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Translation Literature in India

Chapter · January 2012

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Dr. Datta G. Sawant

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Datta G. Sawant,
Assistant Professor of English,
TACS College, Sengaon, Dist. Hingoli

Abstract
Translation is an ancient literary activity caused to survive the most ancient literatures in
India like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Now translation has gained a particular place in
Indian Literatures in English, because the rising contact with native Indian languages has proved
to be one of the inevitable activities and parts of any language literatures in India. Let us take a
recent example of the world’s celebrated biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson published
in English, and at same time more than 60 other languages including Marathi. This stated how
translation became the tool of transformation of literatures in English. Hence it is significant to
take a review of Indian translation literature. The present article, History of Indian Translation
Literature is an attempt to reveal the various facets of the ancient Indian literature and its effect
on the contemporary scene of Indian literatures in English. It also highlights and discusses the
very nature of translation to the Indians.
Keywords: translation, literature, history, knowledge-texts, bhasha texts, ancient texts, the great
Indian epics, classical languages, Bhakti period, adaptations, Buddhist texts, cultural texts,
primary texts, donor language, new Nationhood, vernaculars, regional languages, indigenous
versions, oral-textual translation, oral folk traditions, Indian language milieu.

Let us have a look at the translation tradition of India because translation has a chequered
history in India. The earliest translations seem to have happened between Sanskrit, Prakrit and
Pali and the emerging languages of the regions and between the same languages, and Arabic and
Persian. Indian narrative and knowledge-texts like Panchatantra, Ashtangahridaya, Arthshastra,
Hitopdesa, Yogsutra, Ramayana, Mahabharata and Bhagavad-Gita were translated into Arabic
between eighth and ninth centuries; there was an intense exchange between Persian and Indian
texts. Sanskrit texts especially Bhagavad-Gita and Upanishads came into contact with other
Indian languages during the Bhakti period producing great bhasha texts like Jnaneshwari, a
translation of Gita by the Marathi Saint poet Jnaneshwar and several free translations of the

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epics, especially Ramayana and Mahabharata by the saint-poets of various languages. For
example one may look at the Ramayana adaptations of Pampa, Kambar, Malla, Ezhuthacchan,
Tulsidas, Premanand, Eknath, Balaramadasa, Madhav Kandali or Krittibas.
In the early centuries of the Christian era, Buddhist texts were translated into Chinese and
later into Tibetan. Apart from these northern connection, as attested by Arab sources there was
considerable interaction between the Hindus and pre-Islam Arabs, on the west. Not much direct
evidence remains but it is acknowledged that Hindu mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy
travelled to the west in this phase. Even after the advent of Islam on Alberuni’s testimony, the
relationship of give and take continued. From the eleventh century onwards with the rise of
modern Indian languages, Sanskrit techniqual and cultural texts began to be transferred to those
languages—Assamese, Marathi, kannada, Telgu, Bengali and many other—as a method of
preserving those texts through diffusion. At the same time, translations began to be made into
Persian, Zain-Ul-Abedin (1420-1470), the enlightened ruler of Kashmir, established translation
bureau for bilateral rendering between Sanskrit and Persian. Dara Shikoh’s Persian translations
of the Upanishads and Mulla Ahmad’s rendition of Mahabharata are among the major landmarks
along this stream. In the seventeenth-eighteenth century, the great Sikh Guru, Guru Govind
Singh set up a bureau and had a large number of Sanskrit texts translated into Panjabi.
In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, the encounter with the west resulted in a
complex, bidirectional, cultural-intellectual relationship. In the fields of science, engineering,
and in new disciplines such as politics and economics, English became the donor language for
translations into Indian languages. In the fields of philosophy, religion, linguistics and literary
theory, Sanskrit renewed its role as a donor language for translations into English and other
European languages. In fact in the nineteenth century, Europe discovered India as much as India
discovered Europe and the mutual influence was perhaps equal. By 1820, all the major
universities of Europe had chairs in Sanskrit prestige. As the century progressed, Sanskrit
Studies increasingly shaped the European mind. All the major European minds of the nineteenth
century were either Sanskritists or, on their own admission, had been deeply involved in Indian
thought—Humboldt, Fichte, Hegel, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Kant, Nietzsche, Schiller, Shelling,
Saussure, Roman Jacobson. The list is impressive. In 1839-40, Otto Bohtlingk brought out an
edition of Panini’s Astadhyayi with German comment on rules and an index of techniqual terms
with glosses. In 1841, N.L. Westergaard brought out an edition of the Dhatupatha—enumeration

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of Sanskrit verb roots—with Latin gloss and references. In 1858, W.D. Whitney brought out his
translation into English of Atharvaveda Pratisakhya. In 1874, Lorenz Franz Kielhorn published a
translation into English of Nagojibhatta’s Paribhasendusekhara.
Let us turn our attention now to the translation activities in the British period. Though
Macaulay’s Minute and the Anglicists victory in the debate with the Orientalists marked an end
to whatever translations were encouraged from English into regional languages, the translation
activity around Sanskrit still continued as we noted earlier due to Sanskrit's role as donor
language. Furthermore, despite the multilingual character of the Indian communities, the masses
which shared a common heritage were largely illiterate but deeply immersed in their respective
oral cultures. They did not have to transverse further beyond the confines of their respective
languages; almost all the languages had indigenous versions of classical epics such as Ramayana
and Mahabharata. So even if the British support was lacking for translation between Indian
languages, a situation that has not become much better in contemporary times despite much talk
and felt need for such translations, the awareness created by the filter language, English, and the
fall out of the freedom movement which brought Indians from all regions and corners of the
county together, did generate considerable translation activity. The nationalist writings of V.S.
Khandekar in Marathi and Bankim Chandra Chatarjee in Bengali became available to readers in
their own native languages. Besides, the campaign to popularize science led to European
textbooks being translated into Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali and other local languages.
Translation during this period became part of larger process of resistance to alien domination and
a determining factor in the expression of cultural identity and the reassertion of the native self.
The colonial period saw a spurt in translations between European languages and Indian
languages, especially Sanskrit. While there were exchanges between German, French, Italian,
Spanish and Indian languages. English was considered privileged by its hegemonic status as it
was used by the colonizers. The British phase of translation into English culminated in William
Jone’s translation of Kalidasa’s Abhijananashakuntalam. Shakuntalam as a text has now become
a marker of India’s cultural prestige and one of the primary texts in Indian consciousness. This
explains how it came to be translated into more than ten Indian languages in the 19th century.
The (colonial) British attempts in translation were determined by the orientalist ideology and
need for the new rulers to grasp, define, categorize and control India. They created their own
version of India while the Indian translators of texts into English sought to extend, correct, revise

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and sometime challenge the British understanding though the whole battle was fought around
ancient texts rather than the contemporary ones. Raja Rammohan Roy’s translations of
Shankara’s Vedanta and the Kenand Isavasya Upanishads were the first Indian interventions in
English translations of Indian texts by Indian scholars. It was followed by R.C. Dutt’s
translations of Rig-Veda, the Upanishads, Ramayana, Mahabharata and few classical Sanskrit
plays. These translations were meant to challenge the Romantic and Utilitarian notions of Indians
as submissive and indolent. Then came a flood of translations by others like Dinabhandhu Mitra,
Aurobindo and Rabindra Nath Tagore to name only a few. Translations between Indian
languages also began around this time, though in a limited way. The reality however is that
English still remains inaccessible to even the literate majority in India, and the real
empowerment of these sections is possible only through translations of significant literary as
well as knowledge texts in Indian languages. Gandhi’s views on translation may be relevant
here: I consider English as a language for international trade and commerce and therefore it is
necessary that a few people learn it… and I would like to encourage those to be well versed (in
English) and expect them to translate the masterpieces of English into the vernaculars.” He even
felt that the adoption of English as the medium of education might prevent the growth of Indian
languages.
The Postcolonial scene brought new dimensions to the language and translation activities.
A crucial decision in this regard was to create division of states on the basis of regional
languages which kindled regional linguistic pride and acted as an impediment to any single
language successfully supplanting English as the common national link language. Translation
remains the most powerful tool for better understanding among cultures. Within Postcolonial
contexts, translation can be looked upon as policy, as prioritization, as empowerment, as
enrichment and as culture learning. To turn our attention to the Indian situation again in the years
after independence, or “new Nationhood” (Sujit Mukharjee), Indian literature in English
translation has been published under various circumstances. There have been public as well as
private enterprises. The Sahitya Academy and the National Book Trust both fully funded by the
government of India are supporters of literary publications under the public enterprise.
During the twentieth century, the development of communication theory, the expansion
of the field of structural linguistics and the application of linguistics to the study of translation
effected significant changes in the principles and theory of translation. Good literature written in

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any part of the world in any language now made available to the rest of the world through
translation. Tagore translated his Gitanjali originally written in Bengali into English which won
the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. This is the Indian translation literature history.
Thus the history of the world and the history of the translation being closely entwined,
there is no doubt that most of the world’s past comes to us through translation. All throughout
history, translation has enabled the dominant social groups to understand and control the
dominated social classes; it has also allowed these lower classes to have access to otherwise
unattainable writings that have contributed to the enrichment of their knowledge, as well as
changing people’s lives and perspectives regardless of social class or standing. In modern times,
the advancement in technology, the need for instant global communication, and the never ending
migration of people around the world confirm the everlasting importance and necessity of
translation as a tool for economic, political, cultural, religious advancement. Hence:
“Translators have invented alphabets, helped build languages and written dictionaries.
They have contributed to the emergence of national literatures, the dissemination of knowledge,
and the spread of religions. Importers of foreign cultural values and key players at some of the
great moments of history, translators and interpreters have played a determining role in the
development of their societies and have been fundamental to the unfolding of intellectual history
itself.” [Woodsworth: 65].
After the review of the history, it is time to discuss how Indians respond to the activity of
translation. I’m trying to change the academic notion of the word ‘translation’ and making it
more homely. Let us look at ourselves in our everyday speech activity. We are most of the times
translating from one language into the other. Many of us use at least three languages, one at
home, another on the streets, still another at our office. When we narrate at home what happened
in office, we are translating, and vice versa. This isn’t just an aberration of urban life. We have
many examples of this from ancient times, e.g. Adi Shankara had used two languages:
Malayalam in Kaladi and Sanskrit everywhere he went. And he traveled a lot from Kanyakumari
to Kashmir through a complex web of languages. Dilip Chitre, a noted bilingual poet, must have
used at least three languages, Marathi at home, Hindi and English everywhere he went. Many
Marathi poets and writers did the same, because we live in India in an ambience of languages.
The word ‘mother-tongue’ doesn’t mean what it means in Europe. Conrad is an exception
writing in an alien tongue. We can count such geniuses in Europe on our fingers. But many of

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our writers in India, some of them best in our times, spoke a different language at home. Masti
and Putina spoke Tamil at home and the great poet known for his magical use of language,
Bendre, spoke Marathi at home. This is true of large number of writers in Hindi who speak
Rajastani, Bhojpuri, Panjabi, Awadhi, and many other languages related to Hindi. The characters
in their fiction may be actually speaking these languages and they are rendered for us in Hindi.
More significant than this in our understanding of what constitutes a text is a unique Indian
phenomenon often bypassed. Kalidasa’s Shakuntalam isn’t a text in single language. There are
some poets who used three languages to compose poems, e.g. Shishunal Sharief, a Kannada poet,
have poems where the first line is in Kannada, the second Telgu and third in Urdu. He came from
an area where these languages are spoken, and hence his audience could understand his
compositions. They were listing to the silence beyond the spoken word—especially to the silence
celebrated in a variety of words. Along with this free play of languages, which existed in an
ambience allowing for shifts and the poets of the past in Indian Languages could acquire the
territory of Sanskrit for their vernaculars. The use of vernaculars never seemed to threaten free
communication with others, isolating each language group in its own territory. Such a process of
cultural inclusion and quit synthesis has gone on India for more than a thousand years. First it
was the language of Gods making way for the languages of common people, now it is the official
domain of English making way, however reluctantly, to the vernaculars in the process of the
empowerment of the people. Translation, oral as well as textual, was the principal mode in the
past as well as in the present for such negotiations. When languages which do not travel (as they
lack imperial power) still undertake spiritual and intellectual journeys into the experiential
richness of the other languages (which travel and therefore assume universality), then we don’t
seem to bother much to be literally true to the languages from which we translate. We have to
digest anyhow these languages of power, lest they dominate us. We rarely translated the Sanskrit
word-as- mantra, in which the shabda is supposed to be both sound and sense to the believer. But
we unhesitatingly adapt and change the narrative texts, even when they are composed in the
language of Gods or of the white men who ruled us. In Kamba’s Tamil Ramayana, the cursed
Ahilya becomes a stone, and not a disembodied voice as in Valmiki’s Ramayana. And it was not
Dryden alone, who tried to make Shakespearean tragedies into comedies; many Hindi, Marathi
and Kannada writers did it too. India has been able to digest several influences through her long

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history; it was mainly because of these vernaculars, the unquenchable imaginative hunger of the
people who speak these languages.
To add here that these languages with a difference: they have a front yard of a self-aware
literary tradition, as well as a backyard of unselfconscious oral folk traditions that have never
been discontinued during the millennium. The oral traditions that flourish in the backyard have
vigour as well as unfailing sense of what is alive on the tongues of men and women without
which a literary language can become heavily artificial. To support these ideas we must take an
example; the coastal Karnataka has a small town called Udupi, a name made familiar by its
inhabitants who have opened restaurants all over India. There are at least three languages spoken
in and around Udupi. Tulu is the language of a large number of its inhabitants, the peasants and
workers and it is also a language rich in folklore. This language is spoken by so called lower as
well as upper castes. Konkani—one of the dialect of Marathi but now a separate language—is
mainly the language of trading castes and people living in coastal areas. So the large body of
native literature came from these languages. But when a Tulu or Konkani speaker encountering
other speakers of those languages would invariably use the language native to the speaker. When
we speak about literatures in English, much of the good fiction in English is written by Indian
writers. Isn’t Salman Rushdie translating from Mumbai Hindi which is the mixture of several
languages and dialects in many of his creative and rich passages? The best effects of Arundhati
Roy lie in her great ability to mimic the Syrian Christian Malayalam. Raja Rao’s path-breaking
Kanthapura, although it is written in English, is a basically Kannada novel in its texture as well
as narrative mode—deriving both from the oral traditions of Karnataka. With most of the truly
creative Indian novelists in English, who seem to have made contribution to the way the
language English is handled it would venture to make this remark: for them to create a unique
work in English is to transcreate from an Indian language milieu.

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 Sources:

1. Anderman, Gunilla and Rogers, Margaret (eds.). (2010). Translation Today: Trends and
Perspectives. New Delhi: Viva Books.
2. Das, Bijay Kumar. (2009). A Handbook of Translation Studies. New Delhi: Atlantic.
3. Gentzler, Edwin. (2010). Contemporary Translation Theory. New Delhi: Viva Books.
4. Ray, Mohit, K. (2008). Studies in Translation. New Delhi: Atlantic.
5. Riccardi, Alessandra. (2010). Translation Studies: Perspectives on an Emerging
Discipline. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd.
6. Woodsworth, Judith and Delisle, Jean (1995). Translators through History. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins Publishing Co.

Web Sources:
7. www.en.wikipedia.org.
8. www.gutenberg.org.
9. www.multilingual-matters.com.
10. www.translationdirectory.com.

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