Romesh Chunder Dutt’s Indian-English epics and epochs  

Oleh:

Reddy, Sheshalatha

Jenis: Article from Article
Dalam koleksi: The Journal of Commonwealth Literature vol. 47 no. 2 (Jun. 2012), page 245-263.
Topik: epics; Indian literature; Indian national identity; Mahabharata; Ramayana; Romesh Chunder Dutt; translation
Fulltext: Romesh Chunder Dutt's Indian-English.pdf (561.04KB)

Isi artikel

At the turn of the last century, the Indian poet, novelist, economist, historian, and civil servant Romesh Chunder Dutt published two English-language “condensations” and translations of the authoritative Sanskrit tellings of the ancient epics: the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. This essay argues that, for Dutt, the epics document the past, its social mores and its artefacts, while simultaneously serving as historical artefacts of, as well as living organisms from, that past. The epics are excavated treasures that embody not the dead weight of a now inanimate object but a living, breathing, speaking voice. In transposing the Sanskrit sloka into the English trochaic octametre in his translations, Dutt measures out “India” in verse, transposing the material, metrical, and spoken form of the once-known to the once-again nation. Thus, his translations of the ancient epics simultaneously establish and blur the epochal time of a supposedly historically and geographically stable and singular entity known as “India” and in so doing illustrate the fraught category of “Modern Indian Literature” and the modern Indian nation, which depends on recovering an “authentic” pre-colonial identity to inaugurate its modernity under British colonial rule.

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