ABSTRACT
In her 1993 novel, The Holder of the World, Bharati Mukherjee has her protagonist, Hannah, describe her journey from colonial America to India as her “translation” (104). This usage, unusual to a modern ear, is a trope that reverberates with considerable irony in precolonial, Anglo-Indian texts by British women authors to describe themselves or their female protagonists. Their usage, now obsolete, is the primary meaning of translation: “to bear, convey, or remove from one person, place or condition to another; to transfer, transport.”1 The irony of their usage is the result of its dissonance with its extant meaning, “to turn from one language into another”: these women writers were not only keenly aware of, but often at odds with, the renderings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, known as the Orientalists, whose Sanskrit translations were England’s introduction to India’s Vedic philosophy and literature.2
