Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry (ISSN: 2349-8064)

Translation and Race. Corine Tachtiris. Routledge, New York, 2024, 172 pages, Paperback, £39.99.

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Focusing on the aspect of race and racism in the practice of literary translations, the book Translation and Race by Corine Tachtiris, Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, elaborates how racial discrimination has always been an integral part of translation practice throughout history till contemporary times, through its five main chapters and the significantly fitting introduction. The preface begins with the author’s experience of disjuncture that she felt twenty-five years before writing the book, as an undergraduate student, being a part of a group of students and faculties translating a book by a Black author whose culture was not very familiar to them. That feeling of unfamiliarity guided her to the understanding that race is but a construct — a concept that she remembers throughout her life and uses meaningfully in her book. She then draws opinions of scholars on capitalising the ‘b’ in Black and how their perceptions shape their respective ideas of race. After considering all the opinions, she agrees with La Marr Jurelle Bruce in his statement, “I use a lowercase b because I want to emphasise an improper blackness […] a blackness that is ever-unfurling rather than rigidly fixed” (Bruce 6). She supports Bruce’s opinion and discusses her opinion on “translation’s potential to unfix language through linguistic and cultural disjunctures” (Tachtiris ix). The author rejects norms in translation theories that are normalised by the mainstream but are actually rooted in White supremacy and chooses to rely on the translators’ joke of “it depends” by capitalising the ‘b’ only contextually. The preface, therefore, sets the tone of what the book primarily seeks to express later on.

Introduction:

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This special issue of Sanglap intends to revive the lost voices of women thinkers from “the clutches of academic amnesia” (Chakrabarti ii) and to reorient the focus on the intellectual contribution of women in colonial Bengal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Critical discussions on the cultural and intellectual life in colonial Bengal often bypassed the intellectual investment of women who were trailblazers. This guest-edited issue of Sanglap explores the reasons behind this politics of marginalisation through different articles focusing on some of the remarkable women of colonial Bengal who intervened in the thought-scape with their lives and works.

Rethinking the Literary World:

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This paper, delving into the necessity to excavate the lost traditions of women’s thought in order to break down the patriarchal, monolithic notion of ‘intellectual tradition’, intends to look into the fictional works of Prabhabati Debi Saraswati (1905-1972) whose career of writing domestic novels spanned between 1920s-1960s. Prabhabati also created the first woman detective in Bengali detective fictions, a fact that critical discussions on the canon of Bengali/Indian detective fictions, which is considered to be a genre moving from men to men, conveniently forgets. Prabhabati’s first detective novel introducing her woman detective, Krishna Choudhury, was published in c.1950s. Beginning by situating the impulses that provoked women’s writing during the colonial era, the paper would engage in a brief discussion of Prabhabati’s domestic novels to understand the drift of thought and themes operating in her works. Then, the paper would introduce Prabhabati’s woman detective, Krishna Choudhury, and critically discuss Prabhabati’s venture, in order to comprehend the impulses, constraints and possibilities inherent in such a creation. This endeavour hopes to unravel how the women writers, writing within literary traditions which are associated with mass appeal, negotiate with the motivations and restrictions imposed upon her by the expectations of such literary genres. Prabhabati’s experimentation opened up the constrictions imposed by the genre for future experimentations and improvements, as is quite the case with the canon of Indian women’s detective fictions, which still stands critically unrecognized.

Vicissitudes of Female Medical Education:

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When the issue of female education became consolidated with the progress of rapidly changing time of the period, general female education was given recognition and due priority annually in government reports. The question of adequate nursing in the Medical College Hospitals was both important and difficult and compelled the Hospitals to employ an inadequate number of nurses. The production of trained nurses opened the avenue for female medical graduates in Bengal. But they had to face hard confrontation with teachers of the Medical College itself due to the fact that so far women had been seen through the ‘male gaze’, now it seemed to be a topsy-turvy situation. Women could attain a space of their own and they could see the patriarchal society through their gaze, which was never acceptable to the society. The world of male hierarchy and domination was much afraid of an independent space for the women where Kadambini stands alone like an iconic figure. This article ventures to document the intellectual legacy of Kadambini in this context of patriarchal opposition to female medical education.

Legacy of Maharani Sunity Devi:

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The nineteenth century is very much exceptional in the history of world as well as in India. It is the century when industrialization gathered momentum and when more powerful nations of the West established colonies for themselves in Asia and Africa. On the other hand, the Nineteenth century was in many ways also the age of women. The struggle for women’s rights in every sphere began to take shape from this period. In the nineteenth century things were changing in India too, especially in two provinces- Bengal and Maharashtra. In the history of Bengal, the nineteenth century is marked as a glorious chapter. The wave of renaissance touched almost every sphere of Bengali lives. The influence of this new spirit was amply manifested in various fields of the society such as education, religion, literature, politics and the like. The advancement of women’s education and the pressing campaign for the abolition of Sati were two basic objectives of the women’s movement in Bengal. This spirit of movement also touched the Princely State of Cooch Behar through Sunity Devi, the Maharani of the State and the daughter of Keshab Chandra Sen, celebrated Brahmo reformer of Bengal. Born and brought up in the midst of a Brahmo Family and society, her early age was marked by privilege and progressive thinking. Overall she is very liberal, but sometimes she became conservative. By heart she was an activist for womenfolk. An attempt has been made in this paper to explore the role of Sunity Devi in carrying out different types of reform programmes for women in the Princely State of Cooch Behar and how much she was instrumental in the struggle for women’s rights in every sphere, both in and outside the Cooch Behar State.

At the Crossroad of Decolonial Studies:

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Based on a close study of a travelogue written by a Bengali woman named Hemlata Sarkar in the first decade of twentieth century and a few journal entries by another woman, Dr. Jamini Sen, who composed them while working as a doctor, this paper wants to argue how these otherwise innocuous and effusive pieces are steeped in deep meditations on society and culture in South Asia, thus effectively giving birth to a new idea of South Asia premised on commonalities and similarities across difference and alterities. What is at stake in this discussion is the question of what new perspectives the ‘gaze of a woman’ can bring in the field of decolonial studies. In liberating these women from the narrowed optics of a woman writer who carries her ‘home’ to visualize and wonder about ‘otherness’, this paper wants to see them as epitomizing a serious discourse on social thinking from a decolonial angle.

“Doctor Miss Jamini Sen”:

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The present article is basically a tribute to Dr. Jamini Sen, one of the pioneering women medics who passed out from the Calcutta Medical College, and dedicated their lives to the service of humanity. Unlike her most famous predecessor, Dr. Kadambini Ganguly, Jamini Sen was not a ‘public figure’; she was rather of a reserved character and maintained her privacy almost with a religious zeal ‘not to be exposed’. Little was known about her life, work and legacy, before Chitra Deb mentioned her in the book Mahila Daktar: Bhin Graher Basinda, and some lesser-known prose writings of Kamini Roy, her elder sister revived and published from the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University. That book contains some portions of Jamini’s own diaries and one essay, never published during her lifetime. In this article, an attempt has been made to reconstruct her life and work, and to translate some of her writings on the basis of those texts.

Revisiting the Intellectual Legacy of Chandrabati

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Chandrabati’s Ramayan, or The Ramayan of Chandrabati, is a translated work by Nabaneeta Dev Sen, a woman writer and thinker from Bengal. She completed the manuscript of Chandrabati’s Ramayan just a year before her passing away, and it was published posthumously in 2020. This review of one of her major translated works is a way of paying respect to the distinct literary-academic tradition that she created within the Bengali intelligentsia.

Interview with Geraldine Forbes

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Professor Geraldine Forbes is the Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita, State University of New York, Oswego. As a pioneering persona in the fields of women’s studies and women’s history in India, Professor Forbes charts new avenues in exploring the lives and works of women in India and imparts historical visibility to women’s issues from the perspectives of women. For the last fifty years, her path-breaking contributions as a dedicated researcher of women’s history have inspired generations of scholars in the field of women’s studies in India. Her seminal books, such as Women in Colonial India and Women in Modern India, and numerous research papers have been an enriching oeuvre for women’s studies researchers. A well-known feminist historian of international repute, Geraldine is known for her dynamism, her keen interest in new research in women’s studies and the warmth of her character. Her humanism and sensitivity are truly remarkable.

This interview is an attempt to revisit the journey of Professor Geraldine Forbes as a woman thinker in the arena of women’s history. We are really indebted to Geraldine for giving us the time and space to respond to our queries. We met Prof. Geraldine Forbes in the apartment where she stays in Kolkata on 11 March 2024 at 11:00 a.m. Our meeting lasted for about one and a half hours, and the following is the output of our conversation.

Mamta Kalia's Aapki Chhoti Larki

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The current issue of Sanglap carries the translation of the Hindi writer Mamta Kalia’s story, “Aapki Chhoti Larki,” as “Your Younger Daughter.” It focuses on the internal hierarchies and dynamics of power that exist within an Indian family and interrupts the idea of a prelapsarian state of innocence associated with Indian childhood. It is a story which also shows the structural violence against women within the family where women are not only victims but, through their perpetual circuit of oppression, often naturalise the socially accepted gender roles to become perpetrators by imposing such roles on younger and more vulnerable women. The story is about Turna/Tuniya Sahae, who is a girl in her early teens and is shown to be thoroughly exploited by her parents to perform domestic work. Her mother is seen to be already overworked by doing cooking and other household chores and needs the support of her domestic help, Collins, and younger daughter, Turna. The expected roles of women in the family become more laborious due to the caste rules, and we note how the domestic help Collins could perform all household chores except cooking because of her lower caste status. Turna’s mother not only exploits Turna’s labour and keeps her away from all kinds of childlike enjoyment but also fails to understand her adolescent sexual precarity, and we observe that when a neighbour makes an obscene remark to Turna as she goes to collect water. The story shows Turna’s father as a learned man who is into literature and cinema but is more absorbed in his own world of literary discussions and friendly gatherings than caring for the female members of his family. Turna’s college-going didi (elder sister) is celebrated in the family as an exceptional woman who is supposedly more modern and devoted to studying literature and philosophy and achieves good grades and awards. Therefore, she is spared from all domestic work and, as a result, turns self-centred and insensitive. Despite being a woman, her status in the family is like that of an elder son, with whom the parents have a lot of expectations and pride. The story is important to show such implicit violence during childhood is capable of lowering the self-esteem of a girl. The story shows how Indian parents are often blinded by a certain idea of academic success and undervalue different qualities and interests that may exist in one of their children, who is not a significant achiever. The story is significant as a critique of Indian society and the institution of the family often hailed as sacred and unquestionable.