Translation In India: A Curious History
Harish Trivedi
HISTORY OF TRANSLATION IN INDIA by Tariq Khan National Translation Mission/Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysuru, 2018, 400 pp., 467
February 2018, volume 42, No 2

This book seems to have been published with the primary motive of proving me wrong. You see, for the past fifteen years or more, I have been going around the world proudly proclaiming that there was no translation in India before the British came (—as indeed there was no Calcutta or no English). When I made this brave assertion at a conference at Columbia University in 2004, it even inspired a professor of classics from Princeton who was in the audience to write a whole book speculating on what would have happened had there been no translation from Greek into Latin. (See Denis Feeney, Beyond Greek: The Beginning of Latin Literature, Harvard University Press, 2016, p. 18.) Imagine my predicament then at a book of over 400 pages now coming out with its nineteen contributors delineating the history of translation in their respective Indian languages. I had, of course, made some prudent qualifications to my sweeping one-liner. In an article published in 2006,1 I had argued that my claim was based on the fact that the numerous Ramayanas, Mahabharatas, Bhagavatas and other Puranas etc.,

produced in the many modern Indian languages in the medieval period were not regarded as being translations from the Sanskrit by any Indian who actually read them or heard them recited but were instead acclaimed as original works in their own right.Also, I said my claim concerned only what was translated into India and excluded what was translated out of India into say Chinese or Arabic or Persian—by legendary figures such as Fa-Hien (now spelt Faxian), Hiuen Tsang (now Xuanzang), and Kumarajiva, a half-Indian half-Chinese monk born and brought up in a city on the Silk Route who remains perhaps the most fascinating of all the translators of Buddhist texts into Chinese. Also excluded similarly were the anonymous translators of the Panchatantra into early Pehlevi and Arabic, or synthesizing figures such as Akbar and Dara Shukoh who sponsored translations of the Ramayana and the Upanishads into Persian. For well over a thousand years Sanskrit classics were widely translated into several foreign languages, but strangely, hardly any foreign text was translated into Sanskrit or any other Indian language. Was it because of the conceit that we were jagad-gurus, the teachers of the world, and had nothing to learn from others, or was it just a curious lack of curiosity?

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