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'Introduction _ History in Translation ' by Tejeswini Niranjana

1. Presented by Bhavna Sosa Roll no. 02 Dhvani Rajyaguru Roll no. 04 Hinaba Sarvaiya Roll no. 09 Department of English Maharaja KrishnaKumarSinhji Bhavnagar University Introduction: History in Translation -Tejaswini Niranjana

2. The article examines the "positive" or "uto- pian" response to the postcolonial condition developed by Tejaswini Niranjana in Siting Translation: her attempt to harness translation in the service of decolonization. It traces a postcolonial myth moving from pre coloniality through the recent colonial past and current postcoloniality to an imagined future state of decolonization in or- der to contrast nationalist versions of that myth, with their emphasis on the purity of the precolonial and decolonized states, to postcolonialist versions, which in- sist that all four states are mixed. Abstract :

3. Niranjana draws on Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator" in order to explore the ways in which translating, like rereading/re- writing history, involves a "citing" or "quoting" of words from one context to another, allowing translation to be used by colonists for purposes of colonial subjugation but also by postcolonial subjects for purposes of decolonization.  Finally, the article contrasts Niranjana's Benjaminian sense of literalism as the best decolonizing translational mode with the variety of approaches explored by Vicente Rafael in Contracting Colonialism.

4. A C B Translation as Interpellation The Question of “History” Key points Situating Translation

5. Situating Translation : The context   is one of  contesting and contested stories attempting to account for, to recount, the asymmetry and inequality of relations between people, races, languages. One such  site is translation. Translation  as a practice of shapes and takes  shape within the asymmetrical relations of power that operate under colonialism. Conventionally,  translation depends on the Western philosophical notions of reality, representation, and knowledge. Reality is seen as something unproblematic " out other"  knowledge involves representation of this reality;  and representation provides direct unmediated access to transparent reality.

6. As  Jacques Derrida suggests  the  concepts of metaphysics are not bound by or produced solely within the " field " of philosophy. Rather, they come out of  and circulate through various discourses in several registers, providing a "conceptual network in which philosophy itself has been constituted."  Translation reinforces hegemonic versions of the colonised, helping them acquire the status of what Edward Said  calls representations, or objects without history. Thomas Babington Macaulay's 1835 dismissal of Indigenous  Indian learning as outdated and irrelevant, which prepared  the way for the introduction of English education.

7. Translation functions as a transparent  presentation of something that already exists, although  the "original" is actually brought into being through translation. paradoxically, translation also provides a place in "history" for colonised.   The Hegelian conception of history that translation helps bring into being endorses teleologica,l hierarchical model of Civilizations based on the "coming to consciousness" of " Spirit," an event for which the non-Western cultures are unsuited or unprepared. Her concern here is to explore the place of translation in contemporary Euro- American literary theory through a set of interrelated readings. 

8. In chapters  3,4 and 5, main focus is the work of Paul de Man Jacques Derrida  and Walter Benjamin.  All three thinkers, becoming  associated with  a major preoccupation in each: allegory or literature in de  Man, the problematic  of Representation and intentionally Derrida, and the question of materialist historiography  in Benjamin. The refusal of these Major proponents of deconstruction to address the question of history in Benjamin suggests a critical drawback in their theory and perhaps indicates why  deconstruction has never addressed  the problem of colonialism. In the final chapter, with the help of a translation from Kannada, a South Indian language,  into English, she discusses the "uses" of post structuralism in postcolonial space.

9. This disciplines repress  what  Derrida, in the words of Heidegger,  calls the logocentric or ontotheological  metaphysics by which they are constituted, which involves all the traditional conceptions of representation, translation, reality, unity and knowledge. The  rethinking of translation becomes an important task in a context where it has been used in the European Enlightenment to underwrite practices of subjectification, especially for colonised peoples. 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 colonizing world.

10. It is a set of questions, perhaps a "field" charged with the force of all the terms used, even by the traditional discourse on translation  to name the problem, to translate translation. translatio (Latin) and metapherein (Greek)at once suggest moment,  disruption, displacement. The post - colonial distrust of the liberal-humanist rhetoric of progress and of universalising master narratives has obvious affinities  with post - structuralism. Derrida would argue  that the "origin" is itself dispersed, its "identity"  undecidable. A representation thus does not represent  an "original"  rather, it re-presents that which is always  already represented. Another aspect of post-structuralism that is significant for a   rethinking of translation is it's critique of historicism, which shows the genetic and teleological nature of traditional historiography.

11. 02 Translation As Interpellation

12. Maconochie, a scholar connected to Edinburgh University, urged the British sovereign to take steps “as may be necessary for discovering, collecting and translating whatever is extant of the ancient works of the Hindoos.” William Jones- who arrived in India in 1783 to take his place on the bench of the Supreme Court in Culcutta – that translation would serve “to domesticate the Orient and thereby turn it into a province of European learning.” As translator and scholar, Jones was responsible for the most influential introduction of a textualized India to Europe, Within three months of his arrival, the Asiatic Society held its first meeting with Jones as president and Warren Hastings, the governor- general, as patron.

13. In a letter, Jones declared that his ambition was “to know India better than any other European ever knew it.”Jones’ works were carefully studied by the writers of the age, especially the Germans- Goethe, Herder and others. His translation of Kalidasa’s Sakuntala went through successive reprints; Georg Forster’s famous German translation of the translation came out in 1791, after which the play was translated into other European languages as well. As a twentieth century scholar puts it, “It is not an exaggeration to say that he altered Europe’s whole conception of the Eastern world, If we were compiling a thesis on the influence of Jones we could collect most of our material from footnotes, ranging from Gibbon to Tennyson.

14. In the preface of the 1984 Indian edition of Jones discourses and essays, where the editor, Moni Bagchee, indicates that Indians should “try to preserve accurately and interpret the national heritage by treading the path chalked out by Sir William Jones.” Here, scholar Niranjana’s main concern in examining the texts of Jones is not necessarily to compare his translation of Sakuntala or Manu’s Dharmasastra with the so-called originals.Rather, what I propose to do is to examine the “outwork” of Jones’s translation- the prefaces, the annual discources to the Aiatic Society, his charges to the Grand Jury at Culcatta, his letters, and his “Oriental” poems- to show how he contributes to a historicist, teleogical model of civilization that, coupled with a notion of translation presupposing transparency of representation, helps construct a powerful version of the “Hindu”.

15. The most significant nodes of Jones’s work are a) The need for translation by the European, since the natives are unreliable interpreters of their own laws and culture; b) The desire to be a lawgiver, to give the Indians their “own” laws; and c) The desire to “purify” Indian Culture and speak on its behalf.The interconnections between these obsessions are extremely complicated.

16. The Question of "History" 03

17. Samual Weber charges Jameson with using the gesture of "Capitalizing History" to address the "challenge of post-structuralist thought". Weber's is one of the latest salvoes in the prolonged skirmishing between the defenders of "post-structuralism" and those who accuse it of denying "history". If the former polemicize against history as "phallogocentrism", the latter argue that is an "untranscendable horizon".  Neither specify whether the "history" in question refers to a mode of writing history or to the "past" itself.

18. Tejaswini's 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. Her purposes, I take historicity to mean although not unproblematically effective history, or that part of the past that is still operative in the present. I use the word historicity to avoid invoking History with a capital H, my concern being with "Local" practices of translation that require no overarching theory to contain them.

19. As Foucault declares, "effective history affirms knowledge as perspective", it may be seen as a radical kind of "presentism", which we may be able to work from. The facts of "history" are inescapable for the post-colonial, since attention to history is in a sense demanded by the post-colonial situation, post-colonial theory has to formulate a narrativizing strategy in addition to deconstructive one. Louis Althusser's critique of historicism, which leads him, in Jameson's words, to formulate the notion that "history is a process without a telos or a subject", "a repudiation of master narratives and their twin categories of narrative closure (telos) and of character (subject of history)" .

20. Walter Benjamin, who sees the historian (or we may even say the translator) seizing the past image that comes into a constellation with the past. The discontinuity of the past we construct may provoke us to discuss the "Why" of a translation and how it shows that we need to translate history rather than to interpret it or "read" it. It is interesting to speculate what impact this notion of a dispersed origin might have on deep-rooted European histories of the cradle of civilization and on post-colonial people's image of themselves.

21. Derrida points to historicism's concern with origin and telos and its desire to construct a totalizing narrative. "History" in the texts of post- structuralism is a repressive force that obliterates difference and belongs in a chain that includes meaning,truth, presence, and logos. He has indicated more than once that translation perhaps escapes "the orbit of representation" and is therefore an "exemplary question" . If representation stands for the reappropriation of presence, translation emerges as the sign for what derrida would call "dissemination" .

22. The denial of historicity to conquered peoples, and that suppress history in order to appear as history, it is aware that the situation of the post-colonial "subject", who lives always already "in translation", requires for its articulation some notion of what history is. The point is not just to criticize these characterizations as "inadequate" or "untruth", one should attempt to show the complicity of representations with colonial rule and their part in maintaining the asymmetry of imperialism.

23. In an essay on the Subaltern studies historian's, Gayatri Spivak argues  that their practice is akin to "deconstruction", since they put forward a "theory of charge as the site of displacement of functions between sign-system" and this is "a theory of reading in the strongest possible general sense". Since it is part of my argument that the problematics of translation and the writing of history are inextricably bound together, I shall briefly go over Spivak's main points regarding the Subaltern historians. May help us see more clearly how the nations of history and translation I wish to reinscribe are not only enabled by the postcolonial critique of historiography but might also further strengthen that critique.

24. History and translation function, perhaps,under the same order of representation, truth, and presence, creating coherent and transparent texts through the repressions of difference, and participating thereby in the process of colonial domination. The double inscription Derrida mentions has a parallel in Walter Benjamin's strategy of citation or quotation. For Benjamin, the historical materialist quotes without quotation marks in a method akin to montage. It is  one way of revealing the constellations a past age forms with the present without submitting to a simple historical continuum, to an order of origin and telos.

25. The hybrid therefore, involves translation, deformation displacement. The nation of hybridity,  which is of great importance for a subaltern critique of historiography as well as for a critique of traditional notions of translation, is both "ambitious and historically complex". To restrict "hybridity", or what I called "living in translation", to a post-colonial elite is to deny the pervasiveness, however heterogeneous, of the transformations wrought across class boundaries by colonial and neocolonial domination.