Sinossi
The act of translation, Tejaswini Niranjana maintains, is a political action. Niranjana draws on Benjamin, Derrida, and de Man to show that translation has long been a site for perpetuating the unequal power relations among peoples, races, and languages. The traditional view of translation underwritten by Western philosophy helped colonialism to construct the exotic "other" as unchanging and outside history, and thus easier both to appropriate and control.
Scholars, administrators, and missionaries in colonial India translated the colonized people's literature in order to extend the bounds of empire. Examining translations of Indian texts from the eighteenth century to the present, Niranjana urges post-colonial peoples to reconceive translation as a site for resistance and transformation.
Scholars, administrators, and missionaries in colonial India translated the colonized people's literature in order to extend the bounds of empire. Examining translations of Indian texts from the eighteenth century to the present, Niranjana urges post-colonial peoples to reconceive translation as a site for resistance and transformation.
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Informazioni sull?autore
Tejaswini Niranjana received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles and teaches in the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad.
Dalla quarta di copertina
"Niranjana brings into colloquy key texts from a classic age of translation and new post-humanistic texts on the same issues. She shows how the questions of translation must be reframed in light of the critique of emerging work on imperialism and cultural studies. This is a key work for translation studies."—Frances Bartkowski, author of Feminist Utopias
Dal risvolto di copertina interno
"Niranjana brings into colloquy key texts from a classic age of translation and new post-humanistic texts on the same issues. She shows how the questions of translation must be reframed in light of the critique of emerging work on imperialism and cultural studies. This is a key work for translation studies."Frances Bartkowski, author of Feminist Utopias
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Siting Translation
By Tejaswini NiranjanaUniversity of California Press
Copyright © 1992 Tejaswini NiranjanaAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520074514
Introduction:
History in Translation
The passion for English knowledge has penetrated the most obscure, and extended to the most remote parts of India. The steam boats, passing up and down the Ganges, are boarded by native boys, begging, not for money, but for books. ... Some gentlemen coming to Calcutta were astonished at the eagerness with which they were pressed for books by a troop of boys, who boarded the steamer from an obscure place, called Comercolly. A Plato was lying on the table, and one of the party asked a boy whether that would serve his purpose. "Oh yes," he exclaimed, "give me any book; all I want is a book." The gentleman at last hit upon the expedient of cutting up an old Quarterly Review , and distributing the articles among them.
Charles Trevelyan,
On the Education of the People of India
In a post-colonial context the problematic of translation becomes a significant site for raising questions of representation, power, and historicity. The context is one of contesting and contested stories attempting to account for, to recount, the asymmetry and inequality of relations between peoples, races, languages. Since the practices of subjection/subjectification implicit in the colonial enterprise operate not merely through the coercive machinery of the imperial state but also through the discourses of philosophy, history, anthropology, philology, linguistics, and literary interpretation, the colonial "subject"constructed through technologies or practices of power/knowledge1 is brought into being within multiple
"[Power] produces knowledge . . . [they] directly imply one another," says Foucault (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1979], p. 27). He further suggests that the "individual" or the subject is "fabricated" by technologies of power or practices of subjectification.
discourses and on multiple sites. One such site is translation. Translation as a practice shapes, and takes shape within, the asymmetrical relations of power that operate under colonialism. What is at stake here is the representation of the colonized, who need to be produced in such a manner as to justify colonial domination, and to beg for the English book by themselves. In the colonial context, a certain conceptual economy is created by the set of related questions that is the problematic of translation. Conventionally, translation depends on the Western philosophical notions of reality, representation, and knowledge. Reality is seen as something unproblematic, "out there"; knowledge involves a representation of this reality; and representation provides direct, unmediated access to a transparent reality. Classical philosophical discourse, however, does not simply engender a practice of translation that is then employed for the purposes of colonial domination; I contend that, simultaneously, translation in the colonial context produces and supports a conceptual economy that works into the discourse of Western philosophy to function as a philosopheme (a basic unit of philosophical conceptuality). As Jacques Derrida suggests, the concepts of metaphysics are not bound by or produced solely within the "field" of philosophy. Rather, they come out of and circulate through various discourses in several registers, providing a "conceptual network in which philosophy itself has been constituted."2 In forming a certain kind of subject, in presenting particular versions of the colonized, translation brings into being overarching concepts of reality and representation. These concepts, and what they allow us to assume, completely occlude the violence that accompanies the construction of the colonial subject.
Derrida, "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy," in Margins of Philosophy , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 230.
Translation thus produces strategies of containment. By employing certain modes of representing the otherwhich it thereby also brings into beingtranslation reinforces hegemonic versions of the colonized, helping them acquire the status of what Edward Said calls representations, or objects without history.3 These become facts exerting a force on events in the colony: witness Thomas Babington Macaulay's 1835 dismissal of indigenous Indian learning as outdated and irrelevant, which prepared the way for the introduction of English education.
In creating coherent and transparent texts and subjects, translation participatesacross a range of discoursesin the fixing of colonized cultures, making them seem static and unchanging rather than historically constructed. 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. The Hegelian conception of history that translation helps bring into being endorses a teleological, hierarchical model of civilizations based on the "coming to consciousness" of "Spirit," an event for which the non-Western cultures are unsuited or unprepared. Translation is thus deployed in different kinds of discoursesphilosophy, historiography, education, missionary writings, travel-writingto renew and perpetuate colonial domination.
My concern here is to explore the place of translation in contemporary Euro-American literary theory (using the name of this "discipline" in a broad sense) through a set of interrelated readings. I argue that the deployment of "translation" in the colonial and post-colonial contexts shows us a way of questioning some of the theoretical emphases of post-structuralism.
Chapter 1 outlines the problematic of translation and its relevance to the post-colonial situation. Reading the texts of different kinds of colonial translators, I show how they bring
Said, discussion with Eugenio Donato and others ("An Exchange on Deconstruction and History," Boundary 2 8, no. 1 [Fall 1979]: 6574).
into being hegemonic versions of the non-Western other. Because they are underpinned by the powerful metaphysics of translation, these versions are seen even in the post-colonial context as faithful pictures of the decadence or depravity of "us natives." Through English education, which still legitimizes ruling-class power in formerly colonized countries, the dominant representations put into circulation by translation come to be seen as "natural" and "real." In order to challenge these representations, one must also examine the historicist tenets that endorse them. I will, therefore, discuss the pertinence of the critique of historicism to a world undergoing decolonization. Given the enduring nature of Hegelian presentations 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.
In chapter 2, I examine how "translation" works in the traditional discourse of translation studies and in ethnographic writing. Discussing the last two, which are somewhat marginal to literary theory, may nevertheless help us sharpen our critique of translation. Caught in an idiom of fidelity and betrayal that assumes an unproblematic notion of representation, translation studies fail to ask questions about the historicity of translation; ethnography, on the other hand, has recently begun to question both the innocence of representation and the long-standing asymmetries of translation.
In chapters 3, 4, and 5, my main focus is the work of Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Walter Benjamin (an earlier critic who is becoming increasingly important to post-structuralist thinkers). My analysis shows how translation functions as a "figure" in all three thinkers, becoming synonymous or associated with a major preoccupation in each: allegory or literature in de Man, the problematics of representation and intentionality in Derrida, and the question of materialist historiography in Benjamin. Pointing out the configurations of translation and history in Benjamin's work, I describe the kind of reading provided by de Man and Derrida of Benjamin's important essay "The Task of the Translator." My argument is that Walter Benjamin's early writings on transla-
tion are troped in significant ways into his later essays on the writing of history, a troping that goes unrecognized by both de Man and Derrida. (I use trope to indicate a metaphorizing that includes a displacement as well as a re-figuring.) The refusal of these major proponents of deconstruction to address the question of history in Benjamin suggests a critical drawback in their theory and perhaps indicates why deconstruction has never addressed the problem of colonialism.
In the final chapter, with the help of a translation from Kannada, a South Indian language, into English, I discuss the "uses" of post-structuralism in post-colonial space. Throughout the book, my discussion functions in all the registersphilosophical, linguistic, and politicalin which translation "works" under colonialism. If at any point I seem to dwell on only one of these, it is for a purely strategic purpose.
This work belongs to the larger context of the "crisis" in "English" that is a consequence of the impact of structuralism and post-structuralism on literary studies in a rapidly decolonizing world. The liberal humanist ideology that endorsed and was perpetuated by the civilizing mission of colonialism is still propagated by discourses of "literature" and "criticism" in the tradition of Arnold, Leavis, and Eliot. These disciplines repress what Derrida, in the words of Heidegger, calls the logocentric or ontotheological metaphysics by which they are constituted, which involves all the traditional conceptions of representation, translation, reality, unity, and knowledge.4
There have been few systematic attempts to question "English," or literature, or criticism from a post-colonial perspective, let alone such a perspective that also incorporates insights from contemporary theory.5 In order to help challenge
Post-Romantic literary criticism, for example, relies on a concept of the text as a unified, coherent, symbolic whole that can be re-presented or interpreted by the critic. Derrida would argue that the text is "always already" marked by representation; it was not suddenly brought into being through the "originality" of its "author."
See, however, Gauri Viswanathan, "The Beginnings of English Literary Study in British India," Oxford Literary Review 9, nos. 12 (1987): 226. Viswanathan's book Masks of Conquest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) provides a finely detailed discussion of the ideological uses of English literature in colonial India. I should also mention here Ngugi wa Thiong'o's famous challenge to Eng. Lit. (Ngugi et al., "On the Abolition of the English Department," reprinted in Ngugi, Homecoming [1972; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1983]); Chinua Achebe's essays in Morning Yet on Creation Day (London: Heinemann, 1975); and Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike, Toward the Decolonization of African Literature , vol. 1 (1980; reprint, Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1983).
the complicity of these discourses with colonial and neocolonial domination, I propose 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 underwrite practices of subjectification, especially for colonized peoples. Such a rethinkinga task of great urgency for a post-colonial theory attempting to make sense of "subjects" already living "in translation," imaged and re-imaged by colonial ways of seeingseeks to reclaim the notion of translation by deconstructing it and reinscribing its potential as a strategy of resistance.
Given the dispersed nature of its existence, we shall have to approach an understanding of the "post-colonial" through a variety of nodes: the intersection of the present with a history of domination,6 the formation of colonial "subjects," the workings of hegemony in civil society,7 and the task, already under way, of affirmative deconstruction.8
In beginning to describe the post-colonial, we might reiterate some of the brute facts of colonialism. Starting with the
History , like translation , is a term under constant interrogation in my text. I shall suggest later some of its relevant uses in the post-colonial situation.
Hegemony and civil society are terms used by Antonio Gramsci. Definitions will be provided later in the discussion. Gramsci's famous work is the series of fragments collected in Quaderni del carcere , available in English as Selections from the Prison Notebooks , trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971). Autobiographical circumstances determine my examples of "practices of subjectification," most of which are from colonial and post-colonial India.
See chapter 6 for an example of translation as affirmative deconstruction.
period around the end of the seventeenth century and continuing beyond World War II, Britain and France, and to a lesser extent Spain, Portugal, Germany, Russia, Italy, and Holland, dominatedruled, occupied, exploitednearly the entire world. By 1918, European powers had colonized 85 percent of the earth's surface.9 Not until after World War I (referred to by some non-Western writers as the European Civil War) was the process of decolonization initiated. Of course, we cannot speak here of a swift or complete transition to a post-colonial society, for to do so would be to reduce the ruptured complexities of colonial history to insignificance. The term decolonization can refer only crudely to what has, in the language of national liberation struggles, been called the "transfer of power," usually from the reigning colonial power to an indigenous elite.
Although one cannot see as negligible the importance of the transfer, it would be naive to believe it marks the "end" of domination, for the strength of colonial discourse lies in its enormous flexibility. By colonial discourse I mean the body of knowledge, modes of representation, strategies of power, law, discipline, and so on, that are employed in the construction and domination of "colonial subjects." Discourse is used here in a sense not incompatible with Michel Foucault's notion; as the rest of this chapter will show, however, my use of the term is not exclusively dependent on the Foucauldian framework. Colonial relations of power have often been reproduced in conditions that can only be called neocolonial, and ex-colonials sometimes hunger for the "English book" as avidly as their ancestors.10
For a graphic description of the ambitions of imperial powers, see Edward Said's classic, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).
Although many critics of imperialism describe contemporary Third World societies as "neocolonial," I shall use the term post-colonial in order not to minimize the forces working against colonial and neocolonial domination in these societies. I have in mind especially the Indian context, from which I draw most of my examples. Also, it is more likely that economists rather than cultural theorists would use neocolonial . This is not to posit two separate realms of analysis, but merely to suggest that a term appropriate at one level may not be as accurate at another.
The post-colonial (subject, nation, context) is therefore still scored through by an absentee colonialism. In economic and political terms, the former colony continues to be dependent on the ex-rulers or the "West." In the cultural sphere (using cultural to encompass not only art and literature but other practices of subjectification as well), in spite of widely employed nationalist rhetoric, decolonization is slowest in making an impact. The persistent force of colonial discourse is one we may understand better, and thereby learn to subvert, I argue, by considering translation.
By now it should be apparent that I use the word translation not just to indicate an interlingual process but to name an entire problematic. It is a set of questions, perhaps a "field," charged with the force of all the terms used, even by the traditional discourse on translation, to name the problem, to translate translation. Translatio (Latin) and metapherein (Greek) at once suggest movement, disruption, displacement. So does \bersetzung (German). The French traducteur exists between interprhte and truchement , an indication that we might fashion a translative practice between interpretation and reading, carrying a disruptive force much greater than the other two. The thrust of displacement is seen also in other Latin terms such as transponere , transferre , reddere , vertere . In my writing, translation refers to (a) the problematic of translation that authorizes and is authorized by certain classical notions of representation and reality; and (b) the problematic opened up by the post-structuralist critique of the earlier one, and that makes translation always the "more," or the supplement , in Derrida's sense.11 The double meaning of supplement as providing both
In Positions (trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981]), Derrida defines supplement as an "undecidable," something that cannot any longer "be included within philosophical (binary) opposition," but that resists and disorganizes philosophical binaries "without ever constituting a third term . . .; the supplement is neither a plus nor a minus, neither an outside nor the complement of an inside, neither accident nor essence" (p. 43).
what is missing as well as something "extra"is glossed by Derrida thus: "The overabundance of the signifier, its supplementary character, is . . . the result of a finitude, that is to say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented ."12 Where necessary, however, I shall specify narrower uses of translation .
My study of translation does not make any claim to solve the dilemmas of translators. It does not propose yet another way of theorizing translation to enable a more foolproof "method" of "narrowing the gap" between cultures; it seeks rather to think through this gap, this difference, to explore the positioning of the obsessions and desires of translation, and thus to describe the economies within which the sign of translation circulates. My concern is to probe the absence, lack, or repression of an awareness of asymmetry and historicity in several kinds of writing on translation. Although Euro-American literary modernists such as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Samuel Beckett persistently foregrounded the question of translation, I have not discussed their work, since it has, in any case, been extensively dealt with by mainstream literary critics, and since the focus of my interrogation is not poetics but the discourses of what is today called "theory."
The post-colonial distrust of the liberal-humanist rhetoric of progress and of universalizing master narratives has obvious affinities with post-structuralism.13 Derrida's critique of representation, for example, allows us to question the notion of re-presentation and therefore the very notion of an origin or an original that needs to be re-presented. Derrida would argue that the "origin" is itself dispersed, its "identity" undecidable. A representation thus does not re-present an "original"; rather, it re-presents that which is always already represented. The notion can be employed to undo hegemonic
Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in Writing and Difference , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 290.
In fact, I use even the terms post-colonial and Third World with some hesitation, since they too can be made to serve a totalizing narrative that disregards heterogeneity.
"representations" of "the Hindus," like, for example, those put forward by G. W. F. Hegel and James Mill.14
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. As I have already suggested, of immediate relevance to our concern with colonial practices of subjectification is the fact that "historicism" really presents as natural that which is historical (and therefore neither inevitable nor unchangeable). A critique of historicism might show us a way of deconstructing the "pusillanimous" and "deceitful" Hindus of Mill and Hegel. My concern here is not, of course, with the alleged misrepresentation of the "Hindus." Rather, I am trying to question the withholding of reciprocity and the essentializing of "difference" (what Johannes Fabian calls a denial of coevalness) that permits a stereotypical construction of the other. As Homi Bhabha puts it: "The stereotype is not a simplification because it is a false representation of a given reality. It is a simplification because it is an arrested, fixated form of representation that, in denying the play of difference (that the negation through the Other permits), constitutes a problem for the representation of the subject in significations of psychic and social relations."15
The "native boys" about whom Charles Trevelyan, an ardent supporter of English education for Indians, wrote in 1838, are "interpellated" or constituted as subjects by the discourses of colonialism. Trevelyan shows, with some pride, how young Indians, without any external compulsion, beg for "English."16
Hegel, The Philosophy of History (1837), trans. J. Sibree (New York: P. F. Collier, n.d.), pp. 20335; cited henceforth as PH . Mill, A History of British India (1817; New Delhi: Associated Publishing House, 1972); cited henceforth as HBI .
Bhabha, "The Other Question," Screen 24, no. 6 (November-December 1983): 27.
Under colonial rule, "the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection , i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection 'all by himself'" (Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays , trans. Ben Brewster [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971], p. 182; emphasis in original). Interpellation is a term used by Althusser to describe the "constitution" of subjects in language by ideology.
"Free acceptance" of subjection is ensured, in part, by the production of hegemonic texts about the civilization of the colonized by philosophers like Hegel, historians like Mill, Orientalists like Sir William Jones.17 The "scholarly" discourses, of which literary translation is conceptually emblematic, help maintain the dominance of the colonial rule that endorses them through the interpellation of its "subjects." The colonial subject is constituted through a process of "othering" that involves a teleological notion of history, which views the knowledge and ways of life in the colony as distorted or immature versions of what can be found in "normal" or Western society.18 Hence the knowledge of the Western orientalist appropriates "the power to represent the Oriental, to translate and explain his (and her) thoughts and acts not only to Europeans and Americans but also to the Orientals themselves."19
Translation as InterpellationThat translation became part of the colonial discourse of Orientalism is obvious from late-eighteenth-century British efforts to obtain information about the people ruled by the merchants of the East India Company. A. Maconochie, a scholar connected with the University of Edinburgh, urged the Brit-
I do not mean to lump together Hegel's idealism, Mill's utilitarianism, and Jones's humanism-romanticism. Their texts are, however, based on remarkably similar premises about India and the Hindus. For a discussion of how these premises led eventually to the introduction of English education in India, see my "Translation, Colonialism and the Rise of English," Economic and Political Weekly 25, no. 15 (1990): 77379. I am grateful to Rajeswari Sunder Rajan for her perceptive criticism of my attempt to relate translation to the beginnings of "English" in India.
Ronald Inden, "Orientalist Constructions of India," Modern Asian Studies 20, no. 3 (1986): 40146.
Ibid., p. 408.
ish sovereign (in 1783 and again in 1788) to take steps "as may be necessary for discovering, collecting and translating whatever is extant of the ancient works of the Hindoos."20 Although Maconochie hoped that by these translations European astronomy, "antiquities," and other sciences would be advanced, it became clear in the projects of William Joneswho arrived in India in 1783 to take his place on the bench of the Supreme Court in Calcuttathat translation would serve "to domesticate the Orient and thereby turn it into a province of European learning."21
As translator and scholar, Jones was responsible for the most influential introduction of a textualized India to Europe. Within three months of his arrival, the Asiatic Society held its first meeting with Jones as president and Warren Hastings, the governor-general, as patron. It was primarily through the efforts of the members of the Asiatic Society, themselves administrators and officials of the East India Company's Indian Government, that translation would help "gather in" and "rope off" the Orient.22
In a letter, Jones, whose Persian translations and grammar of Persian had already made him famous as an Orientalist before he came to India, declared that his ambition was "to know India better than any other European ever knew it."23 His translations are said to have been read by almost everyone in the West who was literate in the nineteenth century.24 His works were carefully studied by the writers of the age, especially the GermansGoethe, Herder, and others. When Jones's new writings reached Europe, the shorter pieces were eagerly picked up and reprinted immediately by different pe-
Quoted in Dharampal, The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century (New Delhi: Biblia Impex, 1983), p. 9.
Said, Orientalism , p. 78.
Ibid.
Letter to Lord Althorp, 2d Earl Spencer, August 17, 1787, in The Letters of Sir William Jones , ed. Garland Cannon (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 2:751; emphasis in original. Hereafter abbreviated as LWJ .
A. J. Arberry, Oriental Essays: Portraits of Seven Scholars (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1960), p. 82.
riodicals. His translation of Kalidasa's Sakuntala went through successive reprints; Georg Forster's famous German translation of the translation came out in 1791, after which the play was translated into other European languages as well. As a twentieth-century scholar puts it, "It is not an exaggeration to say that he altered our [i.e., Europe's] whole conception of the Eastern world. If we were compiling a thesis on the influence of Jones we could collect most of our material from footnotes, ranging from Gibbon to Tennyson."25 Evidence for Jones's lasting impact on generations of scholars writing about India can be found even in the preface of the 1984 Indian edition of his discourses and essays, where the editor, Moni Bagchee, indicates that Indians should "try to preserve accurately and interpret the national heritage by treading the path chalked out by Sir William Jones."26
My main concern in examining the texts of Jones is not necessarily to compare his translation of Sakuntala or Manu's Dharmasastra with the so-called originals. Rather, what I propose to do is to examine the "outwork" of Jones's translationsthe prefaces, the annual discourses to the Asiatic Society, his charges to the Grand Jury at Calcutta, his letters, and his "Oriental" poemsto show how he contributes to a historicist, teleological model of civilization that, coupled with a notion of translation presupposing transparency of representation, helps construct a powerful version of the "Hindu" that later writers of different philosophical and political persuasions incorporated into their texts in an almost seamless fashion.
The most significant nodes of Jones's work are (a) the need for translation by the European, since the natives are unreliable interpreters of their own laws and culture; (b) the desire to be a lawgiver, to give the Indians their "own" laws; and (c) the desire to "purify" Indian culture and speak on its behalf. The interconnections between these obsessions are ex-
R. M. Hewitt, quoted by ibid., p. 76.
Bagchee, foreword to Jones's Discourses and Essays (New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1984), p. xvi.
tremely complicated. They can be seen, however, as feeding into a larger discourse of improvement and education that interpellates the colonial subject.
In Jones's construction of the "Hindus," they appear as a submissive, indolent nation unable to appreciate the fruits of freedom, desirous of being ruled by an absolute power, and sunk deeply in the mythology of an ancient religion. In a letter, he points out that the Hindus are "incapable of civil liberty," for "few of them have an idea of it, and those, who have, do not wish it" (LWJ , p. 712). Jones, a good eighteenth-century liberal, deplores the "evil" but recognizes the "necessity" of the Hindus' being "ruled by an absolute power." His "pain" is "much alleviated" by the fact that the natives are much "happier" under the British than under their former rulers. In another letter, Jones bids the Americans, whom he admired, not to be "like the deluded, besotted Indians, among whom I live, who would receive Liberty as a curse instead of a blessing, if it were possible to give it them, and would reject, as a vase of poison, that, which, if they could taste and digest it, would be the water of life" (p. 847).
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. Such a despotic rule, continued by the British, can only fill the coffers of the East India Company: "In these Indian territories, which providence has thrown into
"On Asiatic History, Civil and Natural," in Discourses and Essays , p. 99. Cited hereafter as OAH.
the arms of Britain for their protection and welfare, the religion, manners, and laws of the natives preclude even the idea of political freedom; but . . . our country derives essential benefit from the diligence of a placid and submissive people" (OAH, pp. 99100).
The glorious past of India, according to Jones, is shrouded in superstition, "marked and bedecked in the fantastic robes of mythology and metaphor" (OAH, p. 100), but the now "degenerate" and "abased" Hindus were once "eminent in various knowledge."28 This notion of an Indian Golden Age seems to contradict Jones's insistence on the unchanging nature of Hindu society: "By Indian I mean that whole extent of the country in which the primitive religion and languages of the hindus prevail at this day with more or less of their ancient purity" (TAD, p. 6). He appears to avoid the contradiction, however, by distinguishing, although tenuously, the "religion and languages," which have not changed, from "arts," "government," and "knowledge," which have become debased (pp. 78). Jones's distinction seems to sustain the paradoxical movement of colonial discourse in simultaneously "historicizing" (things have become debased) as well as "naturalizing" (things have remained unchanged) the degradation of the natives. We shall see the same movement in the historian James Mill, although he dismisses Jones's notion of a previous Golden Age and posits instead an unchanging state of barbarism.
The presentation of the Indians as "naturally" effeminate as well as deceitful often goes hand in hand in Jones's work. In an essay on Oriental poetry, he describes the Persians as characterized by "that softness , and love of pleasure , that indolence , and effeminacy , which have made them an easy prey to all the western and northern swarms."29 Persian poetry is said
"Third Anniversary Discourse," in Discourses and Essays , pp. 78. Abbreviated in my text as TAD.
Jones, Translations from Oriental Languages (Delhi: Pravesh Publications, n.d.), 1:348. Cited henceforth as TOL . The feminization of the "native" is a fascinating trope in colonial discourse but will not be discussed further at this time.
to greatly influence the Indians, who are "soft and voluptuous, but artful and insincere."30 Jones's obsession with the insincerity and unreliability of the natives is a trope that appears in his workusually in relation to translationas early as the 1777 Grammar of the Persian Language , a copy of which was sent by Samuel Johnson to Warren Hastings. In his preface to the Grammar , Jones stresses the need for East India Company officials to learn the languages of Asia. Speaking of the increasing interest in Persian (used as a court language in India), he puts it down to the frustration of the British administrators at receiving letters they could not read: "It was found highly dangerous," says Jones, "to employ the natives as interpreters, upon whose fidelity they could not depend."31
As a Supreme Court judge in India, Jones took on, as one of his most important projects, the task of translating the ancient text of Hindu law, Manu's Dharmasastra . In fact, he began to learn Sanskrit primarily so that he could verify the interpretations of Hindu law given by his pandits. In a letter, he wrote of the difficulty of checking and controlling native interpreters of several codes, saying: "Pure Integrity is hardly to be found among the Pandits [Hindu learned men] and Maulavis [Muslim learned men], few of whom give opinions without a culpable bias" (LWJ , p. 720). Before embarking on his study of Sanskrit, Jones wrote to Charles Wilkins, who had already translated a third of the Dharmasastra : "It is of the utmost importance, that the stream of Hindu law should be pure; for we are entirely at the devotion of the native lawyers, through our ignorance of Shanscrit [sic ]" (p. 666). Interestingly enough, the famous Orientalist attempt to reveal the former greatness of India often manifests itself as the British or European task of translating and thereby purifying the debased native texts. This Romantic Orientalist project slides
TOL , 2:358.
Jones, preface to A Grammar of the Persian Language (1771; 8th ed., London: W. Nicol, 1823), p. vii. The recurring emphasis on infidel ity suggests the existence of a long, if repressed, tradition of resistance on the part of the colonized. I hope to explore this notion elsewhere.
almost imperceptibly into the Utilitarian Victorian enterprise of "improving" the natives through English education.32
Even before coming to India, Jones had formulated a solution for the problem of the translation of Indian law. Writing to Lord Cornwallis in 1788, he mentions once again the deceiving native lawyers and the unreliability of their opinions. "The obvious remedy for this evil," he writes, "had occurred to me before I left England" (LWJ , p. 795). This obvious remedy is, of course, the substitution of British translators for Indian ones. Jones, like his patron Warren Hastings, was a staunch advocate of the idea that Indians should be ruled by their own laws. However, since the "deluded," "besotted" Indians thought of liberty as a curse rather than a blessing, since they certainly could not rule themselves or administer their own laws, these laws had first to be taken away from them and "translated" before they could benefit from them. Another manifestation of the natives' insincerity was what Jones called "the frequency of perjury."33 The "oath of a low native" had hardly any value at all, for everyone committed perjury "with as little remorse as if it were a proof of ingenuity, or even a merit."34 Jones hoped to make this perjury "inexpiable" by settling once and for allin another act of translationthe method of taking "evidence" from Indians (p. 682), making them punishable by their own (translated) laws.
For a discussion of the shared assumptions of "Orientalists" and "Anglicists" with regard to the practice of sati , or widow-burning, see Lata Mani, "Contentious Traditions: The Debate on SATI in Colonial India," Cultural Critique (Fall 1987): 11956. Viswanathan, "Beginnings of English Literary Study," suggests that the move to anglicize education for Indians actually draws on the "discoveries" of Orientalism. See also Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (1959; reprint, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989) for a finely differentiated comparison of James Mill's attitudes with Thomas Macaulay's. Stokes argues that Mill was no Anglicist, since he did not think English education fulfilled the criterion of "utility," and since he did not in any case believe in the efficacy of formal education. However, I am concerned here with the larger utilitarian discourse on education that informed the changes in British educational policy in India.
Jones, "Charge to the Grand Jury, June 10, 1787," in Works , vol. 7 (1799; reprint, Delhi: Agam Prakashan, 1979).
Ibid., 7:286.
It is clear that Jones saw the compilation and translation of Manu as "the fruit of [his] Indian Studies," for he hoped it would become "the standard of justice to eight millions of innocent and useful men" in a kingdom that Fortune threw into Britain's lap while she was asleep (LWJ , p. 813). The discourse of law functions here in such a way as to make invisible the extensive violence of the colonial encounter. The translated laws would discipline and regulate the lives of "many millions of Hindu subjects, whose well-directed industry would add largely to the wealth of Britain " (p. 927). For, according to the translator, "those laws are actually revered, as the word of the Most High, by nations of great importance to the political and commercial interests of Europe ."35 Jones's translation went through four editions and several reprints, the last published in Madras in 1880. Although in the later years of Company rule and under the direct rule of the British Crown Indian law was ostensibly formulated according to Western models, the presence to this day of separate civil codes for different religions suggests that the laws actually derive from Orientalist constructions and translations of "Hindu" and "Muslim" scriptures.
Apart from the fact that giving the Indians their own laws would lead in Jones's logic to greater efficiency and therefore to greater profit for England, there is perhaps also another reason for employing Indian law. As Jones had pointed out in his tenth anniversary discourse, the "laws of the natives preclude even the idea of political freedom" (OAH, p. 100). This idea, seen as a reliable (because Western) interpretation of the "original" text, begins to circulate among various styles of discourse, having been set in motion by a concept of translation endorsing, as well as endorsed by, the "transparency" of representation. This kind of deployment of translation, I argue, colludes with or enables the construction of a teleological and hierarchical model of cultures that places Europe at the pinnacle of civilization, and thus also provides a position for the colonized.
Jones, preface to Institutes of Hindu Law , in Works , 7:89.
As I suggested earlier, William Jones's desire to purify Hindu law, art, and philosophy is another version of the British discourse of improvement. Jones, who wished to recover for Indians the glories of their own civilization, describes his task in "A Hymn to Surya" (1786), one of his series of "Indian" hymns, immensely popular in Europe, structured by the figures of the lost Golden Age, the debased and ignorant present, and the translator from a remote land:
And, if they [the gods] ask, "What mortal pours the strain?"
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Say: from the bosom of yon silver isle,
Where skies more softly smile,
He came; and, lisping our celestial tongue,
Though not from Brahma sprung,
Draws Orient knowledge from its fountains pure,
Through caves obstructed long, and paths too long obscure.36
In some poems, like "A Hymn to Ganga" (178586), Jones shifts the first-person pronoun away from himself to create a subject-position for the colonized, making the "Hindu" speak in favor of the British, who "preserve our laws, and bid our terror cease" (TOL , 2:333; emphasis mine). Here the discourse of law seems to foreground violence, but only to place it in a pre -colonial time, or, in other words, to suggest that the coming of the British led to the proper implementation of the Indians' own laws and the end of "despotic" violence and "terror."
Two main kinds of translators of Indian literature existed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: administrators like William Jones and Christian missionaries like the Serampore Baptists William Carey and William Ward. The latter were among the first to translate Indian religious texts into European languages. Often these were works they had themselves textualized, by preparing "standard versions" based on classical Western notions of unity and coherence. On the evidence of these authoritative translations, missionaries berated Hindus for not being true practitioners of Indian re-
TOL , 2:286; punctuation original.
ligion.37 Their only salvation, the missionaries would then claim, lay in conversion to the more evolved religion of the West. The missionaries' theology arises from a historicist model that sets up a series of oppositions between traditional and modern, undeveloped and developed. This kind of attempt to impose linear historical narratives on different civilizations obviously legitimizes and extends colonial domination.
William Ward's preface to his three-volume A View of the History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos 38 is instructive for the virulence with which it attacks the depravity and immorality of the natives. Their religion, manners, customs, and institutions are shown to be characterized, like those of other pagans, by "impurity" and "cruelty," which appear in their most "disgusting" and "horrible" manifestations among the "Hindoos" (VHL , p. xxxvii). The author claims, in his obsessive references to "native" sexuality, to have witnessed innumerable scenes of "impurity," for the Hindu institutions are "hotbeds of impurity," and the very services in the temples present "temptations to impurity" (pp. xxxvivii). Unlike William Jones, however, Ward does not see the present state of the Hindus as a falling away from a former Golden Age. Instead, like James Mill, who quotes him approvingly and often, Ward sees the Hindus as corrupt by nature, lacking the means of education and improvement. He suggests that the "mental and moral improvement" of the Hindus is the "high destiny" of the British nation. Once she was made "enlightened and civilized," India, even if she became independent, would "contribute more to the real prosperity of Britain" by "consuming her manufactures to a vast extent." Ward remarks on the "extraordinary fact" that the British goods
For a discussion of the textualization of Indian religion in the context of widow-burning, see Lata Mani, "The Production of an Official Discourse on SATI in Early Nineteenth-Century Bengal," in Europe and Its Others , ed. Francis Barker et al. (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985), 1:10727.
Ward, A View of the History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos: Including a Minute Description of their Manners and Customs, and Translations from their Principal Works , 2d ed. (London: Kingsbury, Parbury & Allen, 1822). Cited henceforth as VHL .
purchased annually by India "are not sufficient to freight a single vessel from our ports":
But let Hindoost'han receive that higher civilization she needs, that cultivation of which she is so capable; let European literature be transfused into all her languages, and then the ocean, from the ports of Britain to India, will be covered with our merchant vessels; and from the centre of India moral culture and science will be extended all over Asia, to the Burman empire and Siam, to China, with all her millions, to Persia, and even to Arabia. (VHL , p. liii)
The entire "Eastern hemisphere" would then become Christian. In the age of the expansion of capitalism, interpretation and translation help create a market for European merchandise. As the missionary texts help us understand, translation comes into being overdetermined by religious, racial, sexual, and economic discourses. It is overdetermined not only because multiple forces act on it, but because it gives rise to multiple practices. The strategies of containment initiated by translation are therefore deployed across a range of discourses, allowing us to name translation as a significant technology of colonial domination.
The righteous disgust of Ward's writing is echoed uncannily by the "secular" historiography of James Mill, who constructs a version of "Hindoo nature" from the translations of Ward, Jones, Charles Wilkins, Nathaniel Halhed, Henry Colebrooke, and others. Mill's History of British India , published in three volumes in 1817, until quite recently served as a model for histories of India.39 The Indian people, both Hindus and Muslims, were for Mill characterized by their insincerity, mendacity, perfidy, and venality. "The Hindu, like the eunuch," he said, "excels in the qualities of a slave." Like the Chinese, the Hindus were "dissembling, treacherous, mendacious, to an excess which surpasses even the usual measure of uncultivated society." They were also cowardly, un-
Mill's writings are still used in Indian history classes, often with the barest mention of his racism, and with sad approval of the wisdom of his characterizations.
feeling, conceited, and physically unclean (HBI , p. 486).40 In defining the Indian, Mill sought to give by contrast a proper picture of the "superior" European civilization. As Edward Said has pointed out, "the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience."41
Mill declares that to "ascertain the true state of the Hindus in the scale of civilization" is of the greatest practical importance for the British. The Hindus need to be understood before they can be properly ruled, and to consider them as highly civilized would be a grave mistake (HBI , p. 456). In order to prove his thesis, Mill sets out to discredit the Orientalists who spoke of a Golden Age, often by a skillful citation of their own works. Mill's strategy is, first, to demolish the idea that India ever had a history, and then, to suggest that the state of the Hindus bears comparison with primitive societies, including that belonging to Britain's own past, that show evidence of the childhood of humankind. The maturity-immaturity, adulthood-childhood opposition feeds right into the discourse of improvement and education perpetuated by the colonial context.
Framing Mill's History is his comment that "rude nations seem to derive a peculiar gratification from pretensions to a remote antiquity. As a boastful and turgid vanity distinguishes remarkably the oriental nations they have in most instances carried their claims extravagantly high" (HBI , p. 24). Throughout the book, Mill again and again uses the adjectives wild, barbaric, savage , and rude in connection with the "Hindus," thus forming by sheer force of repetition a counterdiscourse to the Orientalist hypothesis of an ancient civilization.
The same descriptions provided by the Orientalists as evidence of the high civilization of the Hindus are declared by
The German Indologist Max M|ller declared that Mill's History "was responsible for some of the greatest misfortunes that had happened to India" (J. P. Guha's prefatory note to the 1972 reprint of HBI , p. xii).
Said, Orientalism , pp. 12.
Mill to be "fallacious proof." The "feminine softness" and gentleness of the Hindus, for example, was taken to be the mark of a civilized community. Mill, on the other hand, suggests that the beginnings of civilization are compatible with "great violence" as well as "great gentleness" of manners. As in the "savages" of North America and the islanders of the South Seas, mildness and the "rudest condition of human life" often go together (HBI , pp. 28788). As for the austerities prescribed by Hinduism, they tend to coexist with the encouragement of the "loosest morality" in the religion of a rude people (p. 205). Where an Orientalist might remark on the rought tools but neat and capable execution of tasks by the Hindu, Mill comments that "a dexterity in the use of its own imperfect tools is a common attribute of a rude society" (p. 335). Should anyone suggest that the Hindus possess beautiful poetry, Mill comes back with the remark that poetry points to the first stage of human literature, where the literature of the Hindus seems to have remained (p. 365).
Drawing on what he calls his knowledge of human nature, which appears in a variety of guises but displays an "astonishing uniformity" with regard to the different stages of society (HBI , p. 107), Mill further consolidates his teleological model of world history. The trial by ordeal prescribed by Hindu law, for example, was common "in the institutions of our barbaric ancestors" (p. 108). Mill seems to pick up the theories of, say, William Jones, about the Indo-Aryan origins of European civilization and employ them in a way that actually clarifies their ideological underpinnings for us. Both the Orientalist and the Utilitarian discourses end up producing the same historicist model and constructing the colonial subject in a very similar fashion. Mill actually draws directly on Jones's view of Hindu law when he says that the account of creation in Manu is "all vagueness and darkness, incoherence, inconsistency and confusion" (p. 163) and the religious ideas of the Hindus are also "loose, vague, wavering, obscure, and inconsistent." The "wild mythology" and "chain of unmeaning panegyric which distinguishes the religion of ignorant men" (p. 182) is characteristic of the rude mind's propensity to create
that which is extravagant, "fantastic and senseless" (p. 163). Compare this with Jones's description in the preface to his translation of Manu of the system created by "description and priestcraft," "filled with strange conceits in metaphysicks and natural philosophy, with idle superstitions . . . it abounds with minute and childish formalities, with ceremonies generally absurd and often ridiculous" (p. 88).
Nearly half of the twenty-eight footnotes in chapter 1 of Mill's History mention William Jones, while the footnotes of chapter 2 are divided primarily between Halhed's translation of the Code of Gentoo Laws 42 and Jones's translation of Manu's Institutes . Quoting judiciously from these two texts (as well as from Colebrooke's Digest of Hindu Law on Contracts and Successions ),43 Mill manages to establish that the Hindu laws are both absurd and unjust. He quotes from Halhed's preface to the Code of Gentoo Laws to the effect that Hindu morals are as gross as Hindu laws, the latter grossness being a result of the former (HBI , p. 125 n. 90). From Charles Wilkins's translation of the Hitopadesa (a collection of fables),44 Mill obtains a picture of the "abject," "grovelling" Hindus, whose self-abasement provides him with proof of the despotic Hindu state; and from William Ward, of course, Mill procures "superabundant evidence of the immoral influence of the Hindu religion" and the "deep depravity" produced by it.
Translations of inscriptions on monuments are used selectively by Mill (HBI , p. 469; p. 504 n. 30). Claims of nobility or antiquity are immediately dismissed as wild fabrications, while anything that shows the depravity of the Hindus is considered legitimate evidence. Mill trashes the Puranas (mythological tales) as false history, but is willing to accept evidence from the play Sakuntala regarding the political
Nathaniel Halhed, Code of Gentoo Laws, or, Ordinations of the Pundits, from a Persian Language translation made from the original writings in the Shanscrit Language (London: n.p., 1777).
Henry Colebrooke and Jagannatha Tarakapanchanana, Digest of Hindu Law , 3d ed. (Madras: Higginbotham, 1864).
See the collated version by Henry Colebrooke, Hitopadesa (Serampore: Mission Press, 1804).
arrangements and laws of the age (pp. 133, 473). History is dismissed as fiction, but fictiontranslatedis admissible as history. Mill embeds in his text several quotations from Captain Wilford's writings (Wilford is also one of Hegel's authorities) in Asiatic Researches , saying: "The Hindu system of geography, chronology, and history, are all equally monstrous and absurd" (p. 40). The whole stock of Hindu historical knowledge could thus be contained in a few quarto pages of print (p. 423). The language is remarkably similar to that Macaulay was to use barely a decade later to denounce Indian education. As the historian Ranajit Guha has pointed out, Mill begins his History with a chapter on the ancient history of the Hindus, and then interrupts the text with nearly five hundred pages (or nine chapters) on the "nature" of the Hindus (that is, their religion, customs, manners, etc.).45 These nine chapters, predominantly in the present tense, perform the function of dehistoricizing the situation of the Hindus, thereby establishing their eternal and unchanging nature, as well as fixing their place in a hierarchy of civilizations.
Not only do secular historiography and philosophy of history participate in colonial discourse, Western metaphysics itself (and the "historicism" that is emblematic of it) seems to emerge in a certain age from colonial translation. The concept of representation put into circulation by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century translators of non-Western texts grounds, for example, the Hegelian theory of world history.
Whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we know it or not, says Paul de Man, we are all "orthodox Hegelians."46 De Man's concern is to perform a critique of the kind of traditional historicism that is suggested by Hegel's teleological scheme of the coming to consciousness of Spirit. In India, says Hegel, "Absolute Being is presented . . . as in the ecstatic state of a dreaming condition"; and since "the generic
Ranajit Guha, "Remarks on Power and Culture in Colonial India" (MS), p. 59.
De Man, "Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics," Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (Summer 1982): 76175. For discussing this and other related points in chapter 1 with me, I am grateful to Sanjay Palshikar.
principle of Hindoo Nature" is this "character of Spirit in a state of Dream," the Indian has not attained to "self" or to "consciousness."47 Because "History" for Hegel refers to the "development of Spirit," and because Indians are not "individuals" capable of action, the "diffusion of Indian culture" is "pre-historical," "a dumb, deedless expansion" (PH , p. 206); hence "it is the necessary fate of Asiatic Empires to be subjected to Europeans" (p. 207).
While Hegel is willing to grant that Indian literature depicts its people as mild, tender, and sentimental, he emphasizes that these qualities often go hand in hand with absolute lack of "freedom of soul" and "consciousness of individual right" (PH, p. 225). The idea of the "pusillanimous," "effeminate" Hindus with their despotic Asian rulers, and their inevitable conquest by the West, is part of a Hegelian philosophy of history that not only interpellates colonial subjects but is authorized by colonial translations. Hegel's condemnation of the Hindu as cunning and deceitful, habituated to "cheating, stealing, robbing, murdering," echoes the writings of James Mill, and the translations of Colebrooke, Wilkins, and other Orientalists.
Mill's model of history participates, as I have pointed out, in the British discourse of improvement that found such enthusiastic adherents in Macaulay and Trevelyan. The ideologists of "utility" and "efficiency" used the opposition between traditional and modern, created in part by Orientalist projects of translation, to make feasible the dismissal of indigenous education and the introduction of Western education.
As examiner or chief executive officer of the East India Company in London from 1830 on, James Mill influenced a number of modifications in Company policy. His son J. S. Mill wrote in his Autobiography that his father's despatches to India, "following his History, did more than had ever been done before to promote the improvement of India, and teach
PH , pp. 20425.
Indian officials to understand their business."48 When William Bentinck became governor-general in 1828, he acknowledged his indebtedness to and discipleship of James Mill. Although Mill was skeptical about the efficacy of formal education,49 in his passion for "useful knowledge" he supported Bentinck's attempts to introduce educational reforms. For Bentinck, "the British language" was "the key to all improvements" and "general education" would lead to "the regeneration of India."50
The radical or utilitarian discourse was supplemented by the Evangelicals, whose horror of Jacobin atheism spurred them to propagate missionary activity in all parts of the rapidly consolidating British empire. Evangelicals such as William Wilberforce and Charles Grant (members of the Clapham Sect) and their supporters held positions of great power in government, as well as in the East India Company. However, Wilberforce's 1793 motion to allow Christian missionaries into India was defeated in Parliament because of British fears that proselytizing would enrage the natives. It was only with the Charter Act of 1813 that the Evangelicals won a major victory: although the act renewed the Company's charter for operations, it also broke the Company's monopoly by allowing free trade and cleared the way for missionary work in India. Given the Evangelicals' belief in the transformation of human character through education, and their conviction that conversion to Christianity required some amount of learning, their victory with the 1813 Act included the provision of an annual sum of #10,000 for the promotion of education for the natives.51
As early as 1797, however, Charles Grant, a director of the Company and its chairman for many years, presented to the
J. S. Mill, Autobiography , cited in Stokes, English Utilitarians and India , p. 49.
See Stokes, English Utilitarians and India , p. 57.
Bentinck, quoted in Percival Spear, A History of India (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), 2:126.
Stokes, English Utilitarians and India , p. 30.
Court of Directors a privately printed treatise in which he advocated English education in India.52 Entitled Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, Particularly with Respect to Morals; and on the Means of Improving It , Grant's treatise argued that the "lamentably degenerate and base Hindus," "governed by malevolent and licentious passions" and possessed of only a "feeble sense of moral obligation," were "sunk in misery" owing to their religion. Supporting his allegations with copious quotations from Orientalist and missionary translations of Indian texts, Grant contended that only education in English would free the minds of the Hindus from their priests' tyranny and allow them to develop individual consciences.53 Anticipating his opponents' argument that English education would teach the Indians to desire English liberty, Grant asserted that "the original design" with which the British had come to Indiathat is, "the extension of our commerce"would best be served by the spread of education. In phrases we hear echoed by William Ward and later by Macaulay, Grant points out that British goods cannot be sold in India because the taste of the people has not been "formed to the use of them"; besides, they have not the means to buy them. English education would awaken invention among the Indians; they would initiate "improvements" at home as well as "acquire a relish" for the ingenious manufactures of Europe. For Grant, as for Macaulay after him, this was "the noblest species of conquest": "Wherever, we may venture to say, our principles and language are introduced, our commerce will follow."54 In a phase described by Ramakrishna Mukherjee as the period of transition from mercantile capitalism to the hegemony of the British industrial bourgeoisie, Grant's arguments seemed espe-
Grant's treatise was reprinted as a Parliamentary Paper in 1813 and again in 1832.
For a discussion of the Clapham's Sect's "interests," see Stokes, English Utilitarians and India , pp. 3033.
Grant, quoted in Ramakrishna Mukherjee, The Rise and Fall of the East India Company (1955; rev. ed., Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1973), p. 421.
cially appropriate.55 British commerce would benefit substantially from the coinciding of "duty" and "self-interest."56
For years a controversy raged between "Orientalists" and "Anglicists" as to whether the money set aside for education by the act of 1813 was to be used for indigenous education or Western education.57 Finally, the compulsions of the changing nature of Company rule enabled, during Bentinck's tenure, the Resolution of March 7, 1835, which declared that the funds provided should "be henceforth employed in imparting to the Native population knowledge of English literature and science through the medium of the English language."58 Schools and colleges were set up by the British; Persian gave way to English as the official language of the colonial state and the medium of the higher courts of law. Bentinck's "westernization" of the administrative system went hand in hand, therefore, with a reversal of Cornwallis's exclusionary
Ibid., passim.
See Stokes, English Utilitarians and India , p. 33.
For an extensive discussion of this debate, see B. K. Boman-Behram, Educational Controversies of India: The Cultural Conquest of India under British Imperialism (Bombay: Taraporevala Sons, 1942). Dharampal suggests that the uprooting of indigenous education could have been prompted by the British fear that the cultural and religious content of Indian education would provide grounds for resistance to colonial hegemony (Dharampal, Beautiful Tree , p. 75). Charles Trevelyan wrote in 1838 that it was unreasonable to expect the British to sponsor indigenous education: "Our bitterest enemies could not desire more than that we should propagate systems of learning which excite the strongest feelings of human nature against ourselves" (Trevelyan, On the Education of the People of India [London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1838], p. 189).
History of India , 2:127. Eric Stokes argues that as early as 1813 the East India Company could not justify its trade monopoly. Indian "piece-goods" no longer had a market in Europe, and with the Company becoming a "purely military and administrative power," it absorbed all available revenue surpluses (Stokes, English Utilitarians and India , pp. 3738). What British rule could now do in India was not to extract tribute but to create a new market for British goods. Besides, after the defeat of the Marathas in 1818, the last resistance to the British crumbled, and the main task became one of effectively administering the large territories acquired by the Company (ibid., p. xv). English education would produce not only large numbers of native bureaucrats but also begin to create the taste for European commodities.
policies and induction of more and more Indians into the hierarchy, a move enabled by English education. Given this rather obvious "use" of English, the Committee on Public Instruction, of which Macaulay was president, emphasized higher education in English and disregarded large-scale primary schooling.
Macaulay did not think it necessary for the entire Indian populace to learn English: the function of anglicized education was "to form a class who may be interpreters between us (the British) and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect."59 A lawgiver like William Jones, Macaulay, who also formulated the Indian Penal Code, spoke of the time when India might become independent, when the British would leave behind an empire that would never decay, because it would be "the imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our laws."60
Macaulay's brother-in-law, Charles Trevelyan, wrote about how the influence of the indigenous elite would secure the "permanence" of the change wrought by Western education: "Our subjects have set out on a new career of improvement: they are about to have a new character imprinted on them."61 The agent of this change would be "English literature," which would lead to Indians speaking of great Englishmen with the same enthusiasm as their rulers: "Educated in the same way, interested in the same objects, engaged in the same pursuits with ourselves, they become more English than Hindus" and look upon the British as their "natural protectors and benefactors," for "the summit of their [the Indians'] ambition is, to resemble us."62
Macaulay, "Indian Education" (Minute of the 2nd of February, 1835), in Prose and Poetry , ed. G. M. Young (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 729.
Macaulay, "Speech of 10 July 1833," in Prose and Poetry , p. 717.
Trevelyan, Education of the People of India , p. 181.
Ibid., pp. 18992.
In his 1835 minute on Indian education, Macaulay, who was an avid reader of Mill's History , claimed he had not found a single Orientalist "who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia,"63 and Trevelyan agreed that the latter was "worse than useless."64 The British propagation of English education resulted ultimately in people being compelled and encouraged "to collaborate in the destruction of their instruments of expression."65
As Gauri Viswanathan has pointed out, the introduction of English education can be seen as "an embattled response to historical and political pressures: to tensions between the English Parliament and the East India Company, between Parliament and the missionaries, between the East India Company and the native elite classes."66 Extending her argument, I would like to suggest that the specific resolution of these tensions through the introduction of English education was enabled discursively by the colonial practice of translation. European translations of Indian texts prepared for a Western audience provided the "educated" Indian with a whole range of Orientalist images. Even when the anglicized Indian spoke a language other than English, "he" would have preferred, because of the symbolic power conveyed by English, to gain access to his own past through the translations and histories circulating through colonial discourse. English education also familiarized the Indian with ways of seeing, techniques of translation, or modes of representation that came to be accepted as "natural."
The philosopheme of translation grounds a multiplicity of discourses, which feed into, as well as emerge out of, the
Macaulay, "Minute," in Prose and Poetry , p. 722.
Trevelyan, Education of the People of India , p. 182.
Pierre Bourdieu, Ce que parler veut dire: L'Economie des ichanges linguistiques (Paris: Fayard, 1981), cited by John Thompson in Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 45.
Viswanathan, "Beginnings of English Literary Study," p. 24.
colonial context. And just as translation is overdetermined, so is the "subject" under colonialism, overdetermined in the sense that it is produced by multiple discourses on multiple sites, and gives rise to a multiplicity of practices. The demand for English education on the part of the colonized is clearly not a simple recognition of "backwardness" or mere political expedience, but a complex need arising from the braiding of a host of historical factors, a need produced and sustained by colonial translation.
The construction of the colonial subject presupposes what Pierre Bourdieu has called "symbolic domination." Symbolic domination, and its violence, effectively reproduce the social order through a combination of recognition and misrecognition (reconnaissance and miconnaissance )recognition that the dominant language is legitimate (one thinks again of the use of English in India) and "a misrecognition of the fact that this language . . . is imposed as dominant. The exercise of symbolic violence is so invisible to social actors precisely because it presupposes the complicity of those who suffer most from its effects."67 Bourdieu's analysis suggests that the colonizedor even the post-colonialrecolonizes him/herself again and again through her/his participation in "the discursive practices of everyday life," which, rather than any powerful system imposed from above, maintain the asymmetrical relations characteristic of colonialism.
The notion of autocolonization implicit in the story about the "native boys" begging for English books could be explored in greater depth through Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony. Gramsci makes a distinction between the state apparatus and "civil society": the first includes the entire coercive mechanism of the state, including army, police, and legislature, while the second includes the school, the family, the church, and the media. The dominant group exercises domination through the state apparatus, with the use of force or coercion, and ensures its hegemony through the production
Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology , p. 58.
of ideology in civil society, where it secures its power through consent.68
Colonial society presents a good example of the workings of a hegemonic culture.69 The discourses of education, theology, historiography, philosophy, and literary translation inform the hegemonic apparatuses that belong to the ideological structure of colonial rule. We may turn again to Gramsci's work for a conception of ideology that breaks away from the traditional notion of "false consciousness."70 Ideology, which for Gramsci is inscribed in practices (for example, colonial practices of subjectification), produces "subjects" and has therefore a certain materiality.71 Influential translations (from Sanskrit and Persian into English in the eighteenth century, for example) interpellated colonial subjects, legitimizing or authorizing certain versions of the Oriental, versions that then came to acquire the status of "truths" even in the countries in which the "original" works were produced. The introduction of Western education was facilitated by what Trevelyan calls "seminaries," missionary-run schools sponsored by the government. European missions, which played an important role in easing colonies into the global economy, often ran the
For an illuminating discussion of Gramsci's ideas, see Chantal Mouffe, "Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci," in Gramsci and Marxist Theory , ed. Mouffe (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979).
But see Ranajit Guha's argument in "Dominance without Hegemony and Its Historiography," in Subaltern Studies VI: Writings on South Asian History and Society , ed. Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989). Guha suggests that domination more appropriately describes colonial society than hegemony , because hegemony implies the consent of all classes, whereas colonial rule had the "sanction" only of the elites. It seems to me that Guha does not sufficiently account for what even Macaulay saw as the filtration effectthat is, the gradual pervading by different forms of colonial rule of all sections of the colonized. This notion, I should admit, however, may not apply to all colonized societies; colonialism may be hegemonic, for example, in Barbados, but not in Jamaica; in Martinique, but not in Guadeloupe, and so on.
Ideology as false consciousness, a classical Marxist notion, suggests a distorted representation of "reality." Gramsci's conception, which stresses the "material nature" of ideology, is more useful in examining the persistence of colonial discourse.
Mouffe, "Hegemony and Ideology," p. 199. Althusser draws on Gramsci's notion of ideology in formulating the theory of interpellation.
entire education system in other colonial societies, such as the Belgian Congo, for example. The systemic collaboration of anthropologists, missionaries, and colonial administrators in the non-European world, in being independent of the willing participation of "individuals," is characteristic of the workings of hegemonic colonial discourse.72 Missionaries, therefore, functioned as colonial agents in the formation of practices of subjectification, not only in their roles as priests and teachers but also in the capacity of linguists, grammarians, and translators.73
The desire of colonial discourse to translate in order to contain (and to contain and control in order to translate, since symbolic domination is as crucial as physical domination) is evidenced in colonial-missionary efforts to compile grammars of "unknown" languages. European missionaries were the first to prepare Western-style dictionaries for most of the Indian languages, participating thereby in the enormous project of collection and codification on which colonial power was based. Administrators and Asiatic Society members like Jones and Halhed published grammars as their first major works of scholarship: Jones's Persian grammar came out in 1777, and Halhed's Bengali grammar, the first one to use Bengali script, in 1778. Halhed complained in the preface to his work about the "unsettled" orthography of Bengali, and the difficulty of applying European principles of grammar to a language that seemed to have lost "its general underlying principles."74 The establishment of the College of Fort William in Calcutta, closely associated with the Asiatic Society and devoted to the "Oriental" education of East India Company employees, provided a major impetus to translators and grammarians. As
I discuss the relationship between anthropologists and colonial rule at greater length in chapter 2. For a discussion of "systemic" collaboration, see Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
For a comprehensive description of the convergence of missionary and imperial efforts in Bengal, the first center of British government in India, see David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969).
Halhed, A Grammar of the Bengali Language (Hooghly: n.p., 1778), cited in Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance , p. 57.
David Kopf puts it, "By 1805 the college had become a veritable laboratory where Europeans and Asians worked out new transliteration schemes, regularized spoken languages into precise grammatical forms, and compiled dictionaries in languages relatively unknown in Europe."75 When a fire in 1812 destroyed the printing shop of the Serampore missionaries, one of whomWilliam Careytaught in the college, among the manuscripts destroyed was that of a polyglot dictionary "containing words of every known oriental tongue."76
The drive to study, to codify, and to "know" the Orient employs the classical notions of representation and reality criticized by post-structuralists like Derrida and de Man. Their work offers a related critique of traditional historicism that is of great relevance in a post-colonial context. The critique of historicism may help us formulate a complex notion of historicity , which would include the "effective history" of the text; this phrase encompasses questions such as: Who uses/interprets the text? How is it used, and for what?77 Both the critique of representation and the critique of historicism empower the post-colonial theorist to undertake an analysis of what Homi Bhabha (following Foucault) has called technologies of colonial power.78 These critiques also enable the reinscription of the problematic of translation: the deconstruction of colonial texts and their "white mythology" helps us to see how translation brings into being notions of representation and reality that endorse the founding concepts of Western philosophy as well as the discourse of literary criticism.
The Question of "History"In a recent essay on Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious , Samuel Weber charges Jameson with using the gesture
Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance , p. 67.
Ibid., p. 78.
See the next section of this chapter for my discussion of the notion of historicity/history.
Bhabha, "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817," Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 14465; cited henceforth as SW.
of "capitalizing History" to address the "challenge of 'post-structuralist' thought."79 Weber's is one of the latest salvoes in the prolonged skirmishing between the defenders of "post-structuralism" and those (on the right as well as the left) who accuse it of denying "history." The early attacks on deconstruction by M. H. Abrams and others now read like the despairing cries of traditional literary historians intent on preserving their notions of tradition, continuity, and historical context against the onslaught of a violent, disruptive Nietzscheanism.80 Jameson, however, has consistently attempted to come to terms with structuralist and post-structuralist thought, and his imperative to historicize derives from the "priority" he gives to "a Marxian interpretive framework."81
As the post-structuralists (I have in mind Derrida and the American deconstructionists in particular) perceive it, the demand that they address "history" comes increasingly from the "left," especially from those who have "taken on" (the phrase is Geoff Bennington's) deconstruction in more senses than one.82 With all the quibbling about "history," it is curious that both the post-structuralists and those who maintain an antagonistic, but admiring, stance toward them should have such a monolithic view of what history means. If the former polemicize against history as "phallogocentrism," the latter argue that is an "untranscendable horizon." Neither specify whether the "history" in question refers to a mode of writing history (a certain conception of the past) or to the "past" itself.
My central concern here is not to elaborate on the battle for "history" now being staged in Euro-American theory but to
Samuel Weber, "Capitalizing History: The Political Unconscious ," in Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 4058.
See, e.g., Abrams, "The Deconstructive Angel," Critical Inquiry 3, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 42538.
Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 10; cited henceforth as PU .
See the recent anthology Post-Structuralism and the Question of History , ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
ask a series of questions from a strategically "partial" perspectivethat of an emergent post-colonial practice willing to profit from the insights of post-structuralism, while at the same time demanding ways of writing history in order to make sense of how subjectification operates.
Since one of the classic moves of colonial discourse (as, for example, in Orientalism) is to present the colonial subject as unchanging and immutable, historicitywhich includes the idea of changeis a notion that needs to be taken seriously. For my purposes, I take historicity to meanalthough not un-problematicallyeffective history (Nietzsche's wirkliche Historie or Gadamer's Wirkungsgeschichte ), or that part of the past that is still operative in the present.83 The notion of effective history helps us read against the grain Jones's late-eighteenth-century translations of ancient Sanskrit texts; it also suggests the kinds of questions one might work with in re-translating those texts two hundred years later. The term historicity thus incorporates questions about how the translation/re-translation worked/works, why the text was/is translated, and who did/does the translating.
I use the word historicity to avoid invoking History with a capital H, my concern being with "local" practices (or micropractices as Foucault calls them) of translation that require no overarching theory to contain them. As Foucault declares, "effective history affirms knowledge as perspective"; it may be seen as a radical kind of "presentism," which we may be able to work from.84 I indicated earlier that post-colonials have good reason to be suspicious of teleological historicism, which Derrida has rightly characterized as a manifestation of Western metaphysics.85 But since the facts of "history" are ines-
Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History , trans. Adrian Collins (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 2d ed.; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method , trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (1975; reprint, New York: Crossroad, 1985).
Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice , ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 156.
Derrida uses this term to refer to the edifice of Western philosophy, a system of thought built on a first principle or foundation that remains unquestioned. He sees his task as one of "deconstructing" this body of assumptions that underwrites the whole of Western culture.
capable for the post-colonial, since attention to history is in a sense demanded by the post-colonial situation, post-colonial theory has to formulate a narrativizing strategy in addition to a deconstructive one. The use of historicity / effective history may help us sidestep the metaphysics of linearity.
We may also find useful Louis Althusser's critique of historicism, which leads him, in Jameson's words, to formulate the notion that "history is a process without a telos or a subject," "a repudiation of . . . master narratives and their twin categories of narrative closure (telos ) and of character (subject of history)" (PU , p. 29). The latter assumption may be seen as an attack on the individualist idea of the subject, which Althusser's own notion of subject deconstructs. Jameson further suggests that history for Althusser is an "absent cause," that it is like Jacques Lacan's "Real," "inaccessible to us except in textual form" (PU , p. 82). The notion that history can be "apprehended only through its effects" (p. 102) is directly relevant to a theorist seeking, like Foucault's genealogist, to understand the "play of dominations" and "systems of subjection" (LCP , p. 148). The genealogist, says Foucault, "needs history to dispel the chimeras of the origin" (LCP , p. 144). A theory emerging from the post-colonial context needs to ally itself with the critique of origin and telos as it tries to practice a way of writing history that is anti-essentialist. In this project, another source of support is the work of Walter Benjamin, who sees the historian (or we may even say the translator) seizing the past image that comes into a constellation with the present. The discontinuity of the past we construct may provoke us to discuss the "why" of a translation and how it manifests effective history.86 Perhaps post-colonial theory can show that we need to translate (that is, disturb or displace)
For an extended discussion of Benjamin's notions of translation and history, see chapters 4 and 5.
history rather than to interpret it (hermeneutically) or "read" it (in a textualizing move).
The most profound insight Derrida's work has afforded to post-colonials is the notion that origin is always already heterogeneous, that it is not some pure, unified source of meaning or history. It would be a mistake for historiographers (literary or otherwise) to challenge colonial representations as "false" or "inadequate"; the striving for adequacy based on such a challenge would trap post-colonial writing in a metaphysics of presence, in what Derrida has called "the generative question" of the age, the question of the value of representation.87
In "Speech and Phenomena," his essay on Husserl, Derrida says:
When in fact I effectively use words . . . I must from the outset operate (within) a structure of repetition whose basic element can only be representative. A sign is never an event, if by event we mean an irreplaceable and irreversible empirical particular. A sign which would take place but "once" would not be a sign. . . . Since this representative structure is signification itself, I cannot enter into an "effective" discourse without being from the start involved in unlimited representation.88
What Derrida is claiming is that there is no primordial "presence" that is then re-presented. The "re-" does not befall the original. It is the concept of representation that suppresses the difference that is already there in the so-called origin and grounds the whole of Western metaphysics. This is a meta-
Derrida, "Sending: On Representation," trans. Peter and Mary Ann Caws, Social Research 49, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 294-326. Another problem with seeing colonial representations as "false" is that the colonial "reality" can be said to be produced by the colonizer. The representation of a "cheating Hindoo," for example, implies the production of a reality in which "cheating" can be a form of resistance to colonial domination. Instead of challenging the colonial representation as false, perhaps we should look at its effects , arguing that different representations can produce other, more enabling or empowering effects.
Derrida, Speech and Phenomena , trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 50. Cited henceforth as SP .
physics of presence, of the "absolute proximity of self-identity" (SP , p. 99) and of presence to oneself. Perhaps the predominant characteristic of the metaphysics of presence is the privileging of voice and speech over "writing" (icriture ) that Derrida calls phonocentrism or logocentrism, wherein writing, as a derived form, the copy of a copy, comes to signify a distant, lost, or broken origin, a notion Derrida contests by revealing that any notion of the simple, the center, or the primordial is always already characterized by an irreducible or untranscendable heterogeneity.
In a series of detailed readings of Husserl, Heidegger, Saussure, Livi-Strauss, and Rousseau, Derrida demonstrates how representationand writingalready belong to the sign and to signification: "In this play of representation, the point of origin becomes ungraspable. . . . There is no longer a simple origin."89 It is interesting to speculate what impact this notion of a dispersed origin might have on deep-rooted European histories of the cradle of civilization (Asia or Africa) and on post-colonial peoples' images of themselves.
To deconstruct logocentric metaphysics, Derrida proposes we use the notion of writing as he has reinscribed it. Derrida's "writing" is another name for difference at the origin; it signifies "the most formidable difference. It threatened the desire for living speech from the closest proximity, it breached living speech from within and from the very beginning" (OG , p. 56). The sign of origin, for Derrida, is a writing of a writing that can only state that the origin is originary translation. Metaphysics tries to reappropriate presence, says Derrida, through notions of adequacy of representation, of totalization, of history. Cartesian-Hegelian history, like the structure of the sign, "is conceivable only on the basis of the presence that it defers and in view of the deferred presence one intends to reappropriate" (SP , p. 138). Here Derrida points to historicism's concern with origin and telos and its desire to construct a totalizing narrative. "History," in the texts of post-structur-
Derrida, Of Grammatology , trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 36. Cited henceforth as OG .
alism, is a repressive force that obliterates difference and belongs in a chain that includes meaning, truth, presence, and logos. We shall see later how Walter Benjamin, in a similar critique of monolithic histories, instead uses materialist historiography as a means of destabilization.
Derrida's critique of representation is important for post-colonial theory because it suggests a critique of the traditional notion of translation as well. In fact, the two problematics have always been intertwined in Derrida's work. He has indicated more than once that translation perhaps escapes "the orbit of representation" and is therefore an "exemplary question."90 If representation stands for the reappropriation of presence, translation emerges as the sign for what Derrida would call "dissemination."91 We must, however, carefully interrogate the conventional concept of translation that belongs to the order of representation, adequacy, and truth.
While post-colonial theory would willingly dispense with the historical narratives that have underwritten the imperialistic enterprise, that come into being with the denial of historicity to conquered peoples, and that suppress history in order to appear as history, it is aware that the situation of the post-colonial "subject," who lives always already "in translation," requires for its articulation some notion of what history is. The translations by Calcutta's Fort William College scholars from Indian languages into English, in constructing the colonial subject, provided representations of the "Asiatik" to generations of Europeans.
The point is not just to criticize these characterizations as "inadequate" or "untrue"; one should attempt to show the complicity of the representations with colonial rule and their part in maintaining the asymmetries of imperialism. The post-colonial desire for "history" is a desire to understand the traces of the "past" in a situation where at least one fact is singularly irreducible: colonialism and what came after. Historiography
Derrida, "Sending: On Representation," p. 298.
Derrida, Dissemination , trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
in such a situation must provide ways of recovering occluded images from the past to deconstruct colonial and neocolonial histories. In India, for example, the Subaltern Studies group, which has initiated such a project of rewriting history, is grappling with the conceptual problems of essentialism and representation.
In an essay on the Subaltern Studies historians, Gayatri Spivak argues that their practice is akin to "deconstruction," since they put forward a "theory of change as the site of displacement of function between sign-systems" and this is "a theory of reading in the strongest possible general sense."92 Spivak's essay is a persuasive, if somewhat anxious, attempt to account for the similarities (and a few of the differences) between these post-colonial historiographers and the projects of post-structuralism. She provides a useful parallel when she suggests that the Subaltern Studies historians focus on the "site of displacement of the function of signs," which is "the name of reading as active transaction between past and future," and that this "transactional reading"perhaps we can also call it translationmay indicate the possibility of action (DH, p. 332).
Since it is part of my argument that the problematics of translation and the writing of history are inextricably bound together, I shall briefly go over Spivak's main points regarding the Subaltern historians. Their strategic use of post-structuralist ideas (whether self-declared or emerging from Spivak's reading of their work) may help us see more clearly how the notions of history and translation I wish to reinscribe are not only enabled by the post-colonial critique of historiography but might also further strengthen that critique.
The significant post-structuralist "themes" Spivak refers to are the critique of origins, writing and the attack on phono-centrism, the critique of bourgeois liberal humanism, the notion of the "enabling" discursive failure, and the notion of
Spivak, "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography," in Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985). Cited henceforth as DH.
"affirmative deconstruction." The Subaltern historians are concerned with revealing the discursivity of a history (colonial or neocolonial) that has come into being through a suppression of historicity. They use the term subaltern "as a name for the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way."93 Through elaborate construction of the figure of the insurgent subaltern and a series of sustained miscognitions, elite historiography presents a history that purports to be "disinterested" and "true." The post-colonial historian tries to show how this discursive field is constituted, and how, as Spivak puts it, the "Muse of History" and counterinsurgency are "complicit" (DH, p. 334). History and translation function, perhaps, under the same order of representation, truth, and presence, creating coherent and transparent texts through the repression of difference, and participating thereby in the process of colonial domination.
The problem of subaltern consciousness, according to Spivak, "operates as a metaphysical methodological presupposition" in the group's work, but "there is always a counterpointing suggestion" that "subaltern consciousness is subject to the cathexis of the elite, that it is never fully recoverable, that it is always askew from its received signifiers, indeed that it is effaced even as it is disclosed, that it is irreducibly discursive" (DH, p. 339). As I tried to suggest in the first section of this chapter, translations into English by colonialists in India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries offered authoritative versions of the Eastern self not only to the "West" but to their (thereby interpellated) subjects. The introduction of English education after 1835 and the decline of indigenous learning ensured that post-colonials would seek their unrecoverable past in the translations and histories constituting colonial discourse. The subaltern, too, exists only "in translation," always already cathected by colonial domination.
Ranajit Guha, preface to Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. vii.
In a move that some may see as imperialistic in its own way, Spivak appropriates the Subaltern historians' critique of origins: "What had seemed the historical predicament of the colonial subaltern can be made to become the allegory of the predicament of all thought, all deliberative consciousness, though the elite profess otherwise" (DH, p. 340, emphasis in original). What she refers to is the creation of the subaltern as a "subject-effect," its operation as subject in an enormous "discontinuous network" or "text." In order to function as subject, it is assigned a "sovereign and determining" role; what is really an effect is presented as a causea metalepsis is posited. Spivak indicates that elements in the work of Subaltern Studies "warrant a reading of the project to retrieve the subaltern consciousness as the attempt to undo a massive historiographical metalepsis and 'situate' the effect of the subject as subaltern" (DH, pp. 34142).
The notion of consciousness, then, is used strategically, deliberately, unnostalgically, in the service of "a scrupulously visible political interest" (DH, p. 342), to refer to an "emergent collective consciousness" rather than that of the liberal humanist subject. The strategic use of essentialist concepts marks what Spivak, and Derrida, would call "affirmative deconstruction." A comment of Derrida's from Of Grammatology offers an important clue to the way in which post-colonial theory will have to situate itself:
The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way , because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it. Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work. (OG , p. 24)
How can theory, or translation, avoid being trapped in the order of representation when it uses the very concepts it crit-
icizes? Derrida would say that it should aim to be the kind of writing that "both marks and goes back over its mark with an undecidable stroke," for this "double mark escapes the pertinence or authority of truth," reinscribing it without overturning it. This displacement is not an event ; it has not "taken place." It is what "writes / is written."94 The double inscription Derrida mentions has a parallel in Walter Benjamin's strategy of citation or quotation. For Benjamin, the historical materialist (the critical historiographer) quotes without quotation marks in a method akin to montage. It is one way of revealing the constellation a past age forms with the present without submitting to a simple historical continuum, to an order of origin and telos .
Derrida's double writing can help us challenge the practices of "subjectification" and domination evident in colonial histories and translations. The challenge will not, however, be made in the name of recovering a lost essence or an undamaged self. Instead, the question of the hybrid will inform our reading. As Bhabha puts it:
Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities; it is the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the "pure" and original identity of authority). Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects. It displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination. (SW, p. 154)
Colonial discourse, although it creates identities for those it transfixes by its gaze of power, is profoundly ambivalent at the source of its authority. Hybridity leads to proliferating differences that escape the "surveillance" of the discriminatory eye. "Faced with the hybridity of its objects," says Bhabha, "the presence of power is revealed as something other than what its rules of recognition assert" (SW, p. 154). When we begin to understand how colonial power ends up producing
Derrida, Dissemination , p. 193.
hybridization, "the discursive conditions of dominance" can be turned into "the grounds of intervention" (p. 154). The hybrid (subject or context), therefore, involves translation, deformation, displacement. As Bhabha is careful to point out, colonial hybridity is not a problem of cultural identity that can be resolved by a relativistic approach; it is, rather, "a problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other 'denied' knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority" (p. 156).95
Clearly, the notion of hybridity, which is of great importance for a Subaltern critique of historiography as well as for a critique of traditional notions of translation, is both "ambiguous and historically complex."96 To restrict "hybridity," or what I call "living in translation," to a post-colonial elite is to deny the pervasiveness, however heterogeneous, of the transformations wrought across class boundaries by colonial and neocolonial domination. This is not to present a metanarrative of global homogenization, but to emphasize the need to reinvent oppositional cultures in nonessentializing ways. Hybridity can be seen, therefore, as the sign of a post-colonial theory that subverts essentialist models of reading while it points toward a new practice of translation.
For a forceful description of the hybrid, see Aijaz Ahmad, "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the 'National Allegory,'" Social Text 15 (Fall 1986): 325.
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 16.
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Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context
Editore:
University of California Press, 1992
ISBN 10: 0520074513
ISBN 13: 9780520074514
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Brossura
Prima edizione
Da: Project HOME Books, Philadelphia, PA, U.S.A.
Valutazione del venditore 4 su 5 stelle
Condizione: Good. shelf wear, paperback Used - Good 1992 First Edition All purchases support Project HOME - ending homelessness in Philadelphia. Codice articolo GG07-000075
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EUR 6,70
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Foto dell'editore
Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context
Editore:
University of California Press, 1992
ISBN 10: 0520074513
ISBN 13: 9780520074514
Antico o usato
paperback
Prima edizione
Da: Textbooks_Source, Columbia, MO, U.S.A.
Valutazione del venditore 5 su 5 stelle
paperback. Condizione: Good. First Edition. Ships in a BOX from Central Missouri! May not include working access code. Will not include dust jacket. Has used sticker(s) and some writing or highlighting. UPS shipping for most packages, (Priority Mail for AK/HI/APO/PO Boxes). Codice articolo 000327684U
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Siting Translation
Editore:
University of California Press, 1992
ISBN 10: 0520074513
ISBN 13: 9780520074514
Antico o usato
Paperback
Da: True Oak Books, Highland, NY, U.S.A.
Valutazione del venditore 5 su 5 stelle
Paperback. Condizione: Very Good-. 5.4 X 0.54 X 8.4 inches; 216 pages; Light foxing to the exterior edge of pages only. Great overall condition. Minor cosmetic wear. No noteworthy blemishes. No writing.; - We're committed to your satisfaction. We offer free returns and respond promptly to all inquiries. Your item will be carefully wrapped in bubble wrap and securely boxed. All orders ship on the same or next business day. Buy with confidence. Codice articolo HVD-28491-A-0
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Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context
Editore:
University of California Press, 1992
ISBN 10: 0520074513
ISBN 13: 9780520074514
Antico o usato
Soft cover
Prima edizione
Da: THE BOOK BROTHERS, CHATHAM, ON, Canada
Valutazione del venditore 4 su 5 stelle
Soft cover. Condizione: Very Good +. No Jacket. 1st Edition. Very Good + copy. (see picture) 203 pages including index.Mild highlighting approx 20 pages at the book back. Codice articolo 019289
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EUR 15,30
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Foto dell'editore
Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context
Editore:
University of California Press, 1992
ISBN 10: 0520074513
ISBN 13: 9780520074514
Antico o usato
Brossura
Da: Anybook.com, Lincoln, Regno Unito
Valutazione del venditore 5 su 5 stelle
Condizione: Good. This is an ex-library book and may have the usual library/used-book markings inside.This book has soft covers. In good all round condition. Please note the Image in this listing is a stock photo and may not match the covers of the actual item,350grams, ISBN:0520074513. Codice articolo 2923818
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Siting Translation : History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context
Editore:
University of California Press, 1992
ISBN 10: 0520074513
ISBN 13: 9780520074514
Antico o usato
Brossura
Da: GreatBookPrices, Columbia, MD, U.S.A.
Valutazione del venditore 5 su 5 stelle
Condizione: good. May show signs of wear, highlighting, writing, and previous use. This item may be a former library book with typical markings. No guarantee on products that contain supplements Your satisfaction is 100% guaranteed. Twenty-five year bookseller with shipments to over fifty million happy customers. Codice articolo 692340-5
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Foto dell'editore
Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context
Editore:
University of California Press, 1992
ISBN 10: 0520074513
ISBN 13: 9780520074514
Antico o usato
Brossura
Da: Anybook.com, Lincoln, Regno Unito
Valutazione del venditore 5 su 5 stelle
Condizione: Fair. This is an ex-library book and may have the usual library/used-book markings inside.This book has soft covers. In fair condition, suitable as a study copy. Please note the Image in this listing is a stock photo and may not match the covers of the actual item,400grams, ISBN:9780520074514. Codice articolo 9547664
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EUR 12,19
Spedizione EUR 15,42
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