Things Fall Apart and Dadi Budha: Portrayal of indigenous community and their disintegration

Abstract

In Gopinath Mohanty’s Dadi budha (1944) which was translated in the name “The Ancestor” and in Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” (1958), both the authors recreate in fictional modes, the indigenous life of the people of two primitive cultures, living on the hills of Koraput, India and in the forests of Nigeria, respectively. This comparison was first drawn by the son of the author Gopinath Mohanty, Arun Kumar Mohanty, who translated Dadi Budha in English. In the afterward of his translation he made this observation and also countered a very important problem of comparison – the problem of language. While “Things Fall Apart” is written in English by an African author, for whom English is just a medium of expression and not a vernacular language; Dadi Budha has been translated into English. Arun Kumar Mohanty vindicates this problem of language by arguing that most original works in English by non-English writers can be viewed as works of self-translation. To back his decision up, he referred to Joanne Akai’s paper on West Indian writing as translation: “Constantly writing in and for another culture, WI writers operate in a space between cultural and linguistic traditions: between Caribbean Creole culture and British or North American English culture, between the Creole language and the English language, between an oral genre (storytelling) and a written genre (novel or short story). WI writers are therefore faced with a number of challenges: as Translators, they must master the language they write-translate to from, as well as the language they write-translate into; as ambassadors, they must accurately represent Carribean experience and reality, as writers, they must communicate in a language that is accessible to as wide an audience as possible.”