The Disengaged ‘Escapist’:

The ‘Modular’ Narrative of Manoj Das

Seen through the Prism of Postcolonial Narratology

Deb Kamal Ganguly

(deb99kamal@yahoo.com)

[ The scavenger lady, who used to clean the queen’s toilet, fell sick one day. So, on her
behalf, her husband had to go to perform the duty. He entered through the specific back
entrance marked for the scavengers to get to the bucket of excreta, placed inside a
chamber under the queen’s latrine-hole. At the same time the queen was using the latrine.
As the scavenger looked up, he caught a glimpse of the inner thigh of the queen. It was
silky smooth, fair and soft as a jasmine petal. That single glimpse of an inch of the
queen’s thigh made the scavenger greatly infatuated with the queen – how beautiful the
queen might be in her totality.

The scavenger came back home being sick with desire, almost left food and sleep.
Intrigued by the change his wife questioned and finally he had to confess about his
sudden obsession for the queen.

‘O God! How can you dare to think to get the queen? You, only a mere scavenger!
Ordinary people can’t even get a glimpse of her’ – the wife tried to pacify him and
distract his mind, but could not succeed.

The scavenger started behaving crazily, sinks more within himself and finally left his
home, became a wanderer. One day, while he was sitting under a banyan tree, thinking
nothing but about the visceral beauty of the queen’s thigh – villagers started gathering
around him. They found him in that same meditative state for last few days, they thought
him to be a great mendicant. They started providing offerings to him. Still he was
unmoved, hardly touched any of the offerings, deeply immersed in his single aspect of
obsession.

Within the month his fame as a sage was spread all over, people started to come from
distant places to pay homage to him. He was unmoved and still was gazing at the queen’s
thigh within his mind. Finally a day came, when the queen herself came to pay respect to
this new holy man – she prostrated herself before him, touched her feet, placed offerings.
He could not have cared less, he didn’t know who she was and it did not matter at all to
him.

So intense was his desire that he got transfixed in a state where he had no desire at all. ]

To start an ‘academic’ discussion with a rather intriguing story may not be considered as
a standard norm in the present time – but in pre-modern times, a tale was often regarded
as a meta-discourse, as a response or even as a counter argument to a basic proposition.

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The elimination of narrative as a potential form of academic discourse in a way marks the
post-enlightenment thrust on empiricism, which was pervasive in a hegemonic way in the
colonial remodeling of the idea of humanities and social sciences.

I have just now ‘re-told’ a folktale, ‘The Scavenger’s Dream’1 collected by A.K.
Ramanujan. And the story came to my mind almost as an immediate narrative response to
the reading experience of ‘The Escapist’. The obvious points of similarity and the
divergence between ‘The Escapist’ and the ‘The Scavenger’s Dream’ are in a way self
evident. I took some effort to get a copy of the book of folktales and read the folk story
again from the printed book, and I found, Ramanujan has marked it as an Oriya tale.
There could not have been a better co-incidence to get initiated in the mental process to
create a discourse around ‘The Escapist’.

In the very beginning, let me confess that though this is primarily a seminar on
translation, involving the Oriya original 'Akashara Ishara' and the English translation 'The
Escapist' I am familiar only with the translation, the original is inaccessible to me because
I have no skills in reading Oriya. I am a native speaker of Bangla, and as a cognate
language to Bangla, almost having a similar historiography, Oriya language universe may
not be that far from me in the conceptual level. I guess some common Oriya utterance
can generate a sense of meaning in the mind of any average Bengalee. There might be
similarity also in the ethical-cultural framework which plays a subterranean role at times
to the linguistic expressions. So what I mean to say, even without reading the 'original', I
may have some tools, other than the translated text to create an idea about the source text.
And that is not going to be reader-independent, it would be relative and contextual. If we
are to grant any legitimacy to this positioning about translation, we would bring the
individuated translation-reader back to the central grid of translation with a bit of context-
dependency as a necessary rider. And if it is applicable for the translation-reader, it would
be applicable for the translation-commentator as well, because 'commentator' is primarily
a 'reader', who has the confidence and urge to share her readings with the world.
Translation studies is a tripartite field of exchange between linguistics, literary studies
and cultural studies2, and our approach so far is situated closer to cultural studies and
understandably little away from linguistics.

I am going to dilute the idea of ‘original text’ and ‘translation’ a little more to support my
disadvantageous position. In a way the idea of ‘original’ is quite elusive, as it might have
shared some ideas/world views already expressed in the past in some form or the other.
As Octavio Paz puts it --
“Each text is unique, yet at the same time it is the translation of
another text. No text can be completely original because
language itself, in its very essence, is already a translation –
first from the nonverbal world, and then, because each sign
and each phrase is a translation of another sign, another phrase.”3
Carlos Fuentes has gone further saying that “ ‘originality is a sickness’, the sickness of a
modernity that is always aspiring to see itself as something new.”4

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The critical intersection between the folk tale ‘The Scavenger’s Dream’, the Oriya novel
Akashara Ishara and its English translation ‘The Escapist’ in terms of shared ideas may
provide us a way to look at all the three artifacts as three different renditions or
translations of some core original ideas. In that sense the narrative becomes more of a
bearer of those culturally embedded ideas in various proportion. For the time being we
are positing a comparative framework from the folklore to the ‘translated’ novel with an
in between imagined ‘original’ in the vernacular.

It may be proposed that even without the knowledge of the source text and source
language, there is always a mental process operating inside the mind of the reader of the
translated text. It is about an approximation of the cultural complex, which have
produced the source text; along with the translation it may take into account various
secondary knowledge, information, mediation and the translation-reader bounces her
cultural 'self' to the 'other', to that of the source culture. Often that approximation might
be inscribed with imaginations, misread information, which may even lead to a mental
process of ‘creative misunderstanding’ – and this may be seen as a ‘necessary evil’ in the
process of translating the ‘other’ culture in one’s own terms. When we talk about things
like 'Orientalism', the cumulative imagination through translation for the source culture
might have been a process largely at work to create an imagined Orient for Europe. In my
case, even the close compatibility of Bangla and Oriya has been a source for 'creative
misunderstanding' – in the translation the vernacular name of the novel is transliterated.
'Akashara' in Oriya would be 'Akasher' in Bangla, just leaving the last alphabet 'a' and
replacing the previous 'a' with 'e'. But I read it as 'Akshara', just overlooking another 'a'
inbetween and for quite some time I knew the name in the vernacular in 'Akshara Ishara',
i.e. suggestion of alphabets; and I almost made a dense reading of the name, specially
relating to the climactic moment of the story, the protagonist lying under the vast night
sky, being small and vulnerable – when the suggestion came to him from the alphabets
floating through the dark sky – the term 'Akshar' in Sanskrit etymology suggests not only
letters but also something which is nonperishable – so somewhere the 'Akshar' and the
sense of 'Akash' merges, 'Akshar' is not a straitjacketed metaphor of 'Akash' but having a
kind of association of metonymy in their overlapping areas of meaning – I was quite
elated to notice the self-implied convolution in the name of the novel. When I came to
know the name correctly, actually, to tell the truth, I was little disappointed and for that I
have nobody to blame other than my 'creative misunderstanding'.

The acts involving translation, i.e. translating, reading translation, commenting on

translation always involves the question of translatability of culture. The problem often is
similar to the classical anthropology. Anthropologists of 19 th and early 20th century were
often preoccupied with the problem – how to translate a cultural concept, often having
cognitive bearings in a particular society, for the people who might not have that cultural
concept at all. We broadly get three responses as interpretative standards to the problem –
first, the Universalism – where the similarities between two cultural spheres are taken
into account and the dissimilarities have often been discounted; second, the Evolutionism
– where the differences are noted but graded within a teleological grid of evolution of
culture from the stage of 'immature' to 'mature'; and the third – the Relativism – where
differences are taken with utmost seriousness and the cultural tendencies are plotted

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against their specific and often non-equivalent contexts.5 I would propose that these three
frame works have implications even beyond anthropology and we may draw some
insights from these frameworks vis a vis our current discussion.

Lets first ponder over something very simple – whether the literary form called 'novel'
can assimilate unequivocally all the disperse fictional forms labeled as 'novel', those have
been produced in different continents in the world since last two centuries? Whatever
different and seemingly contradictory courses the trajectory the 'novel might have taken
over these significant period of time in different spaces, the basic trope of the core
concept of 'novel' hardly changed – the mimesis, the narrative causality, secularly defined
space and time, the individuated 'self' at the focal point of the narrative web, a central
narrative motivation consuming all these aspects. Glyn White referring Josipovici
mentions about one more primary property observable in the initial English novels:
“Encouraged by the Aristotelian line of mimesis which required artifice
to be hidden: 'From the start (Defoe, Richardson) the writers of the
novels seem determined to pretend that their work is not made, but that
it simply exists ... the effect is to divert attention from the fact that a
novel, like a poem is a made thing...”6
The difference among the 'novels' of Defoe, Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, William
Burroughs or Orhan Pamuk may be of light years proportion; but within the basic moral
framework of the concept of 'novel', either the texts have conformed with the framework
or have become the opposite or distant 'other'. The implied memory of the 'novel' as a
concept lies always embedded in a text named as 'novel', either by the visible presence or
by the felt and marked absence of the conceptual framework, created with a perceivable
effort. That is to say, for example, whatever phantasmagoria 'surrealism' might have tried
out, never it could tear itself from its ontological bondage of 'realism', 'surrealism' could
only exist vis a vis 'realism'.

If at all the term 'novel' had that universalizing claim in Europe since post-enlightenment
era or in other continents since the inception of colonial modernity – the aspiration of
Universalism might have prompted specially the 'nationalist' section to find in the
imagined 'tradition', something similar to the 'novel' form. We have the example of 7 th
century Sanskrit text Kadamvari, which was hailed by the new aspirant Hindi novelists in
19th century to write new novels, following the framework of Kadamvari7. Ayyappa
Panicker observes the Kadamvari phenomenon in southern India as well – in Marathi and
Kannada, Kadamvari became the generic term for 'novel' itself 8. Not exactly similar but a
noticeable tendency of Universalism may be found out in Vasudha Dalmia's effort in
finding traits of 'early modernism' in a 17 th century merchant narrative placed in the
merchant related cultural complex of Delhi and Agra, and she connects that 'early
modern' narrative 'Aradhakathanak' to the first established novel 'Pariksha Guru' in Hindi
in 19th century in the similar cultural space9. Dalmia seems to acknowledge the universal
ontological character of novel and tries to trace it back to a pre-colonial time, also in a
way suggesting that pre-colonial narrative forms could flow without much hindrance into
the literary structure in a colonized time, as might be the case for the majority of the
literary productions in India since late 19th century.

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The idea of 'Evolutionism' with respect to central and hegemonic conception of 'novel'
can be plotted as the colonizers' view to the 'efforts' of novel writing by the colonized.
The ideal was already in place, the realist Cartesian coordinates of time and space vis a
vis narrative was already being championed, it was only a question of gradual betterment
of native efforts from 'immature' to 'mature' novels. Elsewhere I have proposed that the
craze for literate section of the natives in India for novel in late 19 th century can be
plotted parallel to the fascination for realist oil paintings and the tactility of the
Renaissance Perspectivalism. For eager 'evolutionists' the novels in vernacular indeed
were becoming an extension of rational space,
“like continuous emotional landscapes with multiple shades and
tones, where characters situated in respective spatial perspectives
specified by discrete emotive-descriptive-temporal co-ordinates.”10
The mimesis was expected to an extent where the linguistic mirroring can visualize the
narrative space with a tactile effect, novel was almost becoming a mimetic visual form.

The response of 'Relativism' regarding the question of novel can be fleshed out within the
paradigm of postcolonialism and postmodernism. Postcolonialism talks about modernity
and modernist forms like 'novel' with a self-imposed relativistic attitude of self-
referentiality – where it tries to define its 'difference' with the hegemonic form of
'modernity' and asserts its own situated-ness as a valid 'other' form of 'modernity'. In the
Latin-american quest for different form/forms of 'novel' (narrative) called 'magic realism',
germinated from their specific linguistic space, the postcolonial urge for 'difference' and
'hybridity' can be easily felt. The Noble Prize lecture given by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in
1982 highlighted strongly that aspect of 'otherness', which according to him would be
beyond the reach of Euro-American mind for comprehension. He said:
“…it is understandable that the rational talents on this side of the
world, exalted in the contemplation of their own cultures, should have
found themselves without valid means to interpret us. It is only
natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they
use for themselves…”11
But the term 'magic realism' also got diluted in later years for its numerous context-free
usages, almost in the same way, the term 'realism' used to put off Roman Jacobson for its
vast non-specific usages. In Indian scenario also there are general usages of the term
'magic realism', even in case of Oriya literature the term has been used by scholars. 12 It is
high time to think whether we need a different term to be coined for the contemporary
narrative domain in India, the parallel, convergent or divergent chronotopes 13 competing
with each other in various languages, to mark their difference from the normative, Euro-
centric idea of 'novel'.

From the postmodernist point of view, even the notion of novel as an overarching genre
of fiction gets splintered – the idea gets backed by Baudrillard on one hand, who
questioned the basic ontological basis of 'reality'(14) in this time of hyper-mediation and
by Fredric Jameson on the other hand, who upturned the notion of 'temporality'(15) itself,
arguing that postmodern condition frees signifiers form their temporal contexts and the
free interplay of signifiers being loosened from their bondage to the respective signified
creates an amorphous sense of vertigo regarding the idea of the linear progression of

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time. Hardly any one can deny that if linear notion of time and reality is taken out of the
concept of novel, only vestiges may remain. Another architect of postmodernism,
Lyotard argued about the dissolution of the 'grand narratives' which constituted the base
of the 'modernism'. Paul Sheehan writes -
“The death of the grand narrative thus heralds the birth of
the local narrative, with its emphasis on diversity and heterogeneity.”(16)
So it is not difficult to imagine a theoretical situation where the literary expressions are
assumed to cross the genre boundaries on one hand, self-reflexive element as something
being constantly scrutinized in them, every literary artifact can be seen as rooted to its
immediate context in an unprecedented way.

We have digressed quite a bit from the specific discussion on translation, rather we spent
some time with different approach to novel and narratology in general. As we have
skewed the standard frameworks of looking at a translation – rather we look at the
mobility and variance of some cultural ideas being manifested from the folktale to novel
to translation, narratology would be our basic tool. We'll see if a work of translation is
seen from the aspect of narratology rather than the normal practice of translation
dynamics, it might offer a different reading.

Lets first consider the overlaps of cultural ideation between the folk tale and the novel. In
both the narratives one cultural notion is clear – if one merely even simulates a saintly act
with all his conscious mind, he is going to transcend the threshold of his immediate social
status and surroundings. The act of faking a holy man makes oneself holy – in Hindu
mind this suggestion can be picked up even from the ancient epic – from the means of
transformation of Dasyu Ratnakar to Rishi Valmiki(17). The notion is remarkably free
from the idea of individual subjectivity, conflict and intentionality of the protagonist.
This cultural world view, when resides in the folk tale, floats in a limbo of non-specific
space and time, as a folk tale generally should be; where as the idea sits in the novel with
its specific time reference to a postcolonial modernity in the subcontinent. In the folk tale
the idea is enmeshed within the non-specified spatio-temporality and blends fine. When
the apparatus of novel in terms of specificity of time has worked on the idea, there is an
undying feeling that the idea itself is in opposition to the rational, progress-oriented,
'realist', 'grand narrative' of the 'modernist' time.

Another key element of novel is that – the person, the 'individual' in the sense of
European Enlightenment is the causal propeller of the narrative. The folk tale, we saw, is
also a story of an individual, but the subjective tone of the individual cannot be heard
there. The narrative envelops and erases the individual. To become a novel, an acute
subjective tone has to play its part, almost like -- if we can hear the internal monologue of
the person in the folktale, it would become a novel. In 'Akashara Ishara' we always hear a
tone of self-reflexive subjectivity, as if it serves its elemental role to become a 'novel', an
apprehension is expressed through the posed distance between the form and function of
that subjectivity in the narrative, the subjectivity is always somehow alienated from the
course of narrative. Remarkably in the climax of the novel, almost as a sudden intrusion,
the moment of transcendence makes this alienation between the subjectivity and the
narrative dissolve away, the whole narrative plot and critical subjectivity gets subjugated

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by the moment of 'sublime' suggestion. By the name 'Akashara Ishara', the writer perhaps
hinted at this moment of dissolution of subjectivity, of narrative course of the novel – i.e.
the devaluation of the elemental idioms of the genre of 'novel'. This tricky disavowal of
the universal proposition of novel indeed calls for our attention to postcolonial
narratology. Gerald Prince observes in the essay 'Postcolonial Narratology' --
“... in keeping with its post colonial orientation, it ... might
grant special consideration to the possibility of gaps,
indeterminacies and inconsistencies within a sequence...,
of contradiction between two sequences, ... transgressions of
ontological boundaries, confluences and transfers across distinct
domains, or 'strange loops', whereby a given sequence embeds
the sequence it is itself embedded in.”(18)
Some of these characteristics are not far from characteristics of Indian narratology as
found out by K. Ayyappa Paniker while examining various classical and folk narrative
texts of India(19). He categorized a list of narrative traits among which Interiorization
(i.e. a sense of contrast or even contradiction between the surface features and internal
essence of the narrative) can be clearly relevant in the present case. So within the
framework of postcolonial narratology we may say that for 'Akashara Ishara' the
precolonial narratological element has been acted upon with the modernist idiom of
'novel' to create a successful 'hybrid' where its postcolonial signature is etched on the
surface of the narrative.

Another strong narratological device which has been used with great importance is the
synchrony of events around a careful ploy of co-incidence, not one but many – the series
of co-incidences become the index of narrative movement. The skepticism of the realism
of classical 'novel' tradition to a narrative formed by co-incidences is not hard to
comprehend, in case of co-incidences, the causality, one of the main moral proposition fo
the novel form gets challenged. It may be proposed that the writer could easily give a
shape to the narrative almost posing it like a causal chain of events, but very consciously
he overplays the rhetoric of co-incidence. From the very beginning the writer almost
demands a folklore-ish instantaneous believability to the performance space of the story
teller by the listener/reader – the reader may not question the realistic possibility of all
these co-incidences but should be acclimatized to this environment of co-incidences and
would be perennially excited about the possibility of the next set of co-incidence to occur
– his narrative interest would be sustained by the curiosity for the next co-incidence. A
similar ploy may be found out in various folktales where the leitmotif of the narrative
itself is the co-incidence. Ramanujan while talking about the implied make-belief code of
folk-tale performance in India observed that the tale in the end would often resolve the
burden of believability for the listener by saying – 'the story went to Kashi and we came
back to Kanchi' (20), or, 'aamar kathaaTi phuralo, naTe gaachTi muRalo' (i.e. my story
ends and the plant has been eaten'. So the last segment tends to set apart the course of the
narrative and course of the listener. In case of 'The Escapist' the resolution does not imply
such a kind of Brechtian alienation, if we may say so, but nevertheless it tends to resolve
by saying -- “...my narrative may read like a novel.' One one hand it suggests that the
narrative may be something like 'novel', not exactly 'novel'. On the other hand it may
even suggest it is unbelievable like a novel but that chain of co-incidences are true. From

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both the angles, we can perceive the engagement of the writer's consciousness to skew
the universalist idea of 'novel' and to mark a conscious postcolonial attitude. According to
scholastic categories of fiction, devised in the Western academia, this subtle game with
the dominant codes can be referred as 'metafiction'. Patricia Waugh defines 'metafiction'
by a kind of
“fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically
draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose
questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.”(21)

Lets for a while depart from the world of alphabets to that of moving images. In the west
some new kinds of cinema has come up within the framework of dominant film
production and distribution system in recent years, where various structural manipulation
has been done to a story which otherwise can be narrated in causal mode through linear
thread of unidirectional time. Two prominent examples of this kind of films are 'Run Lola
Run' and 'Memento'. In 'Run Lola Run' the narrative is shown through various parallel
possibilities, each time foregrounded by a different triggering of co-incidence. The
temporal structure of 'Memento' is more complicated, where an otherwise causal
narrative is being perceived by the protagonist as a series of accidents and co-incidences,
as he suffers from a strange disease of brain, 'short term memory loss'. He always
possesses a memory of say last 15 minutes of his life, before that period he forgets
everything. These new narratives are being scrutinized by the scholars of film studies in
the West, and those have been categorized as 'modular narratives'(22). The postmodern
attitude of this narratives are evident in way, as they try to obliterate the modernist sense
of causal, linear, industrial, 'homogeneous empty' time. We would like to borrow the
concept of 'modular narrative' for 'The Escapist' and may indulge ourselves to see, if we
can find some other kind of 'modular' attitude in the novel. In case of these two films,
whatever structural manipulations have been tried out, it is actually happening within the
notion of horizontal flow of time. Obviously the unidirectionality of the time flow has
been challenged and bits of unidirectional time vectors have been clipped out from their
assumed total flow and the clips have been rearranged giving rise to co-incidence, or
simultaneity of narrative possibility. However those films hardly challenge the horizontal
nature of time flow. In 'The Escapist' the most of the narrative is quite akin to
unidirectionality of time, with some specified flash backs and a marked ellipsis in the end
– it is perfectly within the order of 'modernist' rhetoric of horizontal and even
unidirectional time. But the narrative marks its difference by almost proposing a vertical
sense of time; if horizontal time is perceived by the concept by time flow, the vertical
property of time would be a specific thrust of an 'instant', that thrust to the 'instant'
undermines the sense of flow of time – and that 'instant' looms large in the narrative at
the climactic point through the suggestion of the sky. It seems the 'instant' of that
transcendence is almost a predetermined moment of destiny, which is placed vertically
across the horizontal flow of time. The narrative reaches that vertical moment through a
horizontal time flow, muddled by the several eddies of co-incidence. So the study of
modularity in postcolonial narratives like 'The Escapist' may need 'other' conceptual
frameworks of time than that of 'modernist' paradigm.

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When 'Akashara Ishara', gets translated in the name 'The Escapist' by the writer himself,
the phenomenon calls for our attention. The name 'The Escapist' brings back the typical
sense of 'person the individual' in the foreground' leaving the moment of ethereal
suggestion, unlike the original. The cause may be anticipated – as if the English
translation has to fit itself on the outset to the codes of dominant novel idioms of the
West, and it starts from the name, suggesting a protagonist-dependant narrative. Even in
that case of assumption we may ask -- whether the idea of 'person' in 'The Escapist' is any
different from that of dominant Euro-American tradition, 'whether the concept of 'person'
vary cross-culturally'? Richard Shweder and Edmund J. Bourne took up this question and
like true empiricists they took and analyzed data from some Americans and also from a
sample of Oriya population in Bhubaneshwar across various socio-economic and even
caste status. The sample informants were asked to describe the personalities of some of
their close associates. They observed -
Oriyas are more likely to say “She brings cakes to my family on
festival days.” Americans are more likely to say “She is friendly.”...
Oriyas tell you what someone has done (for example, “He curses at
his neighbors”). The emphasis is upon behavioral occurrences or
“cases.” Americans tell you what is true of what someone has done
(for example, “He is aggressive and hostile”).(23)
They came out with statistical results which confirms the observation of various Western
scholars for various non-western peoples – about a kind of concrete, situation bound,
context-dependent social thinking on the part of Oriyas vis a vis more abstract, context-
free usages by Americans hinting a thought guided by absolute and generalizing terms. It
is not a new knowledge, A.K. Ramanujan also has talked about the context-sensitivity of
Indian mindset. Shweder and Bourne moved little further, they tried to correlate to the
overarching social metaphors for these communities. For the American mind – the
individual is at the heart of things, individuality and societal norms are often in
opposition to each other and morally individual is to be prioritized over society. For the
Oriya consciousness, holism (i.e. the living body as the metaphor of the society) is the
key, where individuals can be perceived only with respect to their contextual relation to
the whole, to the 'body' of the society. Other than society, the person-individual has no
place in the thinking, only exception is the mendicant, the sadhu, who has denounced not
only the society, but also his societal-self. So, though the name 'The Escapist' seems to
cater to the Western idea of protagonist individual, the narrative oscillates between these
two notions of person-hood.

In the characterization of the novel under discussion, also would reveal the idea of
context-sensitivity. The moral profiles of even the seemingly negative characters are not
absolute, they are bound to their context and that’s why even the negativity of the strong
characters like Jayant Thakore performs a sad parody to himself and becomes redeemable
at the end of the novel.

'Postcolonialism' is the buzz-word not only in the field of narratology, perhaps more in
case of translation studies. Postcolonial translation studies has evoked strong metaphors
of 'cannibalism' (24) in case of translations in Latin-American world, where the colonized
is supposed to 'devour' the cultural artifacts of the colonial masters while violating the

9
colonial cultural codes, might be with an oblique sense of homage and to get a sense
cultural nourishment from the act. But for the purpose of the sub-continent, we may have
to look for different metaphor, specially in the case when the Indian fiction is getting
translated in English, intending a dual readership of other Indians not knowing the
vernacular and obviously non-Indian global reader. The glossary at the end of the
translation shows more than fifty terms, aimed mainly at the global reader, some are as
common as 'potato', 'poison' etc. The general view about glossing is about facilitating the
reader from other cultural complexes for a sense of transparency, an exercise of
familiarization process, a kind of well-meaning, missionary view as expressed by
scholars like Nida in 1960s(25). Contemporary scholars like Venuti problematizes the
issue by forwarding a phrase 'illusion of transparency'(26). Defamiliarization also is a
well adopted translation technique, where the uneven power of cultural spheres are
negotiated. When terms like 'aloo', 'puja', 'vish' are put in the glossary, which has single
word translations in English, the intent of mono-dimensional transparency comes into
question. Yes, there is a veil of transparency for the global translation-reader, but at the
deep structure, somewhere the more complex intent can be imagined. It is not simply a
postcolonial anxiety of an Indian writer to represent his native cultural ambiance for the
best possible understandability at the global scale. The specific vernacular words in the
glossary and more vernacular words which are not in the glossary are tied to the various
cultural ideas (some of which have been taken up in the present article) in an
untranslatable way, the words, their utterance and phonetic quality are the signifiers of
the indigenous cultural codes – after translation the codes may look to some extent
meaningful to the global reader, but the complete significance would remain always
beyond grasp. That quirky note of caution, a defamiliarization masked by the
familiarization framework, though in invisible letters, somehow gets pronounced through
this specific glossing activity. This postcolonial mode of negotiation, putting a veil of
familiarity in terms of universalizing, dominant cultural codes for the indigenous
elements, which are ontologically different – somehow relates to the shrewdness of
Hindu mind, rather that of a Brahmin mind, who under pressure may adopt outwardly the
codes of the dominant culture, but the mind is capable of functioning differently for the
outer society and inner belief system, it is capable of cognitive differentiation and
alienation of these two worlds in mutually exclusive domains, for its own existence. We
are almost close to a point, where these narrative strategies, either in the vernacular or in
the translation may call for a different nomenclature, say, 'Brahminical Realism', for
instance, to mark its specific identity. It is time to integrate narratological studies in
translation studies, so that we may figure out a complex web of give and take, sharing
and denying both at the intra-cultural and inter-cultural level.

Lastly, I would make a kind of sweeping comment with reference to the upcoming
scholarship of postnationalism. Scholars are offering a new conceptual framework, where
the national boundaries and entities are continuously trespassed from both the sides by
entities like money, information, terrorism, flow of immigrants, tourism etc(27) – the
severe intensity of these flows call for a reexamination of the 'nation' as a concept. These
flows 'over' the entity of nation are overtly visible and strong and demands a platform
beyond the idea of nation. That postnational reality also can be reciprocated within the
boundary of the nation, if some socio-political activities and attitudes like insurgency etc

10
are considered as flows 'under' the entity of nation(28). In 'The Escapist' in various ways,
the elements and the fragments of the nation reach the narrative. We see the strange
encounter of a road building project, a signifier of the rhetoric of 'progress' of the welfare
state and the opposition of the local 'political society', where the supernatural in terms of
divine dream becomes the tool. The same tool once more is exercised by another section
of the local 'political society' to create a way out for the road to be built, the national
rhetoric to function. We see the state polity in the form of the chief minister visiting the
'holy man', who under the pressure of circumstances are compelled to fake as a sadhu.
All these peculiar encounters suggest a complicated political reality, where religion and
supernatural are very much players along with so-called secular elements in the national
arena – the idea is not something new. But strangely, the protagonist is gradually
transferred to a realm of consciousness, where concerns of nation can hardly map him. If
the 'protagonist individual' in the sense of a 'novel' is marked with the agency of
modernity, as a natural association, 'he' is supposed to have an abiding relationship with
the idea of nation also, as 'nation' is a kind of modernist destiny for the pre-nation kind of
socio-political formations. The protagonist in 'The Escapist', escapes the framework of
nation through the suggestions of the sky. I am tempted to say this position as a
postnational moment of fictive reality, a kind of liminal space, a sense of 'in-
betweenness', beyond the poles of for-the-nation and against-the-nation. We may
conclude by borrowing Homi Bhaba --
“we should remember that ... the in-between space – that carries
the burden of the meaning of culture. ... And by exploring this
Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge
as the others of our selves.”(29)

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(Endnote section is incomplete)

11
1
Ramanujan A.K. - Folktales From India, pp 286-7, Penguin Books India, 2009
2
(endnote Politics of Translation...)
3
Bassnett Susan, Trivedi Harish ed. - 'Introduction: of colonies, cannibals and vernaculars' in 'Post-colonial
Translation', p.3, Routledge, 1999
4
ibid
5
Shweder Richard, Bourne Edmund - Does the Concept of the Person Vary Cross-Culturally?
6
White Glyn - Reading the Graphic Surface: The Presence of Book in Prose Fiction, p.49, Manchester University
Press, 2005
7
(footnote EPW, Vasudha Dalmia essay or footnote section)
8
Paniker Ayyappa – Indian Narratology, ....
9
footnote EPW, Vasudha Dalmia essay
1 0
Ganguly D.K. - Unpublished project proposal to Sarai, CSDS, New Delhi for Associate Fellowship, 2005
1 1
Marquez Gabriel Garcia – Nobel Lecture, 8th Dec. 1982, in Nobel Lectures, Literature 1981-1990, ed.
Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., 1993
1 2
Mohanty Sachidananda - Stories (the) Grand Mother Told: 'Magic Realism' in Contemporary Oriya
Fiction, in The ICFAI Journal of English Studies, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 7-11, September 2006
1 3
Chronotope, a Bakhtinian term, suggesting a space-time notion towards which the narratives would
gravitate...
14 Constable Catherine – Postmodernism and Film – in ‘The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism’, ed.
Connor Steven, p.44, Cambridge University Press, 2004
15 ibid, p.48
16 ibid, p.29
17 I am indebted to Prof. B.N. Patnaik for this observation.
18 Prince Gerald – ‘Postcolonial Narratology’ in ‘A Companion to Narrative Theory’, ed. Phelan James,
Rabinowitz Peter J., p.376, Blackwell Publishing, 2005
19 Paniker Ayyappa – same as note 8…
20 Ramanujan A.K. – Collected Works…
21 White Glyn – same as note 6, p.54…
22 Cameron Allan – Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema – Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
23 Shweder Richard, Bourne Edmund - same as note 5…
24 Viera Else Rebeiro Pires – Liberating Calibans: readings of Antropofagia and Haroldo de Campos’
poetics of transcreation – pp. 95-113, in Post-colonial Translation, Bassnett Susan, Trivedi Harish ed. Routledge, 1999
25 Rubel Paula G., Rosman Abraham - Introduction: Translation and Anthropology in Translating Cultures:
Perspectives on Translation and Anthropology, Rubel Paula G., Rosman Abraham ed., pp. 1-24, Berg, 2003
26 ibid
27 Articles on Postnationalism – EPW…
28 ibid
29 same as note 3