Centre for South Asian Studies

Description

Part of the Translation Studies Research Seminar Series, co-badged by the Centre for South Asian Studies.

The talk examines translation, retranslation, and afterlife as key concepts from translation theory and as lived conditions shaping the post-industrial existence of Bombay’s (now Mumbai’s) textile mill workers. It argues that the closure of textile mills in the 1980s did not merely dismantle a world of labour. It effectively translated workers from subjects of collective industrial life into figures of displacement, dispossession, and social erasure.

Echoing Salman Rushdie’s formulation of modern subjects as “translated men,” remade through historical rupture and spatial dislocation, the talk conceptualises translation not only as a literary practice. It also treats translation as a socio-historical process through which labouring lives have been reconstituted under post-industrial urban transformation of India.

The talk then turns to literary translation and retranslation as practices that generate the cultural afterlife of these labour histories. It does so through two landmark plays: Jayant Pawar’s Adhantar (The Nowhere People, Marathi, 1999), together with its English translation (2012) and retranslation (2022) by Maya Pandit; and Ramu Ramanathan’s Cotton 56, Polyester 84 (English, first staged in 2006 and published in book form in 2025), along with its Hindi translation by Chetan Datar (2006).

These translations, Dr Kumar argues, cannot be treated only as neutral linguistic transfers. Instead, they ought to be read as historically situated interventions. They activate what the paper terms translated geographies of labour. This circulation allows working-class histories to move across languages, readerships, and time. By tracing both the metaphorical translation of workers’ lives and the material translation of texts, the paper shows how literary translation becomes a critical site for recovering alternative labour histories that can supplement economic, urban, and social-scientific accounts of post-industrial Bombay.

About the speaker

Umesh Kumar teaches in the Department of English at Banaras Hindu University, India. He is a practising translator and literary critic who writes regularly on translation, literature, and cultural politics. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh, where he is researching and conceptualising “radical literary translations” in the Indian context.

How to attend

This event is open to all and free to attend. No registration is required - just come along!