This paper analyses epistemic violence as it appears in western feminist interpretations of Bengali women's writings from the Kallol (1923-1929) literary movement, whose works remain untranslated. Kallol magazine privileged women's experiences under colonial and patriarchal domination through experimental strategies like fractured syntax, vernacular language, and deliberate silences. Through a close reading of the short stories of Kallol writers like Haripada Guha and Premendra Mitra this paper argues their representation of female trauma through culturally specific motifs like ghorer chaya (shadow of the home) resists assimilation into western feminist universalisation of suffering. Drawing on Spivak's epistemic violence thesis (1988) and Mohanty's critique of western feminism, the paper shows how untranslated Kallol works resist erasure of the intersectional critique of these Bengali women. By staging the untranslatable as epistemic resistance, this research maps a decolonial translation ethics based on Kallol's feminist poetics as exemplified in key texts like Chithi, Aparadhini, and Bikrita Khudar Phande which collectively demonstrate the movement's multifaceted feminist strategies. It warns against translations that would empty these women's silences into spaces filled with hegemonic paradigms, calling instead for critical opacity through vernacular metaphors and syntactical interruptions. This advances discourse on gendered trauma in postcolonial translation, emphasising ethical engagement with South Asian literary radicalism.
Postcolonial translation studies have foregrounded questions of power and representation. However, limited attention has been paid to how the translation of Dalit women's writing negotiates caste-specific trauma within global feminist frameworks. Addressing this gap, the study analyses the linguistic and cultural shifts between the Bengali source texts and their English translations. This article examines how translation mediates trauma and silence while enabling resistance in select short stories from Dalit Kotha: The Subaltern Voice in a Bengali Woman's Narratives (2022) by Bengali Dalit writer Manju Bala, originally written in Bengali. Through her writings, Bala locates the silence and trauma of the unrecognised voice(s) of Dalit women of Bengal, which has been a less discussed issue in the dominant literary arena of Bengal. Through critical textual analysis, the study demonstrates how translation becomes a form of counter-discursive practice that both exposes and negotiates structures of caste patriarchy.
The paper investigates how Dalit women's autobiographies operate as forms of testimony that recount historical trauma while reconfiguring autobiography as a mode of resistance within Indian caste society. Through close textual and translation-oriented analysis, it examines Pan on Fire: Eight Dalit Women Tell Their Story (1988) by Sumita Bhave, Karukku (1992) by Bama, The Story of My Sanskrit (2013) by Kumud Pawde, The Weave of My Life (2015) by Urmila Pawar and The Prisons We Broke (2018) by Baby Kamble. The paper explores how these narratives translate lived experiences of caste and gender-based marginalisation into literary forms that contest dominant literary narratives and how translation mediates their circulation beyond regional contexts. Drawing on Dalit feminist thought, trauma theory, and translation studies, the paper argues that the texts foreground embodied memory, expose the Brahminical patriarchy, and expand the analytical scope of life writing as a critical intervention in social justice discourse.
This article argues that ecotranslation from postcolonial Asian margins must begin from untranslatability, not as a failure to be repaired but as an ethical condition shaped by colonial and digital regimes of legibility. Reading Michael Cronin's Eco-Translation and Hu Gengshen's Eco-Translatology through a decolonial lens, it proposes (E)co-translation as a cooperative, care-based orientation for translating vernacular ecologies without flattening them into Anglophone equivalence. Conceptually, it traces how 'Plantationocene translation' links translation to extractive infrastructures (publishing markets, policy templates, platform translation, and the energy-intensive circuits of machine translation) that reward speed and readability. It then develops a set of practical decision points-borrowing and glossing, paratextual accountability, multimodality, and community review-through which opacity, ecoambiguity, and slow violence can be carried across without being domesticated. The argument is offered as a theory-in-progress, grounded in selective illustrative cases, and aimed at institutional sites where translation mediates environmental knowledge: publishing, policy, and NGO reporting.
This article interrogates the reconfiguration of postcolonial trauma through a comparative Harman of The Flowers of War. Mediated by diverse institutional agents, the English rendition employs omission, addition, and domestication that erode the source's dual narrative, Qinhuai specificity, and philosophy of silence. Textual evidence reveals that excising the intergenerational narrator dismantles the postmemory mechanism, reducing ethical witnessing to a linear wartime spectacle. Furthermore, domesticating the courtesans' identities while aggrandising the western priest's heroism reinforces white saviour tropes and re-Orientalises the subaltern. Transmuting the survivors' strategic silence into forced testimony further commodifies trauma for the western gaze. This study contends that such translation constitutes epistemic violence, flattening cultural heterogeneity into neo-Orientalist templates. Ultimately, it frames translation as a site of political negotiation, advocating for ethical strategies that preserve the opacity and complexity of non-western trauma narratives.
