We can read, write and speak in English. But there is a creative activity which is crucial to keep our mother-tongue alive and growing. That is literary translation, which has a tremendous potential to strengthen the country’s linguistic plurality and cultural diversity
The idea behind the celebration of International Mother language Day is to honour the sacrifice four young students made with their lives on February 21, 1952, while they were fighting for the dignity of their mother-tongue. The very act of resistance was a quintessentially post-colonial response to the narratives of linguistic imperialism of Urdu against Bengali in Dhaka, a part of the then Pakistan. It was intended to underline the importance of multi-lingualism and multi-culturalism that the very idea of Pakistan had no respect for.
Unesco and other UN agencies celebrate this day each year. They take part in many events to promote linguistic and cultural diversity all across the world. We also do. But the question is: Do we all really care much for being multi-lingual and multi-culturalIJ The answer to this question is not encouraging.
In an arguably multi-lingual and multi-cultural country like India, parents across the nation are proudly demanding only English medium education for their children. Even those who are active for the preservation of their respective mother-tongues, are doing the same. And the majority of children want English language almost exclusively. So what should we do to not only preserve but also to contribute to the growth of our mother-tongueIJ
Of course, we should read, write and speak it as much as possible, and motivate children to do the same. But there is a creative activity which is crucial to keep our mother-tongue alive and growing. That activity is literary translation, which has tremendous potential to strengthen a great deal of linguistic plurality and cultural diversity. I wish to demonstrate this by discussing a bit of literature written in my mother-tongue and some of the early translation practices dealing as they do with languages such as Sanskrit, Hindi, English and Maithili, frequently used in the Mithila region.
Maithili literature narrates the complex and nuanced cultural history of the region north Bihar. For that purpose, it makes use of the language called Maithili, which George Abraham Grierson, the famous orientalist, clubbed with Bhojpuri and Magahi, and mistakenly declared to be a part of Bihari language that never existed at all. It was one of the foundational distortions in The linguistic Survey of India — the body of work for which he is still very much remembered. Maithili today enjoys the status of one of those 22 languages which are included in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India and of those 24 languages which Sahitya Academy has recognised as the literary languages of our country.
The starting point for the discussion of translation practices in Maithili has to be the publication of Mahakavi Vidyapati’s Purusha Pariksha (1888), that actually laid the foundations of an early print culture in this language. Unlike the translation of the Bible, which inaugurated the printing practices in some Indian languages, in Maithili, such practice began with the publication of a Sanskrit text, modelled on the Panchatantra, by Vishnu Sharma. Purusha Pariksha, originally written in Sanskrit by the poet, dramatist and writer of travelogue who was a contemporary of Tulsidas, was translated first by Chanda Jha. It is interesting to note that Purusha Pariksha was published by Darbhanga Raj Press with a Maithili translation done by Chanda Jha, who wrote the preface in Hindi. This Chanda Jha is the same person whose Mithila Bhasa Ramayana got published six years later from the same press established by the then king, lakshmeshwar Singh.
Vidyapati is the first author who gets translated into Maithili before his own works begin to be translated into English. English translations of his love songs of Radha and Krishna have been done by people like professor Jayakant Mishra, a Maithili Brahmin, who taught English at Allahabad University, and the Orientalist, George Abraham Grierson. Grierson knew English but he learnt Maithili before he began to translate. And he learnt it for the rest of his life — doing as he did a lot for spread of this language. He did learn Sanskrit which helped him translate Purusha Pariksha into English as early as 1935.
Vidyapati, who Grierson famously pointed out as the only poet who had been simultaneously and zealously appropriated by three different literary canons such as Maithili, Hindi and Bengali, still remains the most translated man, not in the sense Salman Rushdie says “he is a translated man” — an act of cultural translation, as Homi Bhabha conceptualises in his book, The location of Culture, but in terms of actual translations of the texts of the great writer into languages such as Hindi, Bengali and also English.
No other writer has been able to match him in terms of his translatibilty. And these translations have made the spread of Maithili literature possible far and wide both in India and abroad. They also enabled translators to proactively participate in the task of genuinely strengthening multilingualism and multiculturalism.
During the entire span of the 20th century, two distinctly different theoretical persuasions, namely linguistic and cultural theories, shaped the way transactions in the world of translation took place. The linguistic theory of translation as has been conceptualised by JC Catford in the book, A linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied linguistics (1965), stopped a bit short from emphasising the role of translation for promoting linguistic plurality. And the cultural theory of translation as has been suggested by Susan Bassnett and Andre lefevere in their book, Translation, History and Culture (1990), apparently missed to state that translation primarily promotes cultural diversity.
There is no need to hesitate in saying that it would be extremely helpful in the preservation and development of increasingly endangered mother-tongues, as the translations of Vidyapati and other Maithili writers like Manipadma’s Naika Banjara into English, Harimohan Jha’s Khattar Kaka into Hindi, along with that of the Constitution of India into Maithili, for examples, have proved. Translators work with two languages in an extremely engaging way and so effectively keep them alive so as contribute to the promotion of linguistic plurality and cultural diversity.
(The writer is assistant professor in English, Rajdhani College, University of Delhi)