From Ashokan edicts and Manusmriti to modern novels: deciphering the art and politics of translation in multilingual South Asia

Indian Express

01-05-2025

While speaking at a lecture in Montreal, Canada, sometime during the 1990s, author Amitav Ghosh traced the literary roots that shaped his career. Two early influences stood out: European novels translated into Bengali, found on his grandfather's bookshelf, and ancient Indian tales like the Panchatantra, which travelled across centuries and continents—from Sanskrit to Persian, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, and beyond. Ghosh also reflected on how Indian epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata have been rewritten across time and geography. What links these diverse stories, he observed, is a single powerful force: translation.
But what does 'translation' mean? The English word, derived from the Latin translatio (to carry across), suggests a transfer of meaning from one language to another. Yet the Tamil term for translation – molipeyarppu, as explained by researcher Hephzibah Israel in Religious Transactions in Colonial South India (2011), presents a more complex and unsettling understanding. Formed from moli (language) and peyarppu (displacement), it views translation not as a neutral bridge, but as a disruptive act. As Israel writes, 'This Tamil term serves as a reminder that translation is not a straightforward task…it involves a certain degree of force, a powerful tearing out or uprooting of texts from one language to begin life anew in another.'
This complexity struck translator and teacher Arunava Sinha during his college years. 'When I read One Hundred Years of Solitude after Gabriel García Márquez won the Nobel Prize,' Sinha recalled in an interview with Indianexpress.com, 'I realized for the first time that translation was a distinct process. Until then, I'd always assumed texts somehow existed in the language I read them in. In a way, that's the triumph of translation: it hides itself.'
'But with One Hundred Years,' he added, 'I became aware that this text didn't begin its life in English—it was born in Spanish. And that realization shaped my path as a translator.'
But what does it mean to translate in a multilingual South Asia? Who decides the source language, and what factors determine which language a text is rendered into? What about India's many non-scheduled languages—do their speakers not deserve access to celebrated works? In such a linguistically diverse landscape, how do we navigate the complex politics of language and translation?
The origin of translation in South Asia
Pinpointing a single origin of translation in South Asia is difficult, as Rita Kothari, Head of the Department of English at Ashoka University, Sonepat, told IndianExpress.com: 'It would be very difficult to establish that point of origin—for when something in Sanskrit is retold in another language orally, is that a translation? And when a story from the Ramayana or Mahabharata is rendered as a folk performance, should that too be considered a translation?'
Critiquing the disregard for oral traditions, she noted: 'Not only is the written form seen as more legitimate, but it has also supplanted the oral. Many assume that orality existed for a time, then ceased entirely as writing took over. But I believe India offers one of the most compelling examples of how the oral and written have long coexisted.'
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Fuzail Asar Siddiqi, who teaches at GITAM University, Visakhapatnam, places this bias in context: 'The publishing market is deciding the written text. But in terms of oral translation, what is the market for it?'
Taking both oral and written traditions into account, Kothari and Krupa Shah write in their essay More or less 'translation': Landscapes of language and communication in India (2019) that 'it is possible to say that South Asia as a whole is a region constituted through translation.' Indeed, long before translation became formalised, ancient Indian practices engaged deeply with linguistic diversity. One early example is the edicts of Emperor Ashoka from the fourth century BCE. These inscriptions, as Kothari and Shah note, were multilingual—written in Sanskrit and various Middle-Indic dialects, often referred to as Prakrits. 'A simultaneous production of similar material in different languages would go by the name of translation in its most functional meaning,' they write.
Ashokan edicts (Source: Wikipedia)
This broader, more fluid understanding of translation persisted through the Bhakti movement (1100–1700 CE), where poets rendered Sanskrit texts into regional languages—not through literal transcription but through creative interpretation. Kothari and Shah cite this cultural and linguistic intermingling—from Buddhism's rejection of Sanskrit authority, to the multilingualism of Bhakti and Sufi movements, to the Indian adaptations of Islam and Christianity—as evidence that translation was a generative force in shaping South Asian identity.
Within written traditions, however, Kothari cautions in her interview, translation has historically meant translating from Sanskrit: 'So translating from Sanskrit into Persian, into English, and into other Indian languages.'
Over time, a rich vocabulary emerged to describe different translation practices: bhashantar (change of language), roopantar (change of form), aadhar (a derived text, not necessarily faithful), parivartan (transformation), tarjuma (used in Islamic contexts for translation or biography), and bhavanuvad (emotional rendering). The widely used Hindi word anuvad literally means 'to speak after' (anu = following, vad = speech/discourse), implying a relationship to a source text.
India's epics, in particular, have been translated the most, said Amitendu Bhattacharya, Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at BITS Pilani, Goa, in an interview with Indianexpress.com. In Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era (2000), edited by translator Sherry Simon and Paul St-Pierre, scholar Shantha Ramakrishna argues that many translations of Indian epics are better described as 'recreations.' She writes: 'Literal adherence was not insisted upon, and deviations were tolerated, even preferred, in the name of creative freedom.' Today, however, translators tend to emphasise fidelity to the original—a shift Ramakrishna calls the 'betrayal syndrome underlying all translation activity.'
Translation: a colonial project
Author and translator G J V Prasad, in India in Translation: Translation in India (2019), underscores that governance in a multilingual nation like India inherently relies on translation—a reliance that became even more critical under colonial rule. He writes, 'It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that our ideas of the majority faith and about our nation, including current assertions of its history, have roots in the motivated or simply uninformed translational activity of the colonisers.'
Gargi Bhattacharya, in the same volume, observes that lawmaking was central to the colonial enterprise, given the sharp contrast between British legal norms and Indian customs. Following the East India Company's victories at Plassey (1757) and Buxar (1764), it acquired civil judicial authority in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, creating an urgent need to understand Hindu customary law. This effort culminated in the 1776 English translation of the Sanskrit legal text Vivadarnavasetu —via its Persian version—as A Code of Gentoo Laws, rendered by British orientalist Nathaniel Brassey Halhed at the behest of Governor-General Warren Hastings.
William Jones (Source: Wikipedia)
Orientalist William Jones, influenced by his judicial engagement with legal texts like the Manusmriti, published his 1794 translation titled Institutes of Hindu Law. As Tejaswini Niranjana observes in her article Translation, Colonialism and the Rise of English (1990), Jones's work embodied a broader colonial impulse—the belief that translation should be carried out by Europeans rather than Indians, in order to codify local laws and 'purify' Indian culture. Siddiqi concurs, 'For the British, translation was a project of control.'
Another turning point in colonial translation came with English Orientalist Charles Wilkins' 1785 translation of the Bhagavad Gita. This, according to Jones, as cited by Kothari in her book Translating India (2014), was the 'event that made it possible for the first time to have a reliable impression of Indian literature.'
The rise of print culture further accelerated translation activity. Sisir Kumar Das, as cited by Kothari, credits the establishment of the Serampore Mission Press in 1800—by Joshua Marshman, William Ward, and William Carey—as a major shift from the scribal to the printed word. Though initially focused on translating the Bible into Indian languages, the press expanded to include dictionaries, classical texts, and works by British officials. Yet, translation remained a colonial instrument of control. As Israel observes, the Bible was considered a primary tool to 'save' and 'improve' native populations.
At the same time, Indian social reformers played a pivotal role in legal reform. Gargi Bhattacharya highlights how Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar's English translation of his Bengali work, Marriage of Hindu Widows, directly influenced the passage of the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act in 1856.
Hindu Widow Marriage by Vidyasagar (Source: Amazon)
Ramakrishna, however, laments that the colonial engagement with translation was narrow—limited largely to Sanskrit and Arabic classics into English, or English works into a few Indian languages—leaving much of European literature untranslated and inaccessible.
Yet translation also served as a mode of resistance. A powerful example is Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi's Hindi translation of Victor Hugo's Quatre-vingt-treize, retitled Balidaan (sacrifice), which he enriched with contextual details about the French Revolution to underscore its message of self-sacrifice for Indian readers. Similarly, R C Dutt's translations of the Ramayana and Mahabharata —which he described as India's 'national property'—sought to position them alongside Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: 'Ancient India, like ancient Greece, boasts of two great epics.'
The politics of translation: from 20th century to present day
According to Kothari and Shah, translation in 20th-century India took on a renewed role, serving 'as new symbols of patriotism and group identity,' while also fostering cultural memory and asserting linguistic identity. Academic discussions and seminars on translation, often held under the aegis of institutions like the Sahitya Akademi, typically began by invoking its role in 'connecting' and 'bridging' India's vast linguistic and cultural diversity. These discourses, they argued, frequently reinforced the state's mantra of 'unity in diversity.'
Yet, as academic Runjhun Verma notes in Prasad's edited volume, translation was far from neutral—it was deeply political. 'The politics of translation plays a powerful role in the kind of texts that are chosen to represent a culture/nation/country,' she wrote, shaped largely by market needs and cultural flows.
Author and academic Anita Mannur, in Simon and St-Pierre's edited volume, highlighted the disparities through a table summarising translations into English up to 1984: Bengali (368), Hindi (152), and Tamil (115) dominated, while 'minor' languages like Maithili and Konkani were scarcely represented. Surprisingly, even major literary languages like Urdu and Kannada—despite robust traditions—were largely absent in translation until as late as 1986. Verma also drew attention to the 2001 French anthology Littératures de l'Inde, which included both poems and short stories in 12 Indian languages. Among these, Hindi led with 19 poems, followed by English and Telugu (nine each), illustrating ongoing imbalances even in international efforts.
Cultural transmission across regional languages, thus, remained uneven. Kothari identified three key challenges: general apathy toward translation among writers, a shortage of multilingual translators, and the poor marketability of regional-language books—especially translations. Pointing to the continued prevalence of this bias, Siddiqi reiterates 'Why aren't we translating from Urdu to Marathi, or Urdu to Telugu?' He points to the weak distribution networks in regional publishing compared to large trade publishers, noting that even excellent works remain inaccessible without acclaimed translators and active promotion.
Sayantan Dasgupta, who teaches at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, underscores this imbalance: while Bengali literature is widely translated into Malayalam, the reverse is rare. 'As far as exotropic [outward] translation is concerned, English almost monopolises the space of Target Language for Indian bhasa [language] literature,' he told IndianExpress.com. Still, he highlights rare exceptions—works by Rabindranath Tagore and Mahasweta Devi translated into Lepcha, a non-Scheduled language—demonstrating the potential of 'power' languages to reach marginal communities.
U R Ananthamurthy (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Amitendu Bhattacharya offers a sobering reflection: even writers like U R Ananthamurthy, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, struggled for international visibility. 'It's not about literary merit,' he suggests, 'but about global market dynamics and the limited reach of regional languages like Kannada.'
Challenges, including from AI
While translation as a field of study and career has become more promising than before, Sinha—who has spent considerable time translating—offers a cautionary note: 'I don't think I have really faced any difficulty other than the fact that you can't make a living with it.' Siddiqi shares a similar concern, noting that the craft rarely pays well unless one achieves significant popularity.
Speaking of translation in the age of Artificial Intelligence, Sinha says: 'AI doesn't know how to translate literary text.' While it may manage manuals and factual documents, it falters with the emotional depth, context, and cultural nuance that literary translation demands. 'It's just using linguistic patterns,' he adds, pointing out how AI lacks the ability to sense layered meanings—like how a simple sentence such as 'Have you eaten?' could express concern, frustration, or tenderness depending on context. 'You're able to feel it. AI cannot. It is artificial, not even intelligence at the moment.'
Sankar's Chowringhee translated by Arunava Sinha (Source: Amazon)
Siddiqi echoes this complexity through his struggle with a single word— maula —in a ghazal. Though it can mean 'lord,' 'god,' or 'master,' each English equivalent carries its cultural baggage, none quite capturing the word's spiritual and Sufi resonance. Similarly, multiple Urdu words for love— ishq, mohabbat —collapse into the single English word 'love,' erasing layers of meaning. As he notes, 'The transfer of meaning is never complete…something is always left behind.'
Yet, this very incompleteness is what makes translation a creative act. He reflects, 'A good translation can sometimes enhance the original text. That is why copyright often belongs not to the original author, but to the translator.'
To translate well, Sinha insists, one must 'not only read but listen' — to rhythms, silences, music. 'A good translator is just a reader taken to an extreme point,' he says. But above all, 'you cannot translate a book you don't love.'