It is a sultry June afternoon in Calcutta—untypical of Calcutta though, for the monsoons having been waylaid by Aila, the city is gasping for a drop of rain—and as I find my way to the right corner of the Tolly Club lawns I spot a vibrant group of Alliance Française students belting out a lively French number. I get into the mood before I know and join in every time they sing in chorus. As the choir and soloists rehearse their numbers—French songs bien sûr, and also French translations of Bengali songs, and a popular Hollywood track—I inevitably wander off into thinking about colliding colonialisms...
What must I italicize as I write this piece? The French? The English? I don’t think in italics. I am hopelessly caught in between. I am attending this concert as a student of Alliance, after attending classes where le français is the only language one must speak, and I am trying to do that conscientiously now, for I am coming back to a French classroom after four years. But all other parts of me begin to exercise their weight(s?). Would it be status-quoist to italicize? Would it be honest not to italicize for someone interested broadly in the problematic of translation?
To take a long view of things, as Scout Finch would have said, the reason the compères for the evening are speaking ‘mainly’ in English for the benefit of the audience is nothing less than the outcome of the Seven Years War, and what it meant for Anglo-French colonialist rivalry in the Indian context. And then to think of the continuing cultural impact of colonialism. Even if the game has morphed from the five-day format to one-day to T20, cricket determined the scheduling of the event—the celebrations were advanced by a day, to ensure that the programme did not clash with the Twenty-twenty World Cup Final. The present bears so many tags for the postcolonially-minded, that I must tag this post with cricket, however un-French it might be.
Wishing you health and happiness in the new year
2 years ago
