Translating feminism in the post-colony

Being "in-translation" in a post-colony: Translating feminism in Kerala State, India J. Devika Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, India The article reflects on the translation of feminism into the local language in Kerala State, India, over the past twenty-five years. Drawing on Tejaswini Niranjana's claim that the feminist translator located in post-colonial societies lives constantly "in-translation", I argue that she needs not only to straddle different linguistic registers and political languages, but also to engage in multiple "modes of translation". I seek to view the efforts at translating feminism into the local language within two distinct modes of translation: the "faithful" mode, which aimed for stability of terms created, and was typically associated with pedagogy and high intellectual activity, and the "grounded" mode, seemingly derived out of a broadly modern critical possibility, expressed in local idiom and clearly serving local political ends.

Keywords: Kerala; modernity; translation of politics; feminism Kerala State, in the deep southwest of the Indian sub-continent, was formed in 1956, but first captured major international attention in the 1970s. Until then, it had been regarded as one of the most "backward", resource-starved, and politically turbulent parts of India, which however seemed to present a paradox to established wisdom in development circles: Malayalee society1 combined very low levels of economic development with high levels of social development - extraordinarily high levels of literacy, low infant and maternal mortality, falling birth rates, a strong public health system (Parayil 2000). Indeed, Kerala's earlier fame rested on it being one of the few regions of India in which communism had made heavy inroads since the 1930s. The remarkable strength of the communist movement in Kerala - when the communists were elected to power in Kerala State in 1957, soon after State formation, it made headlines throughout the world - and the instability of politics there made it a favourite site for western political scientists and observers. From the 1940s till the mid 1980s, the left enjoyed almost unquestioned hegemony in Kerala's cultural and political domains. As I will argue, this hegemony was also crafted by the successful translation of communist ideas into the local context.

The shaping of Malayalee modernity, however, began in the early to mid nineteenth century, with the establishment of British dominance over Malayalam-speaking areas. The princely states of Travancore and Cochin acknowledged British dominance and the Malayalam-speaking areas to the north were absorbed into the British presidency of Madras as the province of Malabar. From the mid nineteenth century, a whole array of agents missionaries, colonial officials, the newly educated local elite - began to voice their criticism of the existing socio-cultural order and propose means to change it in "modern ways". This was a debate that would continue right up to the mid twentieth century. The same period also saw the emergence of "community movements" in Malayalee society, which made intense efforts to reform the customary practices and hierarchies of particular castes and give shape to "modern communities" (Jeffrey 2003). This ideal modern community to be realized through reformist efforts in the future inevitably pivoted on the ideal of the individual as naturally endowed with gendered qualities which, however, needed to be developed further through suitable education in order to produce "men" and "women" (Devika 2007). These processes of gendering continued quite unabated through the twentieth century, and the communist movement was itself an important vehicle of the process. The communist movement in Kerala, led by the newly educated radical elite, served to extend the processes of gendering to

the working classes in the mid twentieth century (Lindberg 2001). The hegemony of the left in civil society remained unbreachable in Kerala until the mid 1980s; however, that decade saw the rise of powerful civil society activism, including feminism, challenging the boundaries and definitions of the public and pressing for a more complex, non-state-centred perspective on power.

Though the feminist problematic had begun to receive complex elaboration in Malayalee society by women literary authors as early as the 1930s, feminism as a political mobilization in public, clearly declaring allegiance with first-world feminism, arrived here only in the late 1980s. However, Malayalee feminists have hardly received a warm welcome.

The hostility they have had to endure, especially from political society and from alternate civil society mobilizations like the independent fishworkers' movement on Kerala's coasts (Devika and Kodoth 2001; Nayak and Dietrich 2002; Erwer 2003), may be one reason why feminisf intellectual effort here has never been able to undertake effective self-reflexive analysis of its own tools or practices. Although they have fought pitched battles with Kerala's entrenched political society (Devika and Kodoth 2001), feminists in Kerala have achieved little impact on the micropolitics of gender in everyday life. Given the ongoing "liberalization" of politics through political decentralization and micro-credit, the feminist movement in Kerala today faces the prospect of demobilization and absorption into the governmental project of gendering governance.

Translation and being feminist in the post-colony This article is part of an effort to gain a degree of self-reflexivity about the work that many of us feminists in Kerala have been doing for almost two decades: translating feminist concepts largely produced in first-world contexts into the local language. This arose from the larger recognition that we needed to bridge the "communication chasm", a gap which, we felt, was seriously affecting our ability to intervene not only in everyday language and micropolitics, but even in public debate - where we seemed to have become a presence, but often an ineffective one. We all agreed that a key political goal of any feminist project would be to infiltrate public discourse, not just by bringing into view new issues now recognized as public and political, but also by providing new concepts - ideas - through which reality is constructed afresh. Thus, over the years unwanted male attention has come to be recognized as a form of violence against women, referred to in public not as "eve-teasing" but as "sexual harassment". This act of re-naming is in fact one of the most powerful ways in which feminism may become an enduring force in public life. However, there is no guarantee that any coinage, feminist or otherwise, will remain stable, nor that it will not be mobilized to other ends. Indeed, there is reason to suppose that the instability of concepts is more of an advantage than a disadvantage for a pluralized feminist politics. It thus becomes imperative for feminists to continue keeping track of how meanings change and in what contexts. In a postcolonial society like Kerala, the feminist effort to intervene in public discourse by illumining the workings of patriarchal power cannot but involve an effort to translate feminist concepts into the local culture and idiom.

Translation of western ideas into local languages did, of course, have a previous history, of which the Malayalee feminist translators partook when they began work in the late 1980s. The debates around modernizing communities, practices and individuals in mid to late nineteenth-century Malayalee society, and the later rapid spread of communist ideas mentioned above, both involved intense processes of translating western concepts, undertaken by a range of interlocutors. Irrespective of whether these translators named faithfulness to the "original" among their aims, there can be little doubt that the process of translation involved an effort to interpret the concept within local conditions of possibility. Thus it was by no means a simple matter of transferring concepts across cultures. The conceptual tools with

which feminists in 1980s Kerala sought to bring women's oppression to public light were largely borrowed from feminist theory available in English. The "schema of cofiguration" (Sakai 1997) within which such translation appeared to be a possibility was one that assumed an idealized pair of cultures (the "West", viewed as source, and the "local", viewed as target),2 but that also claimed the universality of male domination across cultures. This underlay the confidence of feminist translators, their confidence that these were not incommensurable universes. However, translations of "feminism" in Malayalam were, from the very beginning, inflected by the local context, feminism being an oppositional political project taking shape within the field of Malayalee politics - even if lip service was sometimes paid to the search for "exact equivalents".

It may be thus possible to make an analytical distinction between two modes of translation of western ideas into Malayalam. The first superficially conforms to relatively familiar ways of viewing translation: as the search for equivalence across difference, with an accent on faithfulness to the source. It often aimed for stability of the terms created, and was typically associated with pedagogy (formal and informal, such as communist party fora) and high intellectual activity - both of which helped to ensure stable associations to some extent.

This quest for stability, as we will see, was chimerical, for many reasons. The second mode is less outspoken in its declaration of faithfulness; indeed, in many instances there seems to be no "original" or "source" concept. Rather, the concept seems to have been derived from a broadly modern critical possibility, expressed in local idiom and clearly serving local political ends. The possibility, it seems, is seized and made to serve local interests in a far more explicit and immediate way. In the following analysis, I draw both on Malayalam translations of feminist ideas actively circulating in public discourse and on my own experience within the field of translation. My method has been to move between cultural, linguistic, political and historical registers to capture the ways in which feminist ideas have been made to work on the ground. My purpose, of course, is to assess the relative political value of different "modes" of translating mentioned above, within the different contexts and fields where they occur - their implication for feminist politics. It is important to emphasize that these modes may not really represent two "generations" of feminists separated by time. Rather, they occur simultaneously, and may indeed be more indicative of the different locations of the translators working in the different modes - both of which may be of equal importance for a feminist intellectual engagement.

Such work takes forward Tejaswini Niranjana's point about the situation of the feminist located in the post-colony (as distinct from the postcolonial feminist). As she explains, "post-colony" refers not only to a position (the "postcolonial") but also to a location, a difference that undeniably marks our political engagement as feminist intellectuals living in Third-World spaces. Niranjana points out that the space of translation in which we operate is not one in which "a clearly demarcated concept is approximated to by its equivalent; rather, it is a space in which the translator simultaneously negotiates different kinds of languages" (Niranjana 1998, 133). The situation of the feminist intellectual located in the post-colony is, therefore, one of being "in-translation". It means she must strain not just to make feminism "simple", but to emphasize the tentativeness of all efforts to translate, and the extent to which those efforts depend on contingent political and cultural contexts (Niranjana 1998, 144).

Drawing from instances of the translation of feminism in Kerala, I would like to argue that being "in-translation" necessarily implies that "faithful" translation is not the only way for ideas and agendas from western feminism to pass into and operate within public discourse in the local language. Besides highlighting the weakness of claims regarding the possibility of "exact" translation in high-intellectual discourse, I would like to stress the less noticed, less institutionalized ways in which feminist ideas emerge in public discourse strongly reshaped, bearing the indelible stamp of local political possibilities and concerns.

The other point I would like to emphasize is this. Even though the borrowing of ideas from the West under colonialism - through which specific modernities were shaped in the colonies - clearly occurred within unequal terms of exchange, this was no simple process of internalizing the colonizer's ideas. The pressures of the local context seem to have ruled out such simple assimilation. This means rejecting an approach which frames the translation of Western ideas in the colonial and postcolonial context through a simple opposition between domination and resistance. Such framing, as Lydia H. Liu has pointed out, "ends up reifying the power of the dominator to a degree that the agency of the non-Western cultures is reduced to a single possibility: resistance" (Liu 1995, xv-xvi). Empirically rigorous, more closely historical accounts which acknowledge the instability of translation, and pay attention to the conditions of possibility within which it takes place, may indeed throw much more light on the specific shaping of modernities in colonies and post-colonies.

Translating in the "faithful" mode The earliest attempts to translate feminism into Malayalam were undertaken mostly, though not exclusively, by intellectuals with radical left sympathies and affiliations.3 Through these different efforts, different senses of "feminism" were conveyed, often without much focused thinking on the heterogeneity of feminism as knowledge and politics. Even while describing the different strands of feminist thinking, many of these authors were keen to emphasize the desirability and validity of socialist feminism.4 However, in practice, the sense of feminism being a politics of sexuality grew stronger in these times, through the work of feministidentified literary authors like Sara Joseph with their attempt at self-assertion in language and sexuality. Since the mid 1990s, the appearance of "gender" as a new term in popular discourse, particularly in the popular discourse of development and political decentralization, has added to the complication. Today, "gender" is often presented as a non-divisive, preferable way of addressing the issue of male domination, and "feminism" seems to hold threatening connotations with its insistence of the pervasiveness of patriarchy. This translation of "gender" in completely liberal terms perhaps indicates how complex the process of translation is, and how it is shaped by forces external to both scholarship and language.

The introductory books on feminism in Malayalam written in the 1980s fall into the "faithful" mode mentioned above. In Kerala, there was hardly any effort to directly translate key feminist theoretical writings into Malayalam, quite in contrast to, say, Marxism. Instead, the major concern expressed was to familiarize the local readership with concepts and postulates of feminism through the generation of local equivalents adequate to capture the "original". Most of this work admitted that the creation of local equivalents enabling local users to apply the theory with rigour and precision would be a lengthy process. Some translators aimed to create a glossary of feminist terms in Malayalam (Satchidanandan, not dated, 3), and it was pointed out that the "language of theory will be shaped only through its application" (ibid.). This process is easily discernible in the translation of theory into Malayalam today, the question often being how to create equivalents that are less highMalayalam and can thus communicate with a wider readership. One of the hinge-points of discussion here is the creation of terms that are less loaded with elitism to express feminist ideas - for instance, the vernacular aankoima is now widely used in Malayalam for patriarchy, as an alternative to the high-Malayalam term pitrmedhavitvam. In a sense, this is an implicit recognition by much translation of the impossibility of homolingual address - of the fact that the existence of a national language does not mean it is equally available to all nationals alike.

This "faithful" mode clearly has a longer past in Kerala - indeed, it dates to a much earlier time than the twentieth century's systematic attempts to create a rigorous "scientific" Marxist terminology in Malayalam. It is also clear that the stability which translators sought

to impart to the terms they coined was an illusion, for the fortunes of translated concepts were not, apparently, determined within language alone. Many concepts, though translated with absolute precision, dropped out of usage altogether. For instance, the CMS missionary George Mathen in the late nineteenth century coined the word paatrata, to mean "capacity", in his Malayalam writings on shaping Christian and moral subjects (Mathen 1866/1993, 343). This is derived from paatram, "cup", and conveys the exact sense of "capacity" - the hollowedness of the subject invested by the project of re-forming so central to the missionary endeavour. Yet this word was hardly used later and is quite forgotten in contemporary Malayalam; quite understandably so, given the predominance of the liberal humanist notion of the subject. Re-forming came to be regarded as the "liberation" of the human individual from the thralldom of tradition, and not the result of the hollowing out of "capacities". Thus, in contemporary Malayalam we often tend to use the same words for "ability" and "capacity* kazhivu or seshi. Other concepts whose translation involved a difficult process of selection from the various senses they carried were mutable, too. For example, the Malayalam translation of the notion of "freedom", swatantryam, firmly anchored it to certain local reformist ends in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. Social reformist authors of this period carefully clarified that it did not indicate the simple removal of constraints upon the individual. The latter sense was even condemned sometimes as the "decadent" Western notion of freedom; instead, these authors were keen to project their aspirations of "finding selfmeans for survival" (swatantryam) as "truly" modern. Indeed, swatantryam was specified to be a state in which external constraints have been removed but internal mechanisms of regulation installed, securing the rationality of society as a whole. This insistence on fixing the meaning of "freedom" in Malayalam makes sense when one considers the fact that the late nineteenth to early twentieth-century reformers were involved in a larger project of shaping the disciplined, productive, gendered individual, who was thought to be already implicated in a modern collectivity, the nation, the community, the family and so on (Devika 2007).

However, when others later sought to deploy the notion of "freedom" against the alreadyimplicated status of the individual, the same word, swatantryam, was re-deployed with fresh inflections. For instance, swatantryam in the 1930s and 40s was used to refer to the anticolonial political goal of the national movement; it also came to be used in the late 1960s and 70s to refer to the general goal of escaping traditional and modern forms of social and aesthetic constraint embraced by literary modernists in Malayalam.

The same instability can be found in the efforts of the translators of feminist concepts in the 1980s as well. Indeed, some of the terms that early translators often preferred to avoid, feeling they carried the wrong senses, did persist. For instance, an early translator, N.K. Ravindran, remarked in a mid-1980s essay that the negative attitude to male adherents of feminism often stemmed from "an apolitical tendency to deny the political dimensions of feminism [Ravindran uses the English word] and reduce it to mere streevadani" (Ravindran not dated, 43; my translation). Streevadam literally means "argument on behalf of women", and Ravindran seems to distinguish this from "feminism", implying the former to connote an exclusively women-centred politics. However, almost fifteen years later, the most commonly encountered Malayalam word for feminism is undoubtedly streevadam.5 This perhaps indicates the strength of other influences, including semi-academic journalism in Malayalam as well as the bigger players in Malayalam publishing. These have tended to abandon the search for completely adequate equivalents and "scientific terminology" in favour of terms that are easier to handle and flexible enough to carry variety of senses.

The search for equivalents is muddled by more than just the need for simplicity. Often, "simplicity" is really familiarity; the "simple term" may be overlaid with other theoretical burdens which the feminist translator would want to contest. An interesting instance revealing the loaded nature of the demand for "simplicity" was a noted critic's point about a book in

Malayalam on feminist theory in Malayalam, Streevadam (Devika 20016). The reviewer complained that the author's coinage garhika adhvanam for "domestic labour" was unnecessary jargon, because the communists had already used the "simple term" veettupani (housework) to refer to it. What he obviously missed was the distinction between "domestic labour" and "housework", which had been belaboured in the book! Another example is the lack of Malayalam words to confidently express female sexuality and pleasure that would disrupt patriarchal scripts - despite the fact that literary writing, both by women authors who have explicitly claimed the feminist label and by others, has long sought to reclaim sexuality and the body. In recent years, equivalents coined for a whole range of feminist concepts have gained much greater circulation, for instance garhikaadhikramam (domestic violence); lingapadavi (gender); lingapadavi tulyata (gender equality); stree saaktheekaranam ^ (women's empowerment) and others. However, three significant issues may be raised about the process of finding "adequate" equivalents for feminist terms.

The first relates to the selective evocation of senses of particular concepts. One of the most widely used terms in recent times, lingapadavi (gender), read literally would mean "status of sex". This sounds quite capacious, indeed quite capable of evoking a wider variety of senses of "gender"; it would even recall precisely the subversiveness of gender as a concept that challenged heteronormativity and the assumption of the existence of the unitary feminist subject across space and time. However, given the fact that lingapadavi is a concept most widely recognized by its presence within governmental discourses in Kerala, it is most commonly read as referring to the male/female divide alone. The sense of variability of gender over time and space is almost entirely lost. Indeed, the creation of a new set of terms through which to express same-sex desire and politics has recently been identified as one of the major challenges facing gay and lesbian politics in Kerala (Bharadwaj 2004). Partly, the problem is that separate words for sex-as-biologically-determined and sex-as-socioculturallyconstituted do not exist in Malayalam. It might perhaps have been a better idea to create separate words for the two - something that has not, however, been considered within feminist debates here. This, I would argue, speaks volumes about the exclusions through which "feminist politics" was constituted in Kerala and which are now being challenged by a second generation (Bharadwaj 2004).

Secondly, we have still not been able to reflect critically upon commonly used, apparently "adequate" and familiar terms that circulate in feminist discourse, applying the insights of feminist historical and sociological analysis. It may be the case that there are common terms which have actually become ineffective or incapable of expressing emergent phenomena, and which we thus need to correct. An excellent illustration of such obsolescence may be the word streedhanam, which denotes the transfer of large sums of money or valuables from the bride's family to the groom's (commonly referred to as "dowry"), something often regarded as an inevitable part of marriages arranged by families. Feminists all over India have been vocal in their opposition to this practice and anti-dowry campaigning was central to early feminist mobilizations in Kerala. Feminists have been quick to point out that dowry, which was almost non-existent in matrilineal castes, has now spread to all social groups, and dowry demands are growing to an alarming degree (Kodoth 2006). Streedhanam, which literally means "woman's wealth", is problematic because it seems to imply that the wealth transferred is the bride's share of her family property, now transferred to the groom's family to support the new family unit. In fact, more often streedhanam is a "groom-price": it has less to do with what the bride may receive from her family than what the family of a man found "eligible" may demand quite arbitrarily. In any case, the woman herself has little control over the transferred wealth. Feminists thus urgently need to replace streedhanam with varavila (groom-price), even though this is an unfamiliar term.

Thirdly, it has proved to be a problem that many coinages draw upon "high" Malayalam, deeply influenced by Sanskrit and often divorced from everyday speech. On the one hand, the feminist translator cannot afford to sacrifice the political force that a new idea carries - which often requires a coinage that may be unfamiliar. On the other, she has often to face charges, most often made by activists, of being inaccessible to the "average reader". Such charges are often met by reminding the accusers of the need to create new and enabling concepts. Also, preserving the obscurity of the text may actually be important when one translates philosophical and theoretical texts. However, the argument of the activist-critics is rather that the new concepts generated are not politically enabling despite the translators' best intentions. Their demand is precisely for a more "grounded" translation, which would carry greater political force in non-academic contexts. Such "grounded" translation does not necessarily have to rely on familiar terms; indeed, we probably need more intriguing perhaps ugly - combinations that disrupt the familiar and provoke reflection. Such instances are not unknown, as I will discuss below. Perhaps we need to view those as representing another mode of translation altogether.

The predominance of the vocabulary of political economy in the representation of the "theoretical", combined with the extreme conservatism of contemporary Malayalee society which discourages the active discussion of themes like sexuality, very often decides the limits of feminist innovation in language. These two forces are, however, weakening: the grip of Marxist terminology is not as firm as it used to be, and economistic concerns have begun to give way to others even within conventional development discourse.7 "Grounded" or "dramatic" translation The second mode of translation is directed at naming, critiquing and countering local forms of oppression and expressing local strategies of resistance and goals. Its starting point is not really the effort to make familiar a text or a body of ideas available only in another language.

Instead, this "grounded" mode is often characterized by its focus on the production of dramatic effect, on multiplying emotive force, rather than one-to-one correspondence. It actively searches within local linguistic traditions to discover a local idiom for local political practice informed by ideas, concepts and goals inspired by radical western political thinking.

This could include retrieving the often obscured senses of local terms or usages, or coining new ones from the local language, interpreting them in the light of western political ideas and concepts, claiming their equivalence, and strategically deploying them in political discourse.

Very often such translation successfully co-opts the nuances of local language to heighten particular inflections of meaning in the translated concept or idea.

This type of "translation", too, has had a long history in twentieth-century Malayalee society. The communist movement in the mid twentieth century used both modes of translations to considerable advantage. On the one hand, the period saw a number of books that introduced socialism as a theory in Malayalam, strenuous efforts being made by leading communist or left-leaning intellectuals like K. Damodaran and C.J. Thomas. Simultaneously, it was also a period of extremely creative "grounded" translation. The Malayalam coinages tozhilali (proletarian) and mutalali (capitalist) are good illustrations of this creativity. The former replaced jolikkaar or panikkaar, which referred to "workers" in early twentiethcentury writings, thus absorbing "workers" into "proletariat". It also may have harnessed the dignity of tozhil - "profession" in Malayalam - to all labour (joli). In Malayalam, "capital" was translated as mooladhanam, yet "capitalist" was not translated as mooladhanamudama (literally "owner of capital") but as mutalali. The latter term is derived from mutal, which means "assets" or "principal amount", making it possible for all sorts of property-owners to be bundled into the category of mutalali, so that anti-capitalist indignation could potentially also be unleashed upon the small entrepreneur, being a de facto employer. This was

strategically advantageous in the context of the left activism in Kerala of those times. The political advantage reaped from such coinage is jealously guarded: for instance, when sexworker mobilizations in Kerala laid claim to the identity tozhilali recently by calling themselves laingika tozhilalikal (the sexual proletariat), it created an unholy uproar within the left.

Such "grounded translation" was also to be found in the early twentieth century, in the writings of authors who tried to give voice to the emergent aspirations of the first generation of modern educated Malayalee women. This involved drawing upon accounts of first-wave feminist activism and women's social work in the West, perhaps even more than borrowing concepts and ideas.8 There were even some coinages which tried to capture the local dimensions of patriarchy, for instance Anna Chandy's (1929/2005) term adukkalavadam (kitchenism), which tried to highlight the extent to which the emergent modern patriarchy in Kerala allowed a degree of mobility to women and access to paid work, but essentially tied them to domestic concerns.

"Grounded" approaches like this did not, however, figure significantly on the political agenda of Malayalee feminism in the 1980s - despite the fact that these forms of patriarchy have grown in strength rather than declined over the course of the century.9 Feminist interventions in Malayalam literature have been critical of everyday language that shapes our sense of being male or female and what these entail.10 In non-literary language, however, the scene is bleaker. Such work has been taken over by the mass media, with ambivalent results.

For instance, the recent upsurge in reportage of sexual harassment and sexual crime by the media has thrown up the concept peedhanam, which literally means "torture". This has, on the one hand, rendered redundant usages such as poovalashalyam (eve-teasing); on the other, it is being thrown around to link sexist comments and gang rape in the same breath. A "covering effect" is produced which shields middle-class sensibilities from the horror of sexual violence, while simultaneously titillating them. Feminists have used other, less sensationalized, coinages like laingikatikramam (sexual violence); however, they face a long haul in a thoroughly media-saturated society. With the coinage laingikatikramam we have a term that carries all the burden of the "faithful" translation mode outlined above: it is simply not dramatic enough to evoke anger against sexual violence.

This no doubt alerts those interested in feminist politics to the urgency of undertaking a "grounded translation" that serves feminist ends. Perhaps this is how the concerns of the activist-critics who complained about inaccessibility should be addressed.11 The task seems to be a dual one. First, we need to be watchful of new devices in language as well as of existing ones, so everyday and naturalized that their political implications are absorbed and never probed. One might, for example, examine the contradictions of referring to the modern housewife in Kerala as veettamma (house-mother), a term that derives emotive force from the earlier ideal of taravattamma (mother of the joint, ordinarily matrilineal, family). Here a subtle operation in language seems to obliterate the distance between the modern housewife, granted only moral authority in the family, and the senior woman in the matrilineal joint family, whose authority derived not from her individualized "qualities" but from her position within the family, which was by no means only moral in nature. Secondly, there is the need to create fresh concepts endowed with emotive force to express adequately the whole range of female experience in Kerala, which remains nameless today. For instance, Anna Chandy's coinage adukkalavadam may be appropriate to name the sheer oppressiveness of educated, employed, yet strictly disciplined and home-oriented womanhood in Kerala (which, no doubt, is the very same womanhood celebrated in the "Kerala Model" of development). But there is much more to be done in the work of "naming" local manifestations of patriarchy. For instance, currently there is no adequate way in Malayalam to name the experience of increasing numbers of poorer women, increasingly forced to shoulder responsibilities inside

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and outside the home and assume the moral posture of wife/mother. Bland adaptations of social science concepts, or even coinages from feminist theory, will not work; thus, possible options like "female headship" or "double shift" do not capture the contingent and fluid nature of boundaries between home and public in non-middle-class settings or their oppressiveness. Yet there is plenty of potential for the retrieval and redeployment of terms that may serve feminist political ends, even if this has been largely unexplored until lately. In genteel Malayalee society, chanthapennungal, for instance, refers pejoratively to women who get their way through loud and vociferous argument. In the literal sense it means "market women", women who earn their livelihood as workers in the market place and who reject dominant norms of feminine modesty. Or the word tantedam- which means self-confidence when applied to men and arrogance when applied to women.

Not surprisingly, "dramatic" translation happens spontaneously; for that reason it often goes unrecorded and, sadly enough, is not ploughed back into feminist discourse. I would argue that preventing such loss remains one of the most important tasks of feminist intellectual work in Kerala. This mode of translation involves not just fresh coinage, but also the radical and dramatic reinterpretation of familiar terms in specific contexts. I would like to mention two instances here to illustrate these two possibilities. The first relates to translating the critical notion "patriarchal aesthetic standards". If one were to limit oneself to a "faithful translation", in the mode discussed earlier, "patriarchal aesthetic standards" would simply be just that: pitrmedhavitva saundarya maanadanddangaL An alternative that has been coined recently, by the Dalit feminist Rekha Raj, dramatically captures this, and much more. She names the oppressive patriarchal norms of beauty imposed upon Malayalee women in a manner that highlights not merely women's subservience to patriarchal culture but also the inherent caste oppression that such norms inevitably sanction: after all, the dominant norms of female beauty in this society are also upper-caste and elitist. She names them collectively as acchilakshanam, combining two words, acchi, which refers to the (upper-caste) Nair woman, and carries slightly derogative caste connotations, and lakshanam,which means "distinguishing marks". That is, acchi was a word referring to the Nair woman and used by castes placed higher than the Nairs (the Brahmins of Kerala, for instance), for whom Nair women worked as domestic servants and to whom they were sexually accessible. Thus acchilakshanam literally means the "distinguishing marks of an ideal (subservient) Nair woman". Using this term to refer to the dominant ideals of female beauty in Malayalee society not only brings out dramatically the woman's subservience to patriarchal aesthetic norms, but also highlights effectively the undeniable mediation of caste dominance in the establishment of such norms. Raj's strategy is to coin a new word to express a complex manifestation of power, which is not easily thinkable in the "faithful" mode.

Another strategy, evident in the second instance I want to discuss, is of reinvesting older words with newer layers of meaning, to exploit the many different senses it may communicate. I draw my example from the speech of a senior activist, K.P. Rugmini Amma, who has recently been in the forefront of organizing women who have lost their husbands, or who are aged widows living with their children. Such loss is indeed daunting in a society in which families largely arrange marriages, in which the woman's remarriage in the event of divorce or death of the husband is frowned upon, and in which the woman's access to resources within the family depends crucially on her being married. Rugmini Amma's campaigns with the All-India Widows' Welfare Society have focused on getting the state to acknowledge "widows" as a category entitled to greater welfare resources. In a recent interview, Rugmini Amma elaborated on the nature of women's labour in her predominantly agricultural home district, Wayanad, arguing that the status of widows is, in effect, equivalent to the status of workers who have lost an employer, to justify her demands upon the state!

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In doing this, she used the term kaanaappani, which has been in circulating since the late 1980s. The term literally means "unseen work", but its use has generally been restricted to refer to "domestic labour'Vlabour rendered invisible in the national income accounts.

However, Rugmini Amma uses the term to capture more than this. She highlights the multiple ways in which women's labour has been rendered invisible, and also challenges the exclusions - of sexual labour, emotional labour, and so on - that constitute the notion of "domestic labour" in this context, many of which have been questioned by feminist theorists elsewhere. To quote her: [Widows] have the right to live. The state ought to help [...] Why? Because they have laboured hard till now [...] For those who work in the field, there is so much to say that today and tomorrow won't suffice to speak all of it [...] Consider a wife in a farming family [...] the husband wakes up in the morning and we [the wife] have to get everything done for him after that [...] he has to be given a cup of coffee [...] when the newspaper arrives, we have to hand him his spectacles [...] after that tea, breakfast. Then if there are school-going kids, they have to be readied too [...] Running here, running here, we do kaanaappani. The work that a woman does before her husband's death is all kaanaappani. All of 24 hours. Isn't it the woman who wakes up first at dawn? And then when it's night [...] that man may be a social or political activist, and may have a large friends' circle. Doesn't the woman have to wait with the food till he's back? [...] So till 10 at night and later [...] now, those who are married will certainly know [...] we have to satisfy that man's desires [...] they won't see that we've been working all day! [...] It is this woman whose life moves forward like this who suddenly [loses her husband].

Now, say, I'm believing I have a master and I have worked in such-and-such fashion for him - imagine what [tumult] goes on inside a woman who thinks this way, when the husband dies suddenly?1 In this passage, kaanaappani - as I have mentioned, the word literally means "work that cannot be seen" - indicates not just the well-accepted elements of women's labour that go uncounted, but also several aspects of the life of a married woman in a farming family that are not ordinarily "seen" as work. First, it points to the immense amount of productive work that peasant women do but that remains invisible. Secondly, it indicates domestic labour, which includes not just cooking and childcare, but also the subtler aspects of "performance" of wifehood (as evident in her mention of handing over spectacles for the man to commence his reading, or waiting till he arrives for dinner), which is not usually counted as "labour" but serves to make possible the husband's public life. Thirdly, it refers to sexual labour - the "unseen" (to the unmarried!) nature of which she emphasizes. Fourthly, kaanaappani is invisible also because the presence of a "master" remains unseen. Thus kaanaappaniis freed of its restricted use to refer to a more complex reality of everyday labour and submission of married women. It is thereby wrested to the purpose of asserting that widows are both labouring subjects and subjects of power and politics, producing both use and surplus values situated within a relation of power with their husband/"master", and making demands upon the state. "Grounded translation", therefore, exploits the multiple translation possibilities of a concept, but its specific outcome is determined by the local context in which the concept or idea is pressed into service.

Feminist reverberations There seems to be a consensus among Translation Studies scholars that "translation does not happen in a vacuum, but in a continuum; it is not an isolated act, it is part of an ongoing process of intercultural transfer. Moreover, translation is a highly manipulative activity that

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involves all kinds of stages in that process of transfer across linguistic and cultural borders" (Bassnett and Trivedi 1999, 2). There is clear recognition of the fact that as the world becomes increasingly diverse and competitive, "common norms are conjectural and fluctuating", and models of universality are "more often the reflection of figures of domination" (Simon 1996, 166). In this context, the suggestions for translation range from Kwame Anthony Appiah's call for "thick translation", which locates the text in a specific, rich cultural and linguistic contexts through annotations and glosses (Appiah 2000), to Spivak's reminder of the need to adequately render the rhetoricity of writing in translation if it is to become a vehicle of feminist solidarity (Spivak 2000).

The greater focus of such work has been on the transfer of literary writing across cultures, and from Third-World languages to English. However, the available work on the translation of literary forms and texts from English to Indian languages - for instance, Vanamala Viswanatha and Sherry Simon's essay on the translation of English poetry and literary genres into Kannada by the well-known Kannadiga author B.M. Srikantaiah (1999) certainly indicates that translation does not result always in derivative forms. The authors point out that influences from the West often provoked new and contestatory forms of writing in Kannada: resistance did not always mean rejection. Viswanatha and Simon identify three strategies, the most successful being a "writing strategy which enabled the Kannada literary tradition to be maintained, while introducing needed changes which came from outside that tradition - by providing a satisfying match between new literary forms and indigenous material" (Viswanatha and Simon 1999, 169-70). Likewise, the experience of translating feminist ideas into Malayalam seems to indicate that while in this case faithfulness to tradition was not at issue, the influence of the indigenous context does work heavily in the translation of theory, especially radical political theory, into the local language.

Translation from English to a non-Western language, and the translation of theory, has received less attention in Translation Studies. Spivak, in her essay on the politics of translation, does briefly mention translating theoretical terms into Bengali, though for an elite audience well-versed in English and other European languages. She mentions that when translating Mahasweta Devi, she had no reason to fear being too accurately judged by her readership in the US whereas, she observes, "the opposite argument is not neatly true".

Without exploring the issue further, she merely indicates that "The act of translating into the Third World language is often a political exercise of a different kind" (Spivak 2000, 406).

Tejaswini Niranjana, cited above, argues explicitly that the state of being "intranslation" involves the ability to go beyond the mere logic of the text or the concept being translated into the local language. Instead, being "in-translation" precisely means being able to function between two different cultural and political registers. The translator has to be attentive to the different - and hierarchical - contexts of communication within local society, in other words attending to several things at the same time as one negotiates between languages, cultural registers and levels of social hierarchy - while remaining on the look-out for opportunities for strategic intervention. This is why to be "in-translation", one would need not just both the "faithful" and the "grounded" modes of translation, but also the capacity to combine them in politically fruitful ways.

The feminist translator's task involves overcoming the problem of assuming homolingual address, the habit of viewing the "two unities of the translating and the translated languages as if they were autonomous and closed entities" (Sakai 1997, 2). Instead, one would have to take seriously the reality of "heterolingual address", the fact that no language is shared equally or in the same way by all its speakers and that there are hierarchies that structure access and use of language. This clearly means that it is not enough to stop at finding a set of adequate and equivalent words for feminist concepts in the local languages. If the "we" that I assume when I articulate my feminism in Malayalam is essentially limited to a

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particular group within my putative language group, then my task as translator can never end.

For if feminism is to thrive as a politics, we need to constantly reach out as "translators" to ever wider groups - and infiltrating public and popular discourses may only be a part of this larger task. That will involve an ongoing process of translation.

This means that both the "faithful" and the "grounded" modes are equally important for feminist engagement in the public sphere. I do believe that translation in the first mode has its uses, especially in a society like Kerala. Here, securing a place in the high-intellectual domain - which involves acquiring the capability to discuss and use theory and abstraction in articulating political concerns and using theoretical terms with a degree of consistency and clarity - is undoubtedly a necessary step that ensures the legitimacy of feminism as a politics articulated in public. The work of feminist scholars located within and outside Kerala have ensured this to a significant extent: serious intellectual work in Malayalam is now more lively to pay attention to gender as an axis of power, rather than omit it. And feminist scholarship is increasingly capable of countering absences - or critiquing partial presences. But I have paid attention to the neglect of the second mode as this lack alerts us to some of the truly debilitating weaknesses of feminist engagement in Malayalee society, as well as indicating some directions to overcome these. At present feminist epistemological and political concerns are, at least, finding their way not only into research in universities, but also into cultural and political analysis that appears in mainstream Malayalam media, especially leading journals.

The theoretical sophistication and political self-reflexivity that at least some of this writing aspires to contrasts sharply with the extent to which feminist activism in Kerala has relied upon journalism for concepts and terms to work with. I would argue that this does not indicate that activists are in some sense "simplistic"; what it highlights is, rather, the need for more "grounded" translation, a need that should be seriously addressed by those engaged in the task of creating feminist knowledge.

When conceived in such terms, feminist translation cannot work as a vehicle to "spread the Word", to communicate a single message. It can only work to produce what Anna Tsing has named "faithless translations" (Tsing 1997) - or as Joan Scott has inimitably called them, "feminist reverberations" (Scott 2003).

References Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2000. Thick Translation. In The Translation Studies Reader, ed.

Lawrence Venuti, 417-29. London: Routledge.

Arunima, G. 2003. "Pennezhuthu" - "Women's Writing" and the Politics of Gender in Contemporary Kerala. In India in the Age of Globalization: Contemporary Discourses and Texts, ed. Suman Gupta, Tapan Basu, and Subarno Chatterjee, 114-43. New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.

Bassnett, Susan, and Harish Trivedi. 1999. Introduction. In Post-Colonial Translation. Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, 1-18. London: Routledge.

Bharadwaj, Reshma, ed. 2004. Mithyakalkku Appuram: Swavargalaingikata Keralattil [BeyondMyths: Homosexuality in Kerala],Kottayam: D.C.Books.

Bygnes, Suzanne. 2005. Questioning Modernity and Development: A Qualitative Inquiry on Women's Emancipation in Kerala, India. PhD diss, University of Bergen.

Chandy, Anna. 1929/2005. On Women's Liberation. In HerSelf: Early Writings onGender

by Malayalee Women, ed. J. Devika, 109-34. Kolkata: Stree.

Chinnammalu Amma, V.K. 1924/2005. The Place of Women in Society. In Her-Self: Early Writingson Gender by Malayalee Women, ed. J. Devika, 75-82. Kolkata: Stree.

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Damodaran, K. 1949. Dhanasastratatvangal [Theories of Economics], Kozhikode: Deshabhimani.

-. 1951. Marxisattinoru Mukhavura [An Introduction to Marxism], Kozhikode.

Devika, J. 2001. Streevadam. Kottayam: D. C. Books. , trans.& ed. 2005. Her-Self: Early Writings on Gender by Malayalee Women. Kolkata: Stree. . 2007. En-Gendering Individuals: The Language of Re-forming in Early Twentieth Century Keralam. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. , and Praveena Kodoth. 2001. Sexual Violence and the Predicament of Feminist Politics.

Economic and Political Weekly (Kerala), 36, no. 33: 3170-77.

Erwer, Monica. 2003. Challenging the Gender Paradox: Women's Collective Agency and the Transformation of Kerala Politics. Goteborg: Department of Peace and Development Research, Goteborg University.

Hiranyan, Gita. 2000. Interview with Sara Joseph. Bhashaposhini Annual Number: 21-39.

Indira. 1987. Feminism: Streekal Samoohyamayum Laingikamayum Adimakalano?

[Feminism: Are Women Slaves, Socially and Sexually?]. Thiruvananthapuram: Prachodana.

Jeffrey, Robin. 2003. Politics, Women and Well-Being: How Kerala Became "A Model".

Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Kodoth, Praveena. 2006. Varante "Vila" Uyarunnu: Vivahaalochanayum Lingaadhikaaravum Keralattil [The Groom's "Price" Rises: Marriage Negotiations and Gender Power in Kerala]. In Aanarashunaatile Kazhcchakal: Kerala Streepaksha Gaveshananttil [Sights from Male-dom: Kerala in Feminist Research], ed. J. Devika, 83-118.

Thiruvananthapuram: Women's Imprint.

Lakshmy Amma, K. 2005. Manly Duty. In Her-Self: Early Writings on Gender by Malayalee Women, ed. J. Devika, 6-9. Kolkata: Stree.

Lefevere, Andre. 1999. Composing the other. In Post-Colonial Translation. Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, 75-94. London: Routledge.

Lindberg, Anna. 2001. Experience and Identity. A Historical Account of Class, Caste and Gender among the Cashew Workers of Kerala, 1930-2000. Lund: Department of History, Lund University.

Liu, Lydia H. 1995. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity - China, 1900-1937. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Mathen, George. 1866. Marumakkathayathalulla Doshangal [The Evils of Matriliny].

Vidyasangraham 1 (8) April 1866, republished by Benjamin Bailey Research Centre, Kottayam, 1993, 342-52.

Nayak, Nalini, and Gabriel Dietrich. 2002. Transition or Transformation? A Study of the Mobilisation, Organisation and the Emergence of Consciousness among the Fishworkers of Kerala, India. Madurai: Department of Social Analysis, Tamilnadu Theological Seminary.

Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1998. Feminism and Translation in India: Contexts, Politics, Futures.

Cultural Dynamics 10, no. 2: 133-146.

Parayil, Govindan, ed. 2000. Kerala: The Development Experience - Reflections on Sustainability and Replicability. London: Zed Press.

Ramakrishnan, A.K., and K.M. Venugopal. 1989. Streevimochanam: Charitram, Siddhantam, Sameepanam [Women's Liberation: History, Theory and Positions]. Payyanur: Nayana Books.

Ravindran, N.K. [n.d.] Keralattile Streevimochanarashtriyam: Charitraparamaaya Oranveshanam [Women's Liberation Politics in Kerala: A Historical Inquiry]. In Streepadhanangal [Women's Studies], ed. Satchidanandan, 39-49. Kozhikode: Bodhi.

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Sakai, Naoki. 1997. Translation and Subjectivity: On "Japan" and Cultural Nationalism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Satchidanandan, ed. [n.d.] Streepadhanangal [Women's Studies], Kozhikode: Bodhi.

Scott, Joan W. 2003. Feminist Reverberations, differences. A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13, no. 3: 1-23.

Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation. Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London: Routledge.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2000. The Politics of Translation. In The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, 397-416. London: Routledge.

Thomas, CJ. 1951. Socialism. Sahitya Pravartaka Sahakarana Sangham: Kottayam.

Tsing, Anna. Transitions as Translations. 1997. Transitions, Environments, Translations: ^ Feminism in International Politics, ed. Joan W. Scott, Cora Kaplan, and Debra Keates, 253-72. New York: Routledge.

Vijayan, Aleyamma. 2002. Sariram, Laingikata, Rashtriyam [Body, Sexuality, Politics]. In Souvenir of the 39th Annual Conference of the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishat focused on gender discrimination. Vivechanattinte Bhinnamukhanagal [The Many Faces of Discrimination], 44-45. Thiruvananthapuram: Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishat.

Viswanatha, Vanamala, and Sherry Simon. 1999. Shifting grounds of exchange: B.M. Srikantaiah and Kannada translation. In Post-Colonial Translation. Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, 162-79. London: Routledge.

Notes

1

The dominant language spoken in Kerala State is Malayalam, and the people are thus called

"Malayalees" or "Keralites".

Arguing convincingly that translation always precedes communication, Naoki Sakai uses the term "schema of cofiguration" to denote the logic that precedes and delimits the act of address that is translation, which co-figures two languages: one as translated and the other as translating. For us, the schema of cofiguration is clearly given by the present world of nation states, in which the speaker's subjectivity is bound to the language and culture of supposedly unique nation-states (Sakai 1997, 15, 49).

3

Significant texts produced in these years were Indira 1987 and Ramakrishnan and

Venugopal 1989; articles and pamphlets on feminism also appeared in these years authored by groups (such as the Stree Padhana Kendram based in Kottayam, south Kerala) and individuals (such as N.K. Ravindran).

14

A

\

In the introduction to their book on feminism, the members of the women's group Prachodana reiterated that they wished to link class politics to their anti-patriarchal struggles and thus contribute to the struggles of anti-capitalist political parties (see "Publishers' Note", Indira 1987). The authors of Streevimochanan remarked in their introduction that they hoped this work would be useful "to highlight the reciprocal relation between leftist political thought and feminism" (Ramakrishnan and Venugopal 1989; my translation). The editor of a voTume of essays on feminism pointed out that "Most of the authors in this book have adopted the socialist feminist perspective that adheres to the slogan 'Women's Liberation for Human Liberation'". See "Introduction" in Satchidanandan (not dated; however, the essays give the impression that they were written in the late 1980s).

5

The early texts referred to streeswatantryapravarttanam (activism for women's

independence); streevimochanam (women's liberation) or streepadhanangal (women's studies) or quite often simply borrowed the English term "feminism".

6

The reviewer was the noted Malayalam critic K.C. Narayanan, speaking on the television

programme Vayanasala on 12 November 2005.

For instance, a shift is perceptible in the language on women's issues used by Kerala's powerful people's science movement, the KSSP (Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishat). Aleyamma Vijayan, a prominent feminist, wrote an article in the souvenir of the KSSP's 39th Annual Conference on the "Politics of the Body and Sexuality", a topic strictly to be avoided in the KSSP around a decade back (Vijayan 2002).

8

See, for instance, essays by K. Lakshmy Amma and V.K. Chinnammalu Amma in Devika

2005: 6-9; 75-82.

9

A recent anthropological study on how Malayalee feminists view the West has remarked on

the extent to which patriarchy in Kerala foregrounds the domestic, and how feminists still feel it is difficult to engage with directly, being somehow in the "air" (Bygnes 2005).

15

10

Such interventions have been christened pennezhuttu by a male critic inspired by French

feminism. The writer Sara Joseph has been the most vocal proponent of pennezhuttu (see Gita Hiranyan 2000, 102), which has, however, also been the butt of much hostility (for a more detailed analysis, see Arunima 2003).

11

These points were made before in Devika, Praveena Kodoth and J. Daya 2003.

Unpublished interview with K.P. Rugmini Amma, All-India Widows' Welfare Society, bf

A.K. Rajasree, 12 February 2007, for the research project "Gendering Governance or Governing Women? Politics, Patriarchy, and Democratic Decentralisation in Kerala State, India", undertaken by Centre for Development Studies, Kerala, and funded by the IDRC, Canada.

1^

Scott speaks of "feminist reverberations" as similar to "seismic shock waves moving out

from dispersed epicenters, leaving shifted geological formations in their wake. The word reverberation carries with it a sense both of causes of infinite regression - reverberations are re-echoes, successions of echoes - and of effect - reverberations are also repercussions" (Scott 2003, 11).

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