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Beyond textual acts of translation

Kitab At-Tawhid and the Politics of Muslim Identity in British India

Abstract

Analysing the reception of Muhammad Ibn Abdul-Wahab’s eighteenth-century Arabic text in its Urdu translation, this paper highlights the importance of the cultural context of the original text and the impact of its translation within the discursive framework of Indian Islam. In the process of its production and consumption, this translation took on a mythic value that transformed the text from a monograph to a signifier of a specific Wahabi political subjectivity that has had direct consequences for Indian Islam, both in its colonial and postcolonial phases.

Abstract

Analysing the reception of Muhammad Ibn Abdul-Wahab’s eighteenth-century Arabic text in its Urdu translation, this paper highlights the importance of the cultural context of the original text and the impact of its translation within the discursive framework of Indian Islam. In the process of its production and consumption, this translation took on a mythic value that transformed the text from a monograph to a signifier of a specific Wahabi political subjectivity that has had direct consequences for Indian Islam, both in its colonial and postcolonial phases.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgements vii
  4. Foreword ix
  5. Introduction 1
  6. Caste in and Recasting language 17
  7. Translation as resistance 29
  8. Tellings and renderings in medieval Karnataka 43
  9. Translating tragedy into Kannada 57
  10. The afterlives of panditry 75
  11. Beyond textual acts of translation 95
  12. Reading Gandhi in two tongues 107
  13. Being-in-translation 119
  14. (Mis)Representation of sufism through translation 133
  15. Translating Indian poetry in the Colonial Period in Korea 145
  16. A. K. Ramanujan 161
  17. An etymological exploration of ‘translation’ in Japan 175
  18. Translating against the grain 195
  19. Index 213
Decentering Translation Studies
This chapter is in the book Decentering Translation Studies
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.86.09ash

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgements vii
  4. Foreword ix
  5. Introduction 1
  6. Caste in and Recasting language 17
  7. Translation as resistance 29
  8. Tellings and renderings in medieval Karnataka 43
  9. Translating tragedy into Kannada 57
  10. The afterlives of panditry 75
  11. Beyond textual acts of translation 95
  12. Reading Gandhi in two tongues 107
  13. Being-in-translation 119
  14. (Mis)Representation of sufism through translation 133
  15. Translating Indian poetry in the Colonial Period in Korea 145
  16. A. K. Ramanujan 161
  17. An etymological exploration of ‘translation’ in Japan 175
  18. Translating against the grain 195
  19. Index 213
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