| |
Women writing in India
The two part anthology Women Writing in India, edited by Susie Tharu and K. Lalita was a conscious act of subversion. It contained a selection of women’s writings in India from 600 BC to the 20th century, mostly in English translation, with a polemical preface that states at the very beginning: “We began work on these volumes with the premise that critical assumptions, historical circumstance, and ideologies generally have been hostile to women’s literary production and have crippled our ability to read and appreciate their work” (xv). The book thus became an attempt to provide a forum for all those women who had been excluded from the canon of Indian writing. It painstakingly documents the writings of hitherto unheard of women writing in different languages in different parts of India in different times. The anthology interrogates the validity of the male-dominated canon, and provokes us to think about the exclusions and selections that go into the formation of a canon.
The translation, as the editors state in the Preface, is not target-language oriented. They point to the politics of translation from a regional Indian language into English – by translating from a regional language to English, they “are representing a regional culture for a more powerful national or “Indian” one, and when this translation is made available to a readership outside India, we are also representing a national culture for a still more powerful international culture – which is today, in effect, a Western one” (xx). Hence the conscious decision was to avoid domestication, and a translation strategy that “demanded of the reader too a translation of herself into another sociohistorical ethos” (xx). What it did was to maintain the basic regional flavor of the text and recreate the historical context in which it was originally composed. Here translation becomes an archaeological tool to further a subversive ideology that is essentially gender-based.
|
