Book Description

Translation suffers a poor reputation: traditionally dismissed as a derivative, invisible process, its recent critical emergence has led to its being cast as a central tool of colonial oppression. In Imperial Babel, Padma Rangarajan challenges both these arguments by revealing translation's complex role in shaping nineteenth-century literary and political relationships between India and Britain. Drawing from a wide range of texts ranging from eighteenth-century oriental tales to mystic poetry of the fin de siècle, Rangarajan examines literal enterprises of translation as well its ethnological, mythographic, and religious variants to show how translation in the empire steps out of the shadows and allows us to consider its diverse political and cultural consequences. Merging ongoing interests in complicating colonial epistemologies with new theoretical shifts of Translation Studies, Rangarajan argues that colonial translation was not merely a monovocal instrument of oppression, but a process that changed both colonizer and colonized, and undermined colonial hegemony as much as it abetted it. Searching for translation's trace enables both a broader, more complex understanding of the work of translation in imperial culture as well as a more nuanced understanding of the dialectical relationship between colonial policy and nineteenth-century fiction. Imperial Babel uses translation's persistent presence in colonial literature to reconsider the history of orientalism and its relationship to nineteenth-century British culture. Rangarajan argues that while bearing witness to the violence that underwrites translation in colonial spaces, we should also remain open to the irresolution of translation, its unfixed nature, and its ability to transform the colonizer as well as the colonized, the translated language and the translator's language. Imperial Babel will be of value to students and scholars of nineteenth-century British literature, South Asia, and translation.