Thursday, June 2, 2011

Transcript: “Scarcely English, but British, of Course, by Descent”: Eurocentrism and Orientalism in SM Stirling’s Peshawar Lancers

I presented this over at SPWF recently for the academic track. Here's the transcript I was reading off, in all its unpolished glory. It needs more tweaking (thanks, Martha, for your helpful comments to give more background on the novel at the beginning!) but I think I hit my major spots with this one for now.
In an alternate history, comets rained down from the heavens in the 19th century and brought on an ice age onto the Global North. Europeans picked up and moved operations into the southern colonies: Benjamin Disraeli oversaw an exodus from England to British India, Napoleon VI’s France is now centered in Algiers in the midst of the Mediterranean, Japan and China have taken over East Asia, and Russia eats its own colonial subjects in Central Asia. In SM Stirling’s vision of this alternate 21st century, life is very much as we might recognize from reading very old pulp fiction, such as Rudyard Kipling and William Burroughs, which is no surprise, since The Peshawar Lancers was inspired by these writers, among others. And like these old storytellers, within the first few pages, it is clear for whom the text is.
            We are in British India, following the adventures of Captain Athelstane King, who has now been embroiled in an international plot to throw the world into chaos (isn’t that always the case?). He is accompanied by Narayan Singh, a loyal Sikh, companion since childhood and thus the perfect right-hand man for this noble member of the Angrezi ruling class.
            The India that Stirling has created is a British India that has never been freed from British imperialism, to the point where the English are now part of the upper-caste, and according to the text, recognized by most Hindus of this alternate India to be part of the warrior-ruler caste. The India in this text is not an uncivilized wilderness, nor is there a Mysterious Orient. It is not a distant space onto which the civilized Westerners compare themselves to, but are in fact a part of. Moreover, it is an India in which the British have become part of the fabric of society, taking up forms of Indian-ness. How, then, does Stirling construct the new Angrezi identity? Is it truly a syncretic mix of India and Britain, or is it a Britain superimposed onto Indian geography and culture?
            Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, in their book Unthinking Eurocentrism, sum up the tendency of Eurocentrism in media thusly: “Eurocentrism sanitizes Western history while patronizing and demonizing the non-West; it thinks of itself in terms of its noblest achievements—science, progress, humanism—but of the non-West in terms of its deficiencies, real or imagined” (3). In Peshawar Lancers, this country generally recognized as Western have packed and moved operations from the British Isles to India, a country normally recognized as Eastern. The seat of Empire is therefore the British Raj, not Britain. Does this change in physical and political geography somehow de-center the Eurocentrism that “permeates and structures contemporary practices and representations even after the formal end of colonialism” (2)?
            Keeping in mind the contradictions inherent in Eurocentrism, we can still ask whether the Peshawar Lancers, written in the tradition of old adventure stories, is also heir to the imbalanced racial dynamics and Orientalist tropesof the genre. For, although this is clearly intended to be a self-contained world, the fashioning of this world is clearly informed by stereotypes of the Other in our own primary world. We could tell with two relationships: the relationship between text and reader, and the relationship between the various cast members and political entities within the text.
            If we were to begin with the dictionary Hindi, we could see the first cracks in the believability of the setting. The novel is written in English, and even in scenes in which the characters are clearly speaking a different language, the scene is in English, so that the English-language reader can follow the plot. There are several scenes in which any non-English phrases are immediately translated into English, for the reader’s benefit. As the setting is one in which several languages are spoken, this is understandable, until one considers the audience. Who is consuming this novel? Who is the text translated for, and why is it so necessary? And thus, whose perspective is being centered?
            On the very second page, the protagonist, Athelstane King, criticizes an Australian battalion for not knowing Hindi, and though he speaks to Narayan in English, Narayan replies in Hindi. This should hint that within this setting, the Hindi language is as important to everyday living as English. Even in the appendix, the author notes, the Imperial English is “a creolized English-based pidgin, one which would have been barely comprehensible to their Victorian ancestors. It was at least one-third Indian in vocabulary, with major loans from ... Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Bihari, Pashtun, and Tamil; syntax had also changed” (475).
            Again, let us consider who the audience of this text is: likely English-educated, English-language speakers, who have little to no understanding of other cultures beyond English-speaking ones. An audience who commands the languages ostensibly spoken in this text is likely to identify the flaws in the stilted, constantly translated Hindi. Yet this alternate British India cleaves to the framework of the familiar: a foreign world that must be translated and made natural to the reader who understands “standard English”. When we consider the history of the English language as the lingua franca of the world, tied to colonialism and continued through economic imperialism today, we can place the innocuous and well-intended translations into a larger context of a White Gaze that must be centered. Thus, in order to be properly consumed, by the right kind of audience, the foreign words must be made comprehensible through their English counterparts.
            The facade of a multicultural, Hindu-influenced British identity is further cracked when we analyse how the non-British-descended characters, speaking languages other than English, are transcribed. The conversation between Angrezi characters flows casually, with grammatical contractions, colloquialisms and other syntactical variations that make dialogue sound as close as possible to our contemporary dialogue, despite the appendix that states that the British characters are speaking a Hindi-influenced pidgin. However, when characters such as Narayan Singh or Ibrahim Khan speak, their sentences are formal, with ‘thee’ and ‘thy,’ echoing Kipling’s translation of his own Indian characters. David Stewart calls this a narrative technique that is “an aural switch between languages” (51), particularly in interactions between English speakers and Hindi speakers.
            Yet compare this narrative technique to scenes in which Ignatieff, the Russian antagonist, consults with two representatives from Dai-Nippon, the East Asian empire, one Japanese and one Chinese; when they speak, their words reflect the syntax used in exclusively English scenes. How, then, do we parse this difference? The only similarity between this Eastern set of characters and the British characters is that they are all members of a colonizing power. Therefore, in the case of Narayan Singh and Ibrahim Khan, the aural shift from contemporary English into a Shakespearean-esque dialect serves to mark their Other-ness within their own context in the land that the British continued to colonize. Although it is historically accurate that native Anglicized Indians were taught through old English literary texts, making their English dialect sound Shakesperean, in an attempt to mimick their betters, this is not a case of mimicry on the part of the colonized; it is a filter from a native language into an English that reflects that native language. Hence, the reader notes them not only as speaking differently, but in a dialect unnatural to English speakers today.
            It is this relationship between the British-descended ruling class and their colonial subjects, the Sikhs and Gurkhas, and the Pathani Muslims who raid their borders, that we see the remnants of traditional Orientalism within the text. The Sikhs and Muslims have long been characterized in Orientalist discourse as violent, needing to be contained. Not only have the Sikhs’ violence have been apprehended in Stirling’s British India to serve the colonizers’ militia, but Narayan Singh compares the Kings’ estate, Rexin Manor, favourably to the Punjab homeland, which is “far too flat and harshly dry for his taste” (109). Ibrahim Khan, despite being a prince of his tribe, is an ornery servant, a “border wolf” and wild, which Athelstane tolerates as he is “familiar with the manners of the Afghan highlands, where insolence was a way of life” (97). This contrast between the difficult Muslim Afghan thief and the tolerant British-descended soldier re-affirms the continued stereotypes of Muslims as demanding and uncivilized versus the civilized Westerner.
            It is also between the various empires that we see traces of Orientalism, or using a foreign space in order to define oneself against: in one scene, the Crown Prince of India, Charles, soothes his sister, Sita, from her anger at an arranged marriage to the prince of France, by saying, “you’ll be queen, there soon enough. And one from the Raj—the Empire—at that. You’ll set the fashion; have ‘em all dressing civilized in saris or shalwar qamiz in no time” to which Sita asks, “are they civilized?” (66). Later, Charles reminds the French envoy, “our two realms are the last of the seed of Europe, of the West” (68), as they discuss an alliance against the Muslim Caliph who rules “from the Danube to Baluchistan” (44). Contrasting self against an uncivilized sister realm, to allying with the sister realm against a Muslim enemy—also a common target of Orientalism that Edward Said pointed to—the British Empire within the pages of the Peshawar Lancers remains an Empire that puts its own interests first, as a Western entity fortifying itself against a Muslim borderland, an “East Asian colossus” (44) and Russian cannibals in Central Asia. Accompanying these relationships are sentiments that reflect the colonizing mindset that sees territory not as regions filled with self-defining peoples, but as prizes “ripe for the plucking” such as the Sultanate of Egypt (45) or a potential new province to add in a generation or two through royal marriages (66).
            What is most obvious of the text’s Eurocentrism is its cast of characters; although it is an ensemble cast, those who are traditional protagonists, moving through arcs that develop their characters, are the British-descended characters (and the one French character). The plot is pushed along by the machinations of the new Oriental threats that would like to see the British Raj in chaos, and all Athelstane and his twin sister Cassandra have to do, according to the clairvoyant Yasmini, is survive, which entails stopping the bad guy, the Russian Ignatieff, with the help of French envoy Henry de Vascogne, political officer Sir Manfred Warburton, Prince Charles and Princess Sita. As they hurtle towards the traditional heteronormative happy ending, Athelstane enlists Ibrahim Khan, and Yasmini joins him, to better humanity’s chances against the cult she has been enslaved by.
            The identities of these characters are clear, even as Stirling attempts to muddy the concept of Britishness: when Henry de Vascogne comments on the English food of “garlic nan, vindaloo, stuffed eggplant ... and okra” (43)—food the reader would recognize as culturally Indian, Sir Manfred replies, “we’re scarcely English. British, of course, by descent” (43). Mostly, Athelstane thinks, and the text meanders into an interior dialogue commenting on his genealogy that involved “a Rajput noblewoman” (43) and an Afghan princess in Sir Manfred’s family tree (44). Later, Cassandra and Charles would contemplate their aversion to beef, a cultural and emotional inheritance from being born in India (176), with its “thousands of castes ... and each with its own weird complexity of rules about food” (175).
            Yet although the influence is said to have gone both ways—the Angrezi class adopting the mores of the people they have colonized, even as the colonized have adopted the new ruling class into their religious system of belief—the influence is not demonstrated in any of the non-British characters. Narayan Singh is a family retainer, but he does not act nor code as European in any mannerism he exhibits. Hasamurti, Athelstane’s Kashmiri mistress, might have broken this although she spends her days waiting for her lover to return from the front by eating sweets and reading trashy novels (31); the only two lines she speaks are translated into a more colloquial, playful English, to reflect the relationship and her character. However, she dies, serving the role of the Woman in Refrigerator, as Gail Simone identified in many male-centric comics, with a racialized angle besides. Ibrahim Khan is depicted as fairly irredeemable, culturally. The only Anglicized Indian character is the King Emperor’s aide, Lord Pratap Batwa, who speaks with the same inflections that the British characters do, yet his role is minimal. All these characters are attached in some way to aid one of the main Angrezi protagonists; none of them have arcs of their own in which they exhibit an agency that is self-driven. The exchange is for the seed of Europe, growing in the lands of Asia, with little input from the seed of the Indian subcontinent on how it is ruled.
            Thus, Ibrahim Khan is resplendent as a prince of Pashtuns, or close to resplendence, only towards the denouement; Narayan Singh will be wounded and tortured for Athelstane’s sake, and black-haired, strong-featured Hasamurti must die in order to make way for the slender, pale-skinned, pale-haired Yasmini with the “astonishing blue-green eyes” (447). The cannibal Russian and his cronies must be thwarted. The story is not for those who recognize their heritage in the colonized, unless they are willing to ignore the continued history of colonialism and its effects on lived reality; it is, once again, for those who are descended of colonizers, who have the privilege to ignore history for an adventure that recalls all the greatness and none of the pain that Empire wreaked.

14 comments:

  1. I'm interested in the use of language in the book, as you describe it (I haven't read it as yet). Kipling's use of "thou"/"thee"/"thy"/"thine" etc. in the English translations of his characters' Hindustani accurately captures the presumable use of "tum" (less formal/more intimate) rather than "aap" (formal/polite/distancing). Sometimes modern English speakers have a sense of "thou", "thee" etc. as being 'formal', because these forms are now archaic; but of course they are just the more intimate/less polite forms of the 2nd person pronoun (the formal/polite form is "you"/"ye"). Does Stirling have any Hindi himself?

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  2. Not that I know of. From what I understand, all the Hindi within the text is dictionary-translated. Moreover, this text is supposed to take place in the 21st century (our century).

    While yes, the use of those pronouns are supposed to connote informality in their original context, this doesn't translate well in a genre novel to an audience who may or may not know this. I question its use, esp. when the Euro-descended English-speakers speak, as one might say, "like we do".

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  3. Right. I mean Kipling is of course *the* white imperalist, but he grew up speaking Hindi, so at least he knows what he's doing.

    I'm guessing Stirling doesn't understand Kipling's use of "thou"/"thee": for instance in _Kim_ the title character and the lama use "thou" towards each other to reflect their closeness (I'm not sure whether "thou" translates Hindi "tum" or "tu", the latter is more familiar/more intimate/less polite, and of course, etymologically related to English "thou", Spanish "tú" etc.). If he has "Hindi-speaking" characters use "thou" throughout, then I'm guessing he doesn't understand the reason Kipling employed it.

    From your description, the book sounds rather poorly executed. Which is a pity, because the basic idea sounds interesting. On the language-side though, a more realistic scenario would be frequent code-switching between Hindi and English, but this would require an author fluent in Hindi (and, I suppose, an audience with some knowledge of Hindi).

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  4. I noted that you're criticizing the novel for translating the Hindi words, however, I wasn't exactly sure why you were criticizing it for that, despite your explanation.

    "let us consider who the audience of this text is: likely English-educated, English-language speakers, who have little to no understanding of other cultures beyond English-speaking ones."

    If the audience is English-language speakers, and presumably people who speak only English, then what is the reason to put in Hindi words or phrases, aside from atmosphere? The book, I assume, is published in the UK. The official language of the UK is English, and the audience is English-speakers, and I imagine that the author does not know any of the recognized languages of the United Kingdom, so it makes sense that he would, in fact, write in English.

    Are you criticizing the fact that he's writing in English, or the fact that the situation he's in makes it necessary to write in English, and not, say only Hindu?

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  5. be_slayed: I think code-switching would definitely have been really excellent for such a novel because it would have de-centered the English language as the main medium of communication, especially between the different groups. It's also very unsatisfactory considering the appendix that states the English being spoken is a pidgin English, yet this isn't reflected in the text at all.

    Krystina: Even if the book was published in the UK, this still wouldn't have worked considering the TYPES of English present in the book: the Hindi-speakers are translated into an archaic-sounding English, whereas the British characters, supposedly speaking a *pidgin* English, are translated into a more colloquial, accessible English. Why this discrepancy?

    If ALL the characters were written as speaking similar dialects of English, I wouldn't have such a quibble about it; however, when certain characters are written as having more formal language to indicate they're speaking in a different language, it's exoticizing.

    Frankly, it might have been more daring to actually write in pidgin English, considering the huge South Asian population in the UK. Just because the official language of the UK is English doesn't mean no one appreciates linguistic play in transnational code-switching. As it is, this is a text for a *certain subset* of English speakers which Others other subsets of English speakers.

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  6. Also, Krystina, your comment assumes that English-speakers only speak a certain kind of English that MUST be catered to. Moreover, as I stated, there ARE Hindi phrases in the text, which are clearly badly translated from a Hindi-English dictionary. This furthers the Other-ing of Hindi speakers and centers white readings of the text as more important.

    There are entire conversations on how language choices make or break the Eurocentrism of a text. Even I've criticized non-English words gratuitously thrown in for a "foreign" atmosphere. There ARE, however, ways to work non-English into a dominantly-English text without alienating non-English speakers.

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  7. Interesting review, but you're missing a few points. I'll address the actual text for a start. First rock:

    >The India that Stirling has created is a British India that has never been freed from British imperialism

    -- actually it would be more accurate to say it's an India that rules the world, or about half of it, as the "hyperpower" of its day.

    In this history, -England- is a backward colony ruled from -India-, and England's inhabitants are regarded as ever-so-slightly "tainted" by their unclean cannibal blood.

    One needs to keep one's irony-meter running.

    >“Eurocentrism sanitizes Western history while patronizing and demonizing the non-West

    -- have you ever seen, oh, just to take an example I ran across recently, an Indonesian movie set in the 19th century with Indonesians in blond wigs playing the Dutch parts, rendered as two-dimensional caricatures against which the hero performs his feats?

    Everybody "centers" the universe with themselves.

    It would be very odd indeed if they didn't, like trying to outrun your own sweat. The important thing is to know what you're doing.

    >and Orientalist tropes of the genre.

    -- ah, Said, the Baron Munchausen of the Palestinians, spinning his web of bafflegab from beyond the grave...

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  8. Next rock. On to the linguistics:

    >There are several scenes in which any non-English phrases are immediately translated into English, for the reader’s benefit... Who is consuming this novel? Who is the text translated for, and why is it so necessary? And thus, whose perspective is being centered?

    -- now, this is bizarre. Of course it's an English-language novel, written for the global market; what should it be in, Hebrew or Cantonese or Danish?

    This -blog- is in English. A third of the human race read English, counting second-language learners.

    Therefore it has to be written in a way that's easily comprehensible to a Standard English speaker. Otherwise they won't read it. They're not under any obligation to me; as the author, I'm working for -them-.

    At the same time, the people in the novel are -not- speaking our Standard English. In fact, virtually every one of them is multilingual and is code-switching all the time, sometimes sentence by sentence, between four or more languages.

    The Angrezi characters are not, in fact, speaking Imperial English to each other all the time. They're switching from that to Hindi and back, depending on the context, and occasionally dropping into other languages as well.

    This is a linguistic environment unfamiliar to most contemporary native Anglophones, though common in many parts of the world.

    There are certain literary conventions (derived from historical fiction set in non-English-speaking environments and extended to SF and fantasy) for doing this sort of thing.

    You translate; and to give the 'flavor' of different languages, translate in rather different ways, occasionally dropping in a phrase and then translating it, or translating using the word-order of the source language rather than that of English.

    For example, having a Francophone character say, "You have reason", instead of "You're right". "You're right" is one way to translate the phrase but doesn't catch quite the same shade of meaning.

    Imperial English has a stripped-down positional/analytic grammar, even more so than our dialect; this is characteristic of Creole languages like Krio or Tok Pisin. Hindi (and Punjabi and Pushtu) have a more inflectional system, and retain features common to the Indo-European language family that English has dropped. For example, the Thou/You, Thine/Yours distinction between intimate and distant forms of address.

    Plus of course you have to take into account class dialect differences, which are noticeable in most languages.

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  9. >Yet this alternate British India cleaves to the framework of the familiar: a foreign world that must be translated and made natural to the reader who understands “standard English”.

    -- of course; otherwise they couldn't read it, now could they? And to think of all the complaints I got that there weren't more footnotes explaining what the Hindi phrases meant...

    >However, when characters such as Narayan Singh or Ibrahim Khan speak, their sentences are formal, with ‘thee’ and ‘thy,’ echoing Kipling’s translation of his own Indian characters.

    -- this simply reflects the structure of the languages concerned. English doesn't have an intimate form of address any more; they do.

    This is a pity, since it can be used to convey a number of fine shades of meaning -- as an expression of closeness, of deference, or (using it in a slightly different context) of hostility or contempt.

    >Yet compare this narrative technique to scenes in which Ignatieff, the Russian antagonist, consults with two representatives from Dai-Nippon, the East Asian empire, one Japanese and one Chinese; when they speak, their words reflect the syntax used in exclusively English scenes.

    -- well, no, they don't.

    The Chinese mandarin uses an (attenuated) form of formal rhetoric that incorporates elements used in pre-1912 Chinese official documents, for example. He's a scholar-bureaucrat covering his butt.

    The Japanese character speaks in a coarser, more brutal tone; he's a pragmatic militarist. Ignatieff flips back and forth, just as he uses a lower-class dialect when he's in the tavern scene in "Oxford". He's a secret agent and a linguistic chameleon.

    >but Narayan Singh compares the Kings’ estate, Rexin Manor, favourably to the Punjab homeland, which is “far too flat and harshly dry for his taste” (109).

    -- Narayan Singh -grew up- in the Vale of Kashmir, which is where Rexin is located. His -great-grandparents- came from the Punjab.

    And compared to the Vale of Kashmir, the Punjab is indeed flat, harsh and dry. Also very hot.

    Sometimes, Anna, a cigar is just a cigar.

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  10. Next rock. In which we procede to issues of class:

    >Ibrahim Khan, despite being a prince of his tribe, is an ornery servant

    -- no, he's -pretending- to be an ornery servant, and -concealing- the fact that he's a prince, playing a game for his own purposes. And fooling Athelstane rather thoroughly in the process, without even outright lying to him. He lets Athelstane assume he's the son of a village headman, instead of a major leader.

    >or using a foreign space in order to define oneself against

    -- is there anyone who -doesn't- do this? Every group defines itself against its neighbors or rivals. Always has, always will, and we all change partners and dance.

    >[Charles says]: "You’ll set the fashion; have ‘em all dressing civilized in saris or shalwar qamiz in no time” to which Sita asks, “are they civilized?”

    -- Charles and Sita are both blithely assuming that civilization involves in part changing from frock coats and crinolines (which is what the overseas French are wearing) to a thoroughly Indian style of dress.

    Just as the Victorians assumed that civilization meant discarding other clothing and wearing crinolines and frock coats.

    You do need to keep the irony meter running here.

    >Later, Charles reminds the French envoy, “our two realms are the last of the seed of Europe, of the West”

    -- the irony meter needs to be activated here again, considering that someone from India is talking to someone from Algeria and neither of them have ever even -visited- England or France.

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  11. Ah! I shall tackle some of our points but ignore others since they are clearly not worth tackling.

    In this history, -England- is a backward colony ruled from -India-, and England's inhabitants are regarded as ever-so-slightly "tainted" by their unclean cannibal blood.

    You miss the point. British India is not England. British India is the seat of Empire in this setting. This means we need to analyze what it means to have a British India that has never stopped colonizing India. British India is ruled by the British, descended of English, certainly, but as the text demonstrates, not English. England has been disavowed; British India, bastion of Empire, has not.

    have you ever seen, oh, just to take an example I ran across recently, an Indonesian movie set in the 19th century with Indonesians in blond wigs playing the Dutch parts, rendered as two-dimensional caricatures against which the hero performs his feats?

    Everybody "centers" the universe with themselves.


    Again, look at the larger historical context. I am looking at a context in which Eurocentrism has been the justification for colonialism and imperialism, devaluing native populations. An Indonesian movie with Indonesian actors wearing blond wigs to mimick the Dutch does not have the same power as an European or Hollywood movie which paints the non-West as backwards. If you cannot engage with the concept that there are unequal power relations between these entities, then you should not post here at all.

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  12. -- now, this is bizarre. Of course it's an English-language novel, written for the global market; what should it be in, Hebrew or Cantonese or Danish?

    This -blog- is in English. A third of the human race read English, counting second-language learners.

    Therefore it has to be written in a way that's easily comprehensible to a Standard English speaker. Otherwise they won't read it. They're not under any obligation to me; as the author, I'm working for -them-.


    Two points in this: 1) This blog is in English because my first language is English. My first language is English because of a history of colonialism that has left its mark on my country's education system. Now, just because something is in English does not mean it has to cater to a specific kind of audience. I raised the question of audience because there are different kinds of people reading the same book. And if we are talking about being writers, we also need to consider, who is our audience? Because a book designed for a straight white male American audience is going to read very differently from a book written for WOC audience, even if they are both using standard English. Which leads to the next point:

    2) Who defines what standard English is? What purpose does it serve to enforce a single kind of English? Especially in a setting where the English isn't exactly really English anymore? Language expresses all sorts of things; cultural context being one of them. Standard English cannot express all kinds of cultural contexts, no matter what we like to think. And I love English, but it cannot speak to certain concepts that I grew up with.

    This is not an argument against the English used. It is an argument against the types of English used, and who speaks which type of English.

    You translate; and to give the 'flavor' of different languages, translate in rather different ways, occasionally dropping in a phrase and then translating it, or translating using the word-order of the source language rather than that of English.

    Translation is in the eye of the beholder. Why do the non-white characters have a distinct "flavour" which marks them as speaking archaic, and thus backwards, whereas the white (or at least powerful characters) speak "normally" in "standard English"? This translation doesn't make sense, unless you're purposefully mimicking Kipling, which is totes fine, because he was trying to do the same thing, until you realize that by doing this, Kipling essentially Other'd an entire group of people, and contributed to a whole way of stereotyping people in a linguistic way.

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  13. -- of course; otherwise they couldn't read it, now could they? And to think of all the complaints I got that there weren't more footnotes explaining what the Hindi phrases meant...

    I liked the very beginning where he very neatly inserted the translation into the text. Much later, though, he starts translating RIGHT AFTER the Hindi phrase, which looks really awkward and lazy. Footnotes actually would have worked a lot more better.

    The other thing about the Hindi phrases is that it's stilted and according to my Hindi-speaking sources, sounds like a bad dictionary translation. So it's silly to use them at all when they can't really communicate what he meant to communicate, and he was going to use English ANYWAY.

    -- this simply reflects the structure of the languages concerned. English doesn't have an intimate form of address any more; they do.

    This is a pity, since it can be used to convey a number of fine shades of meaning -- as an expression of closeness, of deference, or (using it in a slightly different context) of hostility or contempt.


    Which might have been more effective if he had used those actual forms of address rather than reaching for an English equivalent, because the English equivalent read really awkwardly and archaicly. Average English readers do not immediately know that "thee" and "thine" imply intimacy. You talk about audience and writing for your audience; you need to consider what it is your audience will understand from your text.

    -- well, no, they don't.

    Which is reflected in other English-speaking scenes anyway. My point is that there's so much effort in writing Hindi phrases and translating them, to give the ~flavour~ of the Indian setting (and of course there's also Yasmini's stilted way of speaking to to indicate her deference to Ignatieff), but none in a vastly different setting as East Asia. It's consistent.

    -- Narayan Singh -grew up- in the Vale of Kashmir, which is where Rexin is located. His -great-grandparents- came from the Punjab.

    And compared to the Vale of Kashmir, the Punjab is indeed flat, harsh and dry. Also very hot.

    Sometimes, Anna, a cigar is just a cigar.


    You can stick that in your pipe and smoke it. Just because a land is flat, harsh and dry and hot doesn't make it any less beautiful.

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  14. And this is where I stop, because I refuse to engage with you any further since you ARE the author. You can either take my criticism and try to understand where I'm coming with it, or you can carry on with your straight white Eurocentric male self. Which I have no doubt you will do judging by your continued sales.

    Don't forget: I am part of your audience. And I am judging you. Harshly. You can suck it.

    I'll publish your last comment just for shits and giggles, though.

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