Of minority and multiplicity: translation in the eco- civilisational sphere

Abstract

ABSTRACT An anthropogenic pandemic has alerted humankind to the importance of and its estrangement from minor forms of life on the planet. A pandemic of another kind, no less lethal, is seen to have split up humans simultaneously, one that thrived on majoritarian impulses and ethnic supremacy. This paper views both these crises as pathologies of epistemology and communication and accordingly pleads to address them semiotically. By examining the politics of selection and translation of Nazir Mansuri’s Gujarati fiction, this paper seeks to define the contours of a minority text and a minority praxis of translation both of which get marginalised for their political and cultural attitudes amid the sweeping tides of majoritarian, capitalist and consumerist ideologies. It attempts to examine the extent to which Mansuri’s fiction, which operate in an ecosemiosphere, fostering ‘interspecies dialogues and semiotic engagements’ (Maran, 2021) can resist the hegemony of literary technosphere in which symbolic cultural codes and logic of market prevail. Ensconced in the minoritarian understanding of language, literature, culture and worldview, Mansuri’s fiction offers a ray of hope in the age of Anthropocene and its eco-sensitive translation, I argue, is not just a cultural need but a civilisational project and a planetary responsibility.