– Prathama Banerjee

The third set of questions I have in mind relates to language. The issue of language has most commonly been raised in India in contexts of teaching. Here, language is seen primarily as a matter of communicability of content, presumed to be already and sufficiently available in English. Connected to this is the question of availability of reading materials in Indian languages. As of now, in teaching contexts, language thus comes up primarily as a translatability question. Hence, the recent governmental initiative of the National Translation Mission, which however seems defunct even before take-off.

To my mind, the problem here is that we have failed to establish translation itself as a worthwhile academic act – based on research, offering employment at par within academic institutions and bringing formal credit to students specializing in it. Also, in contexts of research, the language question is barely ever raised. It is presumed that high-end research would happen by default in English. Indian languages will of course figure in such research if they are social sciences, but only as primary materials (drawn from archives, fieldwork, interviews etc.), subsequently cooked in English before being served as knowledge, as it were. Finished products of research then would be translated back into the vernaculars for purpose of dissemination.

It is important to note here that since the 1950s, translation of ‘regional’ literature into English, especially under the aegis of the Sahitya Akademi, has been central to our cultural imaginary. More recently, translations of feminist and dalit writings from the bhashas into English have further reinforced this centrality of translation and have impacted social sciences positively. Yet, what this has also done, paradoxically, is create an image of the Indian languages as primarily ‘literary’, i.e. structurally resistant to academic articulation – and this, despite the large volume of intellection that goes on routinely in vernacular domains, often outside enclosed academic institutions and in the larger public sphere of essays, journals and little magazines. In this context, I think it is useful to draw in the language question within the purview of our thoughts on interdisciplinarity.

First of all, we could consider if it is worthwhile setting up ‘translation studies’, within or outside universities, in the shape of an interdisciplinary field – rather than simply presume that translation is either a matter of individual multilingual skill or a subsidiary field to language and literary studies. We must admit that different disciplines have evolved different languages of thought, and academic translation requires a simultaneous engagement with these distinctive conceptual languages. The question of academic language thus is tied to but not reducible to the question of English versus vernacular or spoken versus literary. We must ask then if social sciences share the same conceptual language irrespective of whether they are carried on in English or Bengali or Malayalam?

If not, which is most likely, then the interface between vernacular social science domains and the formal, academic domain is not merely that of translatability but also of interdisciplinarity. That is, the language question here is embedded in the larger question of the relationship between distinct bodies of knowledge with different norms, forms, protocols and textual genres. In other words, translation studies must open unto the interdisciplinarity question – because in the context of social sciences, translation is a matter of both conceptual and linguistic translation, of transactions both across disciplines and across language domains.

Second, we can also reverse the above question. That is, we can ask if interdisciplinarity itself should be seen through the prism of the language question. In other words, when we put two disciplines such as history and economics face to face, are we actually also looking at two languages of articulation, which can only speak to each other through translation or through the mediation of an altogether different third language, which gets produced out of the event of coming face-to-face? In other words, do we get any further purchase in thinking interdisciplinarity by seeing disciplines as different languages seeking to access a common or a shared object of knowledge, rather than by seeing disciplines as primarily constituted by incommensurably different objects of knowledge and different methods?

Finally, we can also consider setting up in our academic institutions centres of ‘regional studies’ – somewhat similar to, yet distinct from, the ‘area studies’ model of US universities. What this does is to subsume, yet critically foreground, the language and translation question within a larger problematic of what is today being called the ‘vernacular domain’. These centres, of say Tamil studies or Bengal studies or North East studies, would call upon all social science disciplines (including economics, film studies and environmental studies) to simultaneously engage with the ‘region’ in India. It will be within this larger framework, then, that we address simultaneously the question of language, of vernacular social science, and of translation. Needless to say, this would require a critical rethinking of what it is to mark out regions, without simply validating the political boundaries of the Indian federal space.

(Excerpted with gratitude from Prathama Banerjee, “Disciplines Inter-disciplines and Languages” Seminar #624, August 2011, )
Accessed at: http://www.india-seminar.com/2011/624/624_prathama_banerjee.htm
Prathama Banerjee is a researcher and teaches at CSDS.