A Multilingual Nation

Description

How does India live through the oddity of being both a nation and multilingual? Is multilingualism in India to be understood as a neatly laid set of discrete languages or a criss-crossing of languages that runs through every source language and text? The questions take us to reviewing what is meant by language, multilingualism, and translation. Challenging these institutions,
A Multilingual Nation illustrates how the received notions of translation discipline do not apply to India. It provocatively argues that translation is not a ‘solution’ to the allegedly chaotic situation of many languages, rather it is its inherent and inalienable part.
An unusual and unorthodox collection of essays by leading thinkers and writers, new and young researchers, it establishes the all-pervasive nature of translation in every sphere in India and reverses the assumptions of the steady nature of language, its definition, and the peculiar fragility that is revealed in the process of translation.

About the Editor

Rita Kothari is a multilingual scholar of translation (theory and practice), language politics, and identity in India. Her ethnographic work is based out of western India, especially Gujarat and Sindhi-speaking parts of Kutch and Rajasthan. She writes especially on local and marginalized communities. One of her acclaimed works is a seminal book on translation studies, Translating India: The Cultural Politics of English.

Table of contents

Introduction: When We Are ‘Multilingual’, Do We Translate?

PART I TRANSLATING IN TIMES OF DEVOTION

1. When a Text Is a Song
Linda Hess

2. Na Hindu Na Turk: Shared Languages, Accents, and Located Meanings
Francesca Orsini

3. Songs on the Move: Mira in Gujarat, Narasinha Mehta in Rajasthan
Neelima Shukla-Bhatt

PART II MAKING AND BREAKING BOUNDARIES IN COLONIAL INDIA AND AFTER

4. Unfixing Multilingualism: India Translated in French Travel Accounts
Sanjukta Banerjee

5. Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India: Acts of Naming and Translating
Rita Kothari

6. Three Languages and a Book: Of Languages and Modernities
Sowmya Dechamma C.C.
7. Language as Contestation: Phule’s Interventions in Education in Nineteenth-century Maharashtra
Rohini Mokashi-Punekar

8. Representing Kamrupi: Ideologies of Grammar and the Question of Linguistic Boundaries
Madhumita Sengupta

9. Translation and the Indian Social Sciences
Veena Naregal

PART III TEXTS AND PRACTICES

10. When India’s North-East Is ‘Translated’ into English
Mitra Phukan

11. On Translating (and-not-translating) Sarasvatichandra
Tridip Suhrud

12. Multilingual Narratives from Western India: Jhaverchand Meghani and the Folk
Krupa Shah

13. Dancing in a Hall of Mirrors: Translation between Indian Languages
Mini Chandran

14. Translating Belonging in Ahmedabad: Representing Some Malayali Voices
Pooja Thomas

PART IV RE-IMAGINING THE TIME OF TRANSLATION

15. Conceptual Priority of Translation over Language
Madhava Chippali and Sundar Sarukkai

16. Changing Script
G.N. Devy

Epilogue: Ficus Benghalensis
Supriya Chaudhuri

Index
About the Editor and Contributors