Writing Nation / Translating Nation: Contextualising the Politics of Erasure and Foregrounding in Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Anandamath

Abstract

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Anandamath, has been an immensely significant piece of work in the socio-cultural and political history of India. The fact that “Vande Mataram” which is officially the “national song” of India, is taken from this book, immediately inscribes it in the discursive narrative of nationalist imagination vis-à-vis its colonial past and its post independent future as a fledging nation state. Indeed right from its first publication as a book in 1882, Anandamath gripped the national imaginary leading to several translations in the various Indian languages indicating a pan-Indian appeal. Indeed, the original Bengali novel too has as many as five editions with slight changes made by the author in every successive edition. The English translations of Ananadamath, all engage with the last i.e. the fifth book edition of the novel which Lipner calls “the standard edition.” The present paper seeks to engage with four different English translations of the novel, undertaken over a period of some hundred years and problematize the politics of translation whereby the same text activates diverse, if not mutually incompatible, subtexts when translated at different junctures of the trajectory of nation building/nationalist politics. In effect the paper attempts to investigate how the act of translation is also an act of selective foregrounding/erasure mediated by an overarching narrative of intent originating from the prevalent logic/register of national self-fashioning. The four translations that will be taken up by this paper as sites of entry into this textual/ hermeneutic politics are the ones by i) Nares Chandra Sen-Gupta (1906), ii) Aurobindo Ghosh and Barindra Kumar Ghosh (1909-11), iii) Bansanta Koomar Roy (1941) and iv) Julius Lipner (2005). It is significant that even the title of the four translations differ indicating the politics of overt foregrounding and concurrent political gaps/silences.