A Collaboration between the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University & National Translation Mission, CIIL, Mysore
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Click on the poster to access the full conference booklet
Geographical landscapes are intricately connected with the memories of communities that inhabit them. Simon Schama, in Landscape and Memory (1995), writes that “…landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock”. Landscape is a repository of human memory, “obsessions” and cultural imaginations. Landscapes are invested with the memories and aspirations of communities which call them their own. Recent works such as Michael Cronin’s Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene (2017) and The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime South Asia (2023), among others, study the impact of texts, translations, and cultural traditions in transforming landscapes and ecologies.
In this context, it is critical to interrogate the textual traditions of South Asia to explore the relationship between geography and memory in the subcontinent. The “translated geographies” of South Asian texts are an excellent site for studying these intersections. The possibilities for such study are varied, from local sacred-text and storytelling traditions and translations into regional languages, colonial translations which provided an alternate topography to the traditions of the subcontinent, administrative documents which imagined and mapped out the region according to a colonial vision, to more recent digital cartographies of the region. These texts and translations are key sites for tracing the manner in which South Asian landscapes and ecologies were transformed.
In this conference, we aim to study South Asia through these themes of translation, geography, and memory and place translation within the framework of the geographical settings in which knowledge and power were transacted. We will attempt to unravel the intertwined narratives of land, conquest, memory, and translation as found in the textual traditions of the subcontinent. This conference will also contribute to an understanding of translation as a key tool in studying the evolving geographies and ecologies of South Asia.
Sessions
DAY 1 (Thursday, Oct 5, 2023)
Inaugural
2:00 PM – 2:30 PM
Shailendra Mohan, Director, CIIL, Mysore, Dept of Education,Govt. of India
Monika Setia, Associate Country Director, Mittal Institute,Harvard University (Chair)
Keynote Lecture: Translation as Desire
2:30 PM – 3:30 PM
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Poet, Critic, Translator
Vidyan Ravinthiran, Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University (Chair)
Plenary: Worlds of Translation: Reflections on Some Larger Projects of “Translation” in the South Asian Context
3:30 PM – 4:30 PM
Francis X. Clooney, Parkman Professor of Divinity, Harvard University (Online)
Vidyan Ravinthiran, Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University (Chair)
DAY 2 (Friday, Oct 6, 2023)
Panel 1: Memory, Geo-spatiality, and Translation
9:30 AM – 11:00 AM
Avishek Parui, Associate Professor (English), Indian Institute of Technology Madras
“Memory, Forgetting, and the Translated Text in a Geo-DigitalAge”
Rindon Kundu, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Arts, Communication and Indic Studies, Sri Sri University, Cuttack
“Geo-modelling Translation Studies: Interweaving TranslationStudies with Geometry and Geography”
Tariq Khan, Officer-in-Charge, National Translation Mission (Chair)
Panel 2: Translation, Displacement, and the Poetics of Landscape
11:30 AM – 1:00 PM
Shash Trevett, Poet & Translator (Online)
“A Poetry of Witness: Translating the Trauma of the SixthLandscape in Tamil Poetry from Sri Lanka”
Umesh Kumar, Assistant Professor (English), Banaras HinduUniversity
“Translating Displacement, Translating Devastation: A Reading of Adhantar and Ringaan”
Vidyan Ravinthiran, Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University (Chair)
Panel 3: Translation, Memory, and South Asian Cartographies
2:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Chandrani Chatterjee, Associate Professor & Head, Department of English, Savitribai Phule Pune University (Online)
“‘Translating’ the ‘City’: Re-visiting Some Nineteenth century Bengali Prose Fiction”
Sarover Zaidi, Associate Professor of Practice, Jindal School of Art and Architecture
“Motif, Milieus, and Landscapes of Architecture: Poetics and Politics of Space in Bombay”
Annie Rachel Royson, India Fellow, Lakshmi Mittal and FamilySouth Asia Institute, Harvard University
“Translation, Geography, and Memory in Nineteenth CenturyIndia: A Journey through the Landscapes of Yātrik Kramaṇ andKhristāyan”
Avishek Parui, Associate Professor (English), Indian Institute ofTechnology Madras (Chair)
Vote of Thanks: 4:00 PM – 4:15 PM