This year, CSAS is excited to welcome Rita Kothari, professor and head of the English department of Ashoka University in New Delhi, India.
Kothari is one of India's most distinguished translation scholars. She earned her MPhil and PhD from Gujarat University in literary studies and translation. She taught at St.Xavier’s College (Ahmedabad), MICA (Ahmedabad), and the Indian Institute of Technology in Gandhinagar.
“I will be on campus from the end of August to the end of October, and that gives me a lot of time to interact with students and colleagues, pursue my research, and attend talks,” says Kothari.
“I also will be teaching a course with Professor Christi Merrill on translation theory and practice in the fall.”
Kothari is a multilingual scholar and translator whose work spans different disciplines, such as literature, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and history. Her questions emerge from observations of regions and communities in the western part of the Indian subcontinent—Gujarat, Kutch, and Sindh. Her ethnographic research on marginal communities—through religion, caste, occupation, and gender—focuses on narratives of identity, raising linguistic and cultural translation questions.
“I believe that one of the meaningful ways of thinking about translation is through analogy. I choose the word analogy informedly as opposed to equivalence. Equivalence is appropriate for converting currency, but human and non-human realities are often understood by comparing something with your life or the life around you. Issues of caste and race have some analogies but not equivalence and similitude. The course can become an opportunity to think through these concepts, “ adds Kothari.
“I also have already begun a very fruitful conversation with U-M South Asian Studies and Anthropology Librarian Jeffrey Martin on how we can establish a better collection of Dalit literature in the library, and I will be traveling to other institutions to give talks, including Harvard, Tufts, NYU, Minnesota, Rutgers.”
Professor Kothari has translated extensively from Gujarati and Sindhi into English and occasionally vice versa. Her translations, as well as her edited volumes, have made significant contributions to the field of language politics and translation.
“As someone who grew up speaking a very minority and relatively unknown language like Sindhi, I was constantly inhabiting otherness of languages,” says Kothari.
“When the ‘same’ language is, in fact, many languages forged together for homogenizing the functions of the state, translation reveals the incomplete project of homogeneity. Translation in India opens up these myths of sameness and differences.”
Her teaching interests include language politics, caste and communalism, Bollywood, Indian literature, translation studies, partition, border studies, Gujarat studies, and Sindh studies. Movement across languages, contexts, and cultures forms the fulcrum of her interests, translating the prism through which she sees the Indian context.
Hughes fellows remain on campus for two weeks to an entire semester. They are encouraged to visit other institutions during their time in the US. Previous Hughes Fellows have included academics, actors, and filmmakers. The fellowships were made possible by the generous support of Gwyn and Marion Hughes in establishing the Gwyn M. Hughes Memorial Fund.
