India and the role of English as a translation vehicle.

(3) Naturalness: Issues of naturalness arise in the context of the subcommunity of Indians who arguably identify with English. This subcommunity and its literary vehicle have been over-researched.

(4) From Familiarity to Artificiality: Other issues waiting to be addressed arise from the necessary artificiality of English as a translation vehicle in the transnation of India.

(5) Design and Expressive Power: A deliberately designed toolkit is often a more effective resource for expressing the simplest general facts about nature—in (for instance) scientific notation.

(6) Teachability: What comes naturally to a community is often harder to teach as a notational device than an artificial toolkit is.

(7) Irrelevance of Initial Naturalness: Any language systematically used as a translation vehicle necessarily turns into a notational device even if it started out as a redeployed natural language.

(8) Regional Counterpoints to the Toolkit Language: Exploring just how English as a device counterpoints the regional languages in India thus becomes in part a literary exploration of teaching as a textual encounter even in the sciences, and can change what we mean or should mean by “textual”.

(9) Going Beyond the Nation Approach: Studies of the nation as an ideological system epitomized in the family, the school, the church, studies informed by the phenomenological themes we have received through the structuralist line of descent/ dissent, do not help this exploration.

(10) Appropriate Tools and Prototypes: The distinctive redeployment of postmodern theory in the service of science studies does help. So does the use of Esperanto as a prototypical transcode in whose terms we articulate the notion of a toolkit language in general for other cases, thus unpacking at a theoretical level the familiar pointthat English as a vehicular language serves as a surrogate for Esperanto.

That was the transnation argument, deliberately not expanded here. To expand it fully in terms of the key concepts that make it tick would be a foray into the social sciences. I shall be happy to undertake such an exploration elsewhere, and for the time being would request readers who find it opaque to just ignore it. The purpose of this particular argument is to work out a critical humanities supplement to the transnation argument, using tools from translation studies. Specifically, the supplement provided here focuses on the contrast between template-intensive and significance-intensive methods of translation. This contrast helps unpack step eight in the transnation argument; the point that encourages us to examine the counterpoint between Indian languages and English in India. Such an examination works best if we visualize India not as a nation-state but as a transnation-republic in whose workings translation plays a constitutive role.

The transnation-republic as envisaged here is a substantive telos (or implicit goal), in contrast to the formally conceptualized nation-state. I take it that the conceptual

grounds for regarding the linguistically homogeneous nation-state as a model have to do with the consultative logic of democracy. That logic drives the replacement of the feudal monarchy by the anti-hierarchical republic. If the monarch’s a priori judgment could in some cases afford to be tolerant of diversity, this was in part because the heterogeneity of the citizenry would not affect the unity of the sovereign royal will that ensures the cohesion of the state. The natural contrast pitted monarchy against the image of a democratic order based on inductive logic, surveying representative opinions among the citizens and arriving at reasonable summations that the republic must implement if it is to reflect the general will.

Now, for a consultative process to make it easy to formulate decisions and to have them communicated, consented to and implemented, it pays to insist that a community that seeks to work the democratic system must be in a habitual state of conversation and speak one language, a homogeneity that yields the habit of conversation as a natural consequence. From this logic it follows that the nation-state, if it is to pursue a democratic path, should preferably be monolingual, in contrast to the typical monarchy, which could afford to ignore linguistic unity or multiplicity in its functioning.

Nationalisms of the classical kind worked very closely with this logic. It is this logic that still underlies such processes as the general decolonization proposed by the League of Nations on the basis of a concept of self-determination pitched at the level of self-conscious ethnicities. The early political processes in the trajectory of many twentieth century nation-states built on these premises adhered fairly closely to the classical model. This closeness of fit kept a general theory of modernization on the shelves for decades on end. It was believed that historical forces, understood reasonably clearly, were propelling the prototypical new nations towards monolingual consolidation, as replications of the European ideal-type of a modern national community.

Just how one construes the breakdown of that modernist model determines one’s reading of the postmodern predicament, both in the social science trajectory visualized for nation-states and in the humanities replay at the level of self-conscious narration that gives these proto-literary realities a textual habitation and a name. Your reading of that breakdown shapes your take on India.

My own reading works along the following lines. For a modern republic to be managed, both the managers and the managees (those managed) have to come up with viable responses to issues of asymmetric access to
the knowledge resources involved. Yes, in the ideally transparent republic, the managees do consult each other and come up with proposals about what the state apparatus should do. But the state filters these proposals through expert advice, and things are so set up that the relevant parts of any state are institutionally bound to do so.

Now, expert advice has an a priori authority that inherits something like the royal mantle, in that it is not accountable to the general public but only to the closed managerial authority of the respective disciplinary procedures of the system. It follows that a modern nation-state cannot evolve towards a truly consultative monolingual conversation whereby the managees increasingly narrow the gap between themselves and the managers. For the process is hijacked by an industrialized system of expertise that has gone international and uses English as one of the instruments of its hegemonic structure.

If there is to be even the beginning of a participatory democratic reversal of this hijack, new mechanisms have to be put in place to make the system accountable. The goal is to subject it to scrutiny by the people in each locality (to take only one example of a subcommunity) with respect to the impact of its decisions on those people. Such mechanisms have to function in the local language. This is a quick summary of what we have learnt from our experience in civil resistance to certain aspects of globalization.

It has been clear that accountability to the local community is not just a matter of geographically defined locations and the communities that inhabit them. The system must be made accountable to categorially defined communities as well — to children, to women, to dalits, to the illiterate, to those below the poverty line, and to overdetermined subcategories such as poor rural women. That exercise also presumes acknowledgement of language differences. The positive actions driving the necessary dialogue in all these cases take the form of translation.

I’ve been presenting the matter in what may look like NGO terms. These come naturally to us because of the pattern of recent public discussion. But surely the NGO discourse is continuing today what was started by socially aware fiction writers yesterday. This continuity leads to the expectation that the community of literary critics may pay some attention to these issues. But it is natural, of course, that literary critics will articulate and address the issues in their own distinctive ways.

One point at which the NGO discourse and the literary follow-up visualized here are likely to overlap is in the enterprise of improving the ability of subaltern users to find and decipher relatively inaccessible

discourses in the public space of a legal, academic, medical and generally technical nature. This enterprise is often wrongly described as the task of widely disseminating the knowledge of English. But what is at stake is often the work of deciphering a document in one of India’s regional languages so that a recipient is able to use it. At the heart of this problem is translation, viewed not as a formal relation between a domestic and a foreign vocabulary, but as the substantive process of turning a difficult text into a version that a particular user can understand.

A transnation is a republic whose functioning makes constitutive use of translation even at the obvious level of managing the traffic of texts across language boundaries. More generally, though, it is a place where these obvious cases of translation serve to highlight the attention paid to the wider process of minimizing or circumventing the opacity that prevents certain users from gaining access to certain texts.

While these matters have long been clear to many persons of good will who wish to intervene, the actual work of translation has remained a mess. This may in part be due to a certain measure of underappreciation of just how the standard regional languages in India are niched. The way a particular standard language looks at a particular stage in the development of the public space reflects the progress so far of the constitutive negotiation that characterizes that space. Such a standard is a construct that represents the current balance of cultural power among the relevant players, including subalterns, whose recent literary interventions have changed this balance. It is this context that has made it appropriate to start redefining the shape and texture of India’s regional languages.

Thus, there is a degree of artifice that has to be borne in mind – not a deliberately designed artifice for which some particular agent can be held responsible, but artifice as a telos of a negotiative public space, a type of artifice shaped by where the chips fall.

In other words, it will not do to regard a standard language as representing pure grass-roots spontaneity just because India labels it as a regional language. When a text is written in such a language, it is a public site from which various readers can receive what they need. But private reception of public discourse is not automatic. It involves effecting a translation from the structure represented by the standard language into idioms current in the milieu of a particular subcommunity that the individual reader is most comfortable with. Surely, translation-based packaging of what goes on in the reception process captures only one aspect of the process. But that is the aspect that the present argument can hope to address.
Current work that takes the substantive aspects of translation seriously indicates that it is useful to distinguish between two general types of translation activity. These types, which I shall call “significance-focused” and “template-focused” translation, call for different approaches and methods. That many translation projects start reasonably well and then drift into disaster can be attributed in part to a failure to pay due attention to these heterogeneities.

For instance, consider translations from Indian languages into English. If a technical treatise on musicology is to be translated, it is essential that words like gamak or miir or shruti are either retained in their original forms or anglicized by using a consistent terminology. Such a rigorous procedure of translation is template-focused. It works towards the goal of building a set of equivalent texts that specify the same entities on exactly the same basis. The term “template” stresses the fact that the labels match rigorously across language boundaries and are under the operational control of a systematic knowledge base.

But there are many translation tasks that do not involve such rigour. If a tourist brochure translates the text of a song by Tagore, neither the producer nor the consumer of such a rendering needs a rigorous or consistent protocol of matching term for term.
Consider the Bangla phrase, “nil aakaashe ke bhaashaale shaadaa megher bhelaa” in such a context. Obviously the English word for “bhelaa” is “raft”. But you find that a translator has chosen to write “I wonder who pushed these cloud-boats into the sky!”, using “boat” rather than “raft”. Will you therefore go apoplectic and shoot off a letter to the agency responsible for the tourist brochure: Shame on you, Can’t even tell a boat from a raft? Or will you start wondering what it is that may have prompted this translator to choose “boat” instead of “raft”?

Perhaps the point was to give the reader something that could be skimmed lightly without demanding much attention, and the frequent word “boat” is easier on the skimming eye than the less frequent “raft”. In such renderings, one is choosing to translate a text to get something across, and in certain cases the point is to highlight the importance of a text by choosing to translate it in the first place. The point is not to strive for micro-level exactitude for its own sake. I am using the term “significance-focused” for such translation, in contrast to the “template-focused” type of work that was illustrated earlier.

When we translate from English into Indian languages, the purposes that we serve are equally diverse. Again, there are occasions on which template-focused methods suit us, and occasions where significance-focused methods are more appropriate.
Recall that the point of translation as a constitutive procedure in the transnation of India is part of what makes democratic consultation possible. It pays to be careful when we invoke democracy as if it were thematically easy to specify—it is no such thing. Democracy plays up both the theme of sovereignty and that of deliberation and consultation. These two strands play out very differently in general, and certainly in their particular consequences for translation.

Let us spell out how this works. For the sake of the sovereignty of Bangla as a language, it is important, on the one hand, that certain crucial documents of the republic should exist in a rigorous register of Bangla that serves as the basis for teaching such disciplines as civics in middle school or political science in universities or law in law schools. However, if a document about the devolution of power to the panchayats is to be rendered into a Bangla that rural leaders can follow, and on the basis of which they will devise their strategies for dealing with the state apparatus, then it becomes essential that you break the legalese down into what it means at the brass tacks level. I pause here to note that my remarks on this issue reflect discussions with Malasree Dasgupta, who has been translating such a document into Bangla, though the passage considered here is not a specific quote from her text.

The legalese in such documents often serves to paper over what amounts to a license for laziness in high places. Such papering over is a lie. An English lie can be rigorously translated into a Bangla lie, with all the template-matching energies harnessed for the noble purpose of making the two mendacities perfectly equivalent. “The commission must be given the necessary discretion so that it can take all relevant factors into account” can be translated as “Aayogke jathopojukto kaarjoporidhi deoaa darkaar jaate taar pokkhe praashonggik shomosto nirnaayokke aayotte aanaa sambhab hae” if the point is to prove that Bangla can match the legalese-spinning capabilities of English.

But in fact the point, in these cases, is not to reproduce the red tape, but to cut it in the public interest. This is not to say that Bangla does not need a register of legalese, but that that register is more appropriate in the context of sovereignty than in the consultative context. A serious democratic process of strengthening the public space needs to develop both the resources of sovereignty and an uninterrupted public conversation. Translation serves these different purposes equally, but differently, using distinct tools from its toolkit.

To return to our panchayat empowerment document, what the Bangla version should say is “Kamishaner shadoshshoraa jaate kaajer shabgulo dik txhikmato bujhe niye shaamlaate paaren shejonne taaxder nijeder mato kore kaaj karaar shaadhinotaa deoaa darkaar.” The public will instantly see that the system leaves the members of the commission free from deadlines. It follows that the public has to bug them so that they deliver without unreasonable delay. If we, the public, do not know that the document gives the commission the right to feel relaxed, then we will not be aware of our duty to keep encouraging the commission to minimize its procrastinations.

At the present juncture, it is possible that certain priorities tend to weigh on our minds as we translate. When we translate from Indian languages to English, we adopt a more template-focused approach than perhaps was the case a generation or so ago. We feel that the validity of knowledge systems encoded in Indian languages has been shortchanged and that the enduring intellectual value of these systems needs more explicit recognition in English. We also have a sense that earlier generations of English readers had it too easy and were offered translations that did not make them sweat. We now want them to work harder to appreciate the intricacies of the Indian cultural ethos, past and present. In part this is because the persons we are writing for are not a “them” but an “us”; much of the consumption of English translations from Indian languages is now within India.

In the other direction, some of us feel that the exercise of proving the capability of Indian languages to sustain a serious academic and pedagogic system has stopped making sense. Consequently, when we translate English documents into Indian languages, we tend to ask ourselves just which readers are likely to need to read them in their mother tongue rather than in English. We thus choose a significance-focused style of translation, hoping thereby to meet the reader half-way.

To the extent that these priorities have an impact on our practices, it is possible that right now many of us have a significance-focused default for translating from English into Indian languages and a template-focused default for the task of englishing serious Indian texts. Notice, however, that at best this is only a minute part of the story. We must be careful not to let our enterprise of making sense of the subtraffic of translation collapse into stereotypes. All methods of translation are relevant in all directions. The questions to ask are: how much of which method, for what concrete purpose in the lives of exactly which stake-holders, and so on. As we ask these questions, we move from the once necessary formal approach to the now pertinent substantive approach to these matters.

As we improve our understanding of the translation relations within our transnation, we move beyond the exigencies of the nation-state into the new public space that contemporary forces are reshaping so
rapidly that our intellectual resources scarcely enable us to keep up with the changes. Surely, scholars in English studies are among those most directly affected by the complexity of questions of this sort in such a space as India. That is why one looks forward to especially serious debate in the context of literary inquiry.

TOP