Translating Mumbai
Discussion and Ahmedabad Launch of Mithun Number Two and Other Mumbai Stories, by Jayant Kaikini, translated by Tejaswini Niranjana
Author
Tejaswini Niranjana
Director
Centre for Inter-Asian Research
Dean, Online Programmes
Ahmedabad University
Tejaswini Niranjana is an Indian professor, cultural theorist, translator, and author. Currently, she serves as the Director, Centre for Inter-Asian Research; and as Dean of Online Programmes, Ahmedabad University.
Her theory of the relationship between colonialism and translation, writings on feminism and the ‘culture question’ in India, and her practice-based research into music (specifically Caribbean music, Hindustani classical music, and India-China collaborations) have contributed greatly to the fields of culture studies, gender studies, translation, and ethnomusicology. Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (Berkeley, 1992), Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (Durham, 2006), and Musicophilia in Mumbai (2019) are some of her published books.
In 2021, Tejaswini Niranjana was awarded the American Literary Translators Association Prize for Prose Fiction Translation for No Presents Please, a translation of author Jayant Kaikini‘s short stories centred around the city of Mumbai. In 2019, No Presents Please was awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2018, which Niranjana shared jointly with Jayant Kaikini.
Discussant
Rita Kothari
Head of the Department, English
Professor of English
Ashoka University
Rita Kothari is a multilingual scholar and translator whose work spans across different disciplines such as literature, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and history. Her questions emerge from observations of regions and communities in the western part of the Indian subcontinent—Gujarat, Kutch, and Sindh.
Her ethnographic research on marginal communities—through religion, caste, occupation, and gender—focuses upon narratives of identity, raising questions of both linguistic and cultural translation. Kothari has translated extensively from Gujarati and Sindhi into English, and occasionally vice versa. Her translations, as well as her edited volumes, have made significant contributions to the field of language politics and translation. Movement across languages, contexts, and cultures form the fulcrum of her interests, making translation the prism through which she sees the Indian context.
Her latest book, Uneasy Translations: Self, Experience and Indian Literature, interweaves her personal journey as an academic into reflections around self, language, and translation – with an eye upon the intangibly available category of experience.
Date: Thursday, March 7, 2024
Time: 5:00 PM IST
Venue: Ahmedabad University Bookstore, University Centre, Central Campus, Navrangpura
