Imperial Babel
Translation, Exoticism, and the Long Nineteenth Century
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At the heart of every colonial encounter lies an act of translation. Once dismissed as a derivative process, the new cultural turn in translation studies has opened the field to dynamic considerations of the contexts that shape translations and that, in turn, reveal translation’s truer function as a locus of power. In Imperial Babel, Padma Rangarajan explores translation’s complex role in shaping literary and political relationships between India and Britain.
Unlike other readings that cast colonial translation as primarily a tool for oppression, Rangarajan’s argues that translation changed both colonizer and colonized and undermined colonial hegemony as much as it abetted it. Imperial Babel explores the diverse political and cultural consequences of a variety of texts, from eighteenth-century oriental tales to mystic poetry of the fin de siecle and from translation proper to its ethnological, mythographic, and religious variants.
Searching for translation’s trace enables a broader, more complex understanding of intellectual exchange in imperial culture as well as a more nuanced awareness of the dialectical relationship between colonial policy and nineteenth-century literature. Rangarajan argues that while bearing witness to the violence that underwrites translation in colonial spaces, we should also remain open to the irresolution of translation, its unfixed nature, and its ability to transform both languages in which it works.
Imperial Babel brings the exciting field of translation studies to bear on the literature of the British Empire in India during the long nineteenth century, roughly from Sir William Jones and Edmund Burke to Max Müller and Rudyard Kipling. Too often critics of English-language literature about India ignore the enormous fact that all such writing emerged from an imperial world that was profoundly polyglot. Rangarajan's admirable work will thus be of great use and interest to scholars and students of Romantic and Victorian cultures of empire along with readers interested in translation and translation theory.
A formidable scholarly achievement. The study answers a pronounced need in a number of intersecting fields---Literary Studies, Postcolonial Theory, South Asian Studies, Translation Studies---to understand the complex cross-cultural negotiations taking place between Britain and the Indian colony in the 19th century.