Swati Ganguly’s excellent book, Tagore’s University: A History of Visva-Bharati, traces the remarkable journey of Rabi Thakur’s “life’s best treasure”, Visva-Bharati, a centre rooted in an Indian ethos of global cultural community. With scholars and students from France, Vienna, England, Sri Lanka, the United States of America, Thailand, and the various Indian states, it must have been a heady cocktail of cosmopolitanism, languages and translations. We make the case for a re-energised translation ecosystem that not only rescues us from historical amnesia but also contributes significantly to the overdue acceleration in the national identity, culture and soft power infrastructure that is India’s translation ecosystem.
Tagore translated his poetry to English and wrote “If God had so wished, he would have made all Indians speak with one language… the unity of India has been and shall always be a unity in diversity.” The rich writing tradition fostered in Santiniketan includes the classic novels of Mahasweta Devi. Decolonising education meant equal importance was given to music and the visual arts; padabali verses by Vaishnava saints, Afzal Ali’s Nasihatnama, and Bharatchandra’s Satyanarayaner Panchalii.
Translation and publishing in Bangla have a deep history starting with Portuguese translations of missionary texts in the 1700s. The Englishman, William Carey, discovered 40 handwritten works in Nabadwip and established the Serampore Press in 1800; Raja Ram Mohan Roy was a frequent collaborator in trying to standardise a Bangla script for print. By 1821, Roy had launched the weekly Bangla-language newspaper, Sambad Kaumudi, the first Indian-owned newspaper printed in India. By 1825, there were around 40 printing presses in Calcutta alone. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the works of prominent thinkers like Ram Mohan Roy, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay were translated into English and other languages like Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati, and Hindi, making Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, for instance, a household name among readers in those languages.
However, even as Bengali literature went through its golden age around the middle of the 20th century, translations were slow to catch up. One example: Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s 1929 classic, Pather Panchali, was not published in English translation (by T.W. Clark and Tarapada Mukherji) till 1968, and then, too, in the US first. It was only in the 1990s and then the 2000s, however, with the entry of the world’s biggest publishing companies in India, that English translations of Bengali fiction (primarily) gathered momentum and began to be published in larger numbers. Newer translators, with a non-academic approach, stepped up to produce translations that often became bestsellers. Over the past decade, the more marginalised writers in Bengali, writing from social, geographical, and linguistic fringes, have also been translated, finding readers and admirers all over India, something that has often eluded them in their own region.
Tapan Roychowdhury discussed the concept of “bhashagato bismriti” or linguistic forgetting in the 1990s as it leads to cultural amnesia in Desh magazine. Today, there are many thriving Bangla publishers, and the Kolkata Book Fair is widely visited. The English translations of authors like Manoranjan Byapari are now widely read, and Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s best-known work remains the original English work, Sultana’s Dream. But there is a gap in non-fiction translation. A forthcoming translation of Nirmal Kumar Bose’s daily journal by New India Foundation fellows, Venkateswar Ramaswamy and Amlan Biswas, will shed light on Noakhali in the crucial historical periods of 1946-47.
But there is good news for India’s national translation ecosystem: India’s first non-profit, open-access, and crowd-sourced database of Indian translations from the Ashoka University Centre for Translation is now searchable at www.bhashavaad.in. Like any open-source living archive, its current dataset — 14,000+ entries, 6,500+ authors, and 7,000+ translators — is a work in progress. Bhashavaad data suggest that the 125 translations in the first five decades of the 20th century leapt to 2,673 in the first two decades of the 21st century. The top ten translated languages are Bengali (1,749), Hindi (1,155), and Marathi (887), followed by Tamil, Malayalam, Urdu, Telugu, Kannada, Sanskrit, and Odia. The top five languages that receive translations outside English (half the story) are Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Bengali, and Telugu. A happy discovery is the long tail of translations from Manipuri, Maithili, Kodava, Rajbangshi, Mizo, Kokborok, and Bongcher. The top languages for translation from Sanskrit are English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, and Punjabi.
A Bhashavaad search for Bengali returns 8,128 results. The most translated author is Rabindranath Tagore (741), followed by Saratchandra Chattopadhyay (332) and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (177). 4,452 titles are fiction; 1,159 non-fiction; 814 poetry; and 533 drama. Ramanlal Soni has the highest number of listed translations (178), followed by Sudhindranath Raha (84).
The questions facing India’s translation ecosystem are perennial but need more debate. How do we get more translations for the long tail? How can we increase the number of translations available in Indian languages? How can we improve matching among translators, authors, and publishers? How can we enhance book discovery and marketing strategies for translated titles? What is the impact, if any, of tools offered by Artificial Intelligence on translation? What is needed for Indian writing in Indian languages to be accessible more widely within and outside India? These questions are complex, but Indians have natural translation consciousness and must lead the world in translation theory, study, and practice.
We must move towards a world in which knowledge is free and words emerge from the depths of truth, where the mind is led into ever-widening thought and action. The linguist, Claude Hagège, suggests languages are not a collection of words, syntax and semantics but living, breathing organisms holding the connections of a culture. They also offer equal citizenship, identity, and soft power. Bengali has long powered India’s translation ecosystem; both will expand further because of new energy.
Manish Sabharwal is an entrepreneur and Arunava Sinha is a Co-Director of the Ashoka University Centre for Translations