ABSTRACT
Saurabh Kumar Chaliha was the pen name of Surendra Nath Medhi (1930-2011), a renowned short story writer in the Asamiya language. His short story “Beethoven” (1974) is based upon the struggles of the eponymous musical genius against his hearing disabilities. Scholarly thinking on translation studies has mostly been found to overlook the engagements of postcolonial societies with the Western world manifested in works written in languages of non-Western origin. This paper proposes that all postcolonial texts, especially those written in indigenous languages, are complex repositories of multiple layers of translation and ‘transcreation’. Through an analysis of “Beethoven”, the paper also seeks to examine the power hierarchies inscribed in acts of translation from Indian languages into major world languages like English, which also happen to be the languages of former colonisers.
The paper situates Chaliha’s short story in the broader context of attitudes towards disability as reflected in its cultural representations, especially its literary representations, in Assam. It is facilitated by a comparative understanding of the representation of disability in Assamese folk literature and an investigation of the continuities and changes in these attitudes in the short story “Beethoven” as a modern, postcolonial Assamese text.
