A Multilingual Nation: Translation and Language Dynamic in India

This anthology takes head on some of the cardinal principles of translation and illustrates how they do not apply to India. The idea of ’source’ - the language and text you translate from - is in a multilingual society slippery and protean, refusing to be confined to any one language. This experience comes to us in this anthology not only from translation theorists, and practitioners, but also from philosophers, historians, and other social scientists. In that sense, the anthology demonstrates the all-pervasive nature of translation in every sphere in India, and in the process it overturns the assumptions of even the steady nature of language, its definition, and the peculiar fragility that is revealed in the process of translation. The anthology provocatively asks if multilingualism in India is itself a translation, an act not an outcome.