The last two decades has seen a spate of translations of mainly short stories and novels set in t... more The last two decades has seen a spate of translations of mainly short stories and novels set in the context of Partition. So large are the number of individual novels, anthologies of short stories and new editions of earlier translations of literary writings on Partition that they constitute today a significant body of literature that goes by the name of "Partition Literature", taught and studied as such today in many universities in India and abroad. While this body of literature includes translations from a wide array of Indian languages -Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, etc. into English, and writers who belong to present-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, it is interesting to note the uneasy relationship between the texts/translations that are being so brought together to constitute a body of literature. The uneasy relationship prevails as the translations are imbued with contentious present-day concerns regarding nation, society and polity. The attempt of literature of bringing them together to 'resolve' these issues and debates is what I call in this paper "Genre politics". I argue that in the process of forming, what I call the 'genre' of Partition Literature, criteria for selection and omission of texts/translations are being evolved; protocols for reading the texts/translations are being set in place, both in the metacommentaries on the translations (Preface/Introduction/Foreword) and in the actual translations -criteria and protocols that are not necessarily of the literary realm. Looking specifically at two translations -Alok Bhalla's (1994) and Muhammad Umar Memon's (1998) -of the same short story by Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi called "Parameshwar
Now it has become academic commonsense that the womanhood that was shaped in and through the lite... more Now it has become academic commonsense that the womanhood that was shaped in and through the literature of the anti-colonial nationalist period was marked by such attributes as purity, fidelity, innocence, spirituality, etc., and the idealized figure was that of the desexualized goddess and mother-like woman who often got conflated with the nation. More nuanced studies of the process of emergence of this woman-figure as hegemonic have pointed to how sexuality became one of the parameters for distinguishing the 'good' woman from the 'bad' or 'lowly' woman, in the process marking out caste distinction and hierarchy. But in the Kannada literature of 60s and 70s we find a dominant representation of woman as a sexual beingpromiscuous, transgressive, saucy, alluring, and never satisfied with a given sexual partner, instead craving for the forbidden other. It seems as if in the colonial period, if the colonizer's presence required and produced a certain kind of ordering of gender relations, the transfer of power to the native elite and their remaining at the helm of affairs of the Independent nation-state once again required a re-ordering of gender relations. Why did this re-ordering of man-woman relations take the particular form that it did in the late 60s and early 70s? What identities were being forged through this process? Have the models of Indian womanhood changed over time? Do the models vary according to literary genres? While these questions would involve a larger study, my present paper is limited in scope to trying to understand the relation between woman and 'folk' in Kannada drama of the late 60s and early 70s, specifically looking at two Kannada plays by Chandrashekar Kambara Rishyshrunga (1965) and Jokumaraswamy (1972) and one play by Karnad Hayavadana (1971). In this paper, by looking at this 'new element' that was introduced in these dramas, the modest attempt is at formulating some issues for further research on the changing gender relations.
With a good number of translations happening from Kannada to English in recent times, and with pu... more With a good number of translations happening from Kannada to English in recent times, and with publishers vying with each other to produce good translations, we see that a translated book today, not only carries the translated (literary) text, but also a lot of framing material, in the form of Translator's/Editor's Preface, Introduction to the text/author, Appendices giving historical or other material relevant to the text, elaborate Bibliographies, besides Glossary and Index. The books also come with eye-catching covers, titles and blurb.
The last two decades has seen a spate of translations of mainly short stories and novels set in t... more The last two decades has seen a spate of translations of mainly short stories and novels set in the context of Partition. So large are the number of individual novels, anthologies of short stories and new editions of earlier translations of literary writings on Partition that they constitute today a significant body of literature that goes by the name of "Partition Literature", taught and studied as such today in many universities in India and abroad. While this body of literature includes translations from a wide array of Indian languages -Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, etc. into English, and writers who belong to present-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, it is interesting to note the uneasy relationship between the texts/translations that are being so brought together to constitute a body of literature. The uneasy relationship prevails as the translations are imbued with contentious present-day concerns regarding nation, society and polity. The attempt of literature of bringing them together to 'resolve' these issues and debates is what I call in this paper "Genre politics". I argue that in the process of forming, what I call the 'genre' of Partition Literature, criteria for selection and omission of texts/translations are being evolved; protocols for reading the texts/translations are being set in place, both in the metacommentaries on the translations (Preface/Introduction/Foreword) and in the actual translations -criteria and protocols that are not necessarily of the literary realm. Looking specifically at two translations -Alok Bhalla's (1994) and Muhammad Umar Memon's (1998) -of the same short story by Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi called "Parameshwar
Now it has become academic commonsense that the womanhood that was shaped in and through the lite... more Now it has become academic commonsense that the womanhood that was shaped in and through the literature of the anti-colonial nationalist period was marked by such attributes as purity, fidelity, innocence, spirituality, etc., and the idealized figure was that of the desexualized goddess and mother-like woman who often got conflated with the nation. More nuanced studies of the process of emergence of this woman-figure as hegemonic have pointed to how sexuality became one of the parameters for distinguishing the 'good' woman from the 'bad' or 'lowly' woman, in the process marking out caste distinction and hierarchy. But in the Kannada literature of 60s and 70s we find a dominant representation of woman as a sexual beingpromiscuous, transgressive, saucy, alluring, and never satisfied with a given sexual partner, instead craving for the forbidden other. It seems as if in the colonial period, if the colonizer's presence required and produced a certain kind of ordering of gender relations, the transfer of power to the native elite and their remaining at the helm of affairs of the Independent nation-state once again required a re-ordering of gender relations. Why did this re-ordering of man-woman relations take the particular form that it did in the late 60s and early 70s? What identities were being forged through this process? Have the models of Indian womanhood changed over time? Do the models vary according to literary genres? While these questions would involve a larger study, my present paper is limited in scope to trying to understand the relation between woman and 'folk' in Kannada drama of the late 60s and early 70s, specifically looking at two Kannada plays by Chandrashekar Kambara Rishyshrunga (1965) and Jokumaraswamy (1972) and one play by Karnad Hayavadana (1971). In this paper, by looking at this 'new element' that was introduced in these dramas, the modest attempt is at formulating some issues for further research on the changing gender relations.
With a good number of translations happening from Kannada to English in recent times, and with pu... more With a good number of translations happening from Kannada to English in recent times, and with publishers vying with each other to produce good translations, we see that a translated book today, not only carries the translated (literary) text, but also a lot of framing material, in the form of Translator's/Editor's Preface, Introduction to the text/author, Appendices giving historical or other material relevant to the text, elaborate Bibliographies, besides Glossary and Index. The books also come with eye-catching covers, titles and blurb.
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Papers by Nikhila H.