Uneasy Translations

Self, Experience and Indian Literature

RITA KOTHARI

Uneasy Translations: Self, Experience and Indian Literature interweaves the personal journey of an academic into reflections around self, language and translation with an eye on the intangibly available category of experience. It dwells on quieter modes of being political, of making knowledge democratic and of seeing gendered language in the everyday. In an unusual combination of real-life incidents and textual examples, it provides a palimpsest of what it is to be in a classroom; in the domestic sphere, straddling the ‘manyness’ of language and, of course, in a constant mode of translation that remains incomplete and unconcluded. Through both a poignant voice and rigorous questions, Kothari asks what it is to live and teach in India as a woman, a multilingual researcher and as both a subject and a rebel of the discipline of English.

What does it mean to be a South Asian writer? Rita’s response:

To live in South Asia is to occupy the unevenness of time – a time that is conceived through modernity and a time that is slow, unseen, shifting if at all at the most minimal speed. The South Asian writer has an opportunity to notice both modernity and its limits almost every day. I remain a keen student of this reality, watching its contours, feeling puzzled by it and sometimes exasperated by it. Are lives of women changing – the answer is yes and no. Are lives of Dalits changing – the answer is yes and no. Given this complexity and granularity of South Asian reality, what does it mean to negotiate metropolitan theory and literary texts? In other words what is the dialectic of experience and theoretical tools in a South Asian setting?

I demonstrate this through stories that are both from testimonies and published texts, films and songs – this repertoire fills my intellectual world. My book Uneasy Translations has this story to tell – the experience of life and the expanse of limits of language produce a condition of incommensurability in everyday India. It looks like translation has happened, but not quite. This work-in-progress nature of language trying to reflect life but almost failing or exceeding its mandate is both a philosophical question as well as a South Asian question. In other words, the South Asian context provides for me a minefield of rich philosophical questions that are perhaps considered settled in some parts of the world. This unsettled-ness is the reason I tell the stories I do, and it characterises both my restlessness as well as inspiration.