Content area
Full Text
Abstract: While the politics of translation has concerned itself with cultural globalisation, in heterogenous national formations it transcends the myopic conception of language alteration to collective imagination. What is at stake in such structures is that the idea of 'history' is severely contested across one national community with its inherent contradictions. The conflict between an umbrella term against individualities of particular communities poses the centrifugal forces of cultural identities. Herein, the co-ordinates of different identities for one community vis-a-vis its acceptance/ rejection by other communities interrogates what constitutes a larger sense of an umbrella community and how this identity is constructed and stabilized. From a technical sense of literary conception, this is a cause of celebration but a challenge for processes of historicization. In this paper, I look into the fiction of Sidhartha Sharma to understand the curious ordeals of translation as he explores the relationships of identity and language to mainland Indian independence struggle. In his novel, The Grasshopper's Run , Sharma risks a double course of translating North Eastern Tribal imagination that thrives through orality (and thus evades documentation like most native cultures) with the processes of transcription. In this endeavour, what is of importance is how meaning gets eroded and newly formed as it is transmitted across cultural barriers.
Keywords: Orality, myth, translation, transcription, nation, meaning, identity
Translation, in the academia, has been contesting the idea of symbolic and cultural transmission since its initial years of epistemological focus. A rather novel field in terms of academic chronology, its involvement in the literary and cultural epistemology has evolved from a sense of inter-cultural comprehension and involvement where the act of 'knowing' the 'othered' figure becomes significant. As true to its political implications, the newly 'autonomized' discipline runs beyond a simpler study in trans-cultural achievements and duly entangles itself in the nuances of the post-colonial lineage. To be sure, 'translation' as used in scientific branches, involves the 'transmission' of source material to the target plane without necessarily modifying or editing the constitutive components. But as social sciences and humanities fails to exclude the inexorable principles of subjectivity and identity, the nuanced grid of collective consciousness across ethnographic demarcations calls for critical attention.
Since in my paper, I tend to limit myself to the...