Towards an Indian Theory of Translation

Author(s): Indra Nath Choudhuri

Source: Indian Literature , September/October 2010, Vol. 54, No. 5 (259)
(September/October 2010), pp. 113-123
Published by: Sahitya Akademi

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 Towards an Indian Theory of
Translation

Indra Nath Choudhuri

Lat is the reason that a multilingual country with a 5000

VV year-old civilization did not care to develop a well-founded
translation theory or even discuss, if not elaborately, at least
concisely, the nature, function and principles of translation. Bh.
Krishnamurti points out that India is a linguistic area and based
on the same analogy one can say India is also a translation area.
Being polyglots, we use more than one language while speaking
or even thinking. But the big question is why isn't there a single
critical text specifying the art or sceince of translation parallel
to Panini's Ashtadhyayi or Tolkapier's Tolkapium or Bharata's
Natyashastra. It is presumed that in Indian context the exclusivist
attitude of the speakers of the master narrative is responsible
for this kind of a dismal situation. It is true to a greater extent
and the reason for this sort of an attitude as traced by Suniti
Kumar Chatterjee is very interesting.
Polyglottism in ancient India, as mentioned by Suniti
Kumar Chatterjee was responsible in the development of
'translating consciousnesses' among the Indians. Vatsyayan's phrase
lokopichanuvada which means 'translatibility' explains the historical
length of existence of India's translating consciousness. Dr Suniti
Kumar Chaterjee in his book Indo-Aryan and Hindi has proved
that much of the literature of Sanskrit, particularly the
Mahabharata and the Puranas, is based nonetheless on a translation
substratum from the literatures of Indo-Aryan languages which
include the languages of born-Aryans, mixed-Aryans, non-Aryans

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Indian Literature: 259

and foreign speakers, particularly, settled groups of foreign people

who spoke Greek and old Persian. When Sanskrit attained pan
Indian prestige status its speakers became reluctant to disclose
the translated character of its literary substratum.
The theoretical reason can be found by alluding to the
Russian formalists who were of the opinion that in every literary
tradition there is not one but several literary schools and they
exist in literature simultaneously, but one of them represents
the canonized crest and Sanskrit, in due course, achieved that
status. The others existed obscurely. The superior position played
down any role of translation from these languages into Sanskrit
and with the passage of time Sanskrit even despised the artistic
creation in the Indian bhashas.

One can, in this respect, give a very interesting example

of a legend which is usually associated with Gunadhya's Brihatkatha.
Gunadhya, a poet of high merit and deep perception, wrote a
book of stories in Paishachi language, a dialect spoken by the
common folk of the North-Western India and entitled it
Brihatkatha. It was about 8th century A.D. and in India Sansk
was still the language of power, scholarship and arrogance. Wh
Gunadhya presented the manuscript to the scholars they rejec
it out-right as the book was not written in Sanskrit. It was ve
frustrating and insulting for Gunadhya and he decided to ta
the extreme step of burning the manuscript.
The legend says that Somadeva, a distinguished scholar o
Sanskrit, was able to rescue one-seventh of the manuscript b
persuading Gunadhya not to burn the complete work. A port
of the recovered part of the manuscript was brought out
Sanskrit translation by Somadeva consisting of 2400 slokas an
it was entitled Kathasaritsagara. Later on Kshemendra, anoth
very distinguished scholar of Sanskrit, translated the recove
part in 7500 Sanskrit slokas and named it Brihatkathamanjar
fact, this was the first book translated into Sanskrit from a
other Indian languages. There are some more translations avail
in Sanskrit from Pali Buddhist texts; otherwise Sanskrit langu
with an elitist approach to literature was not used for translat
from other languages into Sanskrit.
However, the surprising thing is that though Sanskr
scholars and writers did not care to translate from bhasha literature

into Sanskrit, yet they were quite concerned about translatio

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 115
Indra Nath Choudhuri

in a multilingual society in which they lived. Faced with linguistic

divergence, they had to investigate different aspects of language
and comprehension: learning and teaching, universals and
commons in languages and the distances between them, and also
the complex relationship between word and meaning, on the
one hand, and language representation, logic and reality on the
other. All these issues still retain direct relevance to the
understanding of translational linguistics of ancient India and
help in creating a viable theory of translation.
The scattered insights and oblique hints given in different
texts like i) Aitereya or Gopatha Brahmana, ii) Ashtadhyayi of Panini,
iii) Nirukta of Yaska, iv) Kayyat's commentary on Mahabhasyakar's
statement on the sutra of Panini, v) Kulluka Bhatta's commentary
on Bhartrihari and Manusmriti and vi) Vatsyayan's bhasya etc and
also the principles observed by the practitioners of literary
translation in almost all the Indian languages stretching over
several centuries can be pieced together for developing an Indian
theory of translation.
Here I must admit that I have little knowledge of the 700
to 800 years of bhasha tradition and also the explicative discussion
in Prakrit and Apabhramsa of Jain aesthetics about which, some
years ago, Prof D.R.Nagaraj, who occupied the Indian chair at
the Chicago University after A.K. Ramanujan, gave a brilliant
exposition in a seminar in Banglore.
While piecing together what has been said about translation
in different texts one can realize that in Indian context the term
for translation is anuvada i.e. repetition of what is enjoined by
a vedic text with a different wording. But repetition is not
understood as a literal word-by-word rendering of the original
from source to target. In the Indian context the reader is never
a passive receiver of a text in which its truth is enshrined.
The rasa and dhvani theories allude to the fact that a text
is recoding by the individual consciousness of the receiver of
the text, so that he/she may have multiple aesthetic experiences
and hence a text is not perceived as an object which should
produce a single invariant reading and unlike the western approach
any deviation on the part of the reader-translator is not
transgression in translation. That the translator has always the
freedom to interpret the text though the Lefevier's term "invariant
core" remains constant.

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116
Indian Literature: 259

One of the greatest advances in the 20th century Western

literary study is that theoreticians like Roland Barthes see the
place of the literary work as that of making the reader not so
much a "consumer" but as a "producer" of the text (Ronald
Barthes, S/Z, London 1974) and at the same time, Julia Kristeva's
notion of "intertextuality" is profoundly significant because the
very acceptance of all texts that precede and surround it allows
the reader-translator to interpret, clarify and translate. The
ancient Indian view that translation is nothing but repetition
also means that translation is clarification, interpretation which
is obtained by repetitive utterances and therefore to an Indian
society, steeped in an oral literary tradition of smriti and shruti,
differing versions were the norms, not exceptions. The method
of producing the authentic and 'pure' text perpetuated in Europe
particularly during the period of colonial domination by the
Europeans was an alien notion for Indians. To an Indian mind
translation is rebirth where 'atma' the invariant core remains

constant but other things take a new form.

Besides the notion of repetition (vidhivihita tasya
nuvachanuvadah) Gopatha Brahmana reflects on the doctrine of
purposefulness of translation (saprayojanamanuvadah) derived
from the Sanskrit poetics and thus cannot be simply explained
on the basis of the utility theory of demand and supply. The
translation problems are more of an aesthetic problem than a
purely linguistic and functional problem and therefore 'prayojana
should be understood as aesthetic delight (sakala
prayojanamaulibhuta anandam: Mammata) because literary
translation is not just a replication of a text in another verbal
space and verbal period. On the contrary, a translated text presents
profoundly radical questions as to how the translation turns into
an aesthetic activity. The essence of translation lies in the
preservation of meaning across two different languages. This
notion leads us to the central issue of equivalence in translation.
In Jaiminiya Nyaya it is said that the revelation of meaning is
translation (jatasya kathanamanuvadah, 1/4/6) and therefore
equivalence here does not mean a search for sameness. Even
Shakespeare of the 16th century England in his play A Midsummer
Nights' Dream did not accept the theory of sameness for translation.
The play is of common men, kings and queens and fairies with
magical power.

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 117
Indra Nath Choudhuri

One of them, whose name is Puck, turned the weaver

Bottom's head, into a donkey's head to fulfill the wish of Oberon
who wanted to play a joke with his wife Titania. Bottom's friends
were all very scared and thought they were haunted by some
evil spirit.
Snout one of his friend called out, "O Bottom, thou art
changed!" His friend Quience went a step further and retorted,
"Bless thee, Bless thee! Thou art translated." In other words,
for Shakespeare, translation is, complete transformation of the
original.
An adequate translation text is a semantically, pragmatically
and dynamically equivalent one because a translator is confronted
with the range of interpretabilities of a given text and his task
is to analyze consciously the superstructure of content based
on a complex fabric of language.
Revelation of the meaning depends upon i) Etymology
(yoga), ii) Interpretation based on conventionally established
usage (rudhi).
Rudhi-meaning is always stronger than the yoga-meaning
and hence translation is not verbatim reproduction but imaginative
recreation and retelling in the target language.
Indian theoreticians understood the fact that the literal
meaning of an utterance is only a part of its total meaning and
those who try to analyze the literal meaning may completely
loose sight of the real or inner significance of speech. More
than the literal meaning the ancients looked for the inner
significance of the passage. The inner significance of the meaning
is rooted in the context of the verbal art and that determines
the 'literariness' of the artifact and without this knowledge the
translation is never successful and therefore both the verbal and
cultural contexts facilitate in recoding the text by the reader
translator for a meaning which emancipates 'artha' from material
reality. Kayyat and even Tolkapiyar refer to 'pramanaantar' the
contextual meaning which means, when transferred, translation
becomes a reality.
The Buddhist logicians talked of mental or conceptual
images, which do not have their counterpart in the objective
world as conceived by Mimansa and Nyaya philosophers. They
refused to believe there are any real connections between words
and external object. Netti-prakarana, a Buddhist guide book for

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Indian Literature: 259

the commentators stresses more on the context theory of

language and investigates the structure of the word fabric of the
text in a dynamic set-up.
In the famous Tamil work on grammar Tolkappiyam the
role of the context in resolving the problem of meaning and
Bhartrihari's four types of context-factors are significant in
understanding the complex issue of the verbal art:

a) Sansarga (two things known to be related e.g.

savatsadhenu)
b) Viprayoga (relation between two things disappears e.g.
avatsadhenu)
c) Sahacharya (e.g. Ramalaxmana, here Rama is not
Parusharama or Balarama because the compound tells
about the Rama who is the brother of Laxmana)
d) Virodhita (Ahinakula: snake-and-mongoose opposition or
the hostility-relation)

Besides these concepts "anubachanam," "saprayojanam,"

"jatasyakathanam" and "pramanantaram," Ayyappa Panikar has
pieced together some very useful concepts in the context of
medieval Indian translation of Sanskrit classics which, in fact,
reveal all that is said about translation by the Sanskrit theoreticians,
but in a new dimension.
These concepts are: i) anukriti, ii) arthakriya, iii)
vyaktivivekam and iv) ullurai.
i) Anukriti is imitation of the original. One can imitate
only what one is not. The product of imitation is not
the same text, but a similar text;
ii) Arthakriya is putting emphasis on the manifold ways
in which meanings are enacted in different texts. It
emphasizes the creation of meaning or addition,
omission, displacement and expansion;
iii) Vyaktivivekam is rendering of the meaning inferred by
the reader or invoking interpretation based on anumana
or inference potential of a given passage;
iv) Ullurai is a Dravidian term primarily means the inner
speech, not the heard melody but the one unheard
or the speech within. In a literary text this is the vital
layer.

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 119
Indra Nath Choudhuri

These two sets of concepts confirming to a distinct Indian

theory of translation underline the creative freedom enjoyed by
medieval Indian reader-translators to produce viable, fully localized
translations with a visible absence of the anxiety of authenticity
on their part.
These translators attended their job without any inhibition,
and they rarely maintained a word-for-word, line-for-line
discipline. The categories useful for the study are not "the TL
and the SL" or "the mother tongue and the other tongue." The
poet/writers attempting bhasha renderings of Sanskrit texts
treated both the languages as their "own" languages. They had
a sense of possession in respect of the Sanskrit heritage. The
whole medieval bhakti movement of poetry in India, on the one
side, had the desire of "translating" the language of spirituality
from Sanskrit to the language of the people and, on the other
side, it sought to liberate the scriptures from the monopoly of
a restricted class of people and saw to it that these translations
became a means to re-organize the entire society. No western
theory can be adequate to understand the total magnitude of
this traditional activity in India.
Let me, in this respect give the case of Jnaneswara, a very
distinguished poet of medieval Marathi devotional poetry.
His Bhavarthadipika (popularly known as the Jnaneswari)
was free translation of the Bhagwadgita. Within the scope of
this work, the great philosopher and poet subsumes the knowledge
of the Nath tradition so as to wed it with the emotion of Bhakti
tradition. The original text, the Gita, is a set of dialogues,
between Saunaka and the rishis in the Nimisha forest, between
Sanjaya and Dritrashtra, and between Krishna and Arjuna. In
translating it, Jnanadeva adds two more levels of dialogic tension
to it: the first is the oral level of the conversation between the
poet and his Guru Nivrittinath and the second is the lexical level
of dictation given by the poet to his scholiast Satchidanand. In
adding these levels, the poet endows legitimacy on the oral as
a form of literature as valid as the written emphasizing thereby
that the Jnaneswari Gita is more a suta (to be sung in another
language) text than a mantra (Sanskrit verse) text. Contained in
these subversions and shifts, as explained by Ganesh Devy, were
the seeds of an emerging and very complicated Indian theory
of translation. W.B. Quine will apply, in this case, the thesis of

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Indian Literature: 259

indeterminacy of translation and cast his aspersions on this kind

of a theoretical formulation (Word and Object, Cambridge, Mass,
1960) but the Indian theoreticians will say, there is no reason
to be skeptical and fastidious about exactness and accuracy.
It is obvious that medieval India did not believe in literal

translation although Indian writers were familiar with the verbatim

translation, known as 'chhaya'(shadow) of Prakrit text into
Sanskrit, frequently found in Sanskrit plays. But the Indians
preferred adaptation to 'verbatim' translation. The Tolkappiyam
mentions that 'vali' (i.e. an adapted work) can be of four kinds:
i) abridged or ii) expanded, or iii) abridged and expanded or iv)
translated in accordance with the traditions of Tamil. Kamban
belongs to this tradition of 'translation' and the tradition was
not to go for literal paraphrasing but for living or creative
translation. It reminds us of Fitzgerald, the English translator
of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, who once said, "I shall anytime
prefer a living sparrow to a stuffed eagle" Any text is both word
bound and world-bound. The tradition of translation in medieval
India was world-bound and not word-bound.
But where one should set the limits for freedom? When
does a version become subversion? When does deviation lead
to distortion? One can take the counter-texts like Ravanayan
or Meghnad badh kavya or apparently feminist versions of Ramayana
in Bengali and other languages or parodies of Mahabharata like
'The great Indian Novel by Shashi Tharoor. Certainly they ar
not translations in the orthodox or ordinary sense. But they
maintain intertextuality—each work provoking us to think o
the other texts.

The West, on the contrary, has always been obsessed by

the anxiety of authenticity. Perhaps it was with the beginning
of the attempts to translate the Bible into different world
languages that this question of authenticity became a bugbear.
Otherwise also, the European literary tradition reared on Christian
metaphysics as says G.N. Devy, has always alluded to translation
as a 'perpetual exile,' a move away from the origin and an effort
to re-situate the origin. In the West translation is feared as an
intrusion of the "other," which is sometimes desirable as it helps
define one's own identity. The translation of Bible by King James
and Martin Luther is a crucial metaphor of literary defiance in
search for one's own identity.

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 121
Indra Nath Choudhuri

In fact, European literary historiography steeped in a

tradition of single dominant literary tradition has always been
suspicious of 'the other,' the foreign culture entering in their
lives through translation.
Inversely India's amazing capacity to assimilate alien culture
and its acceptance of the Vedantic oneness has always paved the
way in obliterating the difference between "swa' and "para", self
and the other.

In modern times in the West translation has been subjected

to scrutiny from a variety of perspectives such as pure literary
discourse of Paul Valery, Cultural Studies of George Stener,
theoretical linguistics of Catford, psycho-analysis of Andrew
Benjamin, structuralism of Jacobson, deconstruction of Derrida,
Gender study of Lori Chamberlin and of course post-colonial
discourse of Lawrence Venuti. All these perceptions consider
translation as a complicated linguistic and literary act while in
India it is an inevitable way of life and the focus has been more
on the pragmatic aspects of translation. Among the post
structuralist thinkers Jacques Derrida questions the absolute
position that a literary text occupied in the traditional critical
discourse and argues that each new instance of reading the text
is a different occasion to experience the absence of its meaning.
Derrida, thus, grants translation the status of literature as the
translator like a creative writer signifies meaning as independent
presence and develops a more dynamic theory of the relationship
of meaning and language (See, Positions, tran. by Alan Bass, the
University of Chicago Press, 1981, p.33).
Bhartrihari's exposition of the "sphota" theory, almost
anticipated Derrida when he said that the relation between
"nada"(phonetic manifestation) and "sphota" (semantic realization)
is like that of the reflection of sun etc in flowing water, a
reflection which is of a steady object but which acquires the
movements of the current of water (Vakyapadiyam,
Brahmakandam,48-50). No reflection is possible unless there is
a substance which holds this. Yet the reflection in itself and by
itself is a pure nothing. Meaning exists in language not as a
positive presence but as an absence which reflects its independent
presence
This speculation, I have my strong view, was very much
prevalent in India and was used unconsciously in the 'construction'

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122
Indian Literature: 259

of a theory of translation. In modern times it is Sri Aurobindo

who endorses the view by saying that a translator is not necessarily
bound to the original he chooses, he can make his own poem
out of it, if he likes, and that is what is generally done.
However, Indian view being reader-oriented, does not
neglect the basic desire of a reader which is to approach translation
for understanding and enjoying the original and not to make
a new creation out of the original. He goes for a translated text
primarily to come out from his own cultural prison and create
a vantage point from where he can observe, understand and enjoy
the happenings of another culture.
In the present day India plurilingual writers, writing in the
language of the ex-colonizer or in Indian bhashas are challenging
and redefining many accepted notions in translation theory. We
can no longer merely concern ourselves with the conventional
notion of linguistic equivalence or ideas of loss and gain, which
have long been a consideration in translation theory. The reason
is the extensive use of different upabhashas by Indian writers
like Kambar, Debesh Roy, Krishna Sobti and others, or the
creation of a new language by Dalit writers or the use of tribal
languages in multilingual contexts. These are the languages of
the 'in between', which occupy a space 'in between* and challenge
conventional notions of translation seeking to create new models
of translation theory. This is to be seen and accepted as a part
of a historic process and then only we shall be able to analyze
and explain the 'dalit' and 'gramin' literary heterodoxy and
translate it and in the process create an Indian translation theory
and also add to it new insights and affirm the importance of
a moral radical deconstructive path.
I started my paper with a story of Gunadhya and his
Brihatkatha and can I now end the paper with another story
narrated by Alexander Dow, who translated Farishta's History of
Hindostán from Persian into English and mentioned that the
difficulties of translating even from Sanskrit into English is
equally formidable, not just for himself but even for the Mughal
emperors. And he tells a little legendary tale about Faizi, the
great scholar of his time, who changed his name and went to
Varanasi to study the Vedas under a learned Brahmin with the
ultimate view of translating them into Persian. Faizi acquired
the knowledge of Sanskrit after ten years of study; but he also

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 123
Indra Nath Choudhuri

felt passionately in love with the daughter of his Guru. The

Brahmin was delighted to have his daughter married to the
disciple; but when the repentant young man revealed to his Guru
the deception he had carried out, the Brahmin ordered him to
stop at once his learning in the Vedas. He also forewarned him
not to translate the knowledge he had acquired. As the legend
goes, in Alexander's Dow's version, Faizi returned home with
a wife but no translations. In comparison to Faizi in the 16th
century and Dow in the 18th Century our situation in the 21st
Century of translating Sanskrit texts or any bhasha text into
English or in another Indian bhasha is much less depressing, it
is rather brighter. With the spur in the translational activities
a move towards shaping an Indian theory of translation has now
become a plausible reality.
This theory does not deny the pragmatic approach of
sameness in translation but goes a step further to emotionally
reconstruct a verbal art into a different language. In the process
the original necklace with a pendent may loose its string and
only the pendent may remain in translation. If the pendent looks
attractive then don't hesitate to say to the translator,
'Congratulations, you have done it.' May I in this context quote
a couplet from Iqbal, one of the most distinguished poets of
Urdu, which is so apt for our understanding of the Indian
translation consciousness?

'Transcend your reason because though it is a glow,

It is not your destination
It can only the path to the destination show.'

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