For far too long, the trans¬lation into English of Indian literature has been viewed primarily as an act of cross-cultural interpretation, a way of making India’s literary riches accessible to the West. This may well be an accurate assessment of the situation up to 1947: nearly all of the works translated into English were classical ones, mostly Sanskrit, and they were often translated by Western scholars who had Western readers in mind. But the past forty or so years have seen the emergence of a new and still-growing body of works from Indian translators whose aim is no less than the literary discovery of modern India.
Sept-Oct 1982, volume 7, No 2