An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Umesh Kumar (Nominated Fellow, 2025-26)
Rethinking Radical Translation: Ethics, Pre-Understanding, and Subaltern Narratives from India
This presentation theorises “radical translation” from the vantage point of contemporary India by examining how caste, gender, and rural violence shape translational ethics and method. Although the term has recently gained prominence in Anglophone literary discourse—most visibly through the 2025 Booker Prize citation describing Deepa Bhasthi’s Heart Lamp as a “radical translation”—its conceptual parameters remain largely undertheorised within Translation Studies.
Drawing on a close analysis of my English translations of three Hindi narratives—Premchand’s Sawa Ser Gehun, Shivmurti’s Tiriya Charittar, and Ramnika Gupta’s Daag Diya Sach—I argue that radical translation is neither a stylistic innovation nor a contemporary invention. Rather, it is a historically grounded mode of literary and cultural mediation, embedded in South Asia’s long traditions of retelling, reinterpretation, and vernacular plurality.
The presentation frames radical translation as an ethically charged practice that resists the domestication of caste-marked vocabulary, rural idiom, bonded labour, and gendered suffering within the normative fluency of English. Through specific translational decisions—such as titling, caste naming, lexical retention, explanatory framing, and the representation of embodied violence—I demonstrate how translation operates as a political intervention rather than a purely technical exercise.
I further suggest that translating subaltern narratives into English demands a hermeneutic of “pre-understanding”: a culturally situated attentiveness to the social worlds from which these texts emerge. Instead of treating English as a neutral or transparent relay, radical translation deliberately unsettles its smoothing conventions, compelling the target language to absorb the friction, density, and ethical urgency of the source text.
By extending translation’s function beyond linguistic transfer, radical translation enables structurally silenced experiences—of hunger, labour, caste humiliation, and gendered punishment—to circulate within wider intellectual, pedagogical, and activist publics. In doing so, the presentation positions radical translation as a vital methodological framework for reimagining how oppressed voices travel across languages, audiences, and epistemic regimes.
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