WRITING 'HINDOOSTANEE': FALSE TRANSLATIONS AND THE CURSE OF KEHAMA

Padma Rangarajan

Abstract

This article focuses on one of the key transitional moments in British literature and politics. The late eighteenth century witnessed not only the definitive positioning of Britain as the ruling power in the Indian subcontinent, but also the flowering of orientalist studies, as hithertofore inaccessible languages and literatures were translated for a voracious European intelligentsia. In Britain this literary and political pairing resulted in a unique form of fiction I have chosen to call 'false translations': oriental tales written by British authors that combine a desire to emulate a 'real' oriental voice with extensive citation of unfamiliar and foreign customs, phrases, and mythologies. Examining the ideological ramifications of such literature, the article analyzes one of the most spectacular so-called failures of the genre: Robert Southey's The Curse of Kehama. Although many critics wrestling with Kekama have declared the unwieldy poem the result of ideological and aesthetic fracturing, I propose a reading, based on Southey's correspondence and the poem's two prefaces, in which the poem's failure is not the involuntary result of a divided sensibility, but rather the refusal to translate. Using the false translation against itself Southey turns the genre's tempered admiration of the Orient into a stinging diatribe against Hinduism.