Finbarr Flood - Objects of Translation

transculturation

not syncretism, hybridity, influence for the limitations and political implications of such

terms

agents and processes over artifact and product [159]

the past as divisible into static, stable, discrete entities – geopolitical, cultural, linguistic,

religious – a tendency springing from the modernist penchant for clean-cut categorisation

(seeking 'pure' and originary forms), and exacerbated by a reliance on sources which tends

to take their assertions of identity (of the self as well as the other) at face value instead of

examining the politics and problems implied by and inherent in the very fact of these

assertions.

attempts to destabilize, as far as possible, received categories of medieval south asian

historiography. Articulates the need to move beyond oppositional binaries (what he calls

the Manichean tendencies) as well as equally reductive ideas of syncretism, hybridity,

pluralism which obscure as much as they reveal in their general utopianism, towards a

subtler, more differentiated understanding of the world being examined that

acknowledges the fraught and constantly negotiated (political) nature of encounter and

interaction even as it foregrounds this encounter and interaction in an attempt to balance

out neat accounts of the past.

Prestigious imitation, political pragmatism – the plaster of illusions of continuity over

moments of fracture, a taste for the exotic as a status symbol

pushes back the frontiers of transculturation to Ghurid and pre-conquest examples

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emphasis on the mobility – both socio-cultural and geographic – of signs – signified and

signifier

primarily through the media of artifacts/objects and architecture

transculturation because the term implies process, as well as expressing the multi and

polyvalent nature of these interpenetrations – a point he is at pains to stress through the

various examples he uses – the coastal pre-conquest script, surutrana, hammira, and post-

conquest inscriptions (such as the one at Palam) which begin with the Tomars and

Chauhans, and come down to the current Sultan.

Also constantly emphasises the error of assuming these objects (techniques, artifacts,

linguistic and cultural borrowings) as being fixed, stable and static prior to their

'appropriation' or reuse. Even when they are culturally congruent – Indic objects in an

Indic context, for example – they are still as impossible to pin down to one stable, static

meaning. The best one can hope to do is to approach some of the ways in which they are

deployed, especially as it is well nigh impossible, in the case of medieval South Asia, to

suss out the ways in which they were received

Iltutmish's mysterious pillar, and Firoz Shah's pillar already re-inscribed from two

centuries ago – hinting at the continuity even of such acts of appropriation.