FEMINISM AND TRANSLATION IN INDIA:

CONTEXTS, POLITICS, FUTURES

TEJASWINI NIRANJANA
Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, India

ABSTRACT

This article suggests that discussion of linguistic translation in postcolonial

contexts would help open up larger questions of cultural and political rep-
resentation. The space of translation is seen here not as one in which a clearly
demarcated concept is approximated to by its equivalent; rather, it is a space
in which the translator simultaneously negotiates different kinds of lan-
guages. Understanding this interweaving of languages might be imperative
for any rethinking of the contemporary political terrain. The article attempts
to characterize Indian feminism, feminist politics and the feminist subject,
indicating that the insertion of ’translation’ into this field may contribute to
shaping new conceptual-political formulations.
Key Words ♦ community ♦ cultural criticism ♦ feminism ♦ language ♦
modernity ♦ postcolonial ♦ representation ♦ translation

In the past few years, a critical space has been opened up in which to think
through questions of translation and colonialism, and so to interrogate the
complicities of the traditional humanities disciplines (such as literary
studies and translation studies) with the formation of western cultural
hegemony (Asad, 1986; Rafael, 1988; Niranjana, 1992). Energized in part
by these investigations into translation and relations of power, theorists
have turned their attention to how translation functions in the postcolonies,
asking what sorts of questions can productively be raised for/through trans-
lation.I This new focus has in a sense been made possible by the critique of
earlier translation projects, whether humanist, as exemplified in William
Jones’s late 18th-century translations of Sanskrit texts, or ethnographic, as
seen for instance in writers like the Abbe Dubois on India or more con-

temporary anthropologists such Malinowski or Evans-Pritchard. Such

as

critiques opened up the field of linguistic translation to questions of the pol-

itical, and drew attention to the myriad asymmetries structuring every act
of translation. If we posit that postcolonial modernities have been formed

133
134 Cultural Dynamics 10(2)

through multiple acts of translation, thinking through issues of linguistic

translation in colonial and postcolonial contexts may actually help us inves-
tigate larger questions of cultural and political representation.
In this paper, I plan to analyse an explicitly ’political’ field-that of con-
temporary feminism in India-through insights drawn from the postcolo-
nial enquiry into representation and translation. Here I suggest that a
preliminary emphasis on linguistic translation might give us insights into
some of the conceptual-political impasses faced by present-day feminists.
The impasses are caused in part by the political languages we use in the
third-or the postcolonial-world, where our theorizing can be seen as pre-
eminently a process of translation, where we are constantly between, and
trying to account for, the languages of what we may call capital and com-
munity, where we experience a permanent lack of fit, given that these lan-
guages never mesh together smoothly. They do, however, criss-cross each
other, converging and diverging in many different registers. Political initia-
tives in the postcolony, I argue, must be especially attentive to this inter-
weaving of languages.
It is not my intention to suggest that in theorizing politically we are
translating from one terrain (perhaps that of Enlightenment rationality,
symbolized by an imperial language) to another (perhaps the non-West,
symbolized by a non-European language). This sort of opposition, familiar
to us from fields as different as anthropology and translation studies, fails
to account for the already-translatedness of our third-world condition. For
me, the space of translation is not one in which a clearly bounded concept
is transformed into what is perceived as its more or less adequate equiv-
alent. Rather, it is a space in which one simultaneously holds on to and
negotiates different sorts of languages, conceptual as well as linguistic.
Paying serious attention to the historical processes that have fashioned our
present, we might want to describe our situation as one where we live ’in
translation’. There are different-often mutually unintelligible-languages
of the political (as also languages in the ordinary sense of the word) which
inhabit our historical space and configure our questions and interests. Any
contemporary rethinking of translation theory as well as political theory
might well begin by investigating more carefully this interpenetration of
languages, and understanding its import for our politics.
To anticipate some of my arguments, I will concern myself in this paper
with the problem of how to characterize Indian feminism, feminist politics
and the feminist subject today, speculating on how the insertion of ’trans-
lation’ into this field of questions might help contribute to the shaping of
new political strategies for our time. If feminism functions as a discourse of

emancipation, what sorts of questions arise for it today, and how might they
be resolved? What lessons do these attempts at resolution offer for other
forms of politics? What kinds of blockages might be created for feminism
by the crisis of secularism in India, and why? If the question of agency is a
 Niranjana: Feminism and Translation in India 135

crucial one in feminist theory and politics, how is it linked to the question
of the subject, and what might be the yield of using ’translation’ to index
this problematic?
My attempt in this article is to undertake a critical redescription of pos-
itions taken on one crucial occasion, in order to suggest alternative possi-
bilities for the future. The confusion and impasses of our political present
seem to me to arise in large measure from the problems of translation clus-

tering around the dominant language of secularism and civil rights. I plan
to analyse two main kinds of positions relating to the 1987 incident of sati
in Deorala, Rajasthan. The first position I shall call culturalist, in which the
primary concern is with the sovereignty and autonomy of the formerly col-
onized subject, and in which agency is theorized as the ability to be dif-
ferent, and to mark the difference (from the colonizer, or the indigenous
’westernized elite’). This position is preoccupied with the ’badness’ of col-
onialism and the violence of modernity, and it counterposes culture or com-
munity, as a category of resistance, to modernity and the state. The second
position I shall, with some hesitation, call universalist; this includes the fem-
inist position, in which agency is seen to consist in the recognition of and
struggle against gender oppression. This position is characterized by a
certain acceptance of (colonial) modernity and, given the demands
addressed by the women’s movement to the state, ’community’ (a code
word today for religious community), seen as anti-statist, comes to be read
as anti-women and oppressive.

My own position is that there is no ’outside’ of modernity, and that acts

of translation are, indeed, part of our necessary negotiations with moder-
nity. However, I shall emphasize that the translator needs to critically pos-
ition herself ’within’ the space to be criticized. For this to be possible, one
must understand the historical construction of our feminist agency-its
existence in-translation, its excess, its supplementarity-and thus learn to
engage more effectively with the multiple languages of our political
present.2
I propose that we think of the postcolonial political subject, including
the feminist subject, as a subject-in-translation, a concept that would allow
us to historicize this subject and simultaneously mark its supplementarity.3
To explore some of the implications of this proposal, I would like to
describe briefly some of the ’scenes of translation’ that I believe to be
emblematic of the tasks that confront the women’s movement in India. In
my analysis, I shift deliberately between the literal sense of translation and
its other meanings; for me, however, the literality of ’translation’ in these
scenes grounds vividly the difficulty of the feminist project.
136 Cultural Dynamics 10(2)

Scenes of Translation
1. 1991: the bi-annual conference of the Indian Association of Women’s
Studies, held in Calcutta, attended by over 800 delegates, including over
100 rural women from Bihar. All the plenary sessions and panels used
English as the medium of communication. Some of the rural women, who
spoke only Hindi or Bhojpuri, came to listen to the media panel in which
I was a participant and demanded translation of the proceedings into their
own languages. This panel had a few presentations describing the anti-

obscenity campaigns of many urban women’s groups. The ’language’ in

which the campaigns were couched was that of middle-class female purity,
with the women’s outrage often implicitly expressed against lower caste-
class men. The translators for the Bihari women floundered as they tried
to convey the concerns of the anti-obscenity campaigners.
2. 1994: the autonomous women’s groups conference held in Tirupati
(Andhra Pradesh), where participants included 2000 dalit women from
Tamilnadu demanding that the women’s movement address their
specific problems as dalits. Both this demand and the demand for trans-
lation of all sessions into Tamil were met with tacit hostility and irrita-
tion, especially by some feminists who did not share the geopolitical
location of their southern counterparts.
3. 1995: the Indian Association of Women’s Studies, meeting this time in
Jaipur, provided translation of all discussions into Hindi. The women
who were comfortable with neither English nor Hindi, but spoke only
Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam or another Indian language, still could not
follow the deliberations.

These scenes of translation can be read in at least two different ways: (a) as
the permanent and unfortunate predicament of our postcolonial moder-
nity, to be responded to with regret, nostalgia, melancholy; by an acknowl-
edgement of the untranslatable, accompanied by a covert celebration of it
as a crucial (anti-colonial) marker of difference; or (b) as energizing, and

pushing us to resolve continuously, our political questions in the present.

In any case, by 1995, a shifting away from the hegemony of English in
the movement was being signalled by urban feminists, but the specific way
in which this need was addressed skewed the discussion away from the
South in particular. In national meetings, translation into Hindi tends to be
the default option for those who wish to signal their willingness to de-
emphasize English. Interpretation in Hindi, however, does not even begin
to address the postcolonial demand for translation.
The language question in its many ramifications has surfaced on and off
in the third phase of the Indian women’s movement,4for example in urban
activist groups of the 1970s and 1980s which were trying to resolve prob-
lems about the nature of their activism as well as their constituencies, the
 Niranjana: Feminism and Translation in India 137

latter often including less privileged women from non-English-speaking

backgrounds. Like several other issues which seemed divisive, the language
question too remained unaddressed in the heady days of feminist activism.
In the 1990s, however, during a period when minority women and dalit
women in the movement are beginning to articulate their dissatisfaction
with the subject-positions offered by Indian feminism, linguistic differ-
ences-often standing in for differences of other kinds-are also being
foregrounded. Speculatively, one might add that, while in the 1970s there
was still an overlap between the categories urban women/English speakers
and rural women/non-English speakers, this seems not to be a relevant dis-
tinction anymore. There are increasingly larger and larger numbers of non-
English-speaking women who see themselves as feminists and access
feminist modes of analysis in the regional languages, having come to the
women’s movement through their involvement in other political and social
movements or through literary debates in the different languages.5 It is
largely from here that the demand for translation is being raised, and we
need to respond other than with exasperation, impatience, boredom, frus-
tration, endless deferral, or self-righteousness. The feminist might have to
begin by reconceptualizing her subjectivity as one that is formed in-trans-
lation, by realizing how her questions and agendas are shaped and reshaped
continually in the spaces between languages.
Interestingly, although somewhat predictably, the constant tacking back
and forth entailed by the act of translation is a greater burden for feminists
than for other political activists. More than any other political actor in India
today, the feminist is called upon to negotiate the burden of authenticity, to
prove that she is truly Indian and that her political initiatives are not simply
imported from the metropolises. How this is specifically a postcolonial
problem and how ’woman’ is imbricated in the discourse of colonial differ-
ence is an issue I cannot examine further here. There is, however, a growing

body of literature that addresses this very question (Sangari and Vaid, 1989;
Tharu and Lalita, 1991).
I turn my attention now to the debate around the 1987 sati, seeking to
outline the main issues as they emerged in the popular press and in aca-
demic journals. My intention is not to evaluate the arguments for and
against sati but to analyse what the responses to sati signified, indicating
what larger political assumptions they drew upon. Specifically, I am
interested in how the sati issue can be reframed as one linked with femi-
nism’s translation problems.

The Deorala Sati

On 4 September 1987, 18-year-old Roop Kanwar of Deorala, Rajasthan,

was burned to death on the funeral pyre of her husband. There was a public
138 Cultural Dynamics 10(2)

outcry in the English-language press about the incident, and the subsequent
creation of a Sati Sthal, the worship of Sati Mata, and the glorification of
Roop Kanwar, were reported at length in the national newspapers.
The culturalist analysis of Roop Kanwar’s death was presented elabo-
rately by Ashis Nandy, the author of several articles on the topic of sati.
Nandy tried to interpellate ’India’s Westernised middle-classes’, the
’Anglophile, psychologically colonised Indians’ who according to him have
greeted the sati with fear, self-righteousness and anger (Nandy, 1988a:
20-3; 1988b: 1976). For Nandy, contemporary India was marked by a
growing mass culture through which urban Indians were influencing the
political process, as well as by a democratic process which was helping to
consolidate the presence of ’non-modern India in the public sphere’. The
only way, then, the ’modern Indians’ (a term of abuse for Nandy) ’can
retain their social and political dominance is by setting themselves up as the
final bastion of rationality and as the vanguard of social change in India’
(Nandy, 1988a: 20). Nandy makes it clear that he does not support the com-
mitting of sati in contemporary times, because he thinks the practice ’has
been corrupted by modern market forces’ (1988a: 22). He insists, however,
that in ’the mythical past’ sati ’symbolised the reaffirmation of the purity,
self-sacrifice, power and dignity of women’ (1988a: 21). According to
Nandy (1988a: 22),
The ideas represented in the myth of the original sati and its subsequent reaffirmations
in the epics, folktales and ballads continue to live in the hearts of millions of Indians.
These ideas constitute part of the basic substratum of the Indian culture. They cannot
be wiped away by angry letters to the editors of newspapers.

Nandy’s point is that the angry letter-writers are illegitimately translating

the question of sati from Indian mythology, or ’Indian culture’, into their
westernized conceptual frameworks, a process which then allows them to
denounce the practice as barbaric. This is not to say, Nandy would also
admit, that the practice of sati today cannot be criticized. But for him, one
acquires this right to criticize, ’the adhikar, to talk of the inauthenticity of
satis in Kaliyuga only after respectfully admitting the authenticity of the
idea behind sati in mythological times’ (1988a: 22). Nandy also tries to
explain the phenomenon of sati in modern times as being part of ’the des-
perate attempt to retain through sati something of the religious worldview
in an increasingly desacralized, secular world’ (quoted by Sangari, 1988:
27). Similar to this explanation was that offered by Veena Das (1988: 32),
who also condemned sati, saying that ’any custom that defines a human life
in a manner that it can only be glorified in death holds a seduction that must
be resisted’. She saw sati as glamorizing ’an otherwise banal existence’. For
her, the fact that there are, as she says, ’so few channels for &dquo;heroism&dquo; ’
reveals the ’utter banality to which modern existence has been reduced’.66
For Das, the space of in-translation, the space of our postcolonial moder-
nity, is reduced to one of ’banality’, and the problem we need to contend
 Niranjana: Feminism and Translation in India 139

with is some sort of existential meaninglessness. Having defined the

problem thus, Nandy as well asDas would perhaps suggest that this lack of
meaning might be overcome by the assertion of the non-secular, of which
sati is just one manifestation.
Of the many feminist attacks on the culturalist position, Kumkum
Sangari’s is one of the most clearly expressed. She characterizes Nandy’s
arguments as being full of a ’dangerous ambiguity’ (Sangari, 1988: 28). For
her, they represent an ’anti-colonialism which carelessly legitimizes the
worst of indigenous practices’, and signify nothing more than ’a very middle
class, urban and intellectual appropriation of a &dquo;rural&dquo; event’ (Sangari,
1988: 28). Sangari (1988: 25) claims that the attempt to ’salvage’ the ideal of
sati shows the interest of the ’metropolitan ideologues’ in creating ’a cul-
turally useful, anti-woman, symbolic-ideological construct’.
Another attack on Nandy’s position was by Sujata Patel and Krishna
Kumar, who declared (1988: 129-30):
[T]he only test of determining allegiance to a barbarous act like ’sati’ is whether one

accepts it condemns it totally. This is the only test through which one can assert
or
human concern. There can be no justification or sophistry to avoid such assertion
against inhumanity. Ultimately, it is the assertion of those human values which militate
agamst acts like ’sati’ which can decide who is feudal and who is modern.
Other feminists pointed out the collusion of the state, specifically the police
force, in the glorification of sati. Sati, they argued, was a ’thoroughly
&dquo;modern&dquo; phenomenon’ and had nothing to do with ’tradition’ (Kishwar
and Vanita, 1987: 16). A new cult had come up with political and not reli-
gious leaders at its head. They argued that the Deorala episode was not a
’product of illiteracy and backwardness of the rural poor’, but ’the product
of a modernised, developed, prosperous combine’ (Kishwar and Vanita,
1987: 24). There was no need, Kishwar and Vanita argued, to debate the
religiosity of the sati. We ought to ’demystify’ it, they said, and ’see it as a
case of a woman being hounded to death under a specious religious cover,
and of her death being made a symbol by certain power groups to demon-
strate their clout’ (Kishwar and Vanita, 1987: 24). For these writers, Roop
Kanwar’s death was ’only one expression of the general devaluation of
women’s lives’ (Kishwar and Vanita, 1987: 25). This last argument was
made by several other feminists as well. As Pamela Philipose and Teesta
Setalvad (1988: 40) put it:
We saw sati as part of the same social process which leads to female infanticide and

foeticide, rape, including rape in war and police custody, domestic violence and sexual
harassment in streets and work places. They are all frightening indic(a)tors of a deep-
seated social malaise, whereby it seems all right for a male-dominated society to vic-
timise powerless women rather than seek a more positive redressal of social, economic
and political inequity.

’Tradition’, they felt, was always ’invoked to buttress arguments for the
continued suppression of women’. While acknowledging Nandy’s remark
140 Cultural Dynamics 10(2)

that the beliefs of millions of Indians could not be erased by angry letters
to the editor, Philipose and Setalvad argued that these beliefs, when used
as instruments of suppression and destruction, needed to be questioned and

protested against by women.

Other feminists made a direct connection between the ’failure’ of secu-
larism and the inadequacy of the Indian state (Qadeer and Hasan, 1987:
1946-9). While they saw sati as yet another crime against women, they
claimed it was ’part of a series of events, that reflect a dramatic rise in
obscurantism and communalism which threatens to devour the secular
fabric of Indian society’ (Qadeer and Hasan, 1987: 1947). They criticized
’revivalist spokesmen’ for associating sati with ’notions of goodness’, and
thereby, according to them, attempting ’to undermine the very basis of the
women’s rights movement which arises out of this discrimination and
oppression (in whatever form) within the society’s social and religious
norms’ (Qadeer and Hasan, 1987: 1948).
What I have been trying to convey in this brief summary of the feminist
positions on the Deorala sati, apart from the main arguments, is also the
tone of confidence, of political authority, a tone that reflects the certainty
with which we were able to engage in the struggles of the 1980s. The cer-
tainty came from the firm positioning of the Indian women’s movement
within the discourses of secularism and modernity, discourses that
endorsed the drive towards making transparent-and completely translat-
able into a narrative of enlightenment-the situation of the postcolonial
political subject.

Transparency versus Untranslatability

Our available political languages, at least those we would call ’progressive’,
veer towards the demand for transparency. And here the opacity/untrans-
latability argument becomes too often a lapsing into romanticism and nos-
talgia or a refusal of the political, as feminists in particular have pointed
out. For feminists, the positing of a purely ’cultural’ subject marks a retreat
from feminism and makes impossible the theorizing of gender oppression.
For the secular left-liberal feminist, rights come only from an acceptance of
civil law, and identity from citizenship in the nation-state. This is evident
from the way in which feminists often blame the state for not doing enough,
as the sati debate also reveals.

Curiously, even the argument for untranslatability may sound as though

it is based on a certain kind of transparency claim. For Nandy, the hearts of
the rural masses are transparent (especially to him, since he reads off for us
what they feel, believe, etc.) while he claims that they are opaque to
anglophile modems. His position as translator of what he says are the
masses’ real concerns is above scrutiny, his own subject-formation and his
 Niranjana: Feminism and Translation in India 141

political positioning rendered transparent. Part of the work of his

mediation is indeed to produce this effect of transparency, both of his pos-
ition and the masses’ beliefs. Nandy’s attack on the state and the western-
ized modernists (saying they are not truly Indian) cannot afford to take into
account the common origin of indigenism/nativism and modernism. He
cannot provide an explanation for why both are available in the postcolo-
nial present, having both arisen from the same political-conceptual shifts
that have taken place in the last 200 years. Analysing how we responded to
the Deorala sati is part of a necessary effort to investigate the limitations of
both these political languages.
The purely cultural (culturalist) subject posited by Ashis Nandy denies
the irreversible refigurations of colonialism even as it is constituted by, and
is a response to, that very refiguration. What could be the effects of such
positing? Either the subject looks as though s/he has been taken out of
history at the moment of reasserting her integrity/wholeness (and in order to
reassert it), or two different timescapes emerge, India and Bharat-one
inhabited by the moderns (Indians) and the other inhabited by non-moderns
(Bharatvasis)-the latter being subjected to violence by the former. What is
clear for Nandy, however, is the innate goodness of the ’Bharatvasis’, and the
unmitigated, incorrigible thoughtlessness and arrogance of the ’Indians’.
It is indeed laudable that Nandy turns our attention to the obliteration
of the question of community by secularism-as-politics, but his solution is
problematic: he removes ’community’ from the realm of political interven-
tion altogether, rather than saying that contemporary politics must take
’community’ seriously.The assertion of ’community’ becomes in Nandy
the supreme anti-colonial, anti-modern, anti-secular gesture (for him the
latter two guarantee the former). This kind of move not only makes it dif-
ficult to distinguish between the specific significances of such assertions (in
terms of the Hindu majority, the minority groups, etc.), it also compels us
to condone, even celebrate, any such assertion of religious or community

identity, without taking into account its implications for women.

The feminist response to Nandy and his alleged sympathy with the
Deorala Sati-as-cultural-assertion was to posit a universal political subject,
arguing implicitly that the language of rights and humanism provided the
only resource for women to counter the violence committed against them
by patriarchal religious groups. Here the formation of the secular feminist
subject is placed above scrutiny, and its complicities with the exclusionary
project of Indian modernism remain unacknowledged. Every assertion of
’community’, in this view, is regressive, anti-modern, anti-secular. Here too,
there is no way by which we can differentiate between majority and min-
ority assertion, or understand the asymmetries that determine the relations
between communities. The outcome here is that we end up denouncing and
condemning every assertion of community identity in an a priori fashion for
being self-evidently detrimental to the status of women.
142 Cultural Dynamics 10(2)

Flavia Agnes talks about her women’s group, Majlis, being called upon
to extend support to Muslim groups in Bombay after the 1993 riots,and
the political difficulty of doing so when they might well end up on opposite
sides when Majlis took up cases of the victimization of Muslim women
within their community (Agnes, 1994: 1123-8). The question, it seems to
me, is also one of how feminists establish their credentials as critics of
’culture’, and how by extending support to a minority community during
crises they can also begin to find spaces in which to speak critically about
the community’s practices. We should, however, be able to argue that ’com-
munity’ is not some pre-existent or primeval object, but historically formed
like any other political entity, and therefore open to transformation. Today
it is important that we not refuse ’community’ the name and the terrain of
the political.
So why return to the sati debate in the 1990s? Or, more precisely, after
1990 (the anti-Mandal agitation) and 1992 (the fall of the Babri Masjid)?
Will it in retrospect raise once again the question of community and cul-
tural rights as we make the argument today for the Muslim minority’s
rights, risking the charge of anti-secularism? What we used against Hindu
self-assertion, as in the sati, was the charge of ’gender oppression’, ’com-
munalism’ and ’fundamentalism’. The conceptual logic of our argument
would lead us to level the same charges at Muslim self-assertion too. What
might it mean to do this in a context of increasing actual and symbolic viol-
ence against Muslims in India as well as internationally?

Subjects-in- Translation
Critically examining the language of our responses to the sati issue may
help clear for us today a space in which to speak with Muslim women who
may not claim feminism in the way we do, but with whom we might have
some reason to make common cause. To put it differently, we ought to ask
whether a recognition of the irreversible reconfiguring of the cultural-pol-
itical terrain by colonialism should necessarily lead to an acceptance of the
language of universalist liberalism as the only language adequate to our
modernity. Is it only universalism that provides the leverage for the critique
of cultures and communities? And is it, then, only the universal subject-
marked as ’human’-who is capable of political agency?
One of the ways in which universalism, or humanism for that matter,
came to be named in India was through the apparatus of ’English’ (a lan-
guage, a literature, a curriculum, a set of prescriptions for the colonized).
The conceptual frameworks by which questions of rights have been articu-
lated in our context were set in place by Indians with ’English’ education,
who further mapped the English/non-English distinction onto the terms
urban/rural, or indeed modernity/tradition. In post-Independence India,
 Niranjana: Feminism and Translation in India 143

the most visible legal and political articulations of rights questions had to
critique the second term of the binary, as the repository of backwardness,
as that which had to be overcome by a nation on the path to development.
The translation acts they engaged in sought to create, therefore, the
unified-and modernizing if not modern-agent-subject.
When we look back now at the language of Indian feminism in the 1980s,
we see that our politics had to leave ’culture’ behind in order to retain its
critical edge. Criticism of ’our culture’ often meant denouncing it in the
name of the projects of modernity; any mention of religious community, for

example, was seen as ’communalist’, and any mention of caste as ’casteist’.

We had no way of distinguishing between majority or hegemonic assertions
of caste and community, and radical articulations of them.9 As we now see,
however, in order to be able to make that distinction, we have to risk
leaving the question open to begin with. We have to risk interrogating the
project of secular modernism, cease to think of it as an absolute horizon. In
the interest of new solidarities and coalitions imperative for our present we
may now need to pay more attention to the discordances, the interruptions
that prevail in our scenes of translation-not in order to harmonize or to
suppress them, but to hear their distinctive concerns and to maintain the
productive tensions between our different agendas.
I have been trying to present a postcolonial political scenario in which
there would be important consequences to taking translation seriously.
Given the instability of our political present, the problematic of translation
might illuminate the agency of the postcolonial political subject, who has
necessarily to gesture towards the impossibility of fixing meaning, but does
not have the choice not to fix it. By emphasizing ’translation’, I have tried
to draw attention to the interpretive processes that are constantly at work
to make representation possible in the postcolony. Insisting on the ’in-
translatedness’, I would argue, is a way of addressing the question of how
we are historically situated as political actors, of the complexities of our
location and our multiple negotiations with them. It can also be, for femi-
nists, a way of refusing the burden of authenticity by reframing the problem
as one of the locatedness or connectedness of our politics rather than one
of being either ’Indian’ or ’western’.
What we might learn from those scenes of translation, then, is how the
(feminist) subject of politics is being shaped by the process of moving
between languages. In reflecting on the question of feminist subjecthood
and agency, we might also throw light on other forms of political agency in
the postcolonial world. Such agency need not be seen as that of a unified
self whose coherence is produced by its linguistic being and its occupation
of the world its language authenticates. Instead, this subject is one com-
pelled to straddle two or more languages, while not being fully governed by
any one of them. There is an important difference, then, between being
translatable (the political subject of Indian left-liberal discourse) and being
144 Cultural Dynamics 10(2)

in-translation (the subject of a critical feminism): the goal of the first sort of
project is the achievement, however deferred, of an ultimate transparency;
the second kind of project strains in the other direction, accepting the need
for translation not as a process which simplifies or makes transparent, but
one that draws attention to its very tentativeness. The constant demand to
translate made on Indian feminism by other groups (sometimes within the
women’s movement itself, claiming both feminism as well as another source
of identity, such as dalit or Muslim) engaged in questioning the dominant
narratives of the postcolony points to the increasing need for feminism to
create a more reflexive political vocabulary. Here the importance of
moving in and out of languages, of being always between languages, indeed
the importance of translation, needs to be acknowledged as a way of
keeping open the space of criticism.10

NOTES

Much of this paper has been talked through with David Scott. Useful critical com-
ments on earlier drafts were offered by Seemanthini Niranjana, Vivek Dhareshwar,
Rekha Pappu and Ashish Rajadhyaksha. To them all my gratitude. My thanks, as
always, to my friends at Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies for helping
me think about our scenes of translation.

1. At a time when many third-world scholars in first-world locations are claiming

the term ’postcolonial’ as a self-description, I would like to make a distinction
between being postcolonial and living in a postcolony, between position and
location. Compared to the third-world intellectual in the first-world academy,
the intellectual in third-world spaces is a very different kind of postcolonial (for
example, in terms of commitments and political engagements), and her/his
location can be called postcolonial in a different sense than New York or
London can (the latter can perhaps be called ’postcolonial’ but not ’post-
colonies’).
2. I use supplementarity here primarily in the Derridean sense (Derrida, 1981).
Derrida defines supplement as an ’undecidable’, something that cannot any
longer ’be included within philosophical (binary) opposition’, but that resists
and disorganizes philosophical binaries ’without ever constituting a third term’
(p. 43). I would also want to suggest in thinking about postcolonial translation
that supplementarity refers to that seeming lack which is actually a mark of
excess.
3. I have discussed in detail elsewhere how we can think the historicity of our post-
colonial present through the problematic of translation. See my Siting
Translation (1992).
4. Feminist scholars have suggested that the first phase of the women’s movement
can be traced back to the period of social reform in India, and the second phase
to the nationalist struggle for independence. The third phase, then, dates from
the 1970s.
 Niranjana: Feminism and Translation in India 145

5. Almost without exception, literature has been one of the major sites of feminist
discussion—ranging from sexuality to the specific nature of women’s speech
and writing—in the various Indian languages.
6. For Veena Das (1994), the possibility of criticizing collective traditions is linked
only to the assertion of ’selfhood’. Most feminists in India, I imagine, would be
highly sceptical of the sort of individualism this assertion might endorse.
7. This sort of separation of community from the political sphere is evident in
some feminist writings on the ongoing debate
regarding the Uniform Civil Code
as well. See for example the draft on ’Civil Codes and Personal Laws: Reversing
the Option’, presented by the Working Group on Women’s Rights, Delhi, to
the bi-annual meeting of the Indian Association of Women’s Studies, Jaipur,
December 1995.
8. Unprecedented ’Hindu-Muslim’ riots broke out in Bombay in January 1993,
supposedly as a consequence of the destruction of the Babri Masjid by Hindu
extremist groups in November 1992.
9. The ’feminist’ (as political subject), as well as the Indian ’woman’, is produced
in a particular conjuncture between Nation (imaged as an autonomous, sover-
eign, nation-state) and Modernity. Unlike gender, however, caste and com-
munity (or religious identity) are not privileged sites for the representation or
staging of modernity and nationhood. (I refer here in particular to lower caste-
class and Muslim.) On the contrary, the premodern or nonmodern, as well as
the anti-national, is often staged as caste and community. Just as caste tends to
mean lower caste, similarly, community (and anti-secularist) today means

Muslim, since the Hindutva parties claim to be truly secular and truly
nationalist. In other words, invoking identities based on community and caste
would be unacceptable to the secularists who have laid hegemonic claim to the
nation in the post-independence period. The leaving-behind of caste/com-
munity by the national-modern, curiously enough, is facilitated by the claim of
’women’ to modernity and the nation. The question, then, is what happens to an
emancipatory discourse and to a subject of emancipation (here, feminism)
when not only its goals but also its modalities of enunciation are figured through
the dominant social imaginary. Gender analysis, in both its liberal and marxist
variants, was able in the 1970s and 1980s to press for a reconfiguration of the
national-modern which now implicitly includes gender as a central component.
Part of the reason for this success, as I have already suggested, lies in the shared
premisses of humanist universalism as well as the notion of the Indian citizen-
subject that have underwritten both feminism and dominant (anti-colonial and
liberal postcolonial) politics in India.
10. The directionality of feminist translation in India has not been stressed here.
Implicit in my argument is the suggestion that all languages are refigured in the
space of translation, although not perhaps in parallel ways.

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

TEJASWINI NIRANJANA is the author of Siting Translation: History,

Poststructuralism and the Colonial Context (1992) and the co-editor of
Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India (1993). She has taught
at the University of Hyderabad and is presently Senior Fellow at the Centre for
the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore. Address: Centre for the Study of
Culture and Society, 1192, 35th B Cross, Fourth T Block, Jayanagar, Bangalore
560 041, India.