When Bengali intellectuals first began to narrate the history of their own modern literature, they tended to look upon the middle of the nineteenth century as a major turning point. Writing in the latter half of that century, Bankimchandra Chatterjee (Bankim) spoke of the year 1859–60 as a transitional moment (sandhisthala) when older poetic styles yielded to those of a new era (see Bhaṭṭācārya Reference Bhaṭṭācārya1964, 474–75). For Bankim this transition was epitomized by the novel verse experimentation of Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824–73), who famously recreated the epic Rāmāyaṇa for a new audience of educated Bengalis. Bankim's younger contemporary, Romesh Chunder Dutt, identified this same period with the writings of Bankim himself, along with those of Īśvaracandra Vidyāsāgara (1820–91). Dutt remarked that if Vidyāsāgara had yoked a reinvigorated Bengali to the goals of social change, it was Bankim who first produced prose fiction that could match the poetic genius of Michael (Dutt Reference Dutt1895, 195, 223). Taken together, this singling out of Michael, Bankim, and Vidyāsāgara is of special note, since in all three cases the emergence of literary modernity was explicitly associated with a set of new attitudes toward the salience of traditional Sanskrit learning and literature. These three authors were taken to represent the colonial-era maturation of a regional literature away from the slavish imitation of Sanskrit classics to the flowering of new literary creativity. For the indigenous elite who came to adopt and advocate the new norms and ideals embodied by these three figures, this maturation of Bengali literature mapped directly onto the confident articulation of a new Bengali identity (see Chaudhuri Reference Chaudhuri2009, 330–31).
The concept of translation is central to how we think about such developments. Not only did authors like Vidyāsāgara and Michael work to translate Sanskrit literary treasures into Bengali, but even metaphorically the emergence of Bengali literary modernity can be seen as the creative translation of Sanskrit learning into the idioms, genres, and styles of a colonial vernacular moment. And yet as helpful as the concept of translation proves to be in this case, there is a tendency both to assume that we know what translation means in such a context and to suggest that authors like these shared clear and consistent ideas about translating. Are these safe assumptions to make? How might our understanding of translation during this period change if we were to discover that the one important term associated with translation—anuvāda (anubād in Bengali)—was itself a site of significant tension and intellectual negotiation in nineteenth-century Bengal?Footnote 1
This article zeroes in on the term anuvāda to ask not merely what the term meant within the colonial context, but how and why its particular modern meaning was produced in the way it was.Footnote 2 As tempting as it is to think of anuvāda itself undergoing a kind of translation from a premodern to a modern meaning, I will show that this is both misleading and inadequate. The goal of this article is to suggest not only that the colonial history of translation in Bengal is more complicated than it might at first appear; this article also suggests that a fuller appreciation of the colonial mediations shaping the modern use of anuvāda can enrich our understanding of South Asian translational practices in general while supporting new insights into how we tell the particular story of modern Bengali literature and culture. For when it comes to understanding the meaning and practice of anuvāda within this one context, it may be perfectly acceptable to translate anuvāda as translation, but there is also far more to the story than that.
As I will show, the concept of anuvāda has been mobilized in recent years to support a range of critical perspectives on translation, colonialism, and the role of language in debates over regional and national identity in modern South Asia. This only further heightens the need for the present article. Today we find scholars turning to anuvāda to help refine critical translation theory, explore South Asian literary cultures, and rethink the histories of colonialism and nationalism. As such, it is worth taking time to gain a better purchase on the term itself—not only to place it more squarely within appropriate historical and literary contexts, but also to complicate the question of just what we can ask the term to do for us.
Instead of pursuing familiar questions about commensurability and translation equivalents or worrying over whether South Asian authors valued the goal of adequatio in their translations, this article asks how it is that translations have come to be in modern South Asia.Footnote 3 Toward this end, I draw upon Lydia Liu's (Reference Liu1995, 20) approach to translation as “translingual practice” and her goal of entering into the complicated history of translational practice rather than sitting above or outside that history. When looking at colonial Bengali literature, if we focus on the contingent and the mediated, we come to worry less about whether anuvāda means translation and to ask instead how it is that anuvāda has come to mean translation (see Liu Reference Liu1995, 17). To say that anuvāda both does and does not mean translation tells us little. But to inquire into the processes through which anuvāda came to be understood as translation promises to tell us a great deal about the transformation of intellectual practices in colonial South Asia.
To do this we must shift our gaze from the orientalist scholar to the Dubash, or native interpreter. Henceforth I will employ the term “Dubash” as a generic—and somewhat metaphoric—designation for all those local intellectuals who were drawn into various colonial projects associated with the flow of knowledge and power between Europe and South Asia. While Dubashi culture is associated, in particular, with the work of colonial commerce and the practices of European agency houses, I here use the term to highlight the work of those who mastered two or more languages (do-bhāṣā; see Wilson Reference Vidyāsāgara1855, 150; Yule and Burnell Reference Yule and Burnell1903, 328). I thus use Dubash as a label for those who contributed to the translation of Indic textual traditions and who, in turn, helped shape the development of modern Bengali language and literature.Footnote 4 With respect to the Dubash, the question becomes, how did local understandings of textual transmission relate to the norms and practices of translation as found in the work of colonial scholars and officials? What this article seeks to demonstrate is that even as the early colonial use of anuvāda may have reflected an alternate South Asian understanding of translation, during the same period the discourse and practice of translation in South Asia was transformed in and through the convergence of the Dubash's intellectual world with emergent colonial norms and institutions. To examine the history of such changes is another way of asking about the colonial mediations taking place in the zone of the Dubash that helped shape modern understandings of anuvāda.
Anuvāda Makes Its Entrance
Reflection on the linkages between translation and colonialism has proved immensely fruitful both for opening up the logics of imperial domination and for rethinking the history of translation within Western discourse (see Niranjana Reference Niranjana1992). Beginning in the 1990s, a range of scholars highlighted how much colonialism was predicated not only on a master narrative of translation—in which the West was the great original to be translated across the globe (Bassnett and Trivedi Reference Bassnett, Trivedi, Bassnett and Trivedi1999, 4)—but also on the many lesser acts of translation that served to represent non-Western texts and cultures within European discourse. As scholars began to test the linkages between translation, culture, and power, they began simultaneously to think of alternate ways to imagine the work of translation—seeking to exorcise a variety of demons that have tormented Western reflection in this regard, not least the myth of Babel, the metaphysics of Western individualism, and the economic logic of authorship and ownership under print capitalism. At the same time, anxieties surrounding the goal of universal understanding came to be tempered by a growing awareness that once one abandoned the structuring logic of original and copy one might simultaneously mitigate the pangs of betrayal associated with so much reflection on translation. With the rise of poststructural analysis, the privilege of the author and the romantic dream of commensurability ceased to shape the terms on which translation had to be imagined, while the rise of discourse analysis and cultural studies offered new frameworks within which to think about translation as cultural practice (see Liu Reference Liu1995).
Situating translation within more explicitly postcolonial and transnational frameworks allowed scholars like Lydia Liu to shift attention from the theory to the practice of translation. In Liu's work, this practice is shaped not just by simplistic binaries of domination and resistance characteristic of early postcolonial formulations, but by more “complex processes of domination, resistance and appropriation” that can be traced both within the discursive context of a single language as well as in relation to other “linguistic environments” (Liu Reference Liu1995, 25). Liu coined the phrase “translingual practice” to help her explore the conditions of translation whereby new words and meanings arise and circulate in a host language both due to—and often in spite of—its encounter with a guest language.Footnote 5 As translingual practice, translation is viewed not in terms of the transfer and transformation of meaning in interlingual contexts alone but in terms of the invention of meaning within particular historical contexts, a kind of “meaning-making history” that cannot be divorced from issues of both culture and power (32).
Liu chose to illustrate the complex mediations of past and present through which Chinese, Japanese, and English have shaped modern Chinese neologisms as a way to suggest that such change cannot be adequately explained in terms of the mere impact of foreign languages (Liu Reference Liu1995, 39). In a similar fashion, scholars working in the South Asian context have attempted to complicate the practice of translation. If an earlier generation of scholars had brought into view the workings of the colonial knowledge industry at places like the College of Fort William in Bengal (see Kopf Reference Kopf1969), and if this data eventually lent itself to Saidian critique (see Cohn Reference Cohn1996), more recent generations have turned from the work of the colonizer to the lives and activities of a range of South Asian intellectuals. Known variously as Munshi, Pandit, or Dubash, such men played crucial, if unlauded, roles in transforming learning and literature in colonial South Asia (see Dodson Reference Dodson2007; Hatcher Reference Hatcher2005; R. Rocher Reference Rocher and Kellner2007).
Unlike the archive of official discourse in English, the world of such intellectuals—imagined here as the zone of the Dubash—was largely a vernacular one; indeed their importance to the British lay in their ability to mediate between the living languages of India and its classical past. As the vernacular intellectual zone of the Dubash has been brought to light, our repertoire for conceptualizing the practice of translation has expanded in turn.Footnote 6 The fruit of such awareness can be seen in the writing of translation theorists who increasingly make explicit reference to South Asian conceptual categories to think about the practice of translation. One category that figures prominently in such discussions is anuvāda.
This concept makes an important early appearance in a collection of essays on translation theory edited by Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi. In their introduction, they inform the reader that anuvāda is the “word for translation in Sanskrit, which persists unchanged in most of the modern Indian languages” (Bassnett and Trivedi Reference Bassnett, Trivedi, Bassnett and Trivedi1999, 9). What makes the term so interesting for Bassnett and Trivedi is that while it may serve as the English equivalent of translation, its etymology speaks not of the transfer of meaning from one language to another (as in the root sense of translatio), but of the act of repeating something, of restating. Bassnett and Trivedi offer anuvāda as an example of a non-Western term that provides an alternate way to conceptualize the very practice of translation.
More recently, Christi Merrill has attempted to build on this promise by using the logic of anuvāda to overcome (among other things) the Western fixation on translation as a tension between copy and original. Merrill sees in anuvāda an opportunity to ponder translation as practice—most importantly, a practice that is “relational, dynamic and dialogic” (Merrill Reference Merrill2009b, 34). In her treatment, anuvāda speaks not of the strict transmission of a faithful copy but of an endless series of “parodic repetition” (30). Here is one chance to escape the myth of Babel, to let go of our fixation on the author, and possibly even transcend the print capitalist logic of texts as things that are owned, copyrighted, and liable to distortion (38). Merrill writes that “If trans-latus can be read as a ‘carrying across,’ then I would gloss anuvad as a ‘telling in turn’” (43). Through such telling in turn the translator is simultaneously decentered as a fetish of authenticity and reauthorized as a creative agent. In this analysis, anuvāda allows us to let go of concerns over faithful transmission in order to consider the way texts live on through playful creativity and invention. Merrill's desire to find in anuvāda a kind of South Asian translational sensibility harmonizes with the work of other commentators who ask whether the purported gap between the original author and the translator was ever “half as wide as it had been in the West” (Bassnett and Trivedi Reference Bassnett, Trivedi, Bassnett and Trivedi1999, 8).
Merrill's understanding of anuvāda may be likened to Ganesh Devy's concept of a translating consciousness characteristic of South Asian literary traditions. Like Merrill, Devy advances this concept as a way to circumvent the anxiety of literary metaphysics over issues of fidelity and betrayal while depicting an Indic literary milieu in which translation is both “necessary and commonplace” (Devy 1993, cited in Merrill Reference Merrill2009b, 172; cf. Devy Reference Devy, Bassnett and Trivedi1999, 185). If Merrill's storytellers do not fret about the authenticity of the sources for their tales, according to Devy India's translating consciousness is not troubled by the possibility that meaning could be betrayed as tales move from one language to another.
This brief summary highlights the prominent role granted to the idea of anuvāda within recent reflections on translation. It becomes clear that the postcolonial turn, along with an increased concern with translation as practice, has sparked the quest to articulate alternate understandings of translation. It also emerges that anuvāda has been given an important role to play in such new endeavors. While recognizing the utility of recent theorizing, the point of the present article is to suggest that our understanding of anuvāda as concept and practice remains as yet somewhat underdeveloped. As I hope to demonstrate, anuvāda may represent the Sanskrit word for translation, but it is also a word with a range of particular meanings and connotations in Sanskrit and the many South Asian vernaculars. Taking a cue from Lydia Liu's theory of translingual practice, we have an opportunity to go beyond dictionary definitions—whether these be Sanskrit-to-English or Sanskrit-to-Bengali or Bengali-to-English—in order to attempt an analysis that enters into the “dynamic history of the relationship between words, concepts, categories and discourse” as these are invented in a context of colonial change (Liu Reference Liu1995, 20). Liu's insight into the multiply mediated ways in which new idioms arise may in fact caution us against construing the modern meaning of anuvāda as the result of directly transferring some “intact past” meaning to the present (39). Commonsense definitions of anuvāda as the Sanskrit word for translation are bound to remain unsatisfactory so long as they elide the processes of mediation that took place within particular contexts like the world of nineteenth-century Bengali language and literature.
Translation, Universal and Particular
One way to begin complicating our understanding of translation is by considering Ronit Ricci's (Reference Ricci2011) Islam Translated, which explores the processes through which Islamic texts were translated and promulgated across different literary cultures in early modern South and Southeast Asia. Rather than assuming that the meaning and practice of translation is everywhere and always the same, Ricci stresses the need to understand it in relation to cultural practices that necessarily “vary from place to place as well as over time” (33).Footnote 7 While we may conventionally refer to the recreation of one text in another language as translation, Ricci suggests it is “less clear what exactly translation meant in contexts distant in place and time” (32). To appreciate the particular valences of translation, we must situate its practice within the literary cultures that both inform it and are shaped by its ongoing traditions (61).Footnote 8
Ricci also reminds us that the term “translation” does not always possess obvious equivalents in other languages. While “[m]any cultures exhibit diverse ways of addressing and defining the meanings of rewording or rewriting a text from another language,” these do not always map neatly onto the concept of translation (Ricci Reference Ricci2011, 32–33). Ricci locates the particular association of translation with “faithfulness” within the context of early modern European scholastic translation projects, noting that these were often aimed at proving the errors of non-Christian religions (62). The implication is that if the anxieties associated with faithfulness can be situated within the context of European Christian intellectual practice, those anxieties need not haunt us as we explore the terminologies employed within other literary cultures for thinking about the task of recreating texts across languages.
Ricci's analysis of the values and practices of authors writing in languages such as Tamil, Javanese, or Malay reminds us of the newfound salience of anuvāda within translation studies, not least Merrill's (Reference Merrill2009b, 34) understanding of South Asian translation as “relational, dynamic, and dialogic.” As in the case of Merrill's Hindi storytellers, the authors studied by Ricci betray few anxieties about faithfulness, even as they work to carry over into Tamil or Malay original sources from Arabic, Persian, and other Islamized languages. When Ricci speaks of authors retelling or rewriting texts, we are reminded of Merrill's remark that while trans-latus conjures a “carrying over,” anuvāda marks a “telling in turn” (43). Mediated by the demands of local audiences, new patrons, and changing norms, the translator thinks of the original text not as a property to be faithfully handed over; instead the translator says, “I must first take in a story and then pass it along” (43). In Ricci's (Reference Ricci2011, 64) terms, the goal is to create a new text that is both “culturally appropriate and impressively creative.”Footnote 9 In a move reminiscent of Merrill, Ricci finds an important clue in the Javanese verb njawakaken, which is used to express the idea of adapting a foreign text to Javanese idioms (44).Footnote 10 Elsewhere she cites a Javanese expression that speaks of “pressing old texts into the present situation” (247).
The need to bear in mind the mediated ways in which texts are pressed into new situations is also brought home powerfully in Lisa Mitchell's analysis of language and translation in colonial south India. As she demonstrates, what many assume to be the natural relationship between languages and communities—particularly in the context of modern identity politics—is in fact an artifact of colonial bureaucratic, pedagogic, and orientalist practices. Looking at the Andhra region and the Telegu language, Mitchell argues that, prior to the nineteenth century, south Indian intellectuals tended to move comfortably between languages, not with a sense of their being parallel to one another but with an awareness of their basic complementarity: “At the very beginning of the nineteenth century … someone in southern India might have found it perfectly natural to compose an official letter in Persian, record a land transaction in Marathi, study music in Telegu, send a personal note to a relative in Tamil, and perform ablutions in Sanskrit” (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2005, 449). It was only with the advent of colonial rule and the introduction of new modes of teaching, recordkeeping, and scholarship that languages began to be seen as parallel and distinct. Mitchell notes, tellingly, that a precolonial poet who focused his art around the Mahābhārata, and who wrote in both Sanskrit and Telegu, would have been understood first and foremost as a Mahābhārata poet; however, by the twentieth century the same poet would come to be known as a Telegu poet.
It is during the colonial era, too, that in South Asia a new and distinctive set of attitudes toward translation began to emerge. As orientalist scholars and colonial schoolbook publishers began to develop materials to teach and codify Indian languages, they effected a subtle but consequential change in the understanding of language itself (see Mitchell Reference Mitchell2006; Trautmann Reference Trautmann2006). The logic of colonial governance made it possible to distinguish a genre like the precolonial lexicon (which was often multilingual and topically arranged) and the colonial lexicon, a tool developed to assist in the authorized acquisition of grammatical and lexical knowledge. Whereas precolonial lexicons served the arts of memory and poetics, the colonial lexicon was largely a tool for authorizing translation (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2005, 457; see also Mitchell Reference Mitchell2009, chap. 5). The instrumental goals of governance privileged new norms of accuracy and faithfulness, leading European officials to bemoan the inaccurate or unreliable work of their local assistants, as when C. P. Brown complained of Telegu translators who felt free to “omit, transpose and insert” material as they liked (cited in Mitchell Reference Mitchell2005, 460).Footnote 11
In her quest to make sense of the apparent disconnect between precolonial and colonial understandings of translation, Mitchell hits upon the term anuvāda (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2005, 460; see also Reference Mitchell2009, 182–88). While she recognizes that this is one of the most widely used words for translation in South Asia, she makes it clear that the term “has not always been equivalent to the English notion of ‘translation’” (462). Rather, premodern authors understood anuvāda in terms of retelling a familiar story; they wanted “to say something already known” to their audiences (460). And by emphasizing this distinctive understanding of retelling, Mitchell allows us to appreciate how the premodern practice of anuvāda could be seen as a challenge to Brown's more instrumentalist view of translation.
Brown's attitudes may have been hegemonic, but we should resist a simple dichotomization between precolonial and colonial understandings of translation. Instead, when viewed through the lens of translingual practice, anuvāda may be understood as a concept whose modern usage betrays the tensions and fault lines associated with a series of complex colonial mediations. In the remainder of this article I will, first, illustrate the ways in which premodern understandings of anuvāda continued to shape intellectual practice among colonized authors, and second, provide a historical account of the kinds of developments associated with the production of the modern meaning of anuvāda. To assist with the first task, I turn to a single text that may serve to illustrate the continued practice of anuvāda. For the second task, I survey a range of bibliographic data that can help place the production of modern anuvāda in a chronological framework, at least for the region of Bengal. In the end, I will provide an opportunity to consider how these new perspectives on anuvāda may allow us to think differently about the story of literary modernity in Bengal.
Writing Sanskrit in the Vernacular
As an example of the creative attempt by one South Asian author to put an inherited cultural repertoire to new uses, I turn to Īśvaracandra Vidyāsāgara's two-part work on the promotion of Hindu widow marriage (Vidyāsāgara Reference Vidyāsāgara1855). Known in brief as Vidhavā-vivāha, the work was first published in two parts in January and October of 1855.Footnote 12 In the simplest of terms, the text may be understood as a Bengali prose argument strung across an armature of some 200 Sanskrit texts (both verse and prose), which serve as the scriptural authorities in relation to which Vidyāsāgara attempts to prove that widow marriage (vidhavā-vivāha) is sanctioned by Hindu law. Thinking of Ricci's Javanese idioms, we might view Vidhavā-vivāha as an attempt to press older Sanskrit legal sources into a new present, one that was being actively reshaped by British colonial legal practice, print capitalism, public debate, and liberal social reform.
Vidyāsāgara informs his readers that his goal is to make Sanskrit sources on Hindu law (dharmaśāstra) available to an emergent Bengali reading public whom he presumed to lack both the linguistic ability and the technical knowledge to address the original sources on their own. His goal in doing so was to convince the public—and ultimately the British Government—to endorse his proposal regarding the validity of widow marriage. Thus the first book of Vidhavā-vivāha opens by indicating that the work is intended for “the general public … [and] composed in the popular language of the land” (Vidyāsāgara Reference Vidyāsāgara and Hatcher2012, 57). His next order of business is to stipulate how his case will be made. Vidyāsāgara recognizes that mere rational argumentation will never suffice to convince an orthodox Hindu to support a reform that appears to be prohibited by the śāstras (authoritative Hindu treatises). If widow marriage is to find support among the people, Vidyāsāgara presumes that it will do so only if it can be shown to be congruent with the śāstras (see Vidyāsāgara Reference Vidyāsāgara and Hatcher2012, 58).
Since the majority of his readers were unable to read the relevant Sanskrit sources, one might think that Vidyāsāgara would define his task in terms of translating these sources into Bengali for his readers’ benefit. However, he does not do this. He nowhere employs the kinds of terms we might expect to see, such as anuvāda or one of its vernacular equivalents (e.g., bhāṣāntara). Thinking of his readers’ needs, Vidyāsāgara indicates that his goals are to communicate and explain: “The majority of my respected readers do not know Sanskrit. I choose to communicate the meaning [of the Sanskrit passages] in the vernacular so that they may understand” (Vidyāsāgara Reference Vidyāsāgara and Hatcher2012, 158). If anything, Vidyāsāgara takes on the role of a traditional commentator, whose job it is to restate and interpret a particular text or texts. Needless to say, he was trained as a Sanskrit Pandit and was therefore fully conversant with Sanskrit commentarial practice (see Vidyasagar Reference Vidyāsāgara and Hatcher2012, 30–40); he consistently employs a number of terms drawn from the commentarial lexicon, terms such as artha (meaning), tātparya (purport), vyākhyā (explanation), mīmāṃsā (exegesis), and nirṇaya (investigation).
One of the most obvious markers of the commentarial voice in Vidhavā-vivāha is the word arthāt, a Sanskrit indeclinable meaning something like “in other words.” As used by commentators and by Vidyāsāgara, arthāt suggests that what is about to be said represents a restatement of something that has already been expressed. For example, at one point in Book Two of Vidhavā-vivāha, Vidyāsāgara addresses the issue of whether a particular rule promulgated by an ancient sage can be said to remain in effect in the present age, or Kali Yuga. The intricacies of the argument need not detain us; what matters here is the method he employs to address the question. First, he cites the Sanskrit source in question—in this case a verse passage from the Mahābhārata (Vidyāsāgara Reference Vidyāsāgara and Caṭṭopādhyaya1939, 103). Next he renders the same passage into Bengali prose.Footnote 13 Third, and finally, he restates the meaning of the passage (once again, in prose) in order to advance his argument. His restatement commences with the commentarial marker arthāt: “In other words (arthāt), a woman should serve her husband during her season for the purpose of producing offspring; she should not approach another man” (Vidyāsāgara Reference Vidyāsāgara and Hatcher2012, 130–31).
At the risk of oversimplification, this is how the text of Vidhavā-vivāha operates, gathering the relevant Sanskrit sources on any given topic, rendering these passages in Bengali prose, and then moving on to a further Bengali prose restatement in which Vidyāsāgara makes it clear how the topic ought to be understood. To an English-language reader today, such a method may seem overdetermined, if not redundant. But in light of recent critical reflections on the meaning and practice of anuvāda, we might ask whether a text like Vidhavā-vivāha can be viewed as an example of what Merrill (Reference Merrill2009b, 43) has called “telling in turn.” Curiously though, Vidyāsāgara never explicitly invokes the concept of anuvāda.
This fact is somewhat surprising since Vidyāsāgara does employ the term anuvāda elsewhere in his Bengali oeuvre, especially when thinking about the task of rendering Sanskrit texts into Bengali. A good example would be his 1860 translation of the introductory portions (upakramaṇikābhāga) of the Mahābhārata. In this case, he betrays an awareness that on one level the goal of translation should be to provide a complete and accurate rendering of an original text in a second language; thus he tellingly modifies the term anuvāda with the adjective avikala, which connotes both completion and accuracy (see Vidyāsāgara Reference Vidyāsāgara and Hāldāra1972, 3:181). At the same time, he refers directly to the challenges attendant upon achieving equivalence (aikya) between the original text (mūlagrantha) and the translation. In this connection, he says that in many cases he found it necessary to follow the lead of earlier Sanskrit commentators in order to make sense of the meaning (artha) and purport (tātparya) of certain passages. Thus, having introduced the ideal of the accurate translation (avikala anuvāda), he seems to fall back on another understanding of anuvāda as commentarial retelling.
What makes this particular example so noteworthy is the fact that Vidyāsāgara began working on his Mahābhārata project in the mid-1850s, at the very time he was engaged in writing Vidhavā-vivāha. His deference to traditional commentators in the context of the Mahābhārata translation reminds us of his decision in Vidhavā-vivāha to adopt the stance of a commentator focused on communicating and explaining. Why is it, then, that the ideals of completeness and accuracy do not emerge in connection with Vidhavā-vivāha as they do in connection to the Mahābhārata?Footnote 14 One clue may be found in Vidyāsāgara's own English-language translation of the former work, which appeared in 1856 under the title The Marriage of Hindu Widows. Here he links his concerns over completeness and accuracy with the question of audience:
The translation is neither entire nor literal. The original having been intended for the mass of the native population, was written in a manner which would best suit their understandings. But as the English version has been prepared for a different class of Readers, I have been obliged to omit several passages … to avoid repetition and occasionally to add or alter other passages to make the translation suitable to them. (Vidyāsāgara Reference Vidyāsāgara1856, ii)
Vidyāsāgara seems to suggest that the native understanding of translational activity differs from that of his English-language readers, an audience that included colonial government authorities. On the one hand, he betrays an awareness that translation should strive to be both complete and literal, which is why he acknowledges the various omissions, additions, and alterations he made in translating Vidhavā-vivāha into English. On the other hand, he assumes that his Bengali readers would be far more comfortable with patterns of repetition characteristic of the original Bengali work. In this single comment, we find a clue to the commentarial style of the original Vidhavā-vivāha as well as a confirmation that Vidyāsāgara was actively negotiating newly mediated meanings of anuvāda. He both acknowledges the force of emergent colonial ideals (his translation is “neither entire nor literal”) and admits that his Bengali work betrayed a precolonial preference for retelling (evident from the elements of “repetition” he was obliged to omit from the English version).
Anuvāda and Commentarial Restatement
If we are to appreciate the ongoing salience of anuvāda as commentarial restatement for colonial authors such as Vidyāsāgara, it will be useful drop back in time to consider briefly the logic and praxis of premodern retelling. In ancient and classical Sanskrit, the meaning of the term anuvāda can be captured with such terms as “repetition,” “restatement,” or “recapitulation” (see H. Bandyopādhyāya Reference Bandyopādhyāya1978, 1:81; Mitchell Reference Mitchell2005, 462; Renou Reference Renou1942, 32). We find such usage of the term already in Jaimini's Mīmāṃsā Sūtras (ca. third century BCE), where it is said to express the idea of “repeating what is already known” (6.7.30; cf. Kane Reference Kane1930, 3:622). It was from the ritual-based usage of Mīmāṃsā that the term was later borrowed for use in other contexts. Thus classical legal commentators like Medhātithi adopted the term to denote an extension of meaning (as in the latter's comment to Manu 3.199), while rhetoricians (ālaṃkārikas) used it to denote the subject of a sentence. In the latter case, the point was to stress that one should only predicate something with respect to a subject that was already known (see Kavirāja Reference Kavirāja and Dimock1999, 172; McCrea Reference McCrea2004, 80n10).
As Mitchell has noted in the case of Telegu, these older meanings also helped shape the early modern Bengali understanding of the term, wherein anuvāda is used both to express the idea of restating something and the idea of recapitulating the contents of a work. We can illustrate the operation of such ideas by looking at the final chapter of the first book (līlā) of the Caitanya-caritāmṛta, composed in Bengali verse in the early seventeenth century by Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja. There (at Ādi 17.295–98), the author says of Lord Caitanya:
He was Kṛṣṇa, he was a gopī—the highest paradox; most impenetrable are the unimaginable actions of Prabhu. Let no one argue this, or entertain a doubt; like this is the acintya-śakti of Kṛṣṇa. The activities of Kṛṣṇa Caitanya are unthinkable and wonderful; marvelous are his bhāvas, his qualities, and his activities. He who does not honor him because of logical argument is an evil-doer; he rots in hell, and there is no salvation for him. (Kavirāja Reference Kavirāja and Dimock1999, 300)
After making this comment, Kṛṣṇadāsa goes on to quote a Sanskrit verse from Rūpa Goswāmin's sixteenth-century theological treatise, Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu (2.5.93 in the original Sanskrit text): “The bhavas are inscrutable. Logic cannot touch them. Thus to all these logic cannot be applied, for what is beyond material mature is defined as incomprehensible.”Footnote 15
The ordering of these two passages bears noting. Had this quotation of Rūpa's Sanskrit preceded Kṛṣṇadāsa's comment about Lord Caitanya, it might have appeared that Kṛṣṇadāsa was simply translating Rūpa Goswāmin's Sanskrit into Bengali. And that might have led us to find fault with what appear to be the inaccuracies of the translation, since we notice that Kṛṣṇadāsa's comment includes themes not mentioned in Rupa's text (e.g. rotting in hell) and omits others (such as the reference to that which is beyond the realm of material nature, or prakṛti). But of course, this is not how Kṛṣṇadāsa's text is structured. As we have seen, his Bengali comment does come first. Thus if he cites Rūpa's Sanskrit, it is only by way of confirming what he himself has just said. Put simply, Kṛṣṇadāsa's method of exposition is not premised on translating a Sanskrit passage for Bengali readers, but on recapitulating something that has already been said. What Kṛṣṇadāsa does is to offer a kind of commentarial gloss concerning existing views of Caitanya (see Stewart Reference Stewart, Callewaert and Snell1994, 236). Tellingly, the word he uses to describe his method is anuvāda. As he puts it, the goal of anuvāda is to allow the reader to grasp the gist of his argument, or to “taste [again] the meaning of the book” (Ādi 17.300, Kavirāja Reference Kavirāja and Dimock1999, 330; cf. Kavirāja Reference Kavirāja, Sena and Mukhopādhyāya1985, 108).
That anuvāda is about retasting is made clear when Kṛṣṇadāsa tells his readers that he is only stating again what the sage Vyāsa had made clear through his original arrangement of sacred texts like the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. Whereas Vyāsa was thought to have revealed timeless scriptural truths, Kṛṣṇadāsa's job is to add to our understanding of those original truths. Following Mammata, who defined anuvāda as the act of predicating things about subjects that are already known, Kṛṣṇadāsa takes the incarnation of Kṛṣṇa as that which is already known. But of this subject, spoken of in texts like the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, Kṛṣṇadāsa desires to make new claims. These include the claim that Kṛṣṇa is the Lord himself (svayaṃ bhagavān) as well as the claim that the Kṛṣṇa we meet in the śāstras is none other than Caitanya Mahāprabhu (see Kavirāja Reference Kavirāja and Dimock1999, 168, 172–73). This understanding of anuvāda serves as an overall structuring principle for the Caitanya-caritāmṛta, making it an intertextual exercise in which the poet interleaves his Bengali compositions with selected passages from Sanskrit literature. The result is what Tony Stewart (Reference Stewart2010, 261) has dubbed an “elaborate diglossia” that allows the sacred “priority” of the Sanskrit texts to be preserved even while legitimating the emergence of a new theological message in the medium of Bengali.
Restatement thus assists Kṛṣṇadāsa in his attempt both to make the authoritative texts of Sanskrit meaningful for his Bengali audience and to frame his own new message about Caitanya in familiar terms. When inviting readers to taste the meaning of his book, he draws on the aesthetics of rasa theory to suggest that anuvāda is less about the faithful reproduction of literal meaning than it is about the communication of an essential flavor (rasa). That the Caitanya-caritāmṛta would become the central text around which a new community of Caitanyites would organize themselves only underscores the fact that the formal characteristics of a text are closely related to what Tony Stewart calls the grammar of a new religious movement. Indeed, Stewart invokes a “phenomenology of repetition” that is central to Kṛṣṇadāsa's theological project (Stewart Reference Stewart2010, 333–34).
The example of Kṛṣṇadāsa can help us identify some important patterns of translational activity that were carried into the colonial period. His understanding of anuvāda in fact closely mirrors the way an author like Vidyāsāgara handles Sanskrit sources in a text like Vidhavā-vivāha. To see this, we might consider Edward Dimock's characterization of Kṛṣṇadāsa's authorial style, which seems equally applicable to Vidyāsāgara's Vidhavā-vivāha:
Kṛṣṇadāsa will state at the beginning of the book in sūtra or condensed form, the matter with which he plans to concern himself throughout. Not being satisfied with this, he will also state at the beginning of each of the līlās the concerns of the līlā, and summarize them at the end; and he will do the same at the beginning of each chapter, and sometimes at the beginning of a series of episodes within a chapter. And he will preface each chapter with a Sanskrit śloka which will state the matter to be treated in that chapter. The result is sometimes an impression of circles within circles, and one's head may swim slightly with a sense of disorientation and déja-vu; but … these reiterations serve an important function in preserving the integrity of the text. (Kavirāja Reference Kavirāja and Dimock1999, 39; cf. Stewart Reference Stewart2010, 234)
To point out this parallelism is not to deny that a great deal had changed between the seventeenth century and the nineteenth, both in terms of audiences and in terms of the technologies for creating and circulating new knowledge. Clearly Kṛṣṇadāsa's mode of communication was predicated on a largely rural, oral, and performative context (Stewart Reference Stewart2010, 194), whereas Vidyāsāgara wrote for an urban, print-savvy, reading public. However, one constant remained the need to make the meaning of Sanskrit sources accessible to new audiences. Although their ultimate goals may have differed, both Kṛṣṇadāsa and Vidyāsāgara felt the need to anchor the authority of their position in an appeal to Sanskrit authorities. Both authors sought to recapitulate Sanskrit passages for their Bengali readers as a means to bridge the worlds of Sanskrit and vernacular learning (see Stewart Reference Stewart, Callewaert and Snell1994, 236). As Tony Stewart (Reference Stewart, Callewaert and Snell1994, 241) has shown, we miss something if we think of such recapitulation as either rote or unimaginative. It is in fact powerfully creative, opening up through restatement the possibility of new, authoritative readings. To see this is to appreciate the creative potential of anuvāda as commentarial practice (see Kaviraj Reference Kaviraj2005; L. Rocher Reference Rocher2002).
Translating Anuvāda in Early Colonial Bengal
Without attempting to fill in the history that takes us from Kṛṣṇadāsa to Vidyāsāgara, we can give some sense of the continuity of intellectual practice by examining the evidence we find in several early colonial Bengali imprints. Composed within the zone of the Dubash during the earliest phase of colonial knowledge production, these texts provide evidence of an important transitional phase with respect to the meaning and practice of anuvāda. When we situate an overview of these early print materials in relation to the rise of European colonial rule in Bengal and the advent of authorized modes of knowing, we make it possible to appreciate how traditions of premodern translatio studii were reframed and redirected into the colonial mission of translatio imperii.
Christi Merrill draws on the work of Thomas Trautmann (Reference Trautmann2006) to make sense of such developments, demonstrating how the British experience of South Asian culture was powerfully shaped by Biblical narratives and tropes. Confronted by a complex linguistic landscape, the British appealed to the Babel trope as a way to create a temporal frame that allowed them to secure their bearings in the colonial present. By presuming the primacy of Sanskrit as the one original language of India, the British were able to overlook the “disorderly” vernaculars and focus on codifying language and culture in terms of the so-called classical texts (Merrill Reference Merrill, Wakabayashi and Kothari2009a, 75). While Merrill's concern is to emphasize the degree to which contemporary understandings of translation remain captive to the same Biblical tropes (88), she allows us to see how the same presuppositions and inducements would shape the colonial transformation of anuvāda.
British orientalists presumed that a measure of order and utility would flow from grounding their codes and institutions in the security of a single code. The translation of imperial rule likewise rested on the guarantee of certitude and accuracy that would flow from reducing South Asia's purported cultural cacophony to a unified framework of rule. As William Jones remarked, “One correct version of any celebrated Hindu book would be of greater value than all the dissertations or essays that could be composed on the same subject” (quoted in Callewaert and Hemraj Reference Callewaert and Hemraj1983, i). As Sanskrit texts were translated into English, English would become the Latin for India, promising to extend unequivocally the principles of British imperial rule (Merrill Reference Merrill, Wakabayashi and Kothari2009a, 85).
To advance this project of translatio imperii, the colonial authorities found it necessary to recruit the services of South Asian intellectuals who were ultraque lingua erudite, figures whose cultural role is so powerfully evoked by the term “Dubash.” While these local scholars supported the translational activities of the orientalists, they also began to produce and publish works under their own names, often with direct support from the British government. In this way, local norms of translatio studii were channeled into the project of translatio imperii, but not without also creating a fascinating middle ground—the zone of the Dubash—in which the British desire to reduce plurality to unity was mediated by local vernacular practices of textual transmission. It is in the zone of the Dubash that the colonial future of anuvāda was cast. As much as colonial officials like C. P. Brown scorned the inaccuracies of their Pandits, they nonetheless relied heavily on the work of such scholars both for their own edification and for the expansion of the vast pedagogical projects associated with training young civilians, promoting Indic learning, and reforming the supposedly corrupt or decadent practices of South Asian society. The engagements that took place in this mediated space generated a wealth of new print sources that can help us bring to light the kinds of mediations occurring in the zone between translatio imperii and translatio studii. This is where we must look to understand the colonial transformation of anuvāda.
If we look at translational activity from the earliest years of the nineteenth century, it turns out that rather than explicitly invoking terms like anuvāda, Bengali authors spoke differently of their work.Footnote 16 For instance, when these authors produced a new vernacular version of a classical text, they often indicated that their version had been “compiled in the vernacular” (saṃgraha bhāṣāte).Footnote 17 It is a telling expression, one that takes for granted the fact that older texts could be restated in other languages; in this it is reminiscent of the idiom of njawakaken highlighted by Ricci in her study. Some of the most important early works in modern Bengali prose adopt this expression, including Golokanātha Śarmā’s Hitopadeśa (Reference Śarmā1801) and two early prose works by Mṛtyuñjaya Vidyālaṅkāra, his Batriś Siṃhāsana (Reference Vidyālaṅkāra1802) and Rājāvalī (Reference Vidyālaṅkāra1808b). Sometimes these same authors adopted an even more modest locution, indicating simply that they had “composed” (racita) their works “in the Bengali language” (bāṅgālā bhāṣāte). Examples would include Mṛtyuñjaya Vidyālaṅkāra's Hitopadeśa (Reference Vidyālaṅkāra1808a), Caṇḍīcaraṇa Munśī’s Totā itihāsa (Reference Munśī1805), and Haraprasāda Rāya's Puruṣa-parīkṣā (Reference Rāya1815). Regardless of whether they spoke of “compiling” or “composing,” these authors seem comfortable with the idea of writing Sanskrit in another language, even if such a locution seems odd to us today.
The particularity of such usage is thrown into sharp contrast when one notices that the British patrons of these same Bengali scholars—the men typically responsible for commissioning and sometimes publishing these early works—tended to make explicit use of the word “translation” when speaking about the very same works being produced in Bengali. Sometimes we notice the direct juxtaposition of both idioms in a single work, most notably when a single work features title pages in two different languages. Such is the case with Golokanātha Śarmā’s Hitopadeśa (cited above), which carries a separate English title page indicating it was “translated from the Sungskrit.” What Golokanātha viewed as a Bengali restatement, the colonial scholar felt compelled to frame as a translation.Footnote 18 We see the same pattern in some letters written by William Carey in connection with his work at the College of Fort William. Carey more than once refers to the work of scholars like Caṇḍīcaraṇa Munśi and Haraprasāda Rāya as being that of “translation” (see Dāsa Reference Dāsa1940, 133; De Reference De1962, 171n1).
The apparent naturalness of the idea of translation to British readers of the time and to later lexicographers can make it difficult for us to observe the ways in which British usage tends to obscure the particularities of local Bengali praxis. For instance, in the catalogue of Bengali printed books in the British Library, an early prose work like Haraprasāda Rāya's Puruṣa-parīkṣā is annotated as “translated from the Sanskrit of Vidyapati” (see Blumhardt Reference Blumhardt1905, 152; De Reference De1962, 203–4). When we consult the text itself, we notice that the author chooses to describe his work as “composed in the Bengali language” (bāṅgālā bhāṣāte racita). Only rarely are such preferred local idioms adopted by the British lexicographers, as is the case for the British Library catalogue entry for Mṛtyuñjaya Vidyālaṅkāra's Reference Vidyālaṅkāra1808 Hitopadeśa, where the cataloguer comments, “Hitopadeshu in Bengali” (cf. Sena Reference Sena1820).
One of the most gifted Bengali scholars of the early nineteenth century was Rammohun Roy (Rāmamohana Rāya, 1776–1833), whose name is today associated with a host of consequential developments of the time, from the banning of suttee to the founding of the reformist Brāhmo Samāj. In connection with his efforts to contest Christian understandings of Hinduism and to reform the same tradition, Rammohun undertook a sophisticated and elaborate publication program. Among those Bengalis who actively published in English in the 1810s and 1820s, Rammohun was without a doubt the most articulate and self-conscious about what he was doing (see Roy Reference Roy1906, 884; Rāyā Reference Roy1973, 80). When it came to the task of making Sanskrit sources like the Upaniṣads available to local readers, Rammohun spoke of “conveying meaning in the vernacular.” For instance, in the foreword to his Vedāntagrantha (Reference Rāya1815), he wrote of “revealing the meaning of the Vedānta Śāstra in the vernacular” (vedāntaśāstrer artha bhāṣāte … prakāśa). Likewise, when introducing his own Bengali rendering of the Īśā Upaniṣad, he indicated that his goal was to “express the meaning and purport of Vedānta in the vernacular” (bhāṣāte … vivaraṇa).Footnote 19 Finally, when he published a version of the Māṇḍukya Upaniṣad (see Rāya Reference Rāya1845), he used a similar phrase in the title of the work: Vājasaneya-saṃhitopaniṣader bhāṣā vivaraṇa, “An exposition in the vernacular of the meaning of the Vājasaneya-Saṃhita Upaniṣad.”
The phrase “exposition of the meaning in the vernacular” (bhāṣā vivaraṇa) is one Rammohun consistently used for his Bengali Upaniṣads. While the phrase is often taken in the sense of translation, it makes equally good sense to understand bhāṣā vivaraṇa as “commentary” (see Robertson Reference Robertson1995, 204; cf. 81n15); Bruce Robertson even occasionally adopts a usage akin to the early Bengali scholars we have been discussing: “Bengali language exposition” (see, e.g., Robertson Reference Robertson1995, 132). The fact that Robertson adopts at least three different expressions to capture the sense of bhāṣā vivaraṇa is itself a good indicator of the complex mediation of the work of translation in what we are calling the zone of the Dubash.
Parallels to Rammohun's usage can be found in several other works from the same period, including Jayagopāla Tarkālaṅkāra's Reference Tarkālaṅkāra1817 edition of Sanskrit ślokas by Bilvamaṅgala, which claims to provide “the clear meaning in the vernacular” (bhāṣāṃsphuṭārtha); an 1818 bilingual edition of Bopadeva's grammar Mugdhabodha in which the Sanskrit text is paired on the facing page with the text in the “vernacular” (bhāṣā); an 1818 prose translation of Batriś Siṃhāsana by Mṛtyuñjaya Vidyālaṅkāra (see De Reference De1962, 187–89), which indicates that it has been “compiled in the vernacular” (saṃgraha bhāṣāte); and an 1830 edition of the Hitopadeśa by Lakṣmīnārāyaṇa Nyāyālaṅkāra whose Bengali title page indicates it was “compiled in the proper Bengali vernacular” (sādhu gauḍīya bhāṣāy saṃgṛhīta). This last work is interesting insofar as it bears three title pages: one in Sanskrit, one in Bengali, and one in English. As I noted for the pre-Rammohun period, the English title page conforms to British colonial usage, reading “With the English and Bengali translations.”
While the British may have been prone to impose their concept of translation on the work of their Bengali counterparts, it is worth noting that we have not yet encountered a single Bengali author who chose to employ the term anuvāda. It is not until after the middle of the 1830s that the term anuvāda started being applied to the kind of activity we have been canvassing. Some examples would include an 1834 collection of erotic verses from Sanskrit compiled and “translated” (anuvādita) into Bengali meter (quoting De Reference De1962, 601) by Madanamohana Tarkālaṅkāra under the title Rasataraṅgiṇī; an 1835 rendering of the Bhagavadgītā by Gaurīśaṅkara Tarkavāgīśa that styles itself as a “translation of the original” (mūler anuvāda); and a collection of Biblical materials published by the Calcutta Christian Tract and Book Society in 1846 that is identified as having been “translated from the English” (Iṃrāji haite anuvādita) by one Rāmakṛṣṇa Kavirāja. Here the second and third examples are the most striking insofar as they either emphasize the relationship between the new translation and the original or they explicitly call attention to the source language (i.e., “from the English”).
This new usage notwithstanding, we can discern a lingering tension between the idiom of restating the meaning and purport of an original text in the vernacular and providing a translation of an original text. Evidence from several texts suggests there were many who continued to think of their work in terms of restating an original meaning in the vernacular. For instance, we find a work from 1832 on European scientific topics whose English title page reads Bigyana sebadhi, or Treasures of science, but whose Bengali title page adopts the commentarial tactic of restating the topic: “Treasures of science, in other words the wealth of specialized knowledge” (vijñānasevadhi arthāt śilpa śāstrer nidhi). Another work, from 1846, represents the publication of a Sanskrit ruling (vyavasthā) against widow marriage; it is entitled Vidhavā-vivāha niṣedha, but its title page informs us that the Sanskrit text has been “composed with vernacular meaning” (bhāṣārtha saṃgṛhīta).
By the 1840s, we notice increased tension between the newer conception of anuvāda as translation and the idiom of compiling in the vernacular. One marker of this tension is the appearance of the same qualifying adjective Vidyāsāgara employed when he made his translation of the Mahābhārata, namely avikala (“complete” or “accurate”). During the 1840s, we find this qualifier being used by other authors in connection with works that are now explicitly described as anuvāda. This new concern for completeness and accuracy seems to suggest an effort to reframe the meaning of anuvāda, shifting it away from the sense of restating or explaining the meaning of a text and toward that of faithful translation. Tension between these two understandings—compiling in the vernacular as opposed to faithful translation—is evident if we juxtapose some selected works from this period.
We may begin with the case of Vidyāsāgara. On the one hand, we have his Betāla pañcaviṃśati from Reference Vidyāsāgara1846, in which he says he aims to promote “awareness of meaning” (arthabodha) and “comprehension of purport” (tātparya graha)—two idioms that echo premodern notions of anuvāda. On the other hand, we have his Mahābhārata translation from 1860 (mentioned above), in which he says that he seeks to provide an “accurate translation” (avikala anuvāda). Alongside Vidyāsāgara we may consider his friend and colleague, Madanamohana Tarkālaṅkāra. As we have already seen, Madanamohana's Rasataraṅgaṇī (Reference Tarkālaṅkāra1834) claims on its title page to be an anuvāda; however, in the preface to this work he indicates that he understands the goal of anuvāda to be to “express the actual meaning of the poetry in the vernacular” (tatkavitārtha yathārtha rūpe bhāṣāy … bhāṣita kariyā). This is comparable to the way he describes the goal of Vasavadattā (Reference Tarkālaṅkāra1836), in which his patron requests Madanamohana to compose a work that will allow readers to more easily grasp the “purport” (tātparya) of the original Sanskrit drama of Subandhu by “stating it in the vernacular” (bhāṣāy bhāṣita karā).Footnote 20 That this practice of anuvāda did not exactly square with the colonial goal of translation is suggested by Madanamohana's son-in-law, who commented that Vasavadattā could not be called an “accurate translation” (avikala anuvāda) because it really represented an entirely new work composed in the vernacular (bhāṣā).Footnote 21
The picture changes rather drastically when we consider the latter half of the nineteenth century. It is at this time that we notice anuvāda (and related forms such as anuvādita and anūdya) clearly being adopted as the equivalent of the English concept of translation. Some examples would include: an 1859 edition of the Vālmikī Rāmāyaṇa with a Bengali anuvāda by Jadunātha Nyāyapañcānana; an 1878 Bengali anuvāda of Parāśara Saṃhitā by Jaganamohana Tarkālaṅkāra; and an 1879 edition of the Mitākṣara of Yājñavalkya, that indicates it was “translated into Bengali” (baṅgabhāṣāy anuvādita) by Rāmataraṇa Tarkavāgīśa. In all these cases, the usage of anuvāda seems to have been distinctly colored by the imperatives of translatio imperii: translation in search of authoritative and singular sources. It is surely no coincidence that the texts in question here—the Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa and classical legal texts like Parāśara and Mitākṣara—were of central concern to European orientalists.
One clear illustration of anuvāda taking on the sense of faithful translation can be found by comparing two Bengali editions of Śaṅkarācārya's Sanskrit hymn, Ānandalaharī. What makes this example especially revealing is that both editions were prepared by the same man, Rāmacandra Vidyālaṅkara. The first edition is from Reference Vidyālaṅkara1824 and represents an attractive specimen of early Bengali printing, with a fine faux-calligraphic rendering of the title. This edition provides the original Sanskrit text of each verse (in Bengali script) followed by the Bengali rendering, which in each case is preceded by the familiar commentarial phrase, asyārtha, “the meaning of this is.” For this edition, Rāmacandra Vidyālaṅkara indicated that his goal had been to “compile the meaning [of the text] in proper Bengali language” (tadīyārtha sādhu bhāṣā saṃgrahaḥ). By the time the text was reprinted in 1862, the title page was completely revised. Now the publishers specified that the work had been “translated” (anuvādita) by Rāmacandra Vidyālaṅkara. From this illustration we can see, on the one hand, that idioms of compiling in the vernacular were no longer deemed suitable for the demands of colonial knowledge transmission, while on the other hand the term that was coming to stand for faithful translation was anuvāda.
Such evidence notwithstanding, the matter remains rather more complicated. If we bear in mind Liu's (Reference Liu1995, 26) concept of translingual practice, we cannot simply speak of a straightforward transfer of meaning; rather, we must attend to the invention of meaning within a particular local context. In fact, a review of the literature suggests how difficult it is to neatly dissociate the two meanings of anuvāda; even as the term was adopted as a synonym for translation, it retained traces of its earlier usage. As Liu reminds us, there are no uncontaminated meanings (18).
This becomes evident when we consider the way two Bengali intellectuals from the late nineteenth century spoke about various premodern attempts to create Bengali-language texts from Sanskrit sources, thinking of works like the Bengali Mahābhārata of Kāśīdāsa, the Rāmāyaṇa of Kṛttivāsa, or the broad genre of premodern metrical texts known as maṅgalakāvya (on which see Bhaṭṭācārya Reference Bhaṭṭācārya1964). In the first case, the influential scholar Dīneśacandra Sen concluded that “the majority of these translations (anuvāda) are not proper translations” (khāṃṭi anuvāda nahe). Dīneśacandra based his conclusion on the fact that while the premodern poets drew upon original Sanskrit texts, they also “felt no compunction about spinning them out according to their own lights” (Dīneśacandra Sen [Reference Sen and Bandyopādhyāya1896] 2002, 483). Since these works bore the marks of creative license rather than faithful transmission, they could not be taken as examples of “proper” anuvāda.
In the second case, a little-known contemporary of Dīneśacandra named Dīnabandhu Sen examined the same premodern texts and remarked of a text like Krittivas's Bengali Rāmāyaṇa that it was “not really a translation (anuvāda) of any particular Ramayana.” But while Dīnabandhu appears to share Dīneśacandra's normative view of translation, his judgment seems more tentative, not least because he gives a passing nod to the ideal of anuvāda as repetition. Having decreed that the Bengali Rāmāyaṇa was “not really a translation,” Dīnabandhu went on to say that this was because Krittivas “included things he had heard from the mouths of storytellers” (Dīnabandhu Sen Reference Sen1891, 1–2). While his remark serves to ratify the authority of colonial understandings of translation, it can also be read as registering an awareness of the ongoing significance of premodern understandings of anuvāda. Even if inadvertently, Dīnabandhu reminds us that narrative traditions like the Rāmāyaṇa are never singular and amenable to final translation, but are in fact “multiply possessed” (Merrill Reference Merrill2009b, 38). The irony is that Dīnabandhu's grudging recognition of anuvāda as retelling is ultimately what disqualifies Krittivas's work as anuvāda within the dominant colonial framework.
Conclusion
Irony aside, the fact remains that what we observe as we move through the zone of the Dubash from the beginning to the end of the nineteenth century is not just the transformation of anuvāda, but the invention of a new order of value. In this new normative paradigm, anuvāda is given a specific and proper role to play. If it had hitherto been true that South Asian intellectuals were oriented toward “the communication of the message rather than with the scrupulous preservation of the form,” then we can see how during the colonial era this order of priority was reversed (quoting Callewaert and Hemraj Reference Callewaert and Hemraj1983, 75). Here the case of Bengali mirrors that of Telegu as studied by Lisa Mitchell, with the only significant difference being that the colonial understanding of anuvāda as translation appears to have gained currency about a half-century earlier in Bengal than in South India (see Mitchell Reference Mitchell2005, 462).
Might we then use this analysis to endorse the attempt of Christi Merrill to reinvest anuvāda with its earlier meaning? Might we yoke these insights to the quest to recover a uniquely South Asian translating consciousness (Devy Reference Devy, Bassnett and Trivedi1999, 185)? We have certainly seen that there are grounds for identifying premodern anuvāda with distinctive attitudes toward textual transmission; and Merrill's (Reference Merrill, Wakabayashi and Kothari2009a, 88) insights do help us appreciate how the modern meaning of anuvāda relates to the British attempt to ground imperial rule on the truth of a “single common original.” All of this illustrates the degree to which orientalist scholarship not only fostered a European preference for Sanskrit as the one classical Hindu language, but also pulled into its ambit a host of local scholars who could pursue traditions of translatio studii within the institutions and structures of colonial rule. In this way, South Asian translatio studii was ineluctably conjoined with translatio imperii (cf. Pollock Reference Pollock2006, 480–81). Against such a backdrop, Merrill's desire to recover an alternate translational sensibility is both understandable and valuable.
That said, the goal of this article is to caution against allowing such (re)constructive uses of anuvāda to gloss over the significant ramifications that lie at the very heart of the colonial mediations that shaped the modern meanings of anuvāda. We may wish to recover the sensibility of premodern poets and use these insights to rethink what it means to translate, but we must also attend to the way nineteenth-century Bengali authors became involved in actively coproducing the modern norms and practices of anuvāda. We have to think not just about the meaning of a concept but about the complex ways in which local intellectuals were encouraged, rewarded, or coerced to rethink, reshape, and redeploy that concept. We must reckon with the fact that within the ineluctably mediated sphere of colonial knowledge production, it was possible, and often necessary, for indigenous intellectuals to abandon or revise their understanding of anuvāda. To recognize this fact is to pay more attention to how anuvāda was reinvented in the colonial era.
Here the case of Vidyāsāgara's Vidhavā-vivāha is instructive, because it is a text that clearly betrays the dynamics of mediation around the issues of translation and power. As we have seen, there is much about Vidhavā-vivāha that is predicated on the logic and practice of premodern anuvāda. We might say that the text operates, in Rita Copeland's (Reference Copeland1991, 6) terms, as a species of “primary translation,” which is to say its goal is to serve the sources upon which it comments. Put differently, it is a piece of exegetical argumentation, bringing forth for Bengali readers the meaning of the Sanskrit scriptural sources Vidyāsāgara presumed were central to resolving debates around widow marriage. If the text therefore represents the persistence of modern Sanskrit commentarial practice (on which see Vidyāsāgara Reference Vidyāsāgara and Hatcher2012, 34–35), we might go further and conclude that it provides evidence of the ways in which Sanskrit intellectual practices continued to live on during the early colonial period (see Hatcher Reference Hatcher2007). This harmonizes with what we learned from our review of Bengali sources from the first half of the nineteenth century, which revealed how anuvāda as primary translation remained a meaningful endeavor for many Bengali intellectuals. But Vidyāsāgara's work also reminds us of the ways in which Bengali intellectual praxis was being reshaped by a new and competing norm of completeness and accuracy. We saw this not only in his Mahābhārata translation, but also in the concern over “literal” translation he evinced in his English-language work, The Marriage of Hindu Widows. Thus what we learn is that even as the ideal of service to traditional texts remained in play, it was being recast in light of an emerging norm of avikala anuvāda.
One further measure of how densely mediated the practice of translation was becoming by the late nineteenth century may be gleaned from the concerns voiced by Bankimchandra Chatterjee when he set out in the 1880s to write a Bengali commentary on the Bhagavadgītā (a task he began but did not complete). At the outset, Bankim informs his readers that commentary is his principal goal. That he approaches the text in a posture of service is confirmed when he acknowledges the debt he owes to important premodern commentators such as Śaṅkarācārya and Śrīdharasvāmin (Caṭṭopādhyāya Reference Caṭṭopādhyāya and Bāgal1985, 2:680). Bankim also explains to his readers his decision to include with his commentary the original Sanskrit text: this was to reflect established practice wherein commentary (ṭīkā) typically sits alongside the original (mūla). Having said this, Bankim acknowledges (much like Vidyāsāgara in Vidhavā-vivāha) that not all his readers will be able to read the Sanskrit text. It is precisely at this point that we begin to sense how much things have changed since Vidyāsāgara wrote in the 1850s. While Vidyāsāgara was content in Vidhavā-vivāha to restate the meaning of Sanskrit texts in Bengali without taking up the issue of accuracy, Bankim explicitly invokes the ideal of providing a complete or accurate translation (avikala anuvāda). As a result, Bankim's opening remarks betray a lingering tension between commenting and translating. He confesses, for instance, that on more than one occasion he had violated the norm of accurate translation in order to communicate special levels of meaning (see Caṭṭopādhyāya Reference Caṭṭopādhyāya and Bāgal1985, 2:680–81). In his confession we sense a lurking anxiety over the way in which the norm of accuracy was becoming the guiding principle (niyama) for textual transmission, an anxiety that sets Bankim's Bhagavadgītā commentary apart from Vidyāsāgara's Vidhavā-vivāha.
This anxiety speaks to the tenuous work of balancing two attitudes toward translation. On the one hand, Bankim's is an act of primary translation in which the posture of service (in Copeland's terms) remains to the fore. On the other hand, by invoking the ideal of avikala anuvāda, Bankim suggests that any service being performed is now less to the original sources than to the demands of the authorizing discourses of orientalism and colonialism. Translation in this second sense contributes to the British quest to master Sanskrit and extend thereby Britain's imperial mastery over India. Here it may be worth remarking that if there ever was a death of Sanskrit, as Sheldon Pollock (Reference Pollock2001) once famously proposed, then perhaps it was hastened in the colonial era by the emergence of this new norm of avikala anuvāda. Respecting only the sovereign authority of the Sanskrit original, this new attitude toward source texts could be said to contribute to the fetishization of the original, in the process quashing the creative potential inherent in anuvāda as restatement.Footnote 22
Here we may risk a broad comparative remark that if vernacular translation in medieval Europe ultimately facilitated modes of rhetorical invention that led to the eventual eclipsing of Latin authority by emergent regional languages (see Copeland Reference Copeland1991), the colonial suspicion of invention may have only facilitated a kind of ossification in indigenous intellectual practices with respect to Sanskrit sources. While the many works from the first decades of the nineteenth century surveyed here point to the vitality of an early colonial Sanskrit imaginary wherein Sanskrit sources remained the source and inspiration for new forms of textual production, by the end of the century the new norm of accurate translation appears to have rendered Sanskrit more an object of reverence than a tool for thought (see Hatcher Reference Hatcher and Bandyopadhyay2010, Reference Hatcher, Dodson and Hatcher2012). As retellings of the Sanskrit classics gave way to the production of critical editions and scholarly translations, so too did Bengali authors turn from Sanskrit-inspired invention to the colonially approved tasks of editing and translating. This is the moment when the idiom of “proper translation” (khāṃṭi anuvāda) begins to insert itself into the secondary literature surrounding textual production in Bengal, as evidenced by the writings of Dīneścandra Sen and Dīnabandhu Sen discussed earlier (see also Dutt Reference Dutt1895, 44).
Postcolonial theory may lead us to conclude that the net result of such change was a kind of cultural loss, but it is also possible to use this analysis to shed new light on some important developments from the same era. For instance, we can use what we have learned about anuvāda to venture rethinking the very narrative of literary modernity with which I began this article. For as it turns out, the growing suspicion of retelling may be correlated with a growing interest among Bengali intellectuals in the latter half of the nineteenth century to identify the true locus of originality and newness in Bengali literature. In this search for the roots of Bengali cultural identity, anuvāda served not only as a focal point for reflection on how literature was produced but also as a tool for adjudicating where the true genius of Bengali literature could be found.
To see this, we may look briefly at Romesh Chunder Dutt's Reference Dutt1895 English-language survey of Bengali literature. The Literature of Bengal is a work that is invested both in mapping the wealth of Bengali literary production before the colonial period and in identifying important moments in the evolution of Bengali national identity. So, while Dutt's narrative of literary creation from Jayadeva in the twelfth century to Vidyāsāgara, Michael, and Bankim in the nineteenth serves to underscore the depth and range of Bengali literature, certain moments in this history are taken to demonstrate the early crystallization of Bengali national identity (cf. Mitchell Reference Mitchell2005, Reference Mitchell2009). In the premodern period, Dutt focuses on the glories of the sixteenth century, the age of Akbar and Caitanya, an age that stirred the “national mind” (Dutt Reference Dutt1895, 95). And in this connection he singles out the poet Mukundarāma Cakravarti for having created in his Caṇḍīmaṅgala the “first original poem in Bengali” (95). Dutt emphasizes that Mukundarāma's work is not just another of the many “songs and translations” that circulated at the time, but a work whose characters and scenes are delineated with great power (95, 105).
Dutt's reference to the songs and translations of the day allows us to see that he has in mind an entire genre of texts that are associated with premodern modes of anuvāda, within which one could include not just the works of Mukundarāma but also those like Kṛttivāsa's Rāmāyaṇa, which drew even more explicitly on Sanskrit originals. While Dutt had dedicated an earlier chapter to exploring the literary gifts of Kṛttivāsa, when it came to identifying the dawn of a new national literature he looked to Mukundarāma. Kṛttivāsa's Rāmāyaṇa may have offered a compelling “new narration” of a familiar epic, but Dutt associated such work with translation; and to him this smacked of imitation rather than creativity (Dutt Reference Dutt1895, 78). In Mukundarāma he found an author who, while embedded in the same matrix of premodern storytelling, managed not to fall into the trap of mere repetition.
It is worth pausing to ponder the complexity of this verdict. For one thing, it is clear that Dutt's analysis of literary merits in relation to Bengali identity is predicated on a colonially mediated understanding of anuvāda. To be sure, Mukundarāma comes out of the same premodern world of storytelling as Kṛttivāsa, but Mukundarāma's anuvāda cannot be reduced to mere translation. Where did this idea of the inadequacy of translation as a tool for literary creation come from if not from the same colonial context in which the meaning of anuvāda was being produced in relation to ideas of faithful and accurate transmission? For another thing, the complexity of the mediation at work is evident when we recognize that Dutt judges Mukundarāma's work in terms of at least three overlapping and mutually contaminated registers: the premodern practice of anuvāda, emerging colonial usage around anuvāda, and the normative English concept of translation. The cross-contamination among these registers allows Dutt to claim that Mukundarāma was a creative storyteller rather than a mere reciter of older Sanskrit tales. No mere translator, Mukundarāma nonetheless remains indebted to the same patterns of “telling in turn” associated with premodern Bengali genres like the maṅgalakāvya. As such his work may be seen as a familiar species of anuvāda. But in the end, Dutt relies on one further distinction. Because of his lingering indebtedness to the premodern world of anuvāda, Mukundarāma cannot be likened to genuinely modern authors like Michael and Bankim. Through their creative genius, the latter authors transcend repetition and mere imitation.
From Dutt we come to appreciate how the search for originality in the past ultimately served to frame the discovery of originality in the colonial present. The creative retelling of premodern anuvāda had to bow before the authority of modern translation, but even as it did so it opened up new possibilities for using the same norm of accurate translation as a way to stigmatize habits of “mere” translation. The search for Bengali creativity demanded the scourging of all imitation, which by the late nineteenth century had come to be associated with sycophancy and cultural deracination.Footnote 23 And so even as Bengali scholars began to conform to new norms of translation, their literary peers gained praise for working creatively to escape the stigma of mimicry (see Caṭṭopādhyāya Reference Caṭṭopādhyāya and Bāgal1985, 2:200–240). Read in this light, Bankim's major novels may be taken as a repudiation of the efforts of his older contemporary Vidyāsāgara to recast older Sanskrit stories in Bengali. To Bankim, a Bengali Śakuntalā looked like nothing if not mere repetition (see Nyāyaratna [1872] Reference Nyāyaratna and Bandyopadhyay1991, 206).
The way such concerns helped shape new Bengali attitudes toward literary creativity may be suggested by one final, playful example from 1875. While still a fledgling poet himself, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) took advantage of—and simultaneously lampooned—the nascent mania for recovering national literary genius by passing off some of his poems as the work of a purportedly premodern poet named Bhānu Siṃha (Tagore Reference Tagore, Stewart and Twitchell2003, 3). The poems were received with enormous enthusiasm, and the apparent discovery of Bhānu Siṃha was hailed as an occasion for great pride (see Tagore Reference Tagore, Stewart and Twitchell2003, 104–5). Only with time did the poet's fraud become known, which in the end only worked to burnish the poetic glory of the young Tagore. The irony is that Tagore's outright imitation of earlier poetic idioms actually served to showcase his own originality. At one and the same time, Bhānu Siṃha's poems evoke the glories of an authentic precolonial literary universe, represent a fraud perpetrated through sheer imitation, and offer proof of modern poetic genius. Nothing better illustrates the densely mediated ways in which concepts like repetition, imitation, and translation were working to shape claims about literary genius and national identity. Whether we look at young Tagore or his precursors like Vidyāsāgara and Bankim, we come to appreciate how much the narrative of Bengali literary modernity owes to colonial mediations of anuvāda produced within the zone of the Dubash.
Acknowledgments
This article has benefited greatly from the comments of Jack Hawley, Tony Stewart, John Cort, Rosinka Chaudhuri, and other anonymous readers. Unless noted, all translations are the author's own.
