Tejaswini Niranjana examines how translation has historically functioned as a tool of colonial domination and the construction of colonial subjectivities. She argues that translation presented the colonial view of non-Western cultures and peoples as the transparent truth, erasing heterogeneity. Niranjana also discusses how post-structuralism's critique of concepts like representation, history, and the construction of difference can provide a framework to rethink translation's role and move towards practices that resist colonial frameworks. Her analysis suggests translation and histories are intertwined and both can be reinscribed through post-colonial and post-structuralist perspectives.

1. INTRODUCTION:
HISTORY IN TRANSLATION
SITING TRANSLATION HISTORY, POST STRUCTURALISM, AND THE
COLONIAL CONTEXT
- Tejaswini Niranjana
Comparative Literature & Translation Studies

2. Chandani Pandya
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Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar university
Department of English
Kishan Jadav
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3.  Table of content
About Tejaswini Niranjana
Abstract
Key Points
Key Arguments
Analysis
Examples
Conclusion

4.  About Tejaswini Niranjana
 Tejaswini Niranjana is the author of Siting Translation:
History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial
Context (Berkeley, 1992), Mobilizing India: Women, Music
and Migration between India and Trinidad (Durham,
2006), and Musicophilia in Mumbai (forthcoming, 2019).
 She is co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Culture
and Society, Bangalore, which offered an innovative inter-
disciplinary PhD programme from 2000-2012. During
2012-16, she headed the Centre for Indian Languages in
Higher Education at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences,
Mumbai, and was Indian-language advisor to
Wikipedia. She has been Visiting Professor at the
University of Chicago and Yonsei University, Seoul; and a
Fellow at the Asia Research Institute (NUS-Singapore),
the Institute de Etudes Avancees (Nantes, France), and
the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Germany).

5.  Abstract
 For a while now, some of the most urgent debates in contemporary cultural and
literary studies have emerged out of the troubled interface of poststructuralist
theory and historical studies. In its most basic formulation, the problem is that of
articulating radical political agendas within a deconstructive framework. For a
discipline like literary studies, the raison d'être of which is the analysis of
representation, the critique of representation coming from within has engendered
profoundly self-reflexive anxieties.
 She begins by addressing what she sees as deconstructive criticism's failure to
address the problem of colonialism, as well as the neglect by translation studies to
ask questions about its own historicity. Contemporary critiques of representation
have not extended themselves to the point of questioning the idea of translation, of
re-presenting linguistic meaning in interlinguistic transfers.

6.  Key points
 Situating Translation :-
 Translation As Interpellation
 The Question of History

7.  Key arguments
 Her purpose to make a modest beginning by examining the “uses” of translation. The
rethinking of translation becomes an important task in a context where it has been
used since the European Enlightenment to under- write practices of subjectification,
especially for colonized peoples.
 Translation functions as a transparent presentation of something that already exists,
although the "original" is actually brought into being through translation.
Paradoxically, translation also provides a place in "history" for the colonized.
 She was, therefore, discuss the pertinence of the critique of historicism to a world
undergoing decolonization, given the enduring nature of Hegelian presentation of the
non-West and the model of teleological history that authorizes them, a questioning of
the model could underwrite a new practice of translation.

8.  Another aspect of post-structuralism that is significant for a rethinking of
translation is its critique of historicism, which shows the genetic (searching for an
origin) and teleological (positing a certain end) nature of traditional
historiography.
 A critique of historicism might show us a way of deconstructing the
"pusillanimous" and "deceitful" Hindus of Mill and Hegel. Her concern here is
not, of course, with the alleged misrepresentation of the "Hindus." Rather, I am
trying to question the with holding of reciprocity and the essentializing of
“difference” (what Johannes Fabian calls a denial of coevalness) that permits a
stereotypical construction of the other.
 Conventionally, translation depends on the Western philosophical notions of
reality, representation, and knowledge.
 Continue…

9.  It is in the context of this crisis that Tejaswini Niranjana's examination
of translation as critical practice is made possible. Her analysis seems to
amplify and elaborate the possibilities of the claim made by other
postcolonial theorists like Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, as well as
feminists such as Jane Gallop and Nancy K. Miller, that deconstruction
can be used in politically enabling ways. Insisting that a questioning of
humanist or Enlightenment models of representation and translation
"can underwrite a new practice of translation . . . reinscribing its
potential as a strategy of resistance", Niranjana persuasively shows that
a critique of presence can be taken to its limits and yet not incapacitate
the interventionist critic.
 Analysis

10.  Niranjana cites powerful examples from the post-colonial context to show how
translation was "a significant technology of colonial domination"; the use of
translation to codify Hindu law, for instance, is revealed as imperialist cathexis, "to
create a subject position for the colonized" which would "discipline and regulate the
lives of" Hindu subjects. In other words, the notion of "original" text was itself used
to fashion the native's essence-an instance of colonialism's attempt to erase
heterogeneity.
 Jones's disgust is continually mitigated by the necessity of British rule and the
"impossibility" of giving liberty to the Indians. He brings up repeatedly the idea of
"Orientals" being accustomed to a despotic rule. In his tenth annual discourse to the
Asiatic Society, he says that a reader of "history" "could not but remark the constant
effect of despotism in benumbing and debasing all those faculties which distinguish
men from the herd that grazes; and to that cause he would impute the decided
inferiority of most Asiatic nations, ancient and modern."27 The idea of the
"submissive" Indians, their inability to be free, and the native laws that do not permit
the question of liberty to be raised are thus brought together in the concept of Asian
despotism.
 examples

11.  conclusion
Since it is part of her argument that the problematics of
translation and the writing of history are inextricably bound
together, She should briefly go over Spivak's main points
regarding the "Subaltern historians. Their strategic use of
post-structuralist ideas may help us see more clearly how the
notions of history and translation she wish to reinscribe are
not only enabled by the post-colonial critique of
historiography but might also further strengthen that
critique.

12.  references
Niranjana, Tejaswini. SITING TRANSLATION HISTORY, POST-
STRUCTURALISM, AND THE COLONIAL CONTEXT. The Regents of
the University of California, 1992.

13. Thank you…