Writing Between Languages: Translation and Multilingualism in Indian Francophone Writing

(Hardback)

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This open access book casts light on a corpus of Indian Francophone literatures by Indian writers and translators from former French territories of India and beyond.
By examining this understudied facet of Indian literatures, the book offers an alternative and enriched vision of the Indian literary landscape. The book also demonstrates the entanglements between French and Indian languages and literatures that have arisen owing to processes of translation and writing undertaken by Indian Francophone writers, who have acted as intercultural mediators between France and India, facilitating Indo-French exchange. Through an analysis of their work, this book investigates the impact of French literatures on regional traditions of India.

The corpus consists of literatures composed by the writers Ari Gautier (Pondicherry), M. Mukundan (Mah), Manohar Rai Sardessai (Goa), Toru Dutt (Bengal) and Shumona Sinha (Bengal), who conceptualize their relationship to and employ the French language in their writing in various ways. Translation and multilingualism, in various forms, play an important role in the uvre of all these writers. Through a close reading of the corpus, Sheela Mahadevan explores how, why and to what effect these authors write between French and Indian languages and literatures, to enhance theorization of multilingualism and translation. Through an analysis of intersections between translation and creative writing in the work of Indian Francophone writers, this book also enriches existing understanding of the concept of transcreation, a term frequently used to describe translation processes in India. It thereby contributes to existing discussions on the boundaries of literary translation and the concept of originality. Additionally, the book explores what the process of translating Indian Francophone writing can reveal about literary multilingualism, contributing to debates about translation as research.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI.

Author Bio

Sheela Mahadevan is Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Liverpool, UK.