The First English Translation of Mahabharata: Authorship, Authority, Translation and Utility Matters

Research Articles The First English Translation of Mahabharata: Authorship, Authority, Translation and Utility Matters Nandini Bhattacharya* “As Professor Max Mueller noted ‘printing is now the only from its immediate past and being congealed into a means of saving your Sanskrit literature from inevitable standard text/edition. This also meant The Mahabharata destruction’.” being textualized with auteurs that were now claiming P.C. Roy: “Preface” The Mahabharata of ‘authority’ of their ‘translation’ into modern Sanskrit; or/ Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa: p. 30 and into the modern Indic and European vernaculars. Such translations now also clearly state the original This essay explores the issues associated with the authorship of The Mahabharata (following the inexorable fraught entry of The Mahabharata into the domain of logic of print modernity) as belonging to a person called print modernity in India. It focuses on the twin issues ‘Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa.’ of authority-authorization and utility-realism as they These vast transnational processes of The Mahabharata inform and colour such entries. I describe The Mahabharata entering within print modernity cultures also meant in India, before the 18th century, as a vast, complex and ‘fixing’ the ‘event’ genealogically, that is, within intermedially worked-out ‘event’ rather than a ‘text’ in the non-permeable generic categories. While one set of modern sense of the term. The critical distinction made individuals (Indologists such as Albrecht Weber and between a ‘work’ as self-contained and ‘text’ as porous, Friedrich Max Mueller) described The Mahabharata as enabling reader-response, must take into account that mahakavya and mahakavya as signifying ‘epic poetry,’ both (‘work’ and ‘text’) operate within, and are produced another set (Sanskritists, such as Pundit Shashadhar by the overarching operations of print modernity. An Tarkachudamani and Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay) ‘event’, on the other hand, is surely something far more described it as itihasa in the sense of ‘history’ that is a amorphous and preceding the cultures of modernity. record of empirically verifiable facts. Yet, the ancient The Mahabharata ‘event’, even when operating within Sanskrit aesthetic categories of mahakavya and itihasa cultures of orality1, was a complex collaborative, had semantic charges very distinct from their English intermedial processes of narrativizing. Such a process language ‘equivalent’ significations3. implicated The Mahabharata’s ‘orality-performativity’ I will narrate (following The Mahabharata’s digressive, within its ‘orality/performativity-in-ecriture’ dimensions. eclectic, contra teleological style) the story of its entry The renderings of Neelkantha Chatudhara’s 17th into print cultures, in the form of its first complete century Sanskrit Mahabharata or Kashiram Das’s Bengali English translation and its standardization as a reliable Mahabharata or numerous renderings of the Bhagwad Gita ‘text.’ This effort paid obeisance to the principal god of as the essence of Mahabharata did not claim distinction as print-modernity, the nation-state. This nation-state deity, autonomous ‘texts’ but sought privilege as Mahabharata’s however, was paradoxically implicated and operating tikabhasya, being part of its exegetical process. These were within transnational and Empire-informed ideologies! offerings to the ‘event’ called The Mahabharata that were J. van Buietenen’s “Introduction” to his English culled on the anvil of bhakti2. translation, The Mahabharata: Book of Beginning (Book The Mahabharata’s difficult entry within the ambit I, Adi Parva) is in respectful acknowledgement of the of print modernity meant crucial shifts of emphasis ‘authority’ of the Pune-based Bhandarkar Oriental from it being an ‘event’ in continuum to the rupture Research Institute’s (henceforth called BORI) standardized Sanskrit Critical Edition. The task of * Nandini Bhattacharya, Department of English, University editing this ‘definitive text’ began in 1918 at the behest of Burdwan. of Professor Vishnu Sitaram Sukthankar and was finally Summerhill: IIAS Review, Vol. XXVI, No. 1 (Summer 2020) 43 published in 1966. Van Buitenen’s English translation of Krishna DwaipayanaVyasa or TMOKDV), remains till date The Mahabharata is anchored in BORI’s scholarship and the only complete scholarly English translation of The its critical methodologies crystallizing several recensions, Mahabharata and all Western efforts at translating the text and versions into an ultimate, standard text. (and that includes the prestigious Chicago edition, whose van Buitenen, however, does not consider the first translational endeavour J. van Buitenen had led, till his complete English translation of The Mahabharata by ‘P.C. death) have remained, till date, incomplete enterprises. Roy’ in 11 volumes and published from Datavya Karyalaya Press in Chitpur, Kolkata, between 1883-1889, as worthy Authority and Authorship of critical respect. In addition, van Buitenen describes the ‘P.C Roy edition’ as having been rejected by readers of its This first English translation ofThe Mahabharata, authored own times, as well as by those in ours. J. van Buitenen’s by Kishorimohan Ganguli, in the second last decades of grudging admission that the first English translation 19th century colonial Bengal in eleven volumes (1883- possesses a degree of scholarly rigour does not, however, 1896), and published by a person called Protap Chandra ameliorate the fact that it is lacking in both the qualities of Roy,4 the owner of the Datavya Karyalaya Press in ‘authority’ and ‘ethics.’ I quote van Buitenen’s response Chitpur, north Kolkata, is the focal point of my study. to this first English translation ofTheMahabharata , as these My essay studies not merely the act of this translation are the very charges I wish to refute: but its production underpinnings, or what I describe as the ‘enterprise of production of the first EnglishMahabharata ’. Thus, one complete translation was published from Calcutta (eleven volumes, 1883-1896) under the name P.C. Roy, but was Such an ‘enterprise’ comprised garnering intellectual in fact executed by Kesari [sic] Mohun Ganguli. This translation and governmental support; raising funds and ensuring was not well received, either in India or in the West. Indeed the financial support from the public at large; comparing often English is grating and refractory in the extreme and does not conflicting versions of an event called The Mahabharata; allow comfortable reading even to one used to Victorian English translating/crystallising into English a text so culturally applied by the Indian provinces to the rendering of Sanskrit dense that it is practically untranslatable; publishing, classics. [xxxvi] The apparatus is minimal to the point of non- disseminating gratuitously (and I want to emphasise the existence, and the reader who tries to wind his way through act of free distribution of TMOKDV copies by the Datavya The Mahabharata finds not even a table of contents to guide him. Karyalaya Press) advertising, and its reprinting. This Still in spite of the strictures one might level at it, the translation massive enterprise that Roy and Ganguly headed and in […] was by no means a careless job (Buitenen, “Introduction” which an entire ‘jati-people’ were implicated, embodies Book 1, The Mahabharata: Book of Beginning, Chicago: Chicago those complexities that an ‘event’ entering within print UP, 1973, xxxviii) modernity cultures had had to engage with. By the time van Buitenen had come to introduce his However, every excellence of the text entitled The second volume of Mahabharata translation (“Preface” The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa/Translated Mahabharata, Book 2,The Book of Assembly Hall), he wanted into English Prose; but printed without the name of an to “amplify” that the first translation of The Mahabharata, ‘author-translator’ and with the name of its publisher— coming from colonial Bengal, “appeared as if done by P.C. Roy—was overlooked once the fraught questions P.C. Roy but was in fact executed by K.S. Ganguli”! A regarding TMOKDV’s ‘authorship’ came to light. Charges somewhat contrite van Buitenen admits that this fact/ of fraudulence and imposture emerged to besmirch the truth is stated by Ganguli himself in the “Translator’s text’s every value. Its quality of nuanced English (a Postscript”! This is an admission, notes Buitenen, that phenomenal achievement, given the Indians’ relatively comes at the end of the ‘Roy’s’ eleven-volume edition recent acquaintance with English language in India); (“Preface: A Correction.” Mahabharata: The Book of the sheer enormity of the enterprise and the virtual Assembly Hall. Chicago UP, 1979, x). J. van Buitenen also untranslatability of a conceptually-dense Mahabharata; revises his earlier dismissive stance towards the quality of and the utmost rigour of scholarship that marked this the Ganguli’s translation and admits that the edition does translation were undermined repeatedly by Mahabharata have a critical apparatus; a table of contents-instruments critics, post 1960s. that ‘authorize’ a scholarly translation-and that Buitenen Charges of fraudulence and unethical authorship- “often consult[s]” the ‘Roy’ translation, “and mean[s] no assumption on the part of the publisher P.C. Roy (and slight to [his] predecessors” (“Preface” Book of Assembly the consequent denying the actual author, Kishorimohan Hall, x). Ganguly, of his rightful due) were bandied about, I might also add that the Roy translation,

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