Writing the Margins: Negotiating the Politics of Translating Dalit Literature

India, 22-24th November 2017

West Bengal State University, Calcutta

UPDATE: The Fifth IATIS Regional Workshop, Translating Disability across Cultures: The Translation and Representation of Disability in the Modern Indian Short Story, was held at Jawaharlal Nehru University Campus in New Delhi, India in September 2016. Workshop organiser Someshwar Sati and his colleagues have brought out two volumes based on this workshop, one with Routledge and one with Bloomsbury. They are Disability in Translation: The Indian Experience and Reclaiming the Disabled Subject: Representing Disability in Short Fiction. Both these publications stem from work presented and undertaken at the workshop.

New political and cultural margins have emerged as contested terrain in translation studies and one such margin that has witnessed much activity is the area of Dalit Literature. With Dalits and ‘Dalit issues’ gaining electoral mileage on the Indian subcontinent, the political scenario in India has seen the emergence of a space that is fraught with anxieties, apprehensions and misunderstandings. This has led to an increasing demand for intellectual interactions and exchanges between the erstwhile ‘elite’ centers and the margins that are now making rapid strides towards the political centres. Translation has been a key word here, and speeches, essays, manifestoes have needed translations into the common Indian languages, Hindi or English.

This workshop was partly sponsored by Routledge and IATIS gratefully acknowledges their support of our aim to stimulate interaction among scholars in different geographical regions, particularly in regions where Translation Studies is still developing and gaining recognition.