Capital in Bangla: Postcolonial translation of Marx

Abstract

The direction of socialist, communist, and broadly left politics in India has a lot to do with thematerial nature ofMarxism as a discourse in the subcontinent. It is mediated by a different set of vernacular languages, conceptual repertoire, and regional cultures. Certain scholars have pointed out that it involves a complex process of postcolonial translation that is ongoing. However, this recognition has not come together with a close examination of the texts that are involved in the process, for example, a critical reading of the translated works of Marx and broadly Marxism in the different languages, especially contexts where they became powerful. This essay will offer such a reading in the context of late colonial Bengal and laterWest Bengal. The first part of the essay will outline a background of the early translations and adaptations, their experiments aswell as the setting down of certain rules of discourse on Marxism in the Bangla language. The second part of the essay will offer a close reading of the vernacular translations of Marx’s Capital, especially volume one. We will discuss a certain edition at length, published in the late twentieth century by a communist intellectual, who fell out of favor with the new party leadership. It is the first unabridged Bangla translation of Capital, published in seven volumes. For a close reading of the different dimensions of translation involved in such a process, we are going to look at specific passages from the section on commodity fetishism, which follow in the Bangla edition under the heading PanyaPouttalikata Ebang tar Rahasya. The essay will conclude with some remarks on the comparative strategies of translation and the shifting nature of Marxist discourse in the postcolonial period and its broad relations with politics.