Indian Writings in English Translation: A Study of Historical Perspective

Abstract

Md. Eakub Ali. Abstract: Translation is a basic human activity to convey something said in one language in another. It is a practice of changing a work originally written in one language belonging to a certain culture into a different language belonging to another culture. The practice of translation is as old as the human civilization. India is a multi-lingual and multi-cultural country. In this country translation works have been an integral part of Indian literature since the pre-Christian times but Indian writings in English translation is a recent phenomenon initiated by the British during the latter half of the eighteenth century but the emergence of Indian translators on the scene of translation into English was seen in the late nineteenth century. The tradition of Indian writers translating their own work into English was pioneered by Michael Madhusudan Dutt, the man of Bengal Renaissance but its most famous practitioner yet has been Rabindranath Tagore who achieved the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913 for his “Gitanjali”, a work translated by the poet himself from Bengali into English. Tagore’s success has brought about a remarkable change in post-colonial India with a more complicated context of translation and encouraged the Indian writers to fulfil the need to evolve a definition of the Indian Post-colonial in particular, and the Indian Literature in general in order to establish its individual nature and relevance, and to create its post-independence Pan Indian...