ABSTRACT
This chapter is the outcome of my efforts to translate Rabindranath Tagore’s (1861-1941) short stories ‘Subha’ (1892) and ‘Drishtidaan’ (1898), both centred on the theme of disability and acceptance. The chapter has been divided into four major sections.
In my new translations, I highlight that which Tagore had implied - though not explicitly mentioned: the desires of disabled women and their right to be represented as sexual beings, as also their right to represent other such doubly marginalized women from nineteenth century Bengal. The chapter theorizes on the politics of exclusion and ableism that render a disabled subject “undesirable” in the eyes of a hegemonic, normative, socially functional and physically able society.
chapter It also discusses the linguistic choices that I make as a translator translating disability literature. These choices give rise to questions of political correctness and permissibility when representing marginalized voices in art. .
The chapter concludes by positing certain questions regarding the need to build a theory of translation for disability studies in India: what is disability literature, who is fit to translate it, who are we translating it for, and is there a perfect, politically correct idiom that needs to be followed by the artist/ translator.
