Break Down of My (Postdoc) Research Proposal

It was on a visit to my maternal relatives in Gujrat during the early ’90s that I was first introduced to Hans Christian Andersen’s tales. My siblings and I often pestered our youngest aunt to “tell us a story.” She was enrolled in a bachelors program at the time – the first woman to do so in a family of semi-literate carpenters – and the industrious student that she was she would often tell us off so she could focus on her schoolwork. But one day she called the three of us and said she was going to tell us a story just so we would stop bothering her. “It’s my favorite story,” she said, and narrated us “The Red Shoes,” which she had read in a course on “English literature.” She would read a line in English and then translate it for us in Urdu since we did not know any English at the time. I can still recall the feeling of horror and shock when my aunt’s narration reached the point where Karen asked the executioner to chop her feet off.

This childhood memory came rushing to my mind when I read the email by Professor XYZ inviting scholars of world literature to apply for the postdoctoral position at the Han Christian Andersen Center. Soon after, I called my aunt in Pakistan and asked if she remembered Andersen’s story. “Of course,” she said. More than thirty years later, “The Red Shoes” remains one of her favorite stories.

This personal anecdote is but one example of the way Andersen continues to be read and discussed in South Asia where English translations of his works started arriving in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a period characterized by unprecedented political upheaval and cultural unrest. In 1857, the British East India Company (EIC) crushed the Sepoy Rebellion and deposed the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar (1775-1862), after which India was brought under the direct rule of the British Crown. Although the EIC had set up printing presses as early as the late eighteenth century and Baptist missionaries had founded the Serampore Mission Press in 1800 in Danish India, it was not until after 1857 that the colonial government started issuing licenses to local entrepreneurs to set up (lithographic) printing presses for commercial purposes. Dictated by the forces of, what Benedict Anderson calls, print-capitalism and the colonial policy of public education, entrepreneurs like Naval Kishore (1836-1885) started publishing translations and adaptations of English literary works in vernaculars like Hindi and Urdu to meet the demands of a growing reading public.

Drawing on the methods and frameworks developed by book historians of India including Ulrike Stark, Francesca Orsini, and Priya Joshi, the first part of my project will explore the way English translations of Andersen’s works done by Mary Howitt (1799-1888), Anne S. Bushby (1798-1875), and others arrived in the Indian subcontinent and how Indian readers received them. Scholars of Andersen agree that it was mainly his Victorian translators like Howitt, herself a prolific writer of children’s literature, who reduced him to a children’s writer. My sense is that Andersen, as a writer, was “de-infantilized” when his works were translated into Indian vernaculars like Hindi and Urdu given the way the Indian publishing industry and readerly tastes were evolving at the time. For example, Raja Shivaprasad’s (1823-1895) Hindi and Urdu translations of Thomas Day’s novel for children, The History of Sandford and Merton (1783-89), were not meant for children but adults. Similarly, the intended readers of Nazir Ahmad’s (1832-1912) Urdu adaptation of Shivaprasad’s translation of Sandford and Merton were adult Muslim women and not children. One possible explanation for the de-infantilization of his work could be that Andersen’s fairytale world, which his English translators may have considered suitable only for children, was quite similar to the world of the dāstān, a highly developed Perso-Indian genre of oral storytelling. Colonial administrators’ orientalist view of Indian readers could also have played a part in the process of de-infantilization. For his part, Andersen was familiar with India as can be seen in Picture-Book Without Pictures.

I will approach this literary-cultural problematic with the help of Lawrence Venuti’s hermeneutic model, which “conceives of translation as an interpretive act that inevitably varies source-text form, meaning, and effect according to intelligibilities and interests in the receiving culture.” This will be a departure from the conventional, instrumentalist perspective that forces us to consider certain translations of Andersen’s tales poor or shoddy for their failure to reproduce “an invariant form, meaning, or effect” contained in his works. If a translator like Howitt felt compelled to adapt Andersen’s stories to Victorian standards and sensibilities, what were the cultural-political imperatives that governed Hindi and Urdu translations of his works in the late nineteenth-century colonial India? An answer to this question along with an examination of the process of de-infantilization will enrich our understanding of the way Andersen’s tales were read in India.

The second part of the project will investigate the significance of Andersen’s tales with regard to educational curricula in South Asia. I will start by exploring if and how British administrators employed English, Hindi, and Urdu translations of Andersen’s stories to introduce a colonially inflected version of the Protestant Ethic in India. Drawing on the work of Gauri Viswanathan, I will analyze the extent to which Andersen’s work figures (or not) in “the content of the English literary education” that served “the administrative and political imperatives of British rule.”

In addition, I will investigate the reasons as to why Andersen’s tales continue to be included in educational curricula of postcolonial nation-states of India and Pakistan, where the Andersenian expression “the emperor has no clothes” has become an integral part of the contemporary political idiom although very few people would be able to point out its origin. I will explore the kind of relevance Andersen’s stories rooted in a Protestant worldview continue to have for curriculum designers in India and particularly Pakistan, which was founded as an Islamic state. Given the colonial history the state-sanctioned version of Islam in Pakistan is modeled after Protestant Christianity, and it would be interesting to analyze the extent to which Andersen’s stories have played a role in this complex cultural-historical development over the course of the twentieth century.

With the help of theoretical models drawn from the fields of book history, literary criticism, reception studies, and translation theory, this project will make an original contribution to the available scholarship on one of the most famous and influential Danish authors in the history of world literature.