Hans Christian Andersen in South Asia

Translation and Reception of Andersen’s Fairy Tales in Bengali and Urdu Literary Cultures

Abstract

This article studies the dissemination of Hans Chrisitan Andersen’s fairy tales in South Asia with a focus on Bengali and Urdu translation of his fairy tales. I build on my earlier work on reception of Andersen’s fairy tales in colonial Bengal in which I discussed how these translations were used to counter the lowbrow Battala literature considered inappropriate by the Bengali bhadralok. Unlike Bengali translators, however, Urdu literati remained inattentive to Andersen’s tales during the 19th century, and it was only in the mid-twentieth century that Urdu translations of his fairy tales started getting published. I analyze Urdu translations of Andersen’s fairy tales with the help of Lawence Venuti’s hermeneutic model, which conceives of translation not in terms of fidelity to a source text, but as an interpretive act in which a translator uses formal and thematic interpretants to change the source text according to the receiving culture’s preferences and ideologies. While interpretants used in both Bengali and Urdu translations produce conforming (domesticating) effects, they operate differently. The interpretants in Bengali translations are embedded in the process of colonial negotiation while the ones in Urdu translations remove Christian references to domesticate Andersen’s tales for a predominantly Muslim readership.