Shape-shifting sources and illusory targets: Jhaverchand Meghani and Saurashtrani Rasdhar

Abstract

This paper challenges the static notions of a source text, fixed and bordered in language and time, and serving as the prototype for a translation that is always and inevitably seen to take place in a cultural elsewhere. It exploresinstead the source and the target not as binaries separated by cultural and linguistic borders, but as a spectrum, one conflating into the other. This model of thought is particularly helpful in the context of the Gujarati writer Jhaverchand Meghani (1897- 1947) who was a prolific writer, critic and journalist. This paper limits itself to the context of his pioneering work in Gujarati folk literature, especially a collection of lokavarta or folk stories about the Rajput life and valour in medieval Saurashtra called Saurashtrani Rashdhar. Meghani travelled far and wide in Saurashtra over a period of several years collecting and documenting repositories of oral culture through folk stories, songs, ballads and various other popular forms. His sources were people from various occupations, castes, gender and class. Sometimes there was more than one version of the same tale and sometimes the same story contained idioms of two languages of regions that were linguistically similar, like Kutch and Kathiawad. How does one think of borders and sources in these contexts? This paper looks at a number of such consequences in the context of Meghanis folk stories and examines sites of translational borders and exchanges in order to propose a new way of thinking about sources and targets.