Translating Feminism in Kerala State, India J. Devika Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, India

Being "in-translation" in a post-colony: Translating feminism in Kerala State, India J. Devika Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, India The article reflects on the translation of feminism into the local language in Kerala State, India, over the past twenty-five years. Drawing on Tejaswini Niranjana's claim that the feminist translator located in post-colonial societies lives constantly "in-translation", I argue that she needs not only to straddle different linguistic registers and political languages, but also to engage in multiple "modes of translation". I seek to view the efforts at translating feminism into the local language within two distinct modes of translation: the "faithful" mode, which aimed for stability of terms created, and was typically associated with pedagogy and high intellectual activity, and the "grounded" mode, seemingly derived out of a broadly modern critical possibility, expressed in local idiom and clearly serving local political ends. Keywords: Kerala; modernity; translation of politics; feminism Kerala State, in the deep southwest of the Indian sub-continent, was formed in 1956, but first captured major international attention in the 1970s. Until then, it had been regarded as one of the most "backward", resource-starved, and politically turbulent parts of India, which however seemed to present a paradox to established wisdom in development circles: Malayalee society1 combined very low levels of economic development with high levels of social development - extraordinarily high levels of literacy, low infant and maternal mortality, falling birth rates, a strong public health system (Parayil 2000). Indeed, Kerala's earlier fame rested on it being one of the few regions of India in which communism had made heavy inroads since the 1930s. The remarkable strength of the communist movement in Kerala - when the communists were elected to power in Kerala State in 1957, soon after State formation, it made headlines throughout the world - and the instability of politics there made it a favourite site for western political scientists and observers. From the 1940s till the mid 1980s, the left enjoyed almost unquestioned hegemony in Kerala's cultural and political domains. As I will argue, this hegemony was also crafted by the successful translation of communist ideas into the local context. The shaping of Malayalee modernity, however, began in the early to mid nineteenth century, with the establishment of British dominance over Malayalam-speaking areas. The princely states of Travancore and Cochin acknowledged British dominance and the Malayalam-speaking areas to the north were absorbed into the British presidency of Madras as the province of Malabar. From the mid nineteenth century, a whole array of agents - missionaries, colonial officials, the newly educated local elite - began to voice their criticism of the existing socio-cultural order and propose means to change it in "modern ways". This was a debate that would continue right up to the mid twentieth century. The same period also saw the emergence of "community movements" in Malayalee society, which made intense efforts to reform the customary practices and hierarchies of particular castes and give shape to "modern communities" (Jeffrey 2003). This ideal modern community to be realized through reformist efforts in the future inevitably pivoted on the ideal of the individual as naturally endowed with gendered qualities which, however, needed to be developed further through suitable education in order to produce "men" and "women" (Devika 2007). These processes of gendering continued quite unabated through the twentieth century, and the communist movement was itself an important vehicle of the process. The communist movement in Kerala, led by the newly educated radical elite, served to extend the processes of gendering to the working classes in the mid twentieth century (Lindberg 2001). The hegemony of the left in civil society remained unbreachable in Kerala until the mid 1980s; however, that decade saw the rise of powerful civil society activism, including feminism, challenging the boundaries and definitions of the public and pressing for a more complex, non-state-centred perspective on power. Though the feminist problematic had begun to receive complex elaboration in Malayalee society by women literary authors as early as the 1930s, feminism as a political mobilization in public, clearly declaring allegiance with first-world feminism, arrived here only in the late 1980s. However, Malayalee feminists have hardly received a warm welcome. The hostility they have had to endure, especially from political society and from alternate civil society mobilizations like the independent fishworkers' movement on Kerala's coasts (Devika and Kodoth 2001; Nayak and Dietrich 2002; Erwer 2003), may be one reason why feminisf intellectual effort here has never been able to undertake effective self-reflexive analysis of its own tools or practices. Although they have fought pitched battles with Kerala's entrenched political society (Devika and Kodoth 2001), feminists in Kerala have achieved little impact on the micropolitics of gender in everyday life. Given the ongoing "liberalization" of politics through political decentralization and micro-credit, the feminist movement in Kerala today faces the prospect of demobilization and absorption into the governmental project of gendering governance. Translation and being feminist in the post-colony This article is part of an effort to gain a degree of self-reflexivity about the work that many of us feminists in Kerala have been doing for almost two decades: translating feminist concepts largely produced in first-world contexts into the local language. This arose from the larger recognition that we needed to bridge the "communication chasm", a gap which, we felt, was seriously affecting our ability to intervene not only in everyday language and micropolitics, but even in public debate - where we seemed to have become a presence, but often an ineffective one. We all agreed that a key political goal of any feminist project would be to infiltrate public discourse, not just by bringing into view new issues now recognized as public and political, but also by providing new concepts - ideas - through which reality is constructed afresh. Thus, over the years unwanted male attention has come to be recognized as a form of violence against women, referred to in public not as "eve-teasing" but as "sexual harassment". This act of re-naming is in fact one of the most powerful ways in which feminism may become an enduring force in public life. However, there is no guarantee that any coinage, feminist or otherwise, will remain stable, nor that it will not be mobilized to other ends. Indeed, there is reason to suppose that the instability of concepts is more of an advantage than a disadvantage for a pluralized feminist politics. It thus becomes imperative for feminists to continue keeping track of how meanings change and in what contexts. In a postcolonial society like Kerala, the feminist effort to intervene in public discourse by illumining the workings of patriarchal power cannot but involve an effort to translate feminist concepts into the local culture and idiom. Translation of western ideas into local languages did, of course, have a previous history, of which the Malayalee feminist translators partook when they began work in the late 1980s. The debates around modernizing communities, practices and individuals in mid to late nineteenth-century Malayalee society, and the later rapid spread of communist ideas mentioned above, both involved intense processes of translating western concepts, undertaken by a range of interlocutors. Irrespective of whether these translators named faithfulness to the "original" among their aims, there can be little doubt that the process of translation involved an effort to interpret the concept within local conditions of possibility. Thus it was by no means a simple matter of transferring concepts across cultures. The conceptual tools with which feminists in 1980s Kerala sought to bring women's oppression to public light were largely borrowed from feminist theory available in English. The "schema of cofiguration" (Sakai 1997) within which such translation appeared to be a possibility was one that assumed an idealized pair of cultures (the "West", viewed as source, and the "local", viewed as target),2 but that also claimed the universality of male domination across cultures. This underlay the confidence of feminist translators, their confidence that these were not incommensurable universes. However, translations of "feminism" in Malayalam were, from the very beginning, inflected by the local context, feminism being an oppositional political project taking shape within the field of Malayalee politics - even if lip service was sometimes paid to the search for "exact equivalents". It may be thus possible to make an analytical distinction between two modes of translation of western ideas into Malayalam. The first superficially conforms to relatively familiar ways of viewing translation: as the search for equivalence across difference, with an accent on faithfulness to the source. It often aimed for stability of the terms created, and was typically associated with pedagogy (formal and informal, such as communist party fora) and high intellectual activity - both of which helped to ensure stable associations to some extent. This quest for stability, as we will see, was chimerical, for many reasons. The

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