In the context of literary studies in India, there has been a longstanding plea for translations between regional languages (including English). This can be seen from projects such as Katha and the various Katha Prize Stories volumes published to date. As Rimli Bhattacharya and Geeta Dharmarajan assert:

The linguistic map of India is exciting territory in which many areas refuse to be contained within lines and with many other areas where the lines overlap, intersect and even shift … We wanted above all, the movement from one language to another, sometimes from one context to another to be smooth but not seamless … we have deliberately chosen not to italicise Indian words since we believe these belong and should belong to the English language as spoken and used in different parts of India.[i]

Publishers and some University courses are now beginning to accept texts in translation. This does not in itself ensure a mainstream public voice for a poet like Ganorkar. In cases where translation succeeds, it does so underactive support, because the content works for the receiving culture, the translation works in local artistic practice, and the originating culture is politically significant or culturally exotic for the receiving culture. From the perspective of the publishing industry, translation is not an ‘original’ product and therefore, has less attraction for the consumer/reader. As Vanderauwera points out, ‘translations have a potential of not selling well at the target pole’ (202). Lawrence Venuti (26) argues that translation is an ‘offence against the prevailing concept of authorship’, and that authorship is marked by ‘originality, self-expression in a unique text’. In the postcolonial context, self-expression is important, as is identity assertion in terms of group politics, concerning class, ethnicity, or gender. André Léfevere, on the other hand, sees translation as a sign that opens a literary system to both subversion and transformation.

To Vilas Sarang, a bilingual writer and theorist, nativist discourses are simplistic and parochial because they see the world in an ‘Indian-versus-Western dichotomy’ and leave ‘no scope for the writer’s individuality and originality’ transgressive of both Indian and Western reality (311). This analysis can be extended to Ganorkar’s work, which does not fall into a neatly categorised space. She is unknown in the West—to the best of my knowledge, this is the first attempt at translating her work into English—and rarely anthologised, even in India. The transgressive qualities of a writer who, though based in the metropolis, does not write back to the centre seem to have less cultural value than the transgression of postcolonial writers whose writings address the metropolis, writers who employ the same theoretical vocabulary as the dominant Western and/or Marathi literary discourses.

Ganorkar articulates her bleak, often eccentric world-view from the extreme margins. Irrespective of her class position as an academic, she is a minoritised postcolonial writer, one who does not find any solace in national, bourgeois, pre-colonial or anti-colonial reality. She is not canonised because she does not have ‘any abstract universal in the form of a single national language, a single ethnic affiliation, a single pre-fabricated cultural identity’ (Bensmaia, 215). She could, of course, be canonised within Marathi literature, but Ganorkar not only fissures monolithic Indian structures in her writing, she contaminates patriarchal, Brahminical narratives with women’s thoughts and words, opening up spaces and gaps for the screams of the gendered subaltern to be heard.

Ganorkar’s writing works both as a repetition of the multiplicity of the nation and a proliferation of the voice of the ‘Indian woman’. Her poetry renegotiates individuality in a postcolonial space, facilitating possibility for the voices of ‘Indian women’ outside Western and Indian dominant discourses. Her body of work foregrounds the limitations imposed by class, discipline, gender and language, and replaces naturalised truths with fragmented and powerful voices offsetting cultural authority.

Any transcription of narrative carries with it some trace of the original author and original intention, but is transformed in the passage through different tongues, or at least different pens. There is always something possibly monstrous, and something quite revealing when attempting to write both of, and sometimes unavoidably, for another. The narratives are distributed, disturbed, mistranslated and appropriated. They never reach the destination point in the same condition they left, and it is perhaps the willingness to be transformed that swings literary, cultural, and translation studies from heavily policed western narratives to the rich, changing discourse of other cultures, ‘insider’ translations, and transfusions.

While it is often argued that translation in a colonial context is a form of violence (Dingwaney and Maier, cited by Bassnett and Trivedi, 5), in this paper I have argued, rather, for the decolonising project of postcolonial literature being advanced by the consideration of work in ‘native’ languages, while in contexts that avoid, as far as possible, a reductive ‘nativism’. I have argued elsewhere for the validity of anglophone writing as radical work within the nation, while also asserting the need to consider work in ‘native’ languages within wider postcolonial literary studies, both to oppose westernising globalism and to resist reductive nationalist or regionalist claims (Palekar, 70). Women’s writing in India has many histories: classical sanskritic, oral, desi, margi (Devy, 78), colonial, Western, and postcolonial/anticolonial. Each form a distinguishing mark on the final product. There will be a subjectivity, but one that is within the matrix of forces that create an area of knowledge. The only position to take is part medium and part translator, with an awareness that any understanding will oscillate between these two poles.

This paper has sought, at least in part, to critique the ways in which the politics of canonisation and reception inform and inscribe readings of literary productions from postcolonial societies. Despite the fact that postcolonial literary studies and theories are revisionary projects that aim to foreground and recuperate repressed, excommunicated, marginalised and ‘other’ epistemes, the discourse of the postcolonial project does not mobilise its formations in a completely non-hegemonic mode and thus creates its own others and marginalia.

The canonisation of postcolonial cultural productions has predominantly been authorised, monitored, and regulated by Western academia. This is not to suggest that this process is always oppressive because it can also provide better opportunities for the circulation and consumption of these cultural productions. But on the other hand, the choice of themes, material, and language for celebrated postcolonial writers has largely been determined by the ‘write back’ model, and so the ‘real’ postcolonial writer is one who addresses issues of diaspora, nation, and the colonial ‘moment’. In this way, postcolonial theorisation contains itself by drawing its own boundaries. Because postcolonial discourses have their origins in First World academia— as colonial discourses originated in the West—the reception of literary products from the ‘Postcolonial, Third World’ is mediated and contained by the West. The reception of writing from ‘Third World’ countries still largely depends on Western models of literary excellence. When this is not the case, the ‘radicality’ of the work in its relation to the colonial past of its society and the neocolonial present is often the tool of appraisal. Radicality is often measured in terms of an oppositional model of national identity, which is no less problematic.

Many Indian women writers—even those who write in English—neither write back to the colonial centre, nor subscribe to an equally oppressive national and nationalist ideology. They do not find any theoretical and critical space for their creativity in the literary postcolonial scene. They are not caught in the binarism of East-West and thus have not entered the dominant interpretive discourse. Although their names are cited in surveys of Indian English writing, they receive little attention compared to writers such as Nissim Ezekiel or Ramanujan.

Prabha Ganorkar does not write back to either a colonial centre or a neo-colonial centre. Her poetic voice and concerns do not reflect the colonial centre or the after-effects of colonialism. Her voice describes its surroundings in minute and exquisite detail and, most of the time, takes us roaming inside a mind wrapped in its own pain, at once static and nomadic. Ganorkar’s voice may be confessional, but to say that Ganorkar writes ‘like’ the female Western confessional poets of the 1960s is reductionist. It may be possible to struggle against the colonisers and make them leave the country (as happened in India), but it can be much more difficult fighting against internal postcolonial oppressions to do with caste, class, sexuality, and gender.

The aim of this paper has not been to construct bridges over the gaps in theorisation of postcolonial literatures, but to point out the gaps, and to widen the aporetic spaces that exist between the dominant postcolonial discourses and other discourses (or the discourses of the ‘other’). At the end of this exploration, it would be appropriate to stress that Indian literature in English is among the most ‘disorderly of contemporary Indian literatures, and certainly the one most resistant to generalizations’ (A. Dharwadker and V. Dharwadker, 104). A. and V. Dharawadker (104) argue persuasively that, given the high incidence of bilingualism or multilingualism (or at least biculturalism) in Indian writers and theorists and the increasing quantity of translations of a high quality, the rubric of ‘Indian literature in English’ or ‘postcolonial Indian literature’ must also include literature in translation. As Dilip Chitre aptly remarks in an article in the Times of India:

The potential strength of Indian English poetry is going to be derived from native Indian literatures and not without them. The ability to transform non-Anglo-Saxon cultures into the global mainstream of English literature will give Indian English poetry its sustenance in the coming decades, provided Indian English poets discover the nourishing activity of poetic translation as a major aspect of creativity in the contemporary world. (Chitre, Times, online)

I hope that I have been able to convey my enthusiasm for Ganorkar’s work, and the need to redress the lack of critical attention paid to her by feminist/postcolonial researchers. I am aware that there is the ironic possibility of a project such as this paper propelling her into a more central position in Indian writing by giving her theoretical authority as a surrogate subaltern voice. But the problematic nature of that voice’s position and address, and the equivocal status of the translated text within a national or postcolonial framework will continue to work against this.

© Prabha Ganorkar 2003.  All Rights Reserved.

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