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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2025
‘Swaraj’ is perhaps the most widely known of the keywords that are associated with Indian nationalism. Although it was initially used to translate the Western concept of ‘self-government’, by the second decade of the twentieth century, swaraj had become a complex term that could not be readily translated by using English expressions. Intellectual historians have extensively analysed the use of swaraj in the Gandhian oeuvre. Gandhi's Hind Swaraj has often been taken as a guide to explain the meaning of the term. However, the prior history of swaraj and the uses of swaraj by politicians who disagreed with Gandhi's definition of that term have not been adequately explored. To fill this lacuna, in this article, a selection of instances are examined that marked the transformation of swaraj from a traditional term that was associated with the precolonial Maratha history to an untranslatable term that was used by Indian nationalists to conceptualise their anti-colonial activism. I demonstrate here that swaraj was left untranslated in a range of English-language Indian political texts and documents to shape an agenda that was opposed to the collaborationist policies of imperial liberalism. The article thus illustrates the crucial role that the question of untranslatability played in sustaining the anti-colonial agenda of mainstream Indian nationalism.
1 See Gandhi, Collected Works, 98 vols (Ahmedabad and Delhi, 1958–1994), vol. vii, p. 455.
2 Gandhi considered ‘almost all’ of the suggested equivalents as ‘useless’. One reader suggested that Civil Disobedience should be translated as satyānādara—a term that did not please Gandhi, as it meant ‘disobedience to truth’; see Gandhi, Collected Works, vol. viii, p. 130. In Indian Opinion, the expression ramujī citra was used a few times to substitute for cartoon; see e.g. Gandhi, Akshardeha, 82 vols. (Ahmedabad, 1967–2012), vol. viii, p. 391.
3 Maganlal Gandhi—a member of the extended Gandhi family—suggested this equivalent; see Skaria, A., Unconditional Equality: Gandhi's Religion of Resistance (Minneapolis, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 2.
4 Suggestions that Gandhi rejected: pratyupāya; kaṣṭādhīna prativartana; driḍha pratipakṣa; see Gandhi, Collected Works, vol. viii, p. 131.
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10 David Bellos—a professor of French literature and author of many translations—has commented in a review of Apter's work that the ‘only expressions that are truly untranslatable are those you do not understand well enough (or at all)’ and that ‘the problem with them is their inscrutability, not their untranslatability’; see Bellos, D., ‘Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability by Emily Apter (review)’, Common Knowledge 21.1 (2015), p. 110CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Even more critical has been the response of Lawrence Venuti, the acclaimed theorist of translation. In Venuti's opinion, the notion of untranslatability is a product of both ‘political naïveté’ and ‘instrumental thinking about translation’ that effectively reinforces ‘the current critical orthodoxy in academic literary and cultural studies’; see Venuti, L., Contra instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic (Lincoln, 2019), pp. 79–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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81 Ibid, ‘Appendix B: Exhibits for the defence’, p. 72.
82 Ibid, ‘Charge to the jury’, p. 18.
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92 Ibid, p. 20.
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