1st Edition
Disability in Translation The Indian Experience
This volume explores how disability is seen, written about, read and understood through literature and translation. Foregrounding the asymmetrical world of power relations, it delves into the act of translation to exhibit how disability is constructed and deployed in language and culture.
The essays in the volume reflect and theorise on experiences of translating various Indian-language stories (into English) which have disability as their subject. They focus on recovering and empowering marginal voices, as well as on the mechanics of translating idioms of disability. Furthermore, the book goes on to engage the reader to demonstrate how disability, and the space it occupies in our lives, can be reinforced or deconstructed in translation.
A major intervention in translation and disability studies, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, culture, and sociology.
Introduction. Someshwar Sati and G. J. V. Prasad
1. A different idiom: translation and disability. Radha Chakravarty
2. Translation as social action: the counter-discourse on the literary representation of disability. Chitra Harshvardhan
3. Gitopadesha on wheelchairs and crutches: an alternative aesthetic. Himani Kapoor
4. Disabling normalcy in ‘Thakara’: a comparative reading of P. Padmarajan’s short story and its film adaptation. Sanju Thomas
5. Disability, translation and curriculum: a case study of Rangeya Raghav’s ‘Goongey’. Shubhra Dubey
6. Translation as ‘re-presentation’: the disability spectrum in selected Urdu short stories. Deeba Zafir
7. Translating desires of the undesired: re-reading Tagore’s different women in ‘Subha’ and ‘Drishtidaan’. Somrita Ganguly
8. ‘Blind’ fate and the disabled genius: postcoloniality and ‘translation’ in Saurabh Kumar Chaliha’s ‘Beethoven’. Rajashree Bargohain
9. Fighting against multiple bodies! Translating ‘Nāri o Nāgini’ and ‘Tamoshā’ by Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay and ‘Bonjhi Gunjomālā’ by Jagadish Gupta. Subhadeep Ray
10. Negotiating disability in/and translation: a reading of two Tamil short stories. B. Mangalam
11. Reading interrupted: translating disability in ‘Subha’. Ananya Ghoshal
12. ‘Lohini Sagai’: translating disability, literature and culture. Shilpa Das
13. Gendering disability in Dharamvir Bharti’s ‘Gulki Banno’: ‘The Hunchback Bride’. Mukul Chaturvedi
14. The politics of translation: disability, language and the in-between. Ritwick Bhattacharjee
15. ‘Viklang’: performing language and cripping modernity through translation. Shefalee Jain
16. Translating stigma in the postcolonial context: an analysis of Bharat Sasne’s short story ‘Mai Dukh Ki Lambi Raat’. Rohini Mokashi-Punekar
17. Translating rhetoricity and everyday experiences of disablement: the case of Rashid Jahan’s ‘Woh’. Shilpaa Anand
18. Disability and the call for prayer: translating Khalid Jawed’s short story ‘Koobad’. Sania Hashmi
Index.
Biography
Someshwar Sati is Associate Professor at the Department of English, Kirori Mal College, University of Delhi, India. His research interests encompass Postcolonial Studies and the Indian English Novel, Disability Studies, and Translation Studies. Dr Sati has edited three critical volumes on postcolonial theory and literature, Warble of Postcolonial Voices, Volume I and II and Writing the Postcolonial: Poetics, Politics and Praxis.
G.J.V. Prasad is Professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), India, and former Director of the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study, JNU, India. His major research interests are Indian English Literature, Contemporary Theatre, Dalit Writings, Australian Literature, and Translation Theory. He has co-edited with Sara Rai a collection of stories from Indian languages, Imaging the Other. His academic publications include Continuities in Indian English Poetry: Nation Language Form, and Writing India, Writing English, along with five other edited volumes of critical essays, Vikram Seth: An Anthology of Recent Criticism, The Lost Temper: Essays on Look Back in Anger, Translation and Culture: Indian Perspectives, “Violets in a Crucible”: Translating the Orient (along with Madhu Benoit and Susan Blattes), and Indian English and Vernacular India (along with Makarand Paranjape). Professor Prasad is also a poet and a novelist, and has most notably received the Katha Award for translation from Tamil.
