Emerging as a language of literary composition in the Roman script in the sixteenth century, Konkani acquired attributes over time that proved to be recalcitrant in the face of majoritarian cultural narratives of the nineteenth century. The diversity of scripts in which Konkani was written, the distribution of speakers and writers along the western coast, and the association of the Roman script with colonialism and conversion were represented as challenges that had to be overcome. While an implicit objective of transcriptions and translations was to produce a literary tradition from an oral culture, the explicit objective was to purge the language of elements that were seen to have alienated it from itself. Transcrip- tions and translations were a corrective for the Roman script and for Portuguese words and usages, successfully 'restoring' the language by propelling it towards acquiring markers of cultural authenticity. Those aspects of Konkani that found no place in this project, as is also the case with other languages of the subcontinent, demand more appropriate frameworks to represent the contexts and genres in which they circulate.
Rochelle Pinto is an independent researcher. She has held research fellow- ships at the L'Institut d'Études Avancées, Nantes (2019-20), the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi (2015-2017), and the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi (2014-2015). She taught at Delhi Univer- sity, FLAME, Pune and at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bengalu- ru, where she co-directed a two-year project, Archive and Access', funded by the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, Bombay (2009-2011).
Her first book, Between Empires - Print and Politics in Goa (2007) was awarded the Hira Lal Gupta Research award (2009). Her other publications include, "The Foral in the history of the comunidades of Goa' in Journal of World History (June 2018), 'Govin- da Samanta, or eluding ethnography in the colonial novel', in Novel Formations (2019), and 'Settling the land the village and the threat of capital in the novel in Goa' in Commodities and Affect (2017). She co-authored 'Archives and the State', an ethnographic account of the state of archives as an online publication for the Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru.
P. T. Chacko's suggestion for the future of language policy in India has been described as a sane voice in the Constituent Assembly debates, a retrospective reaction to the history of state intervention in language use. The history of policy indicates however, that Chacko's views did not prevail. Language policy was so overwhelmingly defined by the presence of the state that even those petitioning for recognition of excluded languages often used statist terms to define them. Over two decades before Goa's integration into the Indian Republic in 1961, literary perspectives on language had begun to converge with the expectations of linguistic nationalism in British- and then independent-India. The consequences of being excluded from modern economies and administration were too severe for the state's linguistic intervention to be ignored. This book is not an account of the debates that contributed to the official recognition of Konkani in 1987 and in 1992, in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, a list that determines which languages will be used for official purposes and thereby become the responsibility of the state. Instead, it examines the assumptions about the nature of language itself that are the grounds for official recognition. Konkani was an exemplar of a language that did not meet these criteria.
These aberrations from the state model are elaborated in transcriptions and translations and it is in these texts that a language that would eventually meet state criteria and the aspirations of some of its elite was manufactured.
Napoleao Bonaparte, a Konkani text of 1894, is similar to the story Julus pai tum kiteac chintai? Puta tuca kitem zai? of 1931 in as far as neither fits current expectations of a translation. Both adapt stories about the lives of Napoleon and Julius Caesar, to comment on contemporary Goa and its history, to assess the political values these historical figures represented, against the situation of ordinary people in Goa. In fact, this strategy of reimagining the lives of historical figures, or, of inserting an account of life in Goa into the biographies of legendary figures did not distinguish between translation and adaptation and was used often in popular writing, even in the early works of the well-known writer V. Varde Valaulikar. As with localised versions of the Ramayana, this could be characterised as a practice of adopting and embedding traditions or genres, unlike modern author-centered conceptions of literature.
A catalogue in the British Library in London mentions the kin al-anbiya (A history of the Saints from Adam), a translation into Konkani by Kazi Kutb al-Din; a rare sign of the presence of Islamic culture in the nineteenth century history of Konkani print. The entry in the catalogue states that it was written in Sindhi characters. Nur Sobers-Khan, lead curator for South Asia at the British library, confirmed that it was written in the Naskh typeface, that the introductory words and the content relied heavily on Arabic and Persian terminology (with possible Sindhi usages, which may explain the initial catalogue description). Published in 1893 from Bombay, the book is possibly the only known copy of a translated Konkani text from this period, in this typeface. Sobers- Khan's approximate summary of the initial lines of the text reads, the author has translated the work into Konkani so that it will be useful to Konkani-speaking Muslims seeking religious guidance [...]he specifically mentions female Muslims (muslimat) as the target audience, in addition to Muslim men (muslimin). While 'muslimin wa muslimat' is a Quranic phrase that often gets repeated in Islamic religious discourse, its use here seems to be deliberate, with a view to including female readers in the audience.'"
The fact that there are only a few known Konkani texts in this script is not the only reason why it is hard to fit the Kisas al-anbiya into a history of translation or into a history of Konkani writing.5 Literary histories, as critiques of nationalism have demonstrated, did not merely list texts chronologically but used explicit or implicit cultural categories that determined which would be included in national canons of literature. The following sections examine those assumptions of literary histories that positioned Konkani in a hierarchical relation with other languages. This positioning was both a process and a dominant narrative within literary history that would determine how the task of translation was addressed in relation to Konkani.
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