Arundhati Roy: translation as a way of resistance and self-affirmation in postcolonial writing

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(1)Tradução & Comunicação Revista Brasileira de Tradutores Nº. 19, Ano 2009. ARUNDHATI ROY: TRANSLATION AS A WAY OF RESISTANCE AND SELF-AFFIRMATION IN POSTCOLONIAL WRITING Arundhati Roy: tradução como uma forma de resistência e de auto-afirmação na escrita colonial. Kanavillil Rajagopalan Universidade Estadual de Campinas UNICAMP rajagopalan@uol.com.br. ABSTRACT Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is a novel about a number of things. But it is also, in a fundamental sense, about language. Or rather, how existing power structures can be thwarted, by mobilizing their own internal logics, by meticulously teasing out the inconsistencies and contradictions that lie latent in language. One way in which this act of subversion can be carried out is through translation. Both language and translation play a fundamental part in Roy’s writings. This is especially the case in The God of Small of Things. Roy’s genius lies precisely in her uncanny ability to subvert the very logic of the language of the erstwhile colonial masters in which she has chosen to express herself. The result is a superb exercise in translation. There are important lessons to be learned here about how translation is frequently mobilized in postcolonial writing to mark an important positioning and to send a political message. It may well be the case that herein may lie the key to an understanding of the political dimension of all translation, insofar as it often involves transnational contact between peoples and the unequal equations of power and prestige of the parties engaged in the process. Palavras-Chave: Arundhati Roy; The God of Small Things; translation; subversion; postcoloniality.. RESUMO. Anhanguera Educacional S.A. Correspondência/Contato Alameda Maria Tereza, 2000 Valinhos, São Paulo CEP 13.278-181 rc.ipade@unianhanguera.edu.br. O Deus das Pequenas Coisas, de Arundhati Roy, é um romance que trata de diversas coisas. Porém, ele também é, num sentido fundamental, sobre a linguagem. Ou melhor, sobre como as estruturas de poder existentes podem ser subvertidas mobilizando suas próprias lógicas internas, meticulosamente identificando as inconsistências e as contradições latentes na linguagem. Uma das formas pela qual tal ato de subversão pode ser conduzido é via tradução. Tanto a linguagem como a tradução têm um papel fundamental nos escritos de Roy. E esse é, sobretudo, o caso em O Deus das Pequenas Coisas. O gênio de Roy consiste precisamente em sua habilidade ímpar de subverter a própria lógica da língua dos colonizadores de outrora ao mesmo tempo em que opta por escrever nessa língua. O resultado é um exercício surpreendente de tradução. Há lições importantes a serem aprendidas sobre como a tradução é, com frequência, convocada a fim de marcar um posicionamento importante e enviar um recado político. Esse pode bem ser o caso de que esteja aqui a chave para um entendimento da dimensão política de toda e qualquer tradução na medida em que ela muitas vezes envolve contato entre povos e as equações desiguais de poder e prestígio das partes engajadas nesse processo. Keywords: Arundhati Roy; O Deus das Pequenas Coisas; tradução; subversão; póscolonialidade.. Coordenação Instituto de Pesquisas Aplicadas e Desenvolvimento Educacional - IPADE Artigo Original Recebido em: 6/1/2010 Avaliado em: 3/2/2010 Publicação: 27 de abril de 2010 129.

(2) 130. Arundhati Roy: translation as a way of resistance and self-affirmation in postcolonial writing. 1.. INTRODUCTION In Rajagopalan (2005a), I pointed out that a good deal of postcolonial writing is imbued with a political message—indeed, in postcolonialism politics is inextricably intermixed with aesthetics. Or rather, aesthetics is at the service of the political. These writers produce their literature with a view to declaring to the rest of the world that, although they may be writing in a language that was originally passed on to them by their erstwhile colonial masters with the explicit purpose of subjugating them and keeping them in that position, they are not there to reiterate and reproduce the values and mores that the language imposed upon them, but to thwart those very values and mores from within their own premises. In a paper entitled ‘Postcoloniality as translation in action’ (Rajagopalan, 2007), I proposed a possible distinction between ‘postcoloniality’ and ‘postcolonialism’ along the following lines (others have used the terms to make other distinctions). Whereas the latter, postcolonialism, is best reserved, I think, for an intellectual movement that challenged Eurocentrism and many of the Enlightenment values with which it is intricately intertwined, ‘postcoloniality’ might be used to refer to a certain condition which has to do with a geo-political reality within a historically given time-frame that one got involved in, independently of which side of the colonial relation you belonged to (both the colonized and the colonizer have a part in it, indeed are in some sense complicit in it, albeit from divergent standpoints). At its extremes, postcolonial defiance manifests itself either as a summary rejection of the old order and everything associated with it or, contrariwise, as unresisting compliance and willing acceptance of the changing times and a drive to recreate the old order in a new framework, along with a nostalgic longing for the old and bygone days (in the fond and ultimately foolhardy hope that, by erasing the sour memories of the past and joining ranks, as it were, with the oppressors of old times, they can congratulate themselves for seeming to come out victorious in the end). Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the Kenyan writer, is a striking example of the first kind of reaction. In his Decolonising the Mind (Thiong’o, 1984), he announced a complete break with his colonial past, alongside everything that reminded him of it in whatever way, shape or form. This included his own baptismal name – James. But by far the most important of these radical steps was to stop writing in English, preferring instead to give vent to his literary spirit in his tribal language, Gikuyu (cf. Rajagopalan, 2005b). He did so on the strength of his conviction that he would only be surrendering his soul in a most. Tradução & Comunicação - Revista Brasileira de Tradutores • Nº. 19, Ano 2009 • p. 129-138.

(3) Kanavillil Rajagopalan. 131. cowardly fashion to the will of his erstwhile colonial masters by continuing to, as it were, speak in “his master’s voice”. In taking such a radical measure, he simply ignored the possibility that he could, if he wised to, instead appropriate that language to give expression to his own self and even subvert the language in such a way as to his make his old masters cringe. At the other extreme of the spectrum are well-established writers from the old colonies (I would probably regard Chinua Achebe of Nigeria and R. K. Narayan of India as belonging to this group), most of whom lived through the travails of transition from the old order to the new and who, each in their own distinctive and often idiosyncratic way, endeavour to bridge the gap, reconcile unresolved tensions and readjust themselves to the new reality that has landed on them. Many of them either succumbed to the state of affairs that enslaved them in the first place or opted to make the best out of a reality that was not of their own making. In effect then they thought that prudence dictated that they should rather learn to swim with the tides or obey the logic of “If you can’t beat’em, join’em”. One senses this spirit (at the very least, this is one way of interpreting it) in such claims as the following one made by Chinua Achebe: For me there is no other choice. I have been given this language and I intend to use it [….] I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings (Achebe, cited in Loomba 1998: 91). The idea of making the language “suit its new African surroundings”, though it bespeaks some self-affirmation, is still conciliatory, one might argue. But there is also a middle ground. It is arguably the vast majority of contemporary postcolonial writers who, in my view, occupy the middle ground that we are primarily concerned with in this paper. For these writers, there is no point in either rejecting the past outright or wishing it hadn’t ended the way it did—with an unceremonious whimper. Rather than attempt to ignore or bypass history or to distort and re-write it in ways more congenial to their tastes, they set out to re-fashion their own identities in more pro-active ways. They take the reins of destiny into their own hands, rather than let the tide of events decide what they should do and how they should proceed in the face of the changing circumstances. As I argue in Rajagopalan (in press-1), they seek to, in a way, transcend postcolonialism by translating and transforming all difference into indifference and, with hindsight, “come to the realization that there is an urgent need to not just let bygones be bygones, but to reframe the bygones in ways more conducive to dealing with the present and preparing for the future”. This was the essential thrust of a paper by Ramanathan and Pennycook (2007), wherein they argue for. Tradução & Comunicação - Revista Brasileira de Tradutores • Nº. 19, Ano 2009 • p. 129-138.

(4) 132. Arundhati Roy: translation as a way of resistance and self-affirmation in postcolonial writing. a more nuanced reading of the colonial encounter that fights shy of the strictly ‘us vs. them’ binary logic that has lived out its days of usefulness and is no longer serviceable. But what also makes them stand out from the rest is a deep-seated eagerness, indeed an ardent yearning, to “talk back” to their former colonial masters. It is in this sense that Caliban, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, maybe regarded as being the prototype and harbinger of postcolonial spirit. Now that he has learned his master’s tongue, he is in a position to talk back and indeed curse him in a language that is bound to hurt the latter most. But they do this, not from a deep-seated sense of vindictiveness, but from the sheer joy of turning the tables. Khushwant Singh (2001), one of India’s prominent journalists and a writer of exceptional quality sums up this spirit of selfaffirmation and defiance: I am entirely in favour of making English an Indian language on our terms. Maul it, misuse it, mangle it out of shape but make it our own bhasha. The English may not recognise it as their language; they can stew in their own juice. It is not their baap ki jaidaad — ancestral property.. It is interesting to observe here that many authors have seized on the onesidedness of the construction of Self and Other by the colonial master in colonial times. In Alastair Pennycook’s English and the Construction of Colonialism (Pennycook, 1998:15), there is a brief reference to how writers like (Fullton, 1994), have interpreted the following dialogue between the master and his servant in Daniel Defoe’s (1910) The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: Master Friday. Well, Friday, and what does your nation do with the men they take? Do they carry them away or eat them, as these did? Yes, my nation eat mans up too; eat all up.. What both Fullton and, as it seems to me, Pennycook as well, failed to see is that, in his broken English of the “Me Tarzan, you Jane” variety, Friday ends up saying something whose ultimate implications even Defoe wasn’t probably fully aware of: “eat all up”. And, sure enough, there is some dramatic irony in the fact that Friday, or what he represented, namely, colonial inequality, would eventually eat all up, including Friday’s master, seated comfortably in his armchair as well as indeed the entire order he symbolized. Cannibalism is but a metaphor for glottophagy—beginning with Friday starting to nibble at the language of his enslaver. In this paper, I shall zero in on the work of a single postcolonial writer Arundhati Roy whose novel The God of Small Things1 has already won worldwide acclaim. The claim I. 1 The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize in the year 1999. It has been subjected to very diverse and divergent interpretations. In one sense, it is a period novel and most of the action takes place in the southern state of Kerala in India which elected in 1957 a government headed by the Marxist communist leader E.M. Shankaran Namboodiripad. It was the. Tradução & Comunicação - Revista Brasileira de Tradutores • Nº. 19, Ano 2009 • p. 129-138.

(5) Kanavillil Rajagopalan. 133. want to make is that there is a fundamental sense in which postcolonial writing is about translation. By translation, I mean here translation in its widest possible sense that includes migration. In appropriating the English language in ways more congenial to their own purposes—and, in so doing—deliberately and remorselessly tampering with it and twisting it out of shape, or in Khushwant Singh’s more eloquent phrase “mauling, misusing and mangling it out of shape”, they engage in an elaborate work of translation, of translating not just the message but the very medium used for “transporting” it. And that is exactly what Arundhati Roy does all the time in her novel. And she does it with great aplomb and verve.2 Here is just an appetizer: Ammu said that Pappachi was an incurable British CCP, which was short for chhi-chhi poach and in Hindi meant shit-wiper. Chacko said that the correct word for people like Pappachi was Anglophile. He made Rahel and Estha look up Anglophile in the Reader’s Digest Great Encyclopaedic Dictionary. It said Person was well disposed to the English. Then Estha and Rahel had to look up disposed.. (1) (2) (3). It said: Place suitably in particular order. Bring mind in particular state. Do what will with, get off one’s hands, stow away, demolish, finish, settle, consume (food), kill, sell. Chacko said that in Pappachi’s case it meant (2) Bring mind in particular state. (pp. 51-52). Chhi-chhi poach and Anglophile do not mean the same thing. They may denote the same referent, but by no means can be said to connote it. And from the point of view of translation, especially of creative writing, it is how the connotative meanings are rendered that helps one tell a good translation from a bad one. This is all the more significant when it is one and the same language (or is it not?) that we are speaking of. If that sounds far too question-begging, what no one can deny here is that what is going on is a tug-of-war as to who has the control of the language. Ammu is pooh-poohing the idea that someone could claim English to be “their baap ki jaidaad — ancestral property”. She wants to “maul it, misuse it, mangle it out of shape” and Arundhati Roy lets her do it to her soul’s utmost satisfaction. Even as she uses English to express her thoughts, she wants to mock it by tinkering with it. As Canagarajah puts it (cf. Rubdy aqnd Saraceni, 2006:200), “By appropriating th[e] language for their own local uses according to their preferred cultural. first time ever in the history of the world that a Marxist government had been elected to power on the strength of popular ballot. But the novel is also about a forbidden cross-caste love. Furthermore, woven into the texture of the novel are also many other themes, such as the role of big, overarching theories versus local narratives (Rajagopalan, 2010) and the politics of the English language in India and the opposing attitudes and reactions the language finds itself caught up in modern, postcolonial India. 2 Side by side with her role as a major literary figure in contemporary postcolonial literature, Arundhati Roy has also earned a reputation as a militant in the cause of the millions of people wallowing in utter poverty and crass governmental neglect in India. This makes her eminently qualified to fulfill the requirements of the poetics as well as the politics of postcolonial writing, as described by Suresh Canagarajah. Tradução & Comunicação - Revista Brasileira de Tradutores • Nº. 19, Ano 2009 • p. 129-138.

(6) 134. Arundhati Roy: translation as a way of resistance and self-affirmation in postcolonial writing. and linguistic practices, postcolonial communities were initiating subtle changes in the grammar and discourse of English”. Canagarajah concludes his argument by saying that there is both poetics and politics in such a gesture. Diana Montejano (2009) uses the metaphor of braiding to capture the spirit underlying such practices. As a Mexican American writer, straddling two cultures but never fully at ease with either, she simply rejoices in switching from one language to another and doing it back and forth all the time, unmindful of the jarring effect that this might create in the minds of her readers, especially the monolingual ones (or, for all you know, this may precisely be the effect that she wants to create!). As I put it in Rajagopalan (in press-2), “[B]raiding is not straightforward code-switching; it is more like changing horses in the mid-stream and getting away with it!”. Chacko of course is the prototypical Anglophile in the whole novel. The man who insisted he “read”3 (not “studied” as one would be more inclined to say these days) at Oxford and who returned to India, shortly after his English wife Margaret Kochamma divorced him, was the typical “brown sahib”4, desperate to reconcile his newly acquired ‘bourgeois status’ with his political fervour in favour of the Marxist revolution in progress in his home state of Kerala. Roy suggests that even his Marxism had something unmistakably English about it because, although he was unwilling to admit it, he was espousing the cause of the socially downtrodden with the supercilious air of someone who had been lucky enough to have had the benefits of an English education and could now afford to reap full benefits from it without any prejudice to his communist militancy. Thus, hot on the heels of the conversation cited above, we hear: Chacko told the twins that though he hated to admit it, they were all Anglophiles. (ibid.). It is almost as if destiny had reserved for them a role that, no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t possibly shake off. Indeed, Roy goes on to unravel for us the sombre logic that underwrites it all: They were a family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history, and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away. He explained to them that history was like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And Ancestors whispering inside. (ibid.). 3 A slightly dated usage that evokes the memories of the Raj and Britain’s famous red-brick universities are status symbols, especially for the lucky few who could afford to study in the great “citadels of higher education”. 4 A pejorative term that was used by people in India during the colonial times to refer to their fellow-citizens who had had English education, had lived in the “metropolis” and often behaved like the English, typically putting on an affected English accent and other accoutrements of a mostly stereotypical view of the English and their way of life etc. At issue was also a standard pattern of behaviour of the local elite immediately after India gained its independence. They rejoiced in flaunting their ‘English’ upbringing and made no excuses for flourishing it in public and soon became the butt of popular ridicule.. Tradução & Comunicação - Revista Brasileira de Tradutores • Nº. 19, Ano 2009 • p. 129-138.

(7) Kanavillil Rajagopalan. 135. The logic of retracing one’s steps (or rather the impossibility thereof) is worked out at a number of different moments along the unravelling of the plot. Under the indefatigable order of hierarchy imposed by tradition, the untouchables—including Paravans like Velutha—“were expected to crawl backwards with a broom, sweeping away their footprints so that Brahmins or Syrian Christians would not defile themselves by accidentally stepping into a Paravan’s footprint” (p.73). But the untouchable Paravan does the ultimate and fatal transgression by touching what he was not supposed to. Or rather, by allowing himself to want to touch his object of unconfessed (and unconfessable) desire. Here are those fateful moments in Roy’s own powerful words: ‘Ammukkutty ….what is it?’ She went to him and laid the length of her body against him. He just stood there. He didn’t touch her. He was shivering. Partly with cold. Partly terror. Partly aching desire. Despite his fear his body was prepared to take the bait. It wanted her. (p. 334). “There’s a nipple in the air” (p. 73). That was Larry McCaslin, speaking to Rahel, the Freudian slip foreboding the tide of events in store for the tiny mortals in the firm grip of Destiny which has already laid out for each one of them the exact dénouement of their unfolding dramas. To go back to the insistent metaphor of footprints on the sands of time, Estha and Rahel, the twins, are delighted by the fact the word Malayalam (the name of a Dravidian language spoken in the state of Kerala) is a palindrome. “They showed Miss Mitten how it was possible to read both Malayalam and Madam I’m Adam backwards as well as forwards.” (p. 60). But it is not the word Malayalam written in Malayalam. Rather it is its transliteration, using the Roman alphabet and the English spelling conventions. Of course, there are palindromes in Malayalam, whose writing system is in great measure syllabic— but, when transliterated into English, they cease to be palindromatic. So too, when written in the Malayalam script, the word Malayalam (written മലയാളം) is no longer a palindrome. In other words, the twins’ favourite pastime is at all possible because they can think Malayalam through English. They can have all the fun they want because in their mindset the two languages are intertwined, interwoven, braided (to recall Montejano’s metaphor). What is more they alone can feel amused by the hilariousness of it all, as is evidenced by the reaction of Miss Mitten, their teacher, who is unable to see how anyone can feel so excited about such am inconsequential ‘discovery’. Estha and Rahel are, thus, in a curious sense, living translations. They live in translation and their favourite pastime is transgression. They take delight in transgressing Tradução & Comunicação - Revista Brasileira de Tradutores • Nº. 19, Ano 2009 • p. 129-138.

(8) 136. Arundhati Roy: translation as a way of resistance and self-affirmation in postcolonial writing. the petty rules that have to do with writing, spelling and reading aloud. But those around them are either unimpressed or offended by the twin’s childish pranks. Miss Mitten (the Australian missionary) for one “wasn’t amused and it turned out she didn’t even know what Malayalam was”. (p. 60). And as she complains to Baby Kochamma about Estha’s “rudeness” she confides that “she had seen Satan in their eyes. nataS in their seye”. The punishment? “They were made to write In future we will not read backwards. In future we will not read backwards. A hundred times. Forwards”. (ibid.). Indeed, there is something satanic about the whole episode when Miss Mitten is run over and killed by a milk van reversing, i.e., moving backwards. There is also the theme of talking back. Reading backwards is a silent (or at least a more subtle) alternative to talking back. And it is no coincidence that Baby Kochamma, we are told, makes the children read Shakespeare’s The Tempest in its Charles and Mary Lamb abridged version (mind you, among all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays, it had to be The Tempest—the play where Caliban, “a freckled human whelp, hag-born, not honor’d with human shape”, has the ultimate laugh at the expense of his captor and master Prospero— he can talk back and even curse his master in the latter’s own language. In Rahel’s opinion, Baby Kochamma herself was leading a life that was moving backwards. She is living her life backwards, Rahel thought. It was a curiously apt observation. Baby Kochamma had lived her life backwards. As a young woman she had renounced the material world, and now, as an old one, she seemed to embrace it. She hugged it and it her hugged her back. (p. 22). As if to be in perfect keeping with the abiding theme of looking, walking and even living backwards, Arundhati’s prose also constantly harks back to some of the major works of English literature. In the very opening sentence of the novel “May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month” the attentive reader can listen to T.S. Eliot’s “April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain”. The contrast and closeness between the pair “breeding/brooding” is likewise no coincidence. A usual explanation offered for Eliot’s famous turn of phrase is that April does often fall short of expectations by not fulfilling its promise of bringing better days (Whereof the saying “As happy as a hare in May”). April, the month that marks the end of winter in England, becomes cruel when it fails to stir men and beasts to look forward to the brighter days ahead. As Shelley exclaimed with uncharacteristic optimism in Ode to the West Wind “When Winter comes, can Spring be far. Tradução & Comunicação - Revista Brasileira de Tradutores • Nº. 19, Ano 2009 • p. 129-138.

(9) Kanavillil Rajagopalan. 137. behind?”, if only to make amends for his earlier note of sombre pessimism that said “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed”. The full significance of that opening sentence of The God of Small Things only becomes clear as the plot unfolds to reveal the fate of the hapless earthlings that go about their humdrum lives in blissful ignorance of the Destiny that awaits them at the end of the road. It is almost as if there was an inexplicable yet compelling force in the air that infused their hearts with foreboding and made them wish if only they could live their lives backwards. The characters in Arundhati Roy’s masterpiece live out their lives in and through translation. Indeed the world of Ayemenem and its surroundings—in particular, the “house on the other side of the river—Looming in the Heart of Darkness”—is, one might say, a translated world. Unbeknownst to themselves, Marlowe, Kurtz, the pilgrims, the cannibals … are all there as silent witnesses to the drama inexorably and indefatigably unfolding in the novel. If, as Salman Rusdie says, translation comes, etymologically, from the Latin for ‘bearing across’, “[h]aving been borne across the world, we are translated men" (Rushdie, 1992: 17). Rushdie originally meant by we, other ex-pat Indians like himself, but with globalization taking place at this breath-taking speed and the resultant mass migration of peoples across the world, it seems fair to conclude that his words increasingly apply to all of us, no matter where we hail from. But life goes on, writing backwards but inevitably moving forwards, just like the punishment meted out to the child by Miss Mitten: to write a hundred times In future we will not read backwards!. ACKNOWLEDGES The nucleus of this text was prepared from notes originally used for a presentation at the XVIII ENPULI (Fortaleza, CE, June 12 - 16, 2005). It was subsequently modified, revised and updated, both argumentatively and bibliographically. I wish to thank the CNPq for funding my research (currently, Process: 301589/2009-7).. REFERENCES DEFOE, D. (1910) The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Oxford: Clarendon Press. FULLTON, G. D. (1994). ‘Dialogue with the other as potential and peril in Robinson Crusoe’. Language and Literature. 3.1. pp. 1 – 20. LOOMBA, A. (1998). Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge.. Tradução & Comunicação - Revista Brasileira de Tradutores • Nº. 19, Ano 2009 • p. 129-138.

(10) 138. Arundhati Roy: translation as a way of resistance and self-affirmation in postcolonial writing. MERMANN-JOZWIAK, E. and SULLIVAN, N. (orgs). (2009). Conversations with Mexican American Writers. Languages and Literatures in the Borderlands. Jackson, Mississipi: University Press of Mississipi. PENNYCOOK, A. (1998). English and the Discourses of Colonialism. London: Routledge. RAJAGOPALAN, K. (2005a). ‘Arundhati Roy: portrait of the artist as a political activist’. In: Tomitch, Lêda M . B., Abrahão, M. Helena V., Daghlian, Carlos & Ristoff, Dilvo I.. (Org.). Literaturas de Língua Inglesa: Visões e Revisões. Florianópolis-SC: Editora Insular. pp. 409-418. ______. (2005b). ‘A geopolítica da língua inglesa e seus reflexos no Brasil—por uma política prudente e propositiva’. In: Lacoste, Y. (ed.). A Geopolítica do Inglês. São Paulo: Parábola. pp. 135159. ______. (2007). ‘Postcoloniality as translation in action’. Revista do GEL. nº 4. pp. 169-185. ______. (2010). ‘Narrando as narrativas — de le grand récit a la petite histoire’. Em: Lima, D. C. de (Org.). Aprendizagem de Língua Inglesa: histórias refletidas. Vitória da Conquista - BA: Edições UESB. pp. 13-18. ______. (in press-1). ‘The “outer circle” as a role model for the “expanding circle” in dealing with the spread of English.’ English Today. ______. (in press-2). ‘Resenha de Conversations with Mexican American Writers. Languages and Literatures in the Borderlands, organizado por Elisabeth Mermann-Jozwiak and Nancy Sullivan’. World Englishes. RAMANATHAN, V. and PENNYCOOK, A. (2007). Talking across time: Postcolonial challenges to language, history, and difference. Journal of Contemporary Thought. 25. pp. 25-53. ROY, A. (1997). The God of Small Things. London: Flamingo. ______. (1999). The Cost of Living. London: Flamingo. RUBDY, R. and SARACENI, M. (2006). ‘An interview with Suresh Canagarajah.’ In: Rubdy, Rani and Saraceni, Mario (orgs.). English in the World: Global Rules, Global Roles. London: Continuum. pp. 200 – 212. RUSHDIE, S. (1992). Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Penguin. SINGH, K. (2001). ‘Making English an Indian language’. The Tribune. Oct. 21, 2001. Kanavillil Rajagopalan (Rajan) é Professor Titular na área de Semântica e Pragmática das Línguas Naturais da Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Pós-Doutor em Filosofia da Linguagem (Universidade da Califórnia, Berkeley, EUA). Já publicou 4 livros: Por uma Lingüística Crítica (Parábola, 2003), A Lingüística que Nos Faz Falhar (em parceria, Parábola, 2004), Políticas em Linguagem: Perspectivas Identitárias (em parceria, Editora da Mackenzie, 2005) e Applied Linguistics in Latin America (John Benjamins, 2006) e colaborou com Yves Lacoste na publicação da edição brasileira do livro A Geopolítica do Inglês (Parábola, 2005) e publicou mais de 300 textos (artigos em revistas nacionais e internacionais, resenhas, capítulos de livros, anais de congressos, verbetes em handbooks e enciclopédias etc.). Em dezembro de 2006, recebeu o Prêmio de Reconhecimento Acadêmico “Zeferino Vaz”.. Tradução & Comunicação - Revista Brasileira de Tradutores • Nº. 19, Ano 2009 • p. 129-138.

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