Kothari, R. (2003): Translating India, Manchester, St. Jerome Publishing, v + 138 p.

India is typically a multilingual country and translation always plays an extremely important role. Compared with translations between Indian languages (intra-Indian), a much older activity, the English translation from Indian languages is a more recent one. Rita Kothari’s Translating India explores aspects such as production, reception and marketability of the latter in India, which is pioneering work. It is the most impressive book on translation in India I have ever read. The book comprises six chapters and two appendixes. The first chapter ‘Recalling: English Translation in Colonial India’ shows the origin of English translation in India which goes back to the late eighteenth and early nineteen centuries. It offers a thematic overview of English translation done by the East India officers and/or white Orientalists over that period, as well as the contradictions between English translators and the Indian scholars. The translation carried out by the British was for the purpose of knowing the mysterious Orient. But from the nineteenth century onwards, Indian intellectuals began to intervene and interrupt the colonizer’s version of India because they were looking for self-expression. The second chapter ‘Two World Theory’ maps a reconfigured relationship in post-independence India between some Indian languages and the English language, locating the context for accommodating translation. We see in this period both the “strengthening of a regional literary and linguistic tradition” and “the rise of English as an Indian language”(p.32). Chapters ‘Within Academia’ and ‘Outside the Discipline Machine’ discuss the issue of social-cultural viability of English translation in India. The former deals with a fresh area of inquiry, especially for teachers and academics, and explores various translation theories in and outside India. Although translation scholars stress usefulness of translation as a pedagogical tool, much work still needs doing. Many questions have to be answered such as “How are translation courses to be framed and taught in a multilingual classroom?” and “Do translations of Indian literatures in English require more indigenous translation theory and would a more ‘liberal’ and ‘Indian’ (if you will) translation also enlarge Indian literature in English by including adaptations and transcreations?”(p.95). The latter deals with interconnections between translation activity and parallel developments in related print and visual media, and tries to spot the dynamics and prominence of English language production, especially the changing political economy of postcolonial India. ‘Publishers’ Perspective’ and ‘The Case of Gujarati’ rely mainly on the interviews with publishers and editors in the former and Gujarati teachers and intellectuals in the latter. The former examines the role of the publishing industry, its perception of the translation activity and the ways in which it influences the body of Indian Literature in English Translation (ILET), and the latter focuses on the main shift from the general to the particular and taps both processes when examining the production of a specific ‘regional’ literature in English translation. The two appendixes are the questionnaire that was handed out or mailed to select publishers before the actual interview and the full transcripts of the interviews with publishers such as Sahitya Akademi, Macmillan, Katha, Penguin India, Oxford University Press, Rupa-HarperCollins, Kali for Women, Orient Longman, and Stree. The book stresses the production of the body referred as ILET, and its six chapters examine various aspects from which it has received consensus and study the interconnections. I’m very surprised by the unprecedented rise of English translation in India because English is the most recent language in India. As a substantial and distinct body, the existence of ILET is itself a recent phenomenon because for a long time it has been subsumed into the body of Indian Writing in English. Translating into English …