Centre for South Asian Studies

Description

My talk draws on the experience of working with the ‘missionary archive’ on a recent research project focusing on accounts of conversion from nineteenth-century South Asia. While the project team found more than the number of autobiographical accounts anticipated, with written evidence on several documents that they were ‘true’ translations, we were unable to trace both language versions in each case. This meant developing a new set of questions on translation and its relationship with the archive. How do we interpret what we term “translation traces” in bilingual texts, translated extracts, fragments, and evidence of repeated relay translations? Why were some translation pairs preserved and not others? If we think of the archive as a ‘contact zone’ where languages, texts and memory intersect through translation, we can examine the effects that the ‘unarchiving’ of some languages and narratives have on our re-constructions of the past. As I show, asking the translation question also uncovers unexpected language trajectories along which some narratives travelled in colonial India.