This presentation discusses the role of translation in shaping modernist poetic sensibilities in India between 1950-1970. It examines examples from Bengali, Malayalam, and Marathi literature to show how translating modern Western poets helped breach prevailing literary conventions. Many Indian poets were also translators, and translation from Latin American poets like Neruda played a role in Indian modernism. The presentation argues that translation enacted critical evaluation and intervention, legitimizing a new poetic form during India's modernist phase.

1. Presentation Season 4
● Presentation on Comparative
Literature and Translation Studies
● Presented by Pina Gondaliya and
Mahida Bhumika
● Presentation Topic: Shifting Centres
and Emerging Margins: Translation
and the Shaping of Modernist Poetics
Discourse in Indian Poetry.

2. ● E.V. Ramakrishnan is a bilingual writer who has
published poetry and criticism in English and
Malayalam.
● He is the author of three books of poetry,
publishing each after symmetrical intervals of
fourteen years: Being Elsewhere in Myself
(1980), A Python in a Snake Park (1994) and
Terms of Seeing: New and Selected Poems
(2008).
● He is also the author of a landmark book of
translations of modern Indian poetry: The Tree
of Tongues. He teaches English at South
Gujarat State University, Surat.
E.V. Ramakrishnan

3. 01. Introduction Key Arguments
02. Key Points 04. About Book
Table of Contents
0.5. Conclusions

4. ● Translation being looked something shaped Indian modernity. In the language
of Bengali, Malayalam and Marathi how modernity comes through the
Translation.
● This article examines the role played by translation in shaping a modernist
poetic sensibility in some of the major literary traditions of India in the
twentieth century, between 1950 and 1970.
● The chapter will study examples from Bengali, Malayalam and Marathi, to
understand how such translation of modern Western poets were used to
breach the hegemony of prevailing literary sensibilities and poetics modes.
● Many Indian poets such as Buddhadeb Bose, Agyeya,Gopalakrishna Adiga,
Dilip Chitre and Ayyappa Paniker were also translators.
● Translation from Africa and Latin America poetry played a significant role in
this phase of modernism. Neruda and Parra were widely translated into India
languages during this phase.

5. ● In this context, translation enacted a critical act of evaluation, a creative act of
intervention, and performative act of legitimation,in evolving a new poetic
during the modernist phase of Indian poetry.
● The term ‘translation ‘ to suggest a range of cultural practices, from critical
commentary to creation of intertextual text.
● Andre Lefevere’s concept of translation as reflections/ rewriting , the chapter
argues that ‘rewritings’ and ‘reflections’ found in the ‘less obvious form of
criticism…,commentary, historiography , teaching, the collection of works in
anthologies, the production of playshare also instance of translation.
● An essay on T.S. Eliot in Bengali by Sudhindranayh Dutt, or scathing critique in
Malayalam on the poetic practices of Vallathol Narayana Menon by Ayyappa
Paniker, can also described as ‘ translational’ writing as they have elements of
translation embedded in them.

6. Key Points
● Translation.
● ‘rewritings’ or ‘refractions’.
● Modernity and Modernism.
● Project of Modernity in India.
● Literary/ artistic movement.
● The postcolonial phase.
● The reception of Western
modernist discourses in
India.
● The Metaphor of mice
● The human and the mechanical/
artificial intermingle in the
subsequent lines suggesting a
loss of the human in the urban
landscape.
● Context points between est and
west and modernity.
● Translation enacted a critical
act.
● Mythical characters.
● Figure of Gandhi.
● Indigenous roots/ routes.
● The public world conflicts.
● The surreal Image.

7. Key Arguments
● How are we to evaluate the modernisms that emerged in the
postcolonial phase in India? Critics such as Simon Gikandi,Susan
Friedman, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, and Aparna Dharwadker
have argued that Non-Western modernism are not mere derivate
versions of European hegemonic practice.
● R. Sasidhar writes,
● If European modernism was drawn between the euphoric and the
reactive, in Kannada the precipitate modernism was drawn between.
the Brahminical and the non-Brahminical. Just as the euphoric and
the reactive modernisms were part of the internal dynamics of
modernism itself, so also the Brahmanical and the non-Brahmanical
modernisms in Kannada were part and parcel of a modernism that
came as a reaction to the Nehruvian environment. (in Satchidanandan
2001, 34).

8. Continue…..
● One of the recurring themes in Sudhindranath Dutta's
critical essays is the primacy of the word. In 'The
Necessity of Poetry', he argues that the persistence of
poetry through the ages in all societies, particularly
among the unsophisticated and the primitive, attest to its
necessity (Chaudhuri 2008, 3).
● Mardhekar urged Malayalam poets to reject prosody in
favour of rhythmic free verse. In a scathing attack on
Vallathol Narayana Menon, a canonical figure of
Malayalam Romantic poetry, Paniker brought out
Vallathol's lack of intellectual rigour, his dubious political
attitudes and adherence to wornout idioms and stale
diction.

9. Indigenous Imaginaries: Literature,
Region, Modernity
1. Disciplining India: Literature, Region, Modernity.
2.Beyond the Orientalist and Postcolonial Constructs: The Telos of Translation Studies from the Perspective of Comparative Indian
Literature.
3. Dialogics of Dissent in Indian Literature: From Bhakti Tradition to Dalit Literature.
4. Globalisation, Resistance and Social Imagination: The Work of Art in the Market Place.
5. Redefining the Secular and the Modern: The Politics of Identity and the Minority Discourse in Contemporary India. II. Reading as
Recovery: The Textual Worlding of the Singular:
6. Interrogating Modernity: The Social Imaginary in Tagore s Prose Works.
7. Narrating a Community: The Secular Modern and the Discourse of Marginality in the Fictional Works of Vaikom Muhammad
Basheer.
8. Narratives of Memory: Representations of the Other in Postcolonial Indian Fiction.
9. Writing the Region, Imagining the Nation: A Reading of Bhalchandra Nemade s Kosla.
10. Modernity, Memory and Magic Realism: Gabriel García Márquez and Malayalam Fiction.
11. The Poet as Witness: Ethnicity and the Discourse of the Nation in the Poetry of Jean Arasanayagam and Agha Shahid Ali. III.
Colonialism to Comparatism: Translating/Historicising the Other:
12. Hegemony, Ideology and the Idea of the Literary: The Emergence of Comparatism in Colonial India.
13. Beyond Canons and Classrooms: Towards a Dialogic Model of Literary Historiography.
14. Habitations of Resistance: Role of Translation in the Creation of a Literary Public Sphere in Kerala.
15. Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry.
16. Shifting Paradigms of Literary Historiography: Malayalam Literary History in the New Millennium.

10. About Book
● Indigenous Imaginaries argues for a redefinition of humanities
from a comparative perspective anchored in the regional literary
traditions of India. These indigenous traditions have negotiated
hegemonic structures of power over centuries through creative
engagements with differences and dogmas.
● The central argument here concerns the need to reconfigure
epistemologies that do not accommodate the compulsions of
creativity and critical reflection in a multilingual society.
Translation functions throughout this volume as the telos of a
dialogic, interdisciplinary mode of cognition that questions the
exclusivist claims of Euro-centric formulations of the literary.

11. Continue…..
● It argues that the act of reading becomes an act of
recovery when prescriptive protocols and absolutist
dictums are subverted through an intimate
involvement with the subliminal, the unwritten and
the inarticulate embedded in literary texts. The book
analyses the moral imaginaries that animate the
works of Rabindranath Tagore, Vaikom Muhammad
Basheer, Mahasweta Devi, Amitav Ghosh,
Bhalchandra Nemade, Anand, M. Mukundan, N. S.
Madhavan, Agha Shahid Ali and Jean Arasanayagam
as evidences of revisionist ways of radical rethinking
that can propel us in the direction of an
interdisciplinary domain of comparative humanities.

12. Conclusion
● Thus, language became, for the modernists, the
only reality that they could relate to. Their moment
of recognition. enabled by the discourses of
'Western' modernism, was postcolonial in its
essence. The self-reflexive mo(ve)ment was also
made possible by the carrying across of not
content or form, but an interior mode of being that
questioned the prevailing limits of freedom.

13. Citation
● Chaudhuri, Sukanta, ed. 2008. The art of the intellect: Uncollected English
writings of Sudhindranath Datta. New Delhi: Chronicle Books.
● E.V. Ramakrishnan (Poet) - India - Poetry International, 1 May 2009,
www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poet/14027/EV-Ramakrishnan/en/tile.
● Ramakrishnan, E. V. “Indigenous Imaginaries: Literature, Region, Modernity.”
E.V Ramakrishnan, Orient Blackswan, 17 July 2017,
www.abebooks.com/first-edition/Indigenous-Imaginaries-Literature-Region-
Modernity-Ramakrishnan/22610202260/bd#:~:text=Indigenous%20I.
● Ramakrishnan , E V. “Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation
and the Shaping of Modernist Poetics Discourse in Indian Poetry .” pp. 239–
254.
● Satchidanandan, K., ed. 2001. Indian poetry: Modernism and after. New Delhi:
Sahitya Akademi.

14. Thank You…!!