“ Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of the Modernist Discourse in Indian Poetry” in Indigenous Imaginaries: Literature, Region, Modernity by E.V. Ramakrishanan

1. Department of English
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
“ Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins:
Translation and the Shaping of the Modernist
Discourse in Indian Poetry”
in Indigenous Imaginaries: Literature, Region,
Modernity by E.V. Ramakrishanan
Presented by : Khushbu Makwana
Roll No:-13
Nehalba Gohil
Roll No:-15
Sem 4 (batch 21-23)

2. Introduction
• This chapter examines the role played by translation in shaping a
modernist poetic sensibility in some of the major literary traditions
of India in 20th 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.
• Buddhadeb Bose, Agyeya, Gopalakrishna Adiga, Dilip Chitre and
Ayyappa Paniker were Indian poets and translators.
• Translation from Africa and Latin America poetry played a
significant role in phase of modernism. Neruda and Parra were
widely translated into Indian languages during this phase.
• 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.

3. • The term ‘translation ‘ suggest a range of cultural practices, from critical
commentary to creation of intersexual 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 Sudhindranath Dutt, or scathing
critique in Malayalam on the poetic practices of Vallathol Narayana
Menon by Ayyappa Paniker, can described as ‘ translational’ writing.
• In India, modernism, as a practice, differed from west, but it fulfilled a
function in the socio-cultural contexts of Indian languages by
transforming the relations between text and reader, and the odes of
writing and reading.
• Gopalakrishna Adiga or Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh belonged to the
larger modernist tradition which accommodated diverse political
ideologies and innovative experimental styles.

4. Key points:
 Modernity/Modernism
 Literary/artistic movement of modernism
 The reception of Western modernist
discourses in India
 Translation the course of modernism in Indian
Literature
 The indigenous roots/routes of modernity and
modernism

5. # Modernity/Modernism
 The purpose of discussion it may be broadly stated that Modernity
designates an epochal period of wide-ranging transformations brought
about by the advent of colonialism, capitalist economy, industrial mode
of production, Western models of education, assimilation of rationalist
temper, resurgence of nationalist spirit and emergence of social,
political, legal, juridical and educational institutions that constituted a
normative subjectivity embodied with cosmopolitan and individualist
world views.
• it has also been argued that such a modular modernity, as envisaged
in Western terms, brought about a rupture in the social and cultural life
of India, separating its ‘modern period’ from what was ‘pre-modern’.
• The dynamics of literary expression and the apparatus of cultural
transmission came to be redefined in the ‘modern’ period.

6. • The project of modernity in India was implicated in colonialism and
imperialism
• As Dilip Chitre observes, ‘what took nearly a century and half to happen
in England, happened within a hurried half century’ in Indian
literature(1967,2).
• While introducing works of B.S. Mardhekar(Marathi modernist), Chitre
says, ‘The poet B.S. Mardhekar was the most remarkable product of the
cross-pollination between the deeper, larger native tradition and
contemporary world culture’.
• It has been argued that the idea of a ‘self-referential or self-validating’
literary text (P.P. Raveendran in Satchidanandan 2001,60-61),which is
central to modernist poetic, is rooted in an ideology of the aesthetic that
was complicit with colonialism.
• D.R.Nagaraj has pointed out that as nationalism became the ideology of
the nation state. He adds,
‘When ideologies like nationalism and spirituality become apparatuses
of the state, a section of the intelligentsia has no option other than to
seek refuge in bunkers of individualism’(Nagaraj in Ananthamurthy et al
1992, 108).

7. # Literary/artistic movement of modernism
• The term ‘Modernism’ implies a literary/artistic movement that was
characterised by experimentation, conscious rejection of the nationalist/
Romantic as well as popular.
• In the European context, it signified a set of tendencies in artistic
expression and writing style of the late 19th and early 20th century through
new aesthetic that was iconoclastic, insular and elitist.
• The modernism that emerged in Indian literatures shared many of these
defining features, its political affiliations and ideological orientations were
markedly different. its postcolonial location, the Indian modernism did not
share the imperial or metropolitan aspirations of its European counterpart.
The modernist phase in Indian language traditions has not been recognised
as part of the global modernist movement.
• The postcolonial context adds a complex political dimension to the
aesthetic of Indian modernism.
 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.
• The problematic that informs this argument is manifest in the critiques of
Eurocentric accounts of modernism.

8. # The reception of Western modernist discourses in India
• The reception of Western modernist discourses in India was mediated by
the dynamics of socio-political upheavals related to the formation of the
nation state and the realignment of power structures in society.
• The oppositional content of the modernist sensibility functioned
differently in each regional language.
• In the Bengali context, as Amiya Dev observed, ‘It was not because they
imbibed modernism that the adhunik(modernist) Bengali writers turned
away from Rabindranath; on the contrary, Modernism was the means by
which they turned away from Rabindranath and they had to turn away,
for their history demanded it’(in Ananthamurthy et al 1992,7).
 R. Sasidhar writes,

9. # Translation the course of modernism in Indian Literature
• Translation enables us to delineate the complex artistic and ideological
undercurrents that shaped the course of modernism in Indian literature.
• The three representative modernist authors from three separate Indian
literary traditions-Sudhindranath Dutta(1901-60)from Bengali,
B.S.Mardhekar(1909-56) from marathi,and Ayyappa Paniker(1936-2004) from
Malayalam.
• Their essays elaborated the basic feature of a new aesthetic against the
prevailing Romantic-nationalist or Romantic-mystical traditions.
 Sudhindranath Dutta translated Stephane mllarme and Paul Valery into
Bengali.
 Buddhadeb Bose, rendered 112 poems of Charles Baudelaire’s The
Flowers of Evil into Bengali, apart from translating Rainer Maria Rilke,
Friedrich Holderlin, Ezra Pounds, e.e. cummings., Wallace Stevens and
Boris Pasternak.
 Ayyappa Paniker translated European poets into Malayalam.
• Their discursive prose on matters of form in poetry seen as part of
attempt to ‘translate modernism’ into Indian terms.

10. # The indigenous roots/routes of modernity and modernism
 Sudhindranath Dutta (1901-60)
• The primacy of the word.
• In ‘The Necessity of Poetry’, Dutta argues that the persistence
of poetry through the ages in all societies, particularly among
the unsophisticated and the primitive, attest to its
necessity(Chaudhuri2008,3).
• Dutta believes that ‘only the poetic mind, whatever its norm,
can intuit associations where reason faces a void’.
• The modernist poetic is argued in a persuasive manner in the
context of the everyday world and its needs.
• ‘The Highbrow ’, he observes, ‘I agree with Virginia Woolf that
creative artists must from time to time seek shelter within the
much maligned Ivory Tower’.

11. • He invokes the art of Jamini Roy for having boldly shown the way
forward by evolving a universal mode of representation, using
elements of traditional Indian art(Chaudhuri2008,24).
• Dutta highlights Eliot’s commitment to tradition as
‘revolutionary in the fullest sense of the term’. He adds,
‘But I am convinced that if civilization is to survive the atomic war, Mr. Eliot’s ideal
must become widely accepted, so that in the oases that may escape destruction it
may be cherished through the interregnum’.
• ‘The Camel-Bird’ poem is about the crisis of perception that can
only be remedied by reinventing oneself completely. As a
modernist poem, Its voice of anguish is personal and intimate,
bearing testimony to a personal crisis, its larger burden is the
quest for humanity in a brutalised world, and the recovery of a
sense of community in an uprooted world of isolated slaves.

12.  B.S.Mardhekar(1909-56)
• B. S. Mardhekar transformed Marathi poetry and its dire dynamics in
terms of its vision, form and content.
• Both P.S. Rege and Mardhekar went back to the roots of Marathi
poetic traditions to reinvent the saint-poets such as Tukaram and
Ramdas for modern audience.
• His alienation from tradition and his allegiance to tradition were
inseparable. He lived in a society which had an internal discourse of
modernity, beginning with Jyotiba Phule in 19th century and extending
to Bhimrao Ambedkar in 20th .It would be wrong to say that his
modernity did not have any indigenous resources.
• In Mardhekar, both irony and self-reflexivity are strategies to re-
inscribe a self-critical attitude towards the material content of art and
life.

13. • In ‘Mice in the west Barrel Died’, became iconic modernist poem of Marathi.
The metaphor of the mice is meant to evoke the morbid and malevolent in
modern life. When this poem originally published in Marathi, in Abhiruchi, it
was met with several disapproving comments, leading to long discussions and
even parodies of the poem in Marathi.
• As Vilas Sarang points out, in the original Marathi version, Mardhekar use two
separate words, jibha and jihva, for tongue, a modern colloquial word and the
latter an archaic term suggesting ‘devotion’. He also use juxtaposes.
• Philip C. Engblom shows how Maerdhekar transplants the modernist mode
into Marathi:
‘[The poem] does not make a paraphrasable statement. Its structural principle, rather
than based on discursive logic or narrative, is determined by what Ezra Pound called “a
governing image”-which develop according to their own metaphoric “logic of the
imagination”. This is characteristic, defining technique of Modernist poetry’

14.  Ayyappa Paniker(1936-2004)
• Ayyappa Paniker was a poet, critic and translator, who, apart from
introducing world poetry to Malayalam readers. He published a
translation of The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock in his journal in 1953.
• In 1950, in an article on T.S. Eliot, Paniker had highlighted the idea it
was not from and prosody that created poetry but the invention of
rhythm and resonance that befit the emotion.
• He urged Malayalam poets to reject prosody in favour of rhythmic free
verse. In 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.
• Paniker argued that a writer has to integrate his or her personal and
public selves into an emotional apprehension of the totality of relative
truths about the world bound by time and space.
• In a seminal essay on modern Malayalam poetry, he argued that the
ideology of the poet is embodied in the syntactic structure of the
poem.

15. • The modernist poet has to reject the allegorical and the didactic, to
articulate his or her complex awareness of the relation between
from and content.
• The romantic poets had made a shift from Sanskritik traditions to
folk meters, which was movement towards open forms.
• M. Govindan advocated a return to the Dravidian sources of
Malayalam poetry, which he thought could rejuvenate its syntax and
rhythm through a robust earthliness that had been curbed by the
scholastic Sanskritic tradition.
• As in Eliot’s The Waste Land, Kurukshetrsm’s opening line
communicate a pervasive decline of moral values and a disruption of
the organic rhythms of society.

16. • The title, ‘Kurukshetram‘, signifies the place where the epic battle that
forms the central theme of the Mahabharata took place. The poem
progresses through broken images from contemporary life, but there
are also redemptive memories of forgotten harmonies that recur
through the metaphor of the dream.
• The second section of the poem retreats into a private space, away
from these public images.
• The third section returns to the public world of conflicts.
• In the fourth section, the poet denounces the promises made by faith
as well as politics.
• In the last section, with the figure of Gandhi as a failed prophet
standing at its centre.
• The poem has no vision to offer, only a desire to reimagine the world
after one’s own vision.

17. # Conclusion :
 Translation enabled the displaced self of modernity to
locate itself in a language that was intimately private and,
also, outspokenly public. The idiom of their expression
afforded the possibility of self-knowledge through
epiphanies that brought ‘momentary stays against
confusion’. 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.

18. Thank you