Englishing Indulekha - part IV

   Configured thus, as translation and signification- in contrast to what is termed "reflection” in a bourgeois aesthetic and consequently naturalised -novelistic narrative veers away from the pole of transparency and realism, openly acknowledging its task as one of writing; of the embattled production of new subjects, the setting out of new and different modes of signification. Fictional initiatives are envisaged and understood as historical struggles of re-signification, involving representation and production, not simply reflection. (Significantly, the prefatory narrative finds resolution and the author his pleasure with the emergence of readers who consciously engage in battle on its side.) Readers do not approach "translations" of this kind expecting to find themselves at home in its territory. They go as strangers willing to engage with the foreignness of   that text and its nilanguage, willing to develop an understanding of the ways of a new world, willing also to "expand and deepen [their own] language by means of the foreign language"(B 81)
        At one level, then, the novel in its European homeland and the genre in its Nair afterlife have a great deal in common. Both embark on massive tasks of cultural (re-) organisation as they develop the figures, the institutions,the events, the knowledge formations, the codes that set up the new world of the subject-individual. However, while the European novel obscures this process by naturalising it through claims to transparency and realism, the Malayalam novalbuk  acknowledges this initiative quite openly and in fact celebrates it. This reorganisation of self and world undertaken by the narrative is not only crucial to the interests of the Nair-Indian, it promises pleasures hitherto unimagined. We suggest that in Chandumenon’s translation novels, as in Brecht’s epic theatre, this difference critically alters the terms of consent and indeed makes a breach in the very apparatus of European realism.
          The locating of the work of art thus, in the domain of signification or representation (the arena also of "pure language, ” or in Derridean terms, “writing”) is apparent in the interventionist agenda that Chandumenon sets up for lndulekha. He wants to find out whether he will "be able to create a taste amongst my Malayalee readers for ...a story that only contains such facts and incidents as may happen in their own households". Nair domestic life will feature as context (and will in that process become normative/dominant) for a new reality, a new subjectivity, a new kind of pleasure. To achieve this the author must abjure the formal, sanskritised Malayalam of existing   literary artefacts and meticulously fashion the Malayalam that he ordinarily speaks at home to signify itself. In the process he also initiates the setting up of a new written standard for Malayalam in which the   Nair-Namboodiri dialect will become normative. Outside the context of his political initiative Chandumenon's prefatorial inistence on the detail of grammar and pronunciation may seem inexplicable. (Contrast this Malayalam to the language that his contemporary, the missionary lexicographer, Herman Gundert, attempted to codify in his dictionary and grammar -a Malayalam of the street corner or the field). The preface and the letter to Dumerg ue reveal other agendas that relate to the definition and consolidation of a Nairness that is being translated into modernity and refashioned for hegemony ; a modernity that Chandumenon actively seek to shape and regulate.1 3.  For example, Chandumenon wants ”to illustrate to my Malayalee brethern the position, power and influence that our Nair women, who are noted for their natural inteligence and beauty would attain in society. ..." Characters who resemble Indulekha in every way may not exist but they can be imagined and the novel must act as catalyst to that imaginary. All may not be well with the Nair taravad, but both critique and reform can be carried out in the interests of consolidation rather than subversion. Indulekha is to be the new Nair woman, educated, independent, English-knowing yet meticulous in her observance of caste rituals, proud of her breeding and her community; acknowledged blemishes on the social face such as Panchumenon’s partiality towards his direct anandaravans are removed in the new dispensation, represented by Madhavan’s sense of justice and his espousal of his young (male) cousin's cause. Chandumenon advocates English education, but carefully defines the purpose to which it might be put: with a knowledge of the "richest language in the world" a Nair woman can and will acquit herself (in which court?) honourably (according to which code?)in the matter of choosing a husband. Other interesting‘ questions are: how and to what end did this intention, touched no doubt by Chandumenon' s own relationship with Lakshmikuttyamma, deflect/disengage the recasting of women from the colonial and brahmo/brahminicail nationalist programmes? How is this iifference -both from this national/nationalist patriliny and the patriliny of its European original -constitutive of the propriety of the new Nair subject? How will it fare in later debates around the subjectivity of the citizen?14. In class terms, what is the nature of the passage into modernity configured by the novel? What is the hegemonic alliance it seeks to inaugurate?                                                                                                                                               

Chandumenon clearly has a stake in setting up an imagined Malabar with its centre in the Nair taravad; in consolidating Nair identity through endogamous marriage; in re-writing relations of power and entitlement within the Nair family; in re-figuring the intra-regional relationship between the Nairs and the Nambudiris and defining humanism (both in the anti-clerical and ethical senses of the term) as a product of that conflict; in resisting colonial programmes that might disturb the propriety of Nair society in unacceptable ways (for example through marriage with 'lower' castes, or immoderate espousals of humanism/ Enghsh education). He is also proposing new inter-regional or national connections between the martial Nairs and the ”official” ( Bengali-Bihari-Hindu) Indians.15 There is a confident programme here of subject-formation, class- consolidation, region and nation building. A confidence that a dalit or a feminist today should find chilling and challenging.

In the sections that follow we will discuss the 1890 translator’s preface by W. Dumergue and the 1965 foreword to its re-issue by T.C. Shankara Menon as two further fragments of the afterlife of the novel. We conclude with brief reflections on present day debts to this work and the task of the translator today.

V

Dumergue has little trouble recognising the value and the importance of the novel. His enthusiasm is evident in the preface to the 1890 translation which begins by setting up a frame for lndulekha. "No book,” he claims, "was ever written with greater justification than the Malayalam novel of "Indulekha". He explains -and we will do best to quote him at some length: The popular literature of the Dravidian languages, "with all its unnatural and supernatural paraphernalia, belongs to an age when the human mind was still in a go-cart, its language is as obsolete as the language of Piers the Plowman, and as it is without exception founded on the venerable Sanskrit there is a total absence of originality." To "Mr. Chandu Menon” goes the credit of quitting "the well worn track, paved with plagiarism, "and creating, in what is at the same time an originary step for an independent literature for Malabar,  an original work of art, indeed, a work of art that will be canonised as original also by Dumergue's translation. The novel justifies itself in several other ways; all so closely aligned in Dumergue’ s argument that he seems to seems to see no reason to keep them distinct. Major virtues of the book are its realism and the authenticity of its prose: it depicts a ”modern Malabar" using the "living Malayalam of the present day.” As a result, it naturalises, outs flesh and breathes life into, what was but a literature of dry bones. Dumergue does not distinguish the project of realism or of prose -or indeed of “life” itself -from the literary initiatives of colonial government.16 The author “deserves well of all who, from birth, inclination or necessity are interested in a regeneration of oriental literature" (DM vii). Precisely those traits that mark out the book as an authentic beginning for a modern Malayalam literature make it indispensable reading for scholars and administrators. For the former the book will provide welcome respite from the” weariness and disappointment” of classical literature; for the latter, it is an invaluable resource; its colloquial Malayalam "far more important for the ends of administration than all the monuments of archaic ingenuity...."

  Dumergue’ s reading of lndulekha governs both his practice and theory of translation. He regards meaning as transparent, transferable guaranteed by authorial presence: that the translation as a whole represents the meaning of the original is guaranteed by the fact that the author himself did me the favour of pursuing the manuscript copy and suggesting such alterations as were necessary". Indulekha's return journey into the English language encounters few of the grave problems faced by the passage out, indeed no problem that cannot be immediately attended to by good sense and executive efficiency. Take for example the process through which the problem posed by the Sanskrit standzas cited in the Malayalam text is solved. Their original meaning is briskly established, first through consultation with Chandumenon- and where he proved inadequate, with the help of a (unnamed) Telugu Pandit who  commented on a transliteration of the Malayalam rendering. Finally that meaning [is] reproduced" by Dumergue's (unnamed) wife in some pretty English verses. His translation, Dumergue tells us,generally adhered “as closely as possible to the original." Lest the leader is left wondering what exactly regulates the boundaries of generality and possibility, he explains: “I have not hesitated to depart from the literal idiom on occasions when it would be unintelligible or discordant in English." Residues to his fluent translation-recuperation of the narrative are neatly edged into place in the notes attached to the translation where fiction of realism makes space momentarily for another discourse designed to manage difference: ethnology. In them, Dumergue endeavours ”to explain certain passages relating to the social and family system peculiar to Malabar." The act of translation rendered transparent, invisible. Its practice demands no teasing out of the intertextuality of the foreign text; no pause to reflect on its performative force. Objects do not hover at the edge of contracts to their names, they are naturalized for all cultures and all historical periods and can travel without risk to their integrity.

Yet faultiines surface even in this preface of exemplary brevity and directness and are apparent in the notes as well as in what Dumergue’s project prohibits attention to the discursive surface or what he calls "the literal idiom" which is disparaged as useful only to those Englishmen writing examinations who would misuse the transition "as a 'crib'." Similarly, differences between the English of the translation and the Malayalam of the original are trivialised and presented as of the interest only to humourless scholasticism such as that of the French. As for Dumergue, he proudly asserts that he has "neither the courage nor the wish to tamper" with the order of his language.

The result is fluent and eminently readable translation, one that does not seem like a translation at all. But it is also a translation that rewrites its original into the dominant (and therefore also transparent) discourse of the target-language, providing the target-language reader with the pleasure of recognizing  his or her own culture in the foreign text and feeling at home in another history and another culture. Such translations obviously domesticate the foreign text, obscuring differences of history, politics, intertextuality, context etc. Not always so evident is the imperial scope of this universalism. In Dumergue's translation the inaugura initiatives of Chandumenon's novel, -its resistance to the reforms proposed by the Malabar Marriage Commission, its hegemonic ambitions, its recasting of regions, it's nationalism, it's project of individualism, humanism and rationality, it's figuring into being of new women and men -are obscured as the story is presented as one in which the deep-seated and enduring claims of beauty and truth find vindication whatever the obstacles of tradition and irrationality that might come in their way. The reader will perhaps have recognised the preceding statement as a paraphrase of TC. Shankara Menon's comments in the preface to the 1965 re-issue of Demergue's translation. In fact Demergue's "cultured and broadminded" (we are citing Shankara Menon) judgement of Indulekha as a ”well-told, pleasing love-story" that was also "a faithful , fascinating picture of life in Malabar…

no only interesting but also useful to administrators and historians" becomes both the basis of his translation practice and of the canonisation of the original. The translation displaces the original as it establishes the reading in which Indulekha is rendered intelligible and of value, and circulated canonically in Malayalam -and world --literature.

  Shankara Menon' s preface also is an index of the uneasy life of Chandumenon's novel and of the literature of lndia in the universalism of the post-independence literary curriculum. The essay hovers uncertainty between an incapacity to appreciate the importance of this work and the imperative to affirm a national literature and is marked by its ambivalence about the popularity of Indulekha(53 editions by 1956). Shankara Menon explains away the success of the novel as a feature of its simple plot and language. We quote: the plot, ”simple though it be, will appeal to all because sympathy and affection for the young and beautiful for thwarted lover and harrassed innocents, are not restricted to a particular period, place or people (v)." The language "provided a revelation that such a story could be so delightfully told in such simple, at the same time literary, Malayalam (iii).” Though formally blemished and therefore only of secondary value as literature (Shankara Menon even suggests that the reader might skip Chapter 18, which has nothing to do with the plot) the story is of interest to ethnologists and social historians for it "entertain[s] as a true and most interesting picture of a certain phase in the changing pattern of social life in Malabar, its taravad politics, marriage customs and superstitions.”

VI

What then might be the task of the translator today? We suggest that she will have as much to learn from Chandumenon’s scrupulous attention to the demands of translation as from Dumergue’s evasions of those claims.

  The task of our times is a translation that will resist, perhaps defy, 'global’ readings of literature, texts and attend to the objects and strategies of a minority literature that has perhaps now become majoritarian.17 It will necessarily track the migration of signs the ongoing struggles of signification, the de-constructive /deconstituting /reconstituting effects of citation, the interdependence of languages and discourses, the historical contracting of subjects and objects. In sum, a translation that will pave the way for a literary/cultural history set in the scene of representation and scanned as resistance. Can a present-day translation be one, we therefore ask, that will re-mark lndian English/ English in India with its history of resistance?

NOTES

1. Summarised in a letter to Dumergue as ”First, my wife’s oft-expressed desire to read in her own language a novel written after the English fashion, and secondly, a desire on my own part to try whether I should be able to create a taste amongst my Malayalee readers, not conversant with English for that class of literature represented in the English language by novels. . ” O. Chandumenon, lndulekha, trans. W. Dumergue CS. 1890. Rpt Calicut: Mathrubhumi Press, 1965, xvi. Hereafter cited in the text as DM.

2.Report of the Malabar Marriage Commission with Enclosures and Appendixes.Madras.1891.1ndia Office Records V/26/910/1.

3. Benjamin Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield) (1804 1881); Novelist and Tory politician; Prime Minister of Britain 1874-80.

3. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator " trans. Harry John. In Walter Benjamin, IIIuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 71. Hereafter cited in the text as B.

4. Several commentators have pointed out the irony of the fact that British missionaries in India used arguments initially developed by atheists and rationalists in Europe to attack the religious and secular authority of the Church, to criticise the "irrationality and backwardness" of Indian religions. Here too Chandumcnon’s narrative presents the atheistic arguments as ”extreme" but admits the value of the critique of traditional religious practices.

6.Jacques Derrida “Des Tours de Babel,” trans. Joseph F Graham. In Graham ed. Difference in Translation ( lthaca: Cornell Univ Press, 1985), 165-208. Hereafter cited in the text as D.

7. Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Poststructuralism and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

8. J. Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 20. Another important discussion of translation is “Border Lines" which runs parallel with the essay ”Living On" trans. James Hulbert, Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1979), pp. 75-176.

9. J. Derrida in The Ear of the Other trans. and ed. by Peggy Kamuf (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), p. 120.

10. Anticipating objections she warns that this concept of history should not be conflated with a Hegelian teleology associated now "with a theme of the final repression of difference" (149)

11. Paul de Man Writes: "the translation canonises, freezes, an original and shows in the original a mobility, an instability which at first one did not notice". The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) p.82.

12. The whole question of why it is that a marginal (but given Disraeli’ s profile as a political thinker perhaps politically thematic) text such as Henrietta Temple comes to be canonised in translation and the related question of what governs lndian choice in reading (G.W. Reynolds, Marie Correli) opens up other deconstructive dimensions of these “translations." For a fascinating discussion, see Meenakshi Mukherjee, Realism -and Reality: The Novel and Society in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985).

13. We would restrain a reading that collapses “actively" into the now resurgent bourgeois-modern ”agentially ". "We would not here claim that Chandumenon, as author or as the organic intellectual of the Nair middle class, is making an agential move in the classic sense that term. However,  we would posit that he is taking an active initiative as he intervenes in the conjunctures that constitute the politics of his time.

14. The exceptionality of Nair sexual contracts and inheritance laws as well as efforts to normalise them into an all-India Hinduism is a long story that ”ends" constitutionally with the 1950s legislations around a uniform Hindu civil code.

15. For a novel set in Malabar, claiming to depict the real life and the true language of the region the total absence of the Mapillas and the hazy presence of the “lower” castes is significant. It is interesting that the only Muslim featured in the novel is the well -dressed man from the North of India who befriends Madhavan on the train only to cheat him.

16. See Susie Tharu, "The Arrangement of an Alliance: English and the Making of Modern Indian Literature” in Rethinking English edited by Svati Joshi (Delhi: Trianka 1991) for  a discussion of policies for the encouragement of vernacular literatures.

17. See Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka, Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). An engaged translator might ....... the target language on what Deleuze and Guattari call a ”line of escape” from the cultural and social hierarchies that the lannguage embodies, thus turning translation into a means of estrangement and ”deterritorialization" See esp. Ch. 3.

Englishing Indulekha - part III

IV

         We return, then, to Chandumenon’ s prefaces to ask: Why is translation the chosen metaphor for his project? Why does he experience it as so difficult, so risky? What are the stakes in these translations? How might we relate the "stages, " through which the novel idea develops? How do they come into an alignment, or make a constellation?

       Chandumenon’ s task is defined first, by his "wife’s often expressed desire to read in her own language a novel written after the English fashion, ” and secondly by a desire on his own part  "to create a taste amongst my Malayalee readers, not conversant with English, for that class of literature represented in the English language by novels” (D xvi) The project is double-edged. lt demands resitting of the novel form as we as a translation of the reader of Malayalam literature. For the moment let us proceed from the literary historical truism that the European novel is a genre that arrives with its bourgeoisie; or, more strictly: that the European middle-class subject is manoeuvred into place through metanarratives such as that of realist fiction. Chandumenon’ s task, then, is to create a novel for a Nair reader-subject who aspires to a place in an emerging Indian middle-class; or, changing the emphasise somewhat, to write a novel that will figure into being this Nair-Indian hyphenation and all, as subject for the liberal bourgeois project in colonial Kerala. Crucial to that project is the critical mediation of imperial initiatives and the consolidation of Nair hegemony in the region. His novel must re-fashion and re-organise the codes and subcodes, indeed the whole corpus of philosophical assumptions and juridico- political contracts that constitute the bodies of the Sanskrit-Malayalam reader and of the English novel. But that is only part of the enterprise. In order to conjure into being his new Nair- lndian subject (pleasure and all) Chandumenon must also catch the European novel at work. He must assay the historical movement inaugurated by the original and recreate, appropriate, its performative energy. Only then will he succeed in writing a Malayalam novel that would be, like its model, an inaugural scripting, an indulekha. Wittingly and unwittingly, then, Chandumenon deconstructs/ supplements his “original” to remake his world, his reader, and- we must not forget -himself as a husband-lover. Nair, Malayalee, Malabar, India here are not “living subjects,” or empirical objects exemplary of already existing formations, “but names at the edge of language, or more rigorously, the trait which contracts, the relation of the aforementioned living subject to his. name. . .” (D 185)

     Chandumenon’s task is rendered infinitely more complex by his focus on the reader-listener(s) and the reshaping of their subjectivities. His objects are her pleasure, their taste. He is not addressing a totally new reader here -say from a social stratum brought into prominence in a revolutionary movement - but one who has been shaped by Sanskrit literature. The novel must transform such a reader- rework the structure of her feeling, redefine her tastes, reinscribe her authority. This is the task that is finally discharged when Chandumenon writeser an original Malayalam novel that find readers who are not only delighted by it, but freely and in their own agency defend it against criticismsm. The focus on the readers pleasure suggests that the essential task of the translator is the repositioning of the text (in this case the novel genre) for historical subjects and historical projects. It is an afterlife never imagined by the original, but one demanded by it all the same. We must not overlook the fact that the novelist is careful to distinguish his achievement, which is a mutation from the ‘original, " promising Lakshmikuttyamma a novel more or less after the English manner: ”ekadesham englishnovalbukukalude mathiri. . . ”and finally claiming to have written something like an English novel. Understandably, therefore, Chandumenon is as impatient as Benjamin with translations that aim only at a transfer of “information,” or meaning. He rejects the idea of translation as a recounting of the gist of the story- he dubs it “useless”(for what?)- and locates a model (oral rendering) in which he can actively , and in an ongoing manner, tease open his ‘original’, treat it as plural and as formed out of other cultural and linguistic texts. The demands of translation, in fact, bring out a plurality in the text that even a discerning and knowledgeable reader such as himself might have earlier failed to notice, just as the force of his reader -interlocutor shows up its instability. Chandumenon can only reorient Lord Beaconfield’s original to address the Malayali reader-listener by treating theoriginal itself as meshed-in with its outwork and as engaged in the process of translating several signifying chains into what is presented as a univocal signified.11.  It is in this reverse, deconstructive gear, that Chandumenon shapes an afterlife for Henrietta Temple in which it becomes intelligible for his world; an afterlife in which it effectively addresses an historical reader.1 2. We begin to appreciate why the equivalent of the oral rendering of the English novel with the added deconstructive feature of a reader of writing, not a listener of speech, cannot simply be a written translation. It will have to be an altogether new genre; a genre which is something like, but not exactly, the English novel.
     Understandably, therefore, Chandumenon is as impatient as Benjamin with translations that aim only at a transfer of "information"or meaning. He rejects the idea of translation as a recounting of the gist of the story-he dubs it "useless" (for what?)-and locates a mode (oral rendering) in which he can actively, in an ongoing manner, tease open his 'original', treat it as plural and as  formed out of other cultural and linguistic texts. The demands of translation, in fact, bring out a plurality in the text that even a discerning and knowledgeable reader such as himself might have earlier failed to notice, just as the force of his reader-interlocutor shows up its instability. Chandumenon's can only reorient Lord Beaconfield's original to address the Malayali reader-listener by treating the original itself as meshed-in with its outwork and as engaged in the process of translating several signifying chains into what is presented as a univocal signified.11 it is in this reverse, deconstructive gear, that Chandumenon's shapes an afterlife for Henrietta Temple in which it becomes intelligible for his world; an afterlife in which it effectively addresses an historical reader12. We begin to appreciate why the equivalent of the oral rendering of the English novel with the added deconstructive feature of a reader of writing, not a listener of speech, cannot simply be a written translation. It will have to be an altogether new genre; a genre which is something like, but not exactly, the English novel.