Among all successful ‘enterprises’ organized by West Bengal State University was the international conference programme “Translating Culture: Society, History, Politics” organised by the Dept. of English and the Dept. of Sociology of West Bengal State University (WBSU) at Shivananda Hall, Ramkrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Golpark, Kolkata. The three-day conference held consecutively on 9th, 10th and 11th March, 2015 foregathered eminent speakers from all over the country and overseas as well. 

 

The Inaugural Session on Day I clearly foresaw the impending triumph of the seminar when Prof. Jyotish Prakash Basu, The Hon’ble Vice Chancellor of WBSU expressed his gratitude for and supported the endeavour of the organizers followed by the Welcome Address by Dr. Ramanuj Ganguly, the Hon’ble Registrar of the university.

 

In the very first Session chaired by the eminent academic Prof. Krishna Sen, former H.O.D at Dept. of English, University of Calcutta,and Visiting Professor at the University’s Women’s Studies Research Centre, Leverhulme , Fakrul Alam,Professorof English at the University of Dhaka, delivered the first keynote address-- “Cultural Translation and the Transformation of Culture”. Professor Alam is a visiting Associate Professor at Clemson University, USA and a 

notable academic, a literary critic, essayist and editor as well as a translator from Bengali.  He  emphasised the importance of close reading and empathy as two essential requirements for translation, explained how the original undergoes a transformation in translation using Walter Benjamin’s idea of ‘transformation of the target language through literary translation’. He drew attention to the beneficial aspects of cultural translation, one of which is definitely the enrichment of the source language despite myriad restrictions.

 

 The Plenary Session chaired by Prof. Fakrul Alam introduced Prof. Krishna Sen’s paper “Imaging Shree Ramkrishna: Max Muller, Romain Rolland, Christopher Isherwood” which focused mainly on cultural diversity and cultural difference using the image of Ramkrishna as a convenient tool. Her paper also discussed the issues of homoeroticism, ‘Oedipus complex’ with which the occident often associates Ramkrishna.  Shormishtha Panja, Professor of 

English and Joint Director, Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of Delhi, a lecturer at the English Department of Stanford University and an Assistant Professor at the Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi dealt with the Boydell Shakespeare Project and how it might have influenced the production of illustrated Shakespeare translations in Bengali. Prof. Panja linked Boydell with Shakespeare in 19th and early 20th century colonial Bengal on this ground that both Boydell and Bengal made Shakespeare as an essential part of national iconography. The paper demonstrated that the visual narrative of the Bengali illustrations, which stresses that emotions are rooted in a particular cultural context, highlight the complexities of the assimilation of Shakespeare into Bengali cultural imaginary.

 

Business Session I chaired by Prof. Jayati Gupta included two papers entitled “Richardson, the Universal History, and the Negotiations: Global Translations, English Domesticity” and “Cultural Translation and the Question of Gender” by Dr. Samara Cahill and Dr. Ritu Sen Chaudhuri respectively. Dr. Cahill, an Assistant Professor of eighteenth-century English literature in the Division of English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, provided a foundation for Richardson’s global awareness and analysed how that might have informed his representations of cultural aesthetics in his fictions by using two of his projects as a printer- the printing of the Universal History and of The Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe.

 

Dr. Chaudhuri, Associate Professor of Dept. of Sociology of WBSU, argued that the phallogocentric language of translatio makes women passive castrated object against the active phallic subject.

 

Prof. Panja chaired Business Session II that presented two very interesting papers based on  Bollywood. The first one entitled “Multiculturalism and the Universality of Bollywood in Gauri Shinde’s English/Vinglish” was presented by Dr. Sneha Kar Chaudhuri, Assistant Professor of English at WBSU. She is the Assistant Editor and Editorial Board member of Neo-Victorian Studies (ISSN 1757-9481), an international peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by Swansea University, Wales, UK. In her paper she aimed to show the dissonances present in the director’s feminist assumption about women’s empowerment through the apparently enriching medium of the English Language Learning and multicultural exposure. The paper brought out some problems inherent in the universalist discourse of this Bollywood version of cultural transmission and translation and also worked them out with the contemporary theories on language, diaspora and multiculturalism.

 

The last paper on Day I- “Urban Space in Kabir Khan’s New York” by Dr. Chandrava Chakravarty, Associate Professor and Head of the Dept. of English at WBSU, focussed on Bollywood’s treatment of the theme of terrorism from a specifically Indian point of view and offers  Kabir Khan’s New York(2009) as a test case. The film deploys  Indian Muslims in the post 9/11 New York to offer a cinematic lens through which the dialectical relationship between urban space and human identity can be explored. Soja suggests that the social is always at the same time spatial. With this spatial turn in mind, the paper argues that the representation of New York bring to the fore the dynamic and disturbing connection between urban space, individual response to this spatial experience, and constructions of human identity. As individual’s identity engages with the notions of ‘space’ and ‘place’, one experiences a different way of knowing the city. The representations of individual identity and urban space focus on both individual and collective affective responses to the city and reconsider the connections between larger identity construction and the individuals’ access to urban spaces. 

 

The Keynote of Day II was delivered by Prof. Gopal Guru, an eminent scholar of Dalit studies. The following plenary session comprised eminent academic personalities such as Prof. Shefali Moitra, Prof Pradip Bose and Prof. Abhijit Sen. Pradip Kumar Bose, Professor of Sociology at Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, an expert in research methodology, and above all known a superb essayist whose works in English and Bengali on tribes, castes and 

families in Bengal are widely read, delivered his talk on an intriguing idea  “The Translation is a Traitor”. He argued, that anthropologists often invoked the crucial term traduttoretradittore to highlight the impossibility of translating cultures. His paper intended to point out the similarities between cultural translations and linguistic translations and interrogated the legitimacy of translation.

 

Shefali Moitro, former Professor of Philosophy at Jadavpur University (1979-2008), Ex Director, School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University and Joint Coordinator Centre for Counselling Services and Studies in Self-Development, Jadavpur University, argued about the confinement of ‘a different voice’ and in her paper “A Different Voice and Semantic Authority” posed the question whether internalized patriarchy could co-exist with a different voice. In feminist parlance the nuances of ‘a different voice’ have not remained confined to the realm mapped by Carol Gilligan in her book In a Different Voice. Differences could be graded, differences could be radical. Differences could be essential, they could be contingent. They could be central or they could be peripheral. Can an internalized patriarchy co-exist with a different voice? What is the relationship between a web of belief, a conceptual scheme, and a form of life on the one hand and voice? Does the translation of a different voice need a different vocabulary, a different logic and semantics? If it does then who adjudicates these needs and how are they to be fulfilled? The incommensurability of translation is a classical problem which takes on a new turn in the context of gender politics.

 

The audience was greatly moved by the profound presentation of “Rabindranath’s Theatre: Translating Cultures” by Abhijit Sen, Professor at the Dept. of English and Other Modern European Languages, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. He eulogized Tagore’s creativity and artistic genius that helped his literary career to evolve and emphasised how Tagore’s theatre translated cultures and emdraced cross-cultural transactions as its guiding principle.

 

Prof. Julie Banerjee Mehta, a scholar in English and South-Asian Studies from the University of Toronto in English Literature and South Asian Studies, presented a  paper on “Translated Men: How Asian Diasporic Writing Celebrates the Hyphen”. She marked translation, transmutation and transformation as three driving forces that fuel the literary works of Diasporic South Asian writers.

 

 The next paper “Deconstructing Identity: Transmigration and Transculturation of Forgotten Muslims in the New World” by SomdattaMondal, Professor at Dept. of English and Other Modern European Languages, Visva-Bharati, and a recipient of several prestigious fellowships and awards, dealt with the stories of Bengali Muslim migrants between 1880s and 1940s in the US and their multi-ethnic children and descendents. These case histories 

provide  interesting examples of transmigration as well as transculturation.

 

 The last session of Day II offered two fascinating and informative presentations by Partha Ganguly and Abhinandan Bag, Research Scholars in Dept. of English, WBSU. ParthaGanguly’s paper “Translating Sharadotsav: Redefining Ancient Culture to Resolve Modern Crisis” sought to explore Tagore’s attempt to translate an ancient culture for the modern times and to bridge a linguistic gap by reviving the ancient Indian ethics as an antidote to the violence and crises that the world witnessed in the form of the World War.

 

Abhinandan Bag’s presentation “Exploring Musicality, Polylingualism and the Poetics of Transnational Language in Amitav Ghosh’s The River of Smoke invites the raudience to meditate upon a bigger metaphysical picture of the histories dependant on the narratives of placement and displacement. He has projected how the smaller terms of ‘community’ are themselves collapsed into recognition that all people can be traced back to the histories of displacement and migration. This diffusion of ‘big history’  into long  movements and strange movements of Transnationalism is most crucially  drawn out through Ghosh’s heightened and enhanced exploration of what may be described as – to use Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s  term – ‘the polylingualism’  of language.

 

On Day III our Chair persons were Prof. Julie Banerjee Mehta, Prof.Jayati Gupta and Prof. Anirban Das for respective sessions. Plenary Session IV began with Prof. Kavita Punjabi’s paper “Postmodern Appropriations of the Postcolonial: The Case of Magic Realism”. Prof. Punjabi, H.O.D. of Comparative Literature, Co-ordinator of the Centre for Studies in Latin American Literatures and Cultures at Jadavpur University and the editor of Poetics and Politics of Sufism and Bhakti in South Asia: Love, Loss and Liberation, divided her argument into three sections. The first part of this presentation elaborates lejoCarpentier’s concept of “lo real maravilloso” (the “marvellous real”), which refers to specific aspects of cross-cultural perception in the hybrid reality of Latin America; the second part engages with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Nobel Prize speech and some examples from his fiction to elaborate aspects of “magical realism” in the context of literary encounters between Latin America and “western” cultures; and the last section  argues for the epistemological and political difference between “magic realism” and postmodern literature,  despite the apparent similarities in forms of representation.

 

The next plenary speaker Prof. Anirban Das is a faculty in Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and the editor of the first comprehensive volume on deconstruction in Bangla, Banglay Binirman/Abinirman (2007). His paper “Translation in a Zone of Power: Thinking across Two Cultures” focused on the debates  around constructivism through two moments: one is Rabindranath Tagore’s attempts to think about science; the other the disciplinary wars in the wake of the Sokal affair. Certain problems around the question of the scientific method and the ethical/political question of the relation to the non-human will also appear prominently in the discussion. 

 

Moinak Biswas, Professor of Department of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, Coordinator of the Media Lab at Jadavpur, the editor of the Journal of the Moving Image made an entertaining audio-visual presentations to illustrate his paper “Locality and Location: Some Observation on a Cinematic Practice”. The paper dealt with the exploration of ‘locality’ as a visible tendency in films across the world through dense and tactile details. There is a visible tendency in films across the world to construct or explore ‘locality’ through dense and tactile details.  From physical traits of characters to objects and surfaces – detailing has sought to arrive at cinematic equivalents of the habitual information- overload of the media world. The more images travel from one corner of the world to another, employ similar techniques of representation across territories, the more a desire for ethnographic specificity becomes evident in cinema.  But in what way is it possible to evoke locality today without a real possibility of dissolution of its boundaries into globally circulating forms of location? The presentation looked at some recent films to identify the processes through which cinema seeks to resolve this question.

 

After the lunch break the seminar resumed with Business Session III that offered three papers by Dr. Partha Sarathi Mandal, Mr. Raju Raman and Dr.  Suddhaseel Sen. Dr. Mondal, formerly a member of editorial advisory board of the 'Indian Journal of Medical Ethics' and presently Chairperson, Centre for Social Theory, School of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai talked about translation as an integral part of the anthropological enterprise and some recent developments in anthropological theory in his presentation entitled “Mapping Other cultures: Difficulties in Anthropology”.

 

Mr. Raman, formerly Programme Director at Goethe-Institute / Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata and presently Programme Consultant to the Victoria Memorial Hall addressed some key questions related to cultural exchanges in his paper “The Crossroads of Cultural Exchange”. Promoting cultural exchange has been considered to be an effective tool in fostering and even furthering diplomatic relations between different countries. There have also been endless debates on what one can and should showcase in an alien culture. There is the constant danger of something being labelled as too elitist, esoteric, exotic or event downright crass in the name of popular culture. Can a culture-specific art form have the same kind of impact when transported/translated into another culture? How much is ‘lost in translation’? Are the yardsticks different for different art forms – e.g. visual arts, performing arts, audiovisual creations? To what extent does the choice of target audience play a role? –These are some of the interesting issues that raman’s paper addressed on the basis of specific cultural offerings that Kolkata has experienced during the last four decades. The various visits of world 

acclaimed German choreographer Pina Bausch and her productions, including the last one in the year 2009, provide a good case study. There have also been experiments with art/music in public spaces. In the reverse direction, showcasing of Indian culture in Europe, is often laced with an element of exotica. The trend started with the concept of Apna Utsav promoted by our former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. The result – Indian folk art entered five-star culture as ornamental peripheral.

 

 Dr. Sen made an explicit distinction between the older notion of translation or adaptation and the notable shift it has gained over the last decade centering  on the question of fidelity in his thought-provoking presentation “Problematizing “Authenticity”: Translation, Transculturation, and Cultural Self-Fashioning”.

 

Like Day II there was again a Panel of Research Scholars from the Discipline of Sociology where we had two young speakers. Mahua Ray, Assistant Professor at the Dept. of Sociology, Lady Brabourne College and presently pursuing her Ph.D in Sociology, introduced her paper “Translated Identities or an Identity of Her Own: Exploring New Dimensions in Cultural Translation”. It examined the dynamics of power-play in the realm of translation and how a 

woman’s identity is evolved through a process of translation in the various phases of her life by a male translator.

 

Tanushree Kundu,who worked as a research assistant in different projects that dealt with important socio-cultural issues in contemporary society in the Department of History, Jadavpur University and currently pursuing PhD at School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University as a UGC-NET JUNIOR RESEARCH FELLOW, provided a riveting account of socio-cultural life of ‘Hijras’, their constructed identities and multi-dimensional desires which are often suppressed by the recognition of ‘third gender’. Her paper was entitled “Construction of Hijra Identity: A Process of Multilayered Becoming”.

 

The conference offered riches on varied areas of explorations and left the audience refreshed. It hopes to inspire the students and scholars to undertake research on the highly challenging and complex domains of translation, transculturation and formulations of human subjectivities.