The afterlives of panditry
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Christi A. Merrill
Abstract
This paper investigates the emphasis on a single common original that underwrites late eighteenth-century English renderings of Hindu legal texts in order to address the larger issue of translational fidelity. Pointing to examples such as Nathaniel Halhed’s A Code of Gentoo Laws and William Jones’s Institutes of Hindu Law: or, the Ordinances of Menu, I question the ongoing implicit reliance on Fall-of-the-Tower-of-Babel Christian narratives that regard a multilingual environment as backwards and chaotic. Drawing particularly on recent debates over the role of the Sanskrit pandit-as-translator in late eighteenth-century Bengal advising British colonists on sacred texts to become British law, I suggest that the British sought in the Sanskritic tradition a divine, singular origin analogous to the Christian authority underwriting their own conceptualizations of justice on earth, rather than reading the multiple afterlives of these traditions so vital in their own present moment with the complexity they require. In the colonial view translational fidelity assumes a linear (hierarchical) sequencing before and after the Fall and is unable to account for these translations’ complex temporalities in the plural. I ask how we as translation scholars today might define the temporal terms underlying our understanding of fidelity in a way that is not based on concepts of an impossible pre-lapsarian origin.
Abstract
This paper investigates the emphasis on a single common original that underwrites late eighteenth-century English renderings of Hindu legal texts in order to address the larger issue of translational fidelity. Pointing to examples such as Nathaniel Halhed’s A Code of Gentoo Laws and William Jones’s Institutes of Hindu Law: or, the Ordinances of Menu, I question the ongoing implicit reliance on Fall-of-the-Tower-of-Babel Christian narratives that regard a multilingual environment as backwards and chaotic. Drawing particularly on recent debates over the role of the Sanskrit pandit-as-translator in late eighteenth-century Bengal advising British colonists on sacred texts to become British law, I suggest that the British sought in the Sanskritic tradition a divine, singular origin analogous to the Christian authority underwriting their own conceptualizations of justice on earth, rather than reading the multiple afterlives of these traditions so vital in their own present moment with the complexity they require. In the colonial view translational fidelity assumes a linear (hierarchical) sequencing before and after the Fall and is unable to account for these translations’ complex temporalities in the plural. I ask how we as translation scholars today might define the temporal terms underlying our understanding of fidelity in a way that is not based on concepts of an impossible pre-lapsarian origin.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements vii
- Foreword ix
- Introduction 1
- Caste in and Recasting language 17
- Translation as resistance 29
- Tellings and renderings in medieval Karnataka 43
- Translating tragedy into Kannada 57
- The afterlives of panditry 75
- Beyond textual acts of translation 95
- Reading Gandhi in two tongues 107
- Being-in-translation 119
- (Mis)Representation of sufism through translation 133
- Translating Indian poetry in the Colonial Period in Korea 145
- A. K. Ramanujan 161
- An etymological exploration of ‘translation’ in Japan 175
- Translating against the grain 195
- Index 213
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements vii
- Foreword ix
- Introduction 1
- Caste in and Recasting language 17
- Translation as resistance 29
- Tellings and renderings in medieval Karnataka 43
- Translating tragedy into Kannada 57
- The afterlives of panditry 75
- Beyond textual acts of translation 95
- Reading Gandhi in two tongues 107
- Being-in-translation 119
- (Mis)Representation of sufism through translation 133
- Translating Indian poetry in the Colonial Period in Korea 145
- A. K. Ramanujan 161
- An etymological exploration of ‘translation’ in Japan 175
- Translating against the grain 195
- Index 213
