Cast(e) in ‘Other’ Mold: Agency and Anxiety in Translation of Dalit Literature

Abstract

The case of English translation of Dalit literature in India has been complicated by several contesting discourses. In this discursive universe, the logic of the market and dominance of Savarna literary culture tend to shore up caste ethos and structural discrimination in contradistinction to Dalit literature, which is grounded in alternative social imaginary and discursivity. The mission of the Dalit literature is to fashion oppositional identities by inscribing experiences of pain and suffering inflicted by the exploitative socio-cultural structures and raise the consciousness of readers. As a Savarna translator approaches a Dalit text, this dichotomy is intensified further due to the (im)possibility of inhabiting Other’s experience and an alternative social. In addition to the questions of negotiating Dalit experience, epistemology, and esthetics, the very act of translation throws up the challenge of representation and cultural citizenship. In this paper, I probe the ways in which a Savarna translator of Dalit texts can carve out a space of agency without being overwhelmed by a burden of anxiety.

Keywords:

• Cultural representation
• epistemology
• experience
• esthetics
• translating dalit literature

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For me, the image conjures up disturbing history of untouchability in Gujarat, of a time when a Dalit body had to tie a broom around waist so that it can wipe out her polluting footprints as she walked the village space. See Ketan Mehta’s Gujarati movie Bhav ni Bhavai (1980) for a heart-rending folk account of caste oppression in the state.

2 I view this episode with déjà vu. In 2015, when Navayana, “a publishing house that focuses on the issue of caste from an anticaste perspective” (italics mine), brought out an annotated critical edition of Dr. B R. Ambedkar’s powerful book Annihilation of Caste, with an introduction titled “The Doctor and the Saint” by the Booker-winning novelist Arundhati Roy, it triggered an irate response from Dalit intellectuals and the community; the publisher was faulted over the politics of knowledge production, appropriation of Ambedkar for personal agenda, issue of representation and so on. Notably, both Roy and S. Anand who heads Navayana and annotated the book, are non-Dalits. See, Hatred in the Belly (2015), Shared Mirror Publication.

3 Here, the epithets ‘self’ and ‘other’ are used as poststructuralist binaries that unfold exclusively in Indian caste universe divided on the lines of varna system. As with all kinds of binaries, they are constructions, and the contention of the paper is to deconstruct them.

4 The story of a US citizenship aspirant, named Bhagat Thind, who went to court to establish scientifically that he, a high-class Aryan Hindu, was entitled to citizenship as a white man and not as an African, marks the hilarious apogee of caste-race confusion. See, United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923).

5 Attempts in the direction of understanding caste from the perspective of race and vice versa have been made historically by major ant-caste thinkers like Phule and Ambedkar as well as activists like Dalit Panthers in India. In the US, their interrelationships have informed the discourse of abolitionists, Du Bois, Eric Williams, C.L.R. James, Oliver Cromwell Cox and recently, Isabel Wilkerson. As mutually supplementary categories, it is important to remember, both caste and race essentially illuminate conditions of inequality, injustice and exploitation.

6 The district judge said that “an upper-caste man could not have raped a Dalit. A man could not possibly have participated in a gang rape in the presence of his nephew; and that her husband couldn’t possibly have watched passively as his wife was being gangraped—after all, had he not taken marriage vows which bound him to protect her?” See, Shivam Vij, "A Mighty Heart", Tehelka, October13, 2007.

7 Dhedh is a conventional pejorative, a casteist slur, originally used for a person of the weaver community but later extended to all Dalit castes in Gujarat to suggest the polluting work of dragging and stripping carcasses, their caste-based occupation.

8 Dalits in nineteenth-century Gujarat, treated usually like animals, were also considered avatars of the Goddess of Epidemic. As a result, in times of famines and other epidemics, especially in Kathiawar, wandering Dalit children were picked up and sacrificed to appease the Goddess. See Mehta 1995

9 Such collaborative approach has been adopted and discussed by many translators historically, prominently by Suzanne Jill Levine in her memoir, The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction. However, I find Omid Tofighian’s account of his experience of translating Behrouz Boochani’s fiction particularly useful as it presents the idea of modifying the Farsi original in tandem with the translation. In my collaboration with Dalpat Chauhan on translation of Vultures, we ended up doing something similar.

10 The keet-bhramar nyaya is a hypothetical law found in ancient Indian lore, according to which an insect caught in the web of a wasp keeps thinking about the arrival of the latter and its imminent death. Eventually, the intensity of mental focus on a singular object, i.e. the wasp, culminates inevitably in the insect’s transformation into the wasp. I use the relationship between keet and bhramar to represent the apparent identarian opposition between savarna and dalit figures, however without the connotation of the dialectic of prey and preyer.

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Hemang Ashwinkumar

Dr. Hemang Ashwinkumar holds a doctorate in English and has a stint of 24 years in the field of higher education in various academic and administrative capacities. He is a poet, fiction writer, translator, editor and critic who writes in Gujarati and English. His works have been translated into Greek, Italian and other Indian languages. His English translations include Poetic Refractions (2012), an anthology of contemporary Gujarati poetry, and Thirsty Fish and Other Stories (2013), an anthology of select stories by eminent Gujarati writer Sundaram. Penguin Random House India has brought out his translation of Gujarati Dalit writer Dalpat Chauhan’s novel Vultures (2022), and edited collection of short stories titled Fear and Other Stories (2023). His Gujarati translations of Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems (2004), Sarpa Satra (2021) and Jejuri (2024) have been critically acclaimed. His scholarly monograph Translating the Translated: Poetics and Politics of Literary Translation in India and English translation of eminent painter-poet Gulammohammed Sheikh’s collection of autobiographical essays Gher Jatan (On the Way Home) will be published by Orient Blackswan and Seagull Books respectively in 2024.