Date: 06 Aug 2000 12:44:33 EDT
Subject: Re: Translation, Indian vernacular and "Classical" 



Thanks again, Shankar, for the references and  discussion. The undervaluing of South India within Indian nationalism is certainly a very important point on which there is a great deal more to be said, and something that continues in much contemporary scholarship on Indian nationalism. So also is the problem of translation even between Indian languages when there are regional cultural and political differences and inequities of power involved. I have to pull back from the list for a while due to other commitments but wanted to comment briefly on two points from the many interesting ones you raise. 

1) I was thinking earlier of the relationship between modern English and Old English, but didn't mention it, because I didn't know howcomparable it would be to the Indian examples. Readers of modern English cannot read Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) such as Beowulf, without specialized study, but only Middle English (circa 14th Century, such as Chaucer), which is much more easily recognizable. But part of the reason for that is Britain's invasions by a succession of different outside forces, so that besides the Celtic and the Old High German and Dutch and the Latin influences, you have the  Vikings and the French. I'm on shaky ground here, so I'm sure there are inaccuracies in what I say, but the point is that Old English is different from modern English, so that one cannot (at least, I wouldn't) say that the MODERN English literary tradition goes back much before the 14th century. 

2) By coincidence I  started reading -Passions of the Tongue- recently, and from the point of view of our discussion on the list about the loss of literacy in the mother tongue in contemporary India, one interesting thing that Sumathi Ramaswamy says at the outset is that she was the only one of her siblings who took it upon herself to study written Tamil, although it was spoken at home (in a "heavily Sankritized" form). And then, too, she only pursued formal study of it in graduate school in the U.S..

To quote from her preface:

"...my polyglot habits echo a deeper history of multilingualism on the subcontinent ...and they are a consequence of a national education policy which, however haphazardly implemented, ideally expects every Indian citizen to formally study at least three languages: her "mother tongue" (or "regional language"), Hindi, and English. Yet, as my example illustrates...this official linguistic hope has more often than not foundered on issues of how to define the "mother tongue" and encourage its active use in an environment where English and Hindi rule as languages of prestige, profit, and power; of how to promote the study of English against the forces of nationalism that identify it as the language of the (colonial) West; and of how to ward of protests that Hindi. the putative "official" language of India, is but the tongue of one region masquerading as the language of the nation" (Preface, xx).

Josna



-----------------------------------


--- You wrote:
With regard to Josna's request for information below:

Not being familiar with the classical Tamil texts in the original, I will
take recourse to hearsay and citation. 

I came to reading and writing Tamil late, as a teenager, and I remember
one of my teachers in Madras-a translator of the classical
Tolkappiyam-exhorting me to study the classical texts as I learnt to read
because it would be as easy as the modern texts. I never did, confining my
reading to twentieth century texts, and so cannot vouch for his accuracy
here.

It is my impression that the relationship between modern Tamil and
classical Tamil is different from the relationship between Marathi and
Sanskrit. If the relationship between Marathi and Sanskrit is similar to
the relationship between Italian and Latin, for example, the relationship
between modern Tamil and classical Tamil may perhaps be more like the
relationship between Modern English and Old English.

Now for the citations: Sumathi Ramaswami has a book on the Tamil politics
of language called Passions of the Tongue.

A useful if slightly dated introduction to Tamil literature is Mu
Varadarajan's A History of Tamil Literature, put out in an abridged
English translation by the venerable Sahitya Akademi.

Both these books should be available in libraries. Less available might be
the recent Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium, by V. Geetha and S. V.
Rajadurai (Samya, Calcutta) a comprehensive look at the "Self-Respect"
movement of the early twentieth century which arguably is the defining
moment for modern politics of culture in Tamil India.

If I may add a parting comment: the Tamil complaint, waxing and waning
over the decades in response to specific events, of course is the demotion
and undervaluation of "Dravidian" South India within Indian nationalism.
Such a seminal text of Indian nationalism as Nehru's Discovery of India
readily reveals this bias, concentrating its narrative on events and
personalities of the Indo-Gangetic plain. More recent political
events-Kamaraj's sponsorship of Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister as part of
the Syndicate in the late Sixties, P. V. Narasimha Rao and H. D. Deve
Gowda's tenures as Prime Minister in the Nineties-have also been touched
by the division between North and South, at least in the eyes of many
voters in the South. (Rao and Deve Gowda are not Tamil but come from the
"Dravidian" Telugu and Kannada speaking areas respectively.)  

With regard to questions of culture, I might suggest for example that Mani
Ratnam's avidly discussed "terrorism" trilogy-Roja, Bombay, Dil-plays very
differently to Tamil audiences. At least the first two films (which, as
opposed to the third, were made first in Tamil) are as much explorations
of the emotional terrain of Tamil subnationalism as Muslim discontent with
the Indian nation. In Roja, for example, the heroine (I forget her name)
races through a town in Kashmir shouting for help in Tamil and finds that
no one can understand her. As I remember it, when the film was dubbed into
Hindi, her Tamil speech here became a Hindi which was garbled and
incomprehensible only because of her heightened emotional condition. Both
Roja and Bombay, in their Tamil originals, can be viewed as paeans to
rural Tamil life (completely eroticized in a problematic way in the figure
of the beautiful and innocent heroine). To what extent does translation
(in the form of cinematic dubbing here) save these original meanings?

But I have gone on much longer than I intended to.

--Shankar


>
>
Thank you, Shankar. I spoke carelessly and stand corrected.

I also have a question that comes from a position of ignorance: can modern
readers of Tamil understand classical Tamil without any special study of
it (in
contrast with, say, modern readers of Marathi, who  would not be able to
understand Sanskrit unless they had studied it) ?

Josna


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
S. Shankar
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Rutgers University 
Newark, NJ 07102
Tel.: 973 353 5279 x 616	Email: sshankar-AT-andromeda.rutgers.edu




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