Raghavanka. The Life of Harishchandra. Translated by Vanamala Viswanatha. Cambridge, Mass., and London, England, Murty Classical Library of India, Harvard University Press, 2017, 640 p. Paul St-Pierre. Translating Odisha. Bhubaneshwar, Dhauli Books, 2019, 436 p.

I was lucky enough to spend extended periods of time in India during the late 1990s and early 2000s. This was an exciting time for translation studies in India and I learned much from remarkable scholars. India is often called a “natural” translation zone because of its multiple languages and cultures, but equally important is the strong intellectual tradition that drives and gives meaning to translation practices. Tejaswini Niranjana’s Siting Translation (1992) and Harish Trivedi’s Colonial Transactions (1993) are well-known landmark studies. They joined an already rich body of writing about translation in India, enhanced by subsequent writers, including Sujit Mukherjee, P. Lal, A. K. Ramanujan, Vinay Dharwadkar, Ayyappa Paniker, Shivaram Paddikal, G. N. Devy and Rita Kothari. What made those years particularly stimulating was that questions of translation were prominent in public debate—in newspapers as well as academic and literary journals. Closely linked to postcolonialism, translation was key to understanding the relationship between colonized cultures and the metropolis, and more broadly to the controversial status of English. Was English the language of the colonizer or rather a new means of expression for Indian culture itself? Was Indian literature in English gaining stature at the expense of Indian languages, which remained largely untranslated? Why did books in Indian languages (each the bearer of a huge and venerable tradition) remain untranslated into English, but also into other Indian languages? To these questions were added discussions of politically progressive translation strategies with particular attention to caste and gender. Both Vanamala Viswanatha and Paul St-Pierre participated actively in these conversations, as translators and as theorists, each from their respective geo-linguistic location: Bangalore and the Kannada world for Viswanatha, Bubhaneshwar and the Odia world for St-Pierre. The books under review offer different facets of this engagement. Viswanatha adds an entirely new dimension to her work by turning a 13^th century epic poem from medieval Kannada into English, while St-Pierre brings together a collection of his articles and talks on translation in the Odia world. Since its publication, Vanamala Viswanatha’s translation of Raghavanka’s medieval epic has received considerable media attention. One may well wonder why this version of an ancient poetic drama, written in a form of the Kannada language similar to what Chaucer is for us, and published in the Murty series of Indian classics at Harvard University Press (2017), would have such resonance. The answer has as much to do with Viswanatha’s combined abilities as a scholar, translator and performer as with the political and cultural importance of the work for the Kannada language tradition. A former Kannada newsreader, Vanamala Viswanatha is a prominent personality in the Kannada world, deeply engaged with this strong regional culture. ‘Regional culture’ might convey in English an impression of marginality and small numbers. In fact, Kannada is spoken by some 40 million people, has a strong literary and cinematic tradition, and a huge diaspora across the globe. Viswanatha was for many years a professor of English and Translation Studies at Bangalore University, and there is a strong pedagogical bent in all her work. Her academic articles aim at increasing awareness of the political dimensions of translation, particularly in relation to gender and caste. Her translations include the work of both mainstream and marginalized writers such as U.R. Ananthamurthy, P. Lankesh, Tejaswi, Vaidehi, Sara Aboobakkar, and Gulvadi Venkata Rao (this last with Shivarama Padikkal). The story of the honest King Harischandra has been told since ancient times as part of the Sanskrit epic tradition. It enjoys a particularly large place in the Kannada tradition, both as a written text set down by the author Raghavanka in the …