Contributions made by translations to the spread of literature sometimes go far beyond usual human imagination and exceed almost all expectations. This is precisely what happened when Kalidas's Abhijnanasakuntalam was translated, writes SACHIDA NAND JHA
The role of translation in the making of world literature has been not just substantial but spectacularly phenomenal. Our accessibility to literatures in languages other than those we know ourselves is entirely dependent on the art of translation, though we often tend to forget that. The general readership may be indifferent, rather insensitive to the enormous contribution made by translation to the spread of literature, sometimes going far beyond usual human imagination and exceeding almost all expectations. This is precisely what happened when Kalidas’s Abhijnanasakuntalam was translated by the orientalist, Sir William Jones, into English which further triggered as many as 46 translations of this text in 12 other European languages in the 19th century.
One comes to know about this wonderful phenomenon the moment someone gets an opportunity to read a beautifully written, brilliant book dealing as it does with Shakuntala’s story in its own distinct way. The book, Translating the Orient: The Reception of Sakuntala in Nineteenth Century Europe, has been written by Dorothy Matilda Figueira, who knows many languages and has pleasantly and sometimes not so pleasantly surprised the Sankritists worldwide by carefully looking at multiple translations of the text. She picks up the paradigmatic Eastern text and its dissemination largely through translation in order to explore the West’s literary and cultural encounter with the East. Her exploration leads us to know the distortion of Indian ethos as a fallout of that engagement.
Jones was so charmed by Abhijnanasakuntalam that he first translated this Indian nataka from the 4th century Gupta period into latin and later retranslated it into English in 1789. His English translation of Abhijnanasakuntalam took the literary world of Europe by storm and generated a great deal of influence on the intellectual, cultural and literary sensibilities of the 19th century Germany, France and Italy in particular. There were obviously many constraints European readers had to cope up with. First, they were quite ignorant about Indian cultural, historical, linguistic and aesthetic background. Second, they were almost completely clueless about the Sanskrit canon. Thirdly, Shakuntala epitomised a paradigm of a literature whose relationship with world literatures was still a matter of speculation and extrapolation. Despite these constraints, this nataka was received with such euphoria and jubilation by its 19th century European minds that it not only precipitated the translations as cited above, but also virtually inaugurated what we now know as Orientalism.
Figueira tells us that for the first time no Persian intermediary was sought for the the translation of Shakuntala and it has the distinction of being the first Sanskrit drama which was made available to the Western literati. For Figueira, this paradigmatic text set the tone for an exhilarating discussion of the religious, philosophical and aesthetic dynamics of Indian exoticism. The domain of scholarship that attempts to interpret literature coming out of Western engagement with the orient in terms of political discourse, for instance, Edward Said’s Orientalism, defines the exotic as the “other”, as an ideological tool which the orientalist exploits for the sake of asserting his cultural superiority. Figueira, however, appears to interpret exoticism in terms of a myth which embodies an artiste’s preoccupation with creating a reality for herself. On the other hand, conceptualised as an ideological tool, the exoticism stands inextricably linked with racist practices. Figueira does not seem to accept this metaphor of the exotic as racist and hegemonic, and rejects its characterisation as the “other”. Rather than separating culture, language and even history of two races, exoticism for her engages with the political, cultural and erotic aspects of two races.
Figueira here makes both a cogent and provocative argument that goes on to undermine probably the most significant theoretical assumption behind the still predominant postcolonial perception of Orientalism and colonial translation practices that precipitated the growth of Orientalism. Conceptualisations of not only Said and others following in his footsteps seem to have been seriously challenged by such an argument that the reception of Shakuntala or all other Eastern texts, through translation, criticism and adaptation should be understood and interpreted in ways other than the colonial preoccupation to exclusively assert its cultural superiority by constituting the culture to which the text belongs as the “other”. Above all, she identifies Shakuntala with national consciousness as has been made amply clear by the title of the book itself.
Romila Thapar whose Shakuntala: Texts, Readings, Histories appeared exactly eight years later and generated tremendous impact in the domain of both Humanities and Social Sciences wrote her book with a different preoccupation. After seemingly thorough analysis, she concluded that people have, during the last two centuries, completely forgotten the Shakuntala of Mahabharata, a woman who stood for emancipation and fearlessly asked for her rights. And they only remembered and approved the Shakuntala of Kalidas, a woman known for her submissive mindset and subservient attitude.
Thapar’s assumptions are that the 19th century middle class nationalism and its understanding of Hindu tradition have a crucial role to play in reproducing the most recent version of Shakuntala as the ideal Hindu wife. The imperatives of a bourgeois nationalism have to keep the idea of a subaltern woman away. Thapar challenges here only the inclusive nature of our nationalism. Otherwise, she harbours misgivings about the legitimacy of our nationalist thought as well. In her concluding remarks, the category of the nation has been subtly put into the bar of judgment as has been routinely done in India by academic scholarship of different persuasions from the mid-1980s onwards. Not only subaltern and marxist historiography but also dalit and feminist discourse have subjected the concept of nation to serious scrutiny, suggesting that an upper caste, middle class, male figure, or an elite constitutes the idea of nation. This is to say that the nation does not represent the interests of the poor, the dalits, the women and the lower castes – the subaltern of India. What I am suggesting is the fact that Thapar’s perception of Indian nationalism betrays ideological prejudice that in turn has made her understanding of Kalidas’s Abhijnanasakuntalam highly selective and fundamentally flawed.
There is much merit when a distinguished Indian mathematician and a connoisseur of classical mind, Wagish Shukla says that Thapar has misunderstood the rationale which defines the drama and so has done tremendous disservice to the body of Shakuntala studies with her own set of distortions. Moreover, it is rather unusual but extremely gratifying that a scholar from abroad had already set the record straight, perhaps in anticipation of Thapar’s polemical analysis of the play, by suggesting in a subtle way that the an inclusive idea of nation is inherently embedded in this classical play of ours.
The reviewer is Assistant Professor in English, University of Delhi