English is structurally the worst Indian language for conveying India’s oral literature

Evidence

Meanwhile, it is in English more than any other language that the largest archive of translations has been assembled so far; if present trends continue, English will become, in effect, the language in which the knowledge of ‘Indian’ literature is produced. The difficulty is that it is the language least suitable for this role – not because it was inserted into India in tandem with colonialism, but entirely because it is, among all the Indian languages, the most removed, in its structure and ambience, from all the other Indian languages, hence least able to bridge the cultural gap between the original and the translated text. This disability is proportionately greater the closer the original text is to the oral, the performative, the domestic, the customary, the assumed, the unsaid; Miran in any other Indian language would make sense; in English nothing much better than doggerel is really possible without fundamentally altering the original to the point of unrecognizability. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 496

Lacking such public institutions for overlapping translations, direct knowledge of an ‘Indian’ literature presumes the knowledge of so many languages that only rare specialists could command them all, and considering that public rewards for such labours are minimal, competenct::s of that kind presume rare kinds of linguistic abilities combined with very exceptional kinds of individual industry and devotionindeed, most of the work in this integrated field has been done by individuals who managed this rare combination. Meanwhile, it is in English more than any other language that the largest archive of translations has been assembled so far; if present trends continue, English will become, in effect, the language in which the knowledge of ‘Indian’ literature is produced. The difficulty is that it is the language least suitable for this rolenot because it was inserted into India in tandem with colonialism, but entirely because it is, among all the Indian languages, the most removed, in its structure and ambience, from all the other Indian languages, hence least able to bridge the cultural gap between the original and the translated text. This disability is proportionately greater the closer the original text is to the oral, the performative, the domestic, the customary, the assumed, the unsaid~ Miran in any other Indian language would make sense; in English nothing much better than doggerel is really possible without fundamentally altering the original to the point of unrecognizability. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1110

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to debates on postcolonial translation and the ‘translation imperative’ of English departments; parallels Rushdie’s claim that India’s best writing comes in English, which Ahmad directly challenges.
• DEEPTHINKING: The argument that structural proximity to the source culture, not colonial history, determines translation adequacy inverts the usual postcolonial critique of English.
• QUESTION: Ahmad’s claim that English fails to approximate the oral/performative/domestic register of Indian languages — is this an argument against translation per se, or a principled case for an institutionalized multilingual translation ecology that materially undercuts English’s hegemonic archive-building role?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 496; Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1110