Translating Models: A review of Awadheshwari.
Awadheshwari. By Shankar Mokashi Punekar. Trans. P P Giridhar. 2006. Bangalore: Sahitya Akademi. 408 pages.
In times when tradition and modernity persist as crucial issues in all of our scholarship in literature as well as the social sciences, the translation of Shankar Mokashi Punekar’s Awadheshwari, by P P Giridhar is an apt venture. The novel is a creative take on the political life in Vedic times. Written in 1987, the novel won itself a Sahitya Akademi Award. For all of us now, such a novel and its translation into English rakes up a series of questions. How can one reconstruct the Vedic times? What are resources available to do so to creative writers? How does a reconstruction of the Vedic times in the 1980s look like, would it look any different or similar now? How would a translation of Vedic times, so to say, into English look like?Does the translation of Vedic times involve a translation of concepts of the life-world of a certain time-space or does it demand a reconfiguring of language or even meet with dead-ends and involves in struggles against prevalent idioms of the present? In what sense exactly were the Vedic times different from ours? Is it only the case that sometimes translations into English end up merely sounding anachronistic or western-Christian or do they even distort meanings. Is it possible that to a native audience even these anachronistic-sounding renderings make meaning only in a context-specific sense? Further then, can practices/rituals be understood as concepts? Surely, these are interesting questions spanning various fields of inquiry; I will speculatively answer some of them summarily in this review article, by taking up the novel first and issues of translation next.
A novel?:
Awadheshwari is a peculiar novel, (to retain the term), not just for its brave attempt to creatively reconstruct the vedic times, it is so for other reasons as well. For instance, in the foreword, the author goes into researches current in his time and into scriptures and seals and tells us about a unified theory of oriental paleography. Our current understanding however, (of seeking out scriptures or judging practices like incest, both inventions of 19th century anthropology), is that it is a result of British colonization and that prior to colonization we related differently to ‘scriptures’ and that our life-worlds were composed differently. Although Punekar in his other writings was sensitive to issues of colonization and writing, it is often less known as to what exactly we mean by colonization or even modernity, all we can say is that he felt the unease that many of us still struggle with. Then again the author also puts forward the thesis that “they are like us”. He also exemplifies literature over ritual, “…To give it a sacrificial-spiritual interpretative, because it is a Rigvedic hymn is to do disservice to his poetic prowess”. A sort of paradox emerges between the author’s claims and what the novel actually accomplishes. While for the author then, our pasts can be rewritten or opted out of and life can be led on ideological or belief-based stances, the novel presents us with more complex instances. This raises a set of unanswered questions about colonization, modernity, passage of time etc or even anachronisms and other debates in historiography. In the limited space of this article I will show that these anachronisms reveal more about our issues and terms of contention and that the issues may themselves demand different treatment.
In form:
Surely then, if I were to read the novel and not the author’s promises, then we are confronted with peculiar things. A series of unrelated plots, lengthy sub-plots: the sheer number of it almost blinding us to the need or aesthetics of it. On the whole, the large number of plots cannot be missed by any reader at all. This leads us to ask, if then Awadheshwari is a novel at all. The numerous unrelated plots should perhaps be understood in terms of the story-telling traditions in our contexts. Typically, Awadheshwari is like a record of a set of instances. It does not seek to provide experience; fewer stream of consciousness techniques, abrupt shifts from reflections of characters to the development of plot (which can participate in theoretical endevours) and such like mark the novel from time to time. One can see Awadheshwari as working through models (of set of instances) that are set in the form that then relates to us a different life-world. One can read the content of Awadheshwari as a particular understanding of the Vedic time-space, that strangely or perhaps not so strangely after all, offers us story-structures or models that take off from the main plot, never to return or contribute otherwise. Stories than, one could say have more ambiguous roles to play than novels or other forms, particularly in our contexts. A story could aim to merely relate or keep alive curiosity or retain a world, unlike a novel. And throughout Awadheshwari the reader meets with such stories. One could see the effort of the author to capture difference, showing in the form of Awadheshwari more than in say, it’s content, although the content offers to us equally different stuff. This poses to us a unique task, that of translating models, which I will take up in a moment. To see Awadheshwari as a record is even interesting in times where the dharmashastras are understood less as laws or codes and more as records. The lack of the form of the novel in our contexts can be drawn upon here to form interesting hypothesis.
In Content:
The content of this novel is fraught with characters, but these are no characters from a typical 19th century novel! They are characters because they reflective actors and because action can be typified at least in some general ways. The characters’ attitude to action on the whole, the attitude of engagement and negotiation with existing practices and the unabashed pragmatism that is placed within a discourse of right action, contemplative/reflective life cannot be missed at all. With content fashioned in such a way, it is noteworthy that one cannot be proposing that the Vedic times were a degenerate or barbaric time. Thus the novel provides by default and this perhaps has to do with the form, a glimpse into a way of life that we can perhaps with due respect understand as our traditions or inheritances. Read like this the novel does not make us see colonialism as just another cultural encounter that occurred naturally in course of time, but the novel stands for something that can record tradition and show to us the ruptures that colonization set forth.
Translating Models?:
The issues regarding the translation of such a novel then involve awareness of the story form and the models presented therein. However, very interesting questions arise here. Is translation only a task of translating the concepts? Can practices be translated or recreated as concepts? Are there practices that do not lend themselves to conceptualization and translation? And do they remain as practices only because they manage to remain outside of conceptualization? The awareness of the translator in such a case I think is shifted from providing an experience that is nearer or faithful to the original but in preserving the model that the original presents. Thus one has to translate models more than attempting to provide experiences or specific meanings. Here then, with the novel Awadheshwari, we are confronted with a case where language cannot be seen as representing culture in any direct manner. So then, the translator must be cautious not to be ideologically inclined and must translate the meaning of the path or model if at all (because specific meanings are only part of a given path or model). So that, a model preserved and passed on, and numerous experiences within it can become possible. In times when endless ideological translations prevail upon us, even heaped upon us constantly, Giridhar’s translation is more relevant. For instance, his “asked himself wordlessly” and similar phrases point to a particular from of reflection, specific perhaps to our times and contexts alone, the composition of which we can reflect upon. That Giridhar believes that one can be indifferent to ideological positions in the act of translation perhaps best suites the translation of stories in the Indian tradition.
Published in Translation Today Vol.2, No.2. Oct 2005. pp243-247
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