2025 Ranjit Hoskote – The Urgency of Translation

14th Ashok da Ranade Memorial Lecture by Ranjit Hoskote: The Urgency of Translation by Ranjit Hoskote Translation is far more than the merely instrumental activity of making the literary productions of one language available in another. It opens the doors of the imagination to a diversity of cultural possibilities. It is a political act, since it stretches the reader's imagination by introducing it to degrees of affinity and different, expanding the readers capacities for curiosity, empathy, criticality and openness to the Other. Indeed translations thus assumes a vital and urgent role today, in a world where linguistic practice must confront the homogenising effects of digital culture, as well as repressive forms of politics that demonise the Other and impose unitary conceptions of culture on societies that have been characterised by diversity. Ranjit Hoskote discusses how the practice of translation can embody three major gestures: anamnesia, resistance and cosmopolitics. Anamnesia is a refusal to forget a drawing on memories of dissent and inquiry encoded into various languages, a refusal to accept the subordinate and spurious position of the dialect in relation to the officially sanctioned version. By revealing Language as a key battle ground in the war over history, by sustaining plurality of expression and retrieving literatures from oblivion, translation also acts as a vital form of resistance. By recourse to key moments in the global history of translation, Hoskote will suggest that translation can be more than an assurance of complacent cosmopolitanism. Instead it can be a vehicle of an insurgent cosmopolitics