ABSTRACT
Aparna Dharwadker’s article proposes translation as a crucial mode of cultural exchange that has remained relatively neglected in colonial/postcolonial studies, and explores three variations on the process by which source-texts are “carried across” in modern Indian theater: Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s English translation of his own Bengali play, Sharmishtha, in 1859; Munshi Premchand’s Hindi translations of three plays by John Galsworthy in 1930; and Raghuvir Sahay’s Hindi translation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (titled Barnam vana) in 1979. By analyzing these three iconic moments of translation together, Dharwadker not only delineates the changes in Indo-European cultural relations but also reveals that the activity of modern translation (as an intrinsic component of India’s culture of multilingual literacy) cannot be contained within reductive categories such as colonialist hegemony, subaltern capitulation or postcolonial counterdiscursivity. “Cultural interweaving,” she concludes, is a more appropriate concept to approach this monumental process of cultural interpenetration through the translation and transculturation of English, European and, subsequently, world drama into more than a dozen modern Indian languages, which began around 1850 and continues to be a prominent component of urban theater today.
