Introduction: History in Translation by Tejaswini Niranjana

Hello Monks...

I am Riddhi Bhatt. Today I want to talk about "Introduction: History in Translation" by Tejaswini Niranjana . This article is from 'Sitting Translation: History, Poststructuralism and the Colonial Context, 1992'.  This task is assigned by Prof. Dr.Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of the English Department are learning the paper called Comparative Literature & Translation Studies. So, let’s start friends. But before we start I want to give short information about what kind of things we see here…

📌Abstract :

For a while now, some of the most urgent debates in contemporary cultural and literary studies have emerged out of the troubled interface of poststructuralist theory and historical studies. In its most basic formulation, the problem is that of articulating radical political agendas within a deconstructive framework. For a discipline like literary studies, the raison d'être of which is the analysis of representation, the critique of representation coming from within has engendered profoundly self-reflexive anxieties. It is in the context of this crisis that Tejaswini Niranjana's examination of translation as critical practice is made possible. Her analysis seems to amplify and elaborate the possibilities of the claim made by other postcolonial theorists like Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, as well as feminists such as Jane Gallop and Nancy K. Miller, that deconstruction can be used in politically enabling ways. Insisting that a questioning of humanist or Enlightenment models of representation and translation "can underwrite a new practice of translation . . . reinscribing its potential as a strategy of resistance" (6), Niranjana persuasively shows that a critique of presence can be taken to its limits and yet not incapacitate the interventionist critic.

She begins by addressing what she sees as deconstructive criticism's failure to address the problem of colonialism, as well as the neglect by translation studies to ask questions about its own historicity. Contemporary critiques of representation have not extended themselves to the point of questioning the idea of translation, of re-presenting linguistic meaning in interlinguistic transfers. Translation is made possible by the belief in mimesis, which in turn assumes the purity of the original. Niranjana cites powerful examples from the post-colonial context to show how translation was "a significant technology of colonial domination" (21); the use of translation to codify Hindu law, for instance, is revealed as imperialist cathexis, "to create a subject position for the colonised" (19) which would "discipline and regulate the lives of" Hindu subjects (18). In other words, the notion of "original" text was itself used to fashion the native's essence-an instance of colonialism's attempt to erase heterogeneity.

📌Key Points :

• Situating Translation 
• Translation As Interpellation
• The Question of History

📌Key Arguments :

In the colonial context, a certain conceptual economy is created by the set of related questions that is the problematic of translation. Conventionally, translation depends on the Western philosophical notions of reality, representation, and knowledge.Translation functions as a transparent presentation of something that already exists, although the "original" is actually brought into being through translation. 

📌Analysis :

Paradoxically, translation also provides a place in "history" for the colonized. She was, therefore, discuss the pertinence of the critique of historicism to a world undergoing decolonization, given the enduring nature of Hegelian presentation of the non-West and the model of teleological history that authorizes them, a questioning of the model could underwrite a new practice of translation. In the final chapter, with the help of a translation from Kannada, a South Indian language, into English, I discuss the "uses" of post-structuralism in post-colonial space. Throughout the book, my discussion functions in all the registers philosophical, linguistic, and political-in which translation "works" under colonialism. If at any point I seem to dwell on only one of these, it is for a purely strategic purpose. Another aspect of post-structuralism that is significant for a rethinking of translation is its critique of historicism, which shows the genetic (searching for an origin) and teleological (positing a certain end) nature of traditional historiography.A critique of historicism might show us a way of deconstructing the "pusillanimous" and "deceitful" Hindus of Mill and Hegel. Her concern here is not, of course, with the alleged misrepresentation of the "Hindus." Rather, I am trying to question the with holding of reciprocity and the essentializing of “difference” (what Johannes Fabian calls a denial of co evalness) that permits a stereotypical construction of the other.This kind of deployment of translation, I argue, colludes with or enables the construction of a teleological and hierarchical model of cultures that places Europe at I the pinnacle of civilization, and thus also provides a position ,for the colonized. This work belongs to the larger context of the “crisis” in "English" that is a consequence of the impact of structuralism and post-structuralism on literary studies in a rapidly decolonized world. 

 📌Conclusion :

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. Since it is part of her argument that the problematics of translation and the writing of history are inextricably bound together, She should briefly go over Spivak's main points regardin the "Subaltern historians. Their strategic use of post-structuralist ideas may help us see more clearly how the notions of history and translation she wish to reinscribe are not only enabled by the post-colonial critique of historiography but might also further strengthen that critique. 

📌Work Cited :

• Niranjana, Tejsawini. “Sitting Translation: History, Poststructuralism And the Colonial Context.” Introduction: History In Translation, 1992.

THANK YOU..