Christi A. Merrill's Riddles of Belonging: India in Translation and Other Tales of Possession is a rigorous and relevant intervention into South Asian literary studies, postcolonial and cultural theory, comparative literature, and translation studies. Merrill's wide-ranging book traces the dialogical connections among written and oral texts in Rajasthani, Hindi, Urdu, and Sanskrit. As the title playfully signposts, the book addresses questions of ownership and authorship in textual transmission. Merrill emphasizes an emic notion of translation from one etymological aspect of anuvāda, indicating repetition, or “telling in turn,” as she puts it. This shifts the logic of translation as something carried across (trans-latus) in favor of something shared and told again. This reading of anuvāda as “telling in turn,” although teleological, is generative in that it reveals the ways in which stories, riddles, parodies, and jokes all have their own trajectories separate from an urtext as the prime mover of discursivity.
The first chapter provides an overview of debates in translation studies and the positions of major thinkers in this field. Merrill sides with a move away from a focus on originality in favor of treating texts and their subsequent iterations as temporarily “possessed” by different communities and times. In her own words, the “project examines the networks that give such a text meaning over the years across a range of differences (language, nation, race, class, gender, ethnicity, faith).” Merrill confronts “the displaced anxiety over originality that pervades much of our literary discussions today” by focusing on texts that defy easy categorization as oral or written, translated or original, high or low, and so on. (p. 13).
Chapter 2 features the frame story “Chouboli” as an instructive guide to the ways in which riddles and whimsy within “folk” traditions enable subversive readings and performances to operate with impunity. We see the life of the story through the Dalit storyteller Savalram, the Rajasthani writer Vijay Dan Detha, the professional storyteller Abdul Rahman, and, finally, Merrill's own translation. The interplay among versions demonstrates that no telling is singularly authoritative; all are in dynamic and dialogical relation to one another.
Chapter 3 continues to explore the “ludic economy” of literary texts and how laughter and riddling function within seemingly infinitely recurring frames (mise en abîme) to reveal hierarchies and workings of power that these texts subtly ridicule. The chapter concentrates on the Vetālapañcaviṃśati (The twenty-five tales of the undead), a frame story within the Kathāsaritsāgara (The ocean of the streams of stories). Its very form confounds authorship, both inside and outside the text, as the Sanskrit version is supposedly a translated fragment of an overheard story, subsequently recorded in the unattested goblin language known as Paiśācī.
Chapter 4 discusses the valences of eleven translations of Manto's famous partition story, Toba Tek Singh. Merrill offers a fresh reading in which nationalist allegories of transnational exchange are set aside for a more dynamic reading that thinks of the story as not only one about place, but also about the temporal aspects that make the protagonist a person in historical time and the subsequent literary performances of translation also marking their times. Merrill concludes that it is not the ground and borders that divide us, but the narratives that authorize them to place us in exclusive categories.
In the final two chapters (5 and 6), Merrill plays with the word bhūt as meaning both the past and the passed (ghosts), initiating a hauntological turn that dominates the rest of the book. Translated literature is, for Merrill, not a question of original and derivative, but resembles a ghost that haunts and possesses temporarily the body of the translated text, and thence onward to the next literary performance. The clearest example of this possession is in “parody,” which both critiques and renews the parodied text in its very structure; it ensures some continued existence of the former text. Merrill wants us to see that translation, likewise, can be understood as the ability of a speaker to borrow someone else's speech in a way that is not strictly derivative, but a temporary possession that revives.
Some shortcomings are to be expected of an ambitious book challenging established notions of literary merit and authorship. The gender imbalance is striking and passes without comment—where and when are women “telling in turn,” notwithstanding Merrill's translations. Also, the book's expanse of literary and theoretical engagements could use clearer unpacking of complicated ideas and not ask the reader to connect as many dots (even if this is part of the fun). To this end, the effort to problematize and complicate binaries of originality and derivation, at times, tends toward indeterminacy—which may be the point, but that occasionally gets obfuscated by density.
These quibbles aside, Merrill reliably demonstrates that listeners and tellers of tales, jokes, and riddles temporarily possess texts in a fluid oscillation; viewed this way, these exchanges emancipate texts from the spatial and temporal order of assumed origination. The story frames have a moral schema that allows a “chain of interpreters to negotiate concrete human reality age after age” (p. 216). Riddles of Belonging offers a view of literary frames and reframing, riddles and humor that resists narrow interpretive practices and can reveal to us our own unconscious ideological coordinates. The book's content and analysis are decidedly valuable contributions to South Asian literary studies. Moreover, in the decade since it was published, Merrill's methodological intervention exceeds this spatial frame and has made an admirable impact in translation studies more generally, especially for scholars working with literary traditions of the global south and concerned with questions of world literature.
