Tracing the Local: The Translator-Travellee in French Accounts of India

Abstract

This paper examines aspects of multilingual India as described in a few eighteenth-century French travel accounts of the subcontinent to underscore the interactional history of representation that the conventions of European travel writing have tended to elide, particularly in the context of the subcontinent. It draws on the notions of fractal and vertical in travel to examine vernacular-Sanskrit relations encountered by the travellers, and to render visible the role of the “translator-travellee” in embedding vernacular knowledge in international discursive networks. Rather than merely questioning the travellers’ often skewed and necessarily partial readings of India’s linguistic plurality, I approach these travel accounts as crucial for understanding the specificity of the region’s multilingualism, one that was largely incommensurable with the typology of language that the accounts seek to establish.