Translating the Bengal Famine of 1943/Translating Famine Texts: A Workshop

 

​On the Bengal Famine of 1943

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Malabika Biswas, “The Hungry in the City: Bengal Famine of 1943”

 

Scholarship across disciplines now acknowledges that famines do not occur in modern times from natural disasters, or crop failures: famines are political outcomes. There are few sharper examples to demonstrate this than the Bengal Famine of 1943, which killed an estimated 3 million people when the colonial British government diverted grains out of Bengal to feed its troops stationed in South-East Asia. Curiously the Bengal Famine of 1943, or Panchasher Manwantar (Famine of fifty) as it is called in Bengali, alluding to the year 1350 in the Bengali calendar, is also an instructive case to underscore that what we see and remember as a famine are culturally determined. By reading some selected Famine texts, produced in the 1940s, this talk argues that the longue durée crises of hunger in Bengal and its surrounded regions came to be seen as a famine only after the city of Calcutta witnessed the spectacular arrival of rural starving masses migrating to the city in search of food. It traces how the famine, from a generic akal (bad-times) or durbhikkho (a prevalent condition of starvation and death because of chronic food scarcity; literally a ‘scarcity of alms’), culturally becomes a manwantar (an epoch’s end)—an event in the full capacity of a social transformation. It also indicates that this happens through the urban onlooker’s aesthetic experience of the hungry as an outlier to the city’s social. The act of seeing the hungry in the city is what imbibed the crises of hunger into a rhetoric of social change that was so critical in the Famine of 1943 becoming the decisive crucible of left politics and cultural production in and beyond Bengal in the subcontinent.​

 

 

On Translation

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Hephzibah Israel, (Session 1) “Translation as Intervention: Thinking Theoretically”

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Translation acts are never ‘innocent’. Every decision act of translation intervenes with a text in some form or other. This session introduces the idea of translation as leading to a fundamental and epistemological change in either the ‘meaning’ of the text, or its effects or purpose. We will discuss key debates between translation scholars on the politics of intervention and what intervention looks like when viewed from the perspective of power, direction of translation and representation of minority cultures/disenfranchised groups. 

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(Session 2) “Translation and Creativity: Doing translation”

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What is the purpose of considerations of aesthetics and creativity when translating? Can political translations also be creative? And should creative translations also be political? This session will explore the difficulties of defining creativity to arrive at a stable definition for this rather fluid concept. Yet, there are some key arguments to take into account when translating literary texts for a wider audience, especially in the context of structural inequalities. We will work on a series of short exercises to try our hand at translating creatively. The session will also include a discussion on ‘flattening discursive moves’ when translating across non-standard language registers. 

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(Session 3) “Translation workshop: Focusing on ‘Famine texts’”

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This workshop will focus on the texts brought to class by participants. We will discuss questions grouped in the following manner: 

• What?

  • The choice of text 

  • Definitions: famine, language, discourse 

•  Why?

  • What is the purpose of this project? 

  • Focus on famine as a theme/famines of the past. 

• How?

  • Translation strategies

  • Process: how are we going to proceed with this project 

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The following readings are suggested for these sessions:

1. Adejunmobi, Moradewun. ‘Translation and Postcolonial Identity: African Writing and European Languages,’ Translator: Studies in Intercultural Communication, 4(2), 1998, 163 – 81.

2. Venuti, Lawrence. ‘Invisibility’, The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2008, 1-34.

3. Shamma, Tarek. ‘The Exotic Dimension of Foreignizing Strategies: Burton's Translation of the Arabian Nights,’ The Translator, 11(1), 2005-01-01, 51 – 67.

4. Optional: Damrosch, D. (2007). ‘What could a message mean to a cloud? Kalidasa travels West.’ Translation Studies, 1(1), 41–54.

Please find them here.

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Sreejata Paul, “The Difference between Translating Prose and Verse”

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In this session on discussing the difference between translating prose and verse from a practitioner's point of view, I draw from my experience of being part of The Antonym’s translation residency at Purnendu Patri Shilpogram in August 2023 in the lead-up to that year's Kolkata Poetry Confluence and what it has meant for my translation practice. I touch on the cruciality of rhythm, cadence, figurative language, brevity, and visual parity when translating poetry in particular and the difficulties these might present for one who has predominantly concentrated on translation of bhasha literatures into English in prose in the past. Taking examples from my translations of the Bangla poetry of Ramchandra Pramanik into English, which I undertook for the residency as well as a forthcoming book-length publication from The Antonym Collection, I discuss the efficacy of incorporating internal rhymes, navigating run-on lines in the target language and accounting for cultural specificity in translating metaphors, aphorisms, onomatopoeia, etc. I also highlight the pleasures of sustained engagement with the work of one poet and the joys of being able to reflect on the process on a regular basis with a community of fellow translators. With respect to the latter, I posit a model of this kind of community in the form of the three other translators with whom I attended the residency (incidentally all women), the editor assigned by the publisher, and the residency mentor, who met every couple of months to provide feedback on working drafts and debate the nuances of this word over that, one phrase over another.

 

 

On History, Archives, and Translation

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Priyanka Basu, “Archives, Digitisation, and the Questions of Access: ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ at the British Library”

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This session draws on the curatorial work I did on the British Library’s ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ digitisation project between 2017 and 2021. Mostly focussed on low-life print in colonial Calcutta, these resources I worked with offer a new way of looking into the histories of intermediality between print and performance in nineteenth-century India. The curatorial, digitisation and research aspects of this project underline the rich and complex print-theatre histories from the Global South, indicating how to access and read them and eventually write on them. Contiguous to the ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ is also the Endangered Archives Project (EAP) at the British Library that offers digitisation opportunities for archival material in the Global South in need of urgent preservation. Both these digitisation projects highlight issues of accessibility and research pertaining to students and scholars in South Asia, promising a digital platform to dig into. However, the recent cyber-attack on the library’s resources have made inaccessibility a major challenge for many months. This session, therefore, focuses on three main questions (i) what does archiving mean to us in terms of research and teaching? (ii) do field trips enhance our practices? (iii) what best practices can we share for working with challenging materials? The answer to these questions relates to the practice of pedagogy in South Asia where reliance on digital resources such as the ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ might alienate the researcher student from the existence of physical archives, rare books, and larger colonial print culture. How do we then encourage and teach students of theatre and performance histories to go back to these sites and refamiliarize themselves with printed material, their multiple editions, their tactility, and their significance in writing theatre and performance histories. This workshop will look towards answering some of these questions in the light of curatorial experiences on the above-mentioned projects, challenges of working with research material scattered around transnationally, and a field-visit to one of the oldest libraries from colonial India (the Uttarpara Joy Krishna Public Library). 

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Participants are encouraged to reflect on the above questions by bringing in examples of archives (preferably of Indian language material) that they have visited, that are in need of preservation/digitisation, and in what ways they could be translated for research, dissemination and public engagement. Participants are also encouraged to look at two online digital archives—the Hathi Trust and Digital South Asia Library (University of Chicago) that continue to be important online resources on South Asian material, especially as accessibility issues continue to affect research on British Library resources.

 

 

Neilesh Bose, “Archives in and of Global Histories”

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I will share some reflections on a project I have been a part of since 2023, as a fellow in the Past Wrongs, Future Choices research team based at the University of Victoria, in Canada, which is a multi-year, multi-sited research collective working on synthesizing the history of Japanese internment in World War II from a global and comparative perspective drawing on histories in the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Australia, and elsewhere. Quite distant from the project of famines and famine texts, the project nevertheless aligns with the mission of critically engaging with the contested role of archives, done so with a view toward contemporary artists, activists, and memorialization.

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Sharmila, “The idea of the archive in the shifting planes of the ‘literary’”

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I propose to explore some of the mobilities and meanings that the idea of the archive has come to acquire from the shifting planes of the “literary” (I use this term to indicate both the fields of literature and of its study, without collapsing the two into each other). In doing so, I hope to tease the following questions: What forms of the archive does the literary suggest and lend itself to? Does the literary foreground new/differing meanings of the archive, its possibilities and its limits? Finally, what are some of the implications that unfold when the literary is mobilised as an archive and/or for archival functions-- notably also for the literary? I hope to keep the project of famine and famine-texts in my viewfinder as I address these questions.

 

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Sharmistha Saha, “Archives and Performance”

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In this discussion on the archives, I plan to draw attention to its relationship to performance. Theoretically, a performance has been understood as ephemeral, located in the present, bearing affective excess, having transformative powers, identified as disappearance etc. Its ‘material’ absence has been at the heart of these theoretical formulations. However, at the same time, it has also been understood as ‘circulation of representations of representations’. While for the study of performance, the archive has often been used as a resource for getting information, space to reflect on the past, location of cultural and power relations. Looking at how archival practices transforms performance and performing arts practices, I wish to draw attention at how it becomes a fruitful platform of stimuli or a provocation for artistic work (especially performance art and theatre) and theoretical discourse around practice of performance.

 

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Hephzibah Israel, “Reconstructing Historical Memory: Translation and the Archive”

[Adjoining event 1]

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Translation scholars working with historical contexts and translations are aware that they do not re-construct translation history as a consequence of working with stable and reliable archives. But the challenge they face is how their focus on translation can be used as a pivot to engage critically with archival evidence as itself a construct. Rather than ‘extract’ archival evidence to re-construct a history how does the translation scholar respond to the constructed nature of the archive in the first place? Equally, how should they interpret the silence of many archives on matters relating to translation? I will draw on my experience of working with archives relating to South Asia to comment on the construction and circulation of ‘translatables’ and ‘nontranslatables’ and the trajectory of specific historical narratives. I will argue that interpretative engagements with archival materials through the lens of translation can yield valuable insights for the historian who may not have hitherto paid attention to the transformative role of translation or languages. This approach will also be useful for translation scholars who may be tempted to treat history as a mere inanimate backdrop to their study of translation. 

 

 

Working with Performance Genres

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Priyanka Basu, The Poet’s Song ‘Folk’ and its Cultural Politics in South Asia by (Routledge, 2024), presentation by the author and discussion by Neilesh Bose and Sharmistha Saha 

[Adjoining Event 2] 

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This book explores the ‘folk’ performance genre of Kobigaan, a dialogic song-theatre form in which performers verse-duel in contemporary West Bengal and Bangladesh. It is a verse-duelling genre practiced across the India-Bangladesh border. It is one of the many dialogic genres in South Asia highlighting the verbal virtuosity, bricolage, and storytelling abilities of performers (kobiyaals). While rural performances of this genre (most often tied with religious rituals and village fairs) can last through overnight sessions, Kobigaan’s other formats are often truncated and adapted according to diverse venues, audience tastes and artistic choices. Caste, class, gender, and identity politics intertwine with the larger cultural politics of ‘folk’ in cross-border contemporary practices of Kobigaan. Consequently, several performing groups become ‘claimants’ of authentic Kobigaan as it travels from rural settings to urban festivals, and from Bengali cinema to television and the new media. Over time, the element of debate (kobir loraai) has become a synecdoche for Kobigaan. It has also come to signify people’s songs, national culture, folk heritage and even sound chronotopes (in cinema). Conflictingly, the perception of Kobigaan in Bengali cultural memory also relies on its status as ‘decadent’, ‘extinct’ or ‘obsolete’. 

The book shows how the genre, thought to be a nearly extinct form, is still prevalent in the India-Bangladesh region. It shows how, like many other ‘folk’ practices in South and South-East Asia, the content and format of this genre has undergone vital changes, thus raising questions of authenticity, patronage, and cultural politics. The Poet’s Song captures live performances of Kobigaan through ethnographies spread across borders—from village rituals to urban festivals, and from Bengali cinema to television and new media. While understanding Kobigaan from the practitioners’ points of view, this book also explores the crucial issues of gender, marginalisation, and representation that are true of any performance genre.