Colonialism and Translation

This period also needs to be demarcated into two – from 1757 till 1857 (the year of the First War of Indian Independence) and post-1857 (the period in which the British Empire gained the upper hand over the East India Company). After 1757, the East India Company was interested in consolidating the power it had established in India. The establishment of the Asiatic Society in Kolkata in 1784 by Sir William Jones marks a significant point of this phase. This is the Orientalist phase when the British showed a remarkable interest in the ancient Sanskrit classics and other non-literary texts. We see a flurry of translation activity that included translations of texts as diverse as Abhinjanasakuntalam and Manusmriti. This cannot be seen as an innocent intellectual exercise. This was the best way to know the colonized people and their ways, and knowing was a way of controlling. It has been pointed out by G. N. Devy how these Indologists focused only on the ancient Sanskrit texts and ignored the wealth of literature or other knowledge produced in medieval India. He maintains that this was a deliberate ploy to emphasize that the country they had colonized had a splendid past, but that it had degenerated subsequently to become a region steeped in superstition and other forms of ignorance. On the other hand, many European works including the Bible were translated into Indian languages. This was a form of cultural colonization that resulted in crushing native languages and literatures.

Ironically, these translations also helped in the making of the nationalist consciousness among Indians. India of those days did have her share of social problems like the oppression of women and the injustice of the caste system. European literature translated into Indian languages brought in a new way of thought to India, forcing intellectuals to rethink many aspects of social life. This paved the way for throwing out many rites and customs that had come to be accepted as part of Indian culture. Rabindranath Tagore has mentioned this liberating aspect of western thought that was transplanted on Indian soil. Social reformers like Raja Rammohan Roy were influenced by western thought to work for the uplift of his countrymen and forge the nationalist consciousness. The colonizer's language and culture were appropriated by the natives and used to hone the political awareness of a still passive populace. Perhaps the best example of this is Sri Aurobindo. He had a typically Anglophile childhood, having done his schooling in the exclusive public schools of England and fed with very British aspirations. But his education and exposure to non-Indian thought coupled with experiences in India convinced him of the need to fight the British in India . The latter half of the 19th century and early 20th century, marked as it is by an increasingly violent nationalist movement in Bengal (some of it spearheaded by Aurobindo) is also the period when he did a lot of his translations of Indian literature. He translated Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's Anandamath and was primarily responsible for the popularization of the slogan ‘Vande Mataram'.