Do You Understand Me?: The Culture of Translation in India

Abstract

India’s cultures of translation date back to pre-colonial times that had witnessed several kinds of literary translation, though our ancients may not claim that they were doing translations. This is perhaps natural to multilingual cultures where poets (Kabir, Mira, Nanak, Vidyapati) easily moved from one language to another without even being aware of it; and translators did not fear being executed for deviations as in the West (remember the fate of Etienne Dolet, the 16th century French translator of Plato?).