Translation came to be institutionalised in independent India as a consequence of the State’s perception that emotional integration of India is possible only through the arts. Literature had a major role to play here. The idea of translation thus got linked to the idea of the nation. If nation, as Benedict Anderson says, is an ‘imagined community’, literature plays a role in creating and sustaining that community. India’s linguistic economy underwent a change after 1947 and mother tongues were perceived to be the chief markers of identity and carriers of tradition. Inter-language translation continues to be one of the chief activities of the Sahitya Akademi and National Book Trust, two public institutions created in the times of Jawaharlal Nehru’s liberal and forward-looking regime. Now we also have other national projects like the National Translation Mission, meant to translate knowledge-texts from English into Indian languages (and hopefully vice-versa), and Indian Literature Abroad meant to make significant Indian literary texts available in foreign languages.

Inter-language translations have played a major role in creating movements across linguistic territories. Horizontal translations of patriotic works as well as social-reformist works during the Independence movement played a role in shaping our national consciousness. The same is also true of progressive literature where the translations of the likes of Premchand, Manto, Krishan Chander, Amrita Pritam, Jayakantan and Thakazhi encouraged an egalitarian ethos. This happened again during the Modernist movement. I remember how the works of Mardhekar, Muktibodh, Gopalakrishna Adiga, Nakulan, Dilip Chitre, Ananthamurthy, Nirmal Verma and others got translated into Malayalam during the 1960s. And it is happening again now, contributing to Dalit and feminist literary movements in many languages. The translations of Marathi Dalit writing have been crucial in creating a similar body of literature in languages like Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi or Gujarati, though later many of these languages discovered the existence of earlier works. Translations have also helped create genres in languages where they had not originally existed. More.

See: The Hindu

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