| The argument that European colonization would not have been possible without translators and translations has renewed interest in the relationship between translation and postcolonial studies. While the traditional approach to translation was complicit in the consolidation of British hegemony over India, translation can be reformulated to become a strategy through which Indian-English authors can engage with the politics English and of translation in various Indian contexts.; The first chapter of this dissertation looks at traditional and Orientalist approaches to translation and considers how recent attempts to reformulate translation theory offer insightful perspectives from which to undertake the study of Indian-English literature. Chapter Two considers how three early Indian-English writers, Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan and Ahmed Ali, use vastly different strategies to translate the English language into the specific contexts of their novels, Untouchable (1935), The Guide (1958), and Twilight in Delhi (1940) respectively. Chapter Three focuses on G.V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr (1948) and explores how Desani uses a fragmentary narrative style and gestural system of language to negotiate (translate) between mundane and transcendental realities, and between the various linguistic and cultural influences that inform his work.; Chapter Four focuses on Anita Desai's novels Clear Light of Day (1980), and In Custody (1984), and examines how Desai uses translation to allow her characters to negotiate beyond the oppositional relationship that exists between Hindi and Urdu within the context of Old Delhi. Chapter Five considers how Salman Rushdie translates genre by incorporating elements of Bombay Cinema into his novel Midnight's Children (1980). Finally, Chapter Six looks at Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997) and Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines (1988) and considers how each of these authors translate Indian history into the English language of their novels.; In seeking to synthesize multiple linguistic and cultural influences within the English language of their narratives, such authors work to transcend the artificial, and largely political, divide that exists between the various languages (including English) and cultures that define the Indian context, and thus, for them, the very act of writing in English represents simultaneously an act of translation. |
