Week 3, Thursday 5 February 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library
Dr Malini Murali
Following the 19th Century’s feverish preoccupation with the East, very little sustained work has emerged over the next two centuries on translating pre-modern Indian texts and engaging with the reflective paradigms they endorse. The earlier efforts, mostly carried out by Orientalists, led to the establishment of Indology departments across Europe. In India, on the other hand, such rigorous institutional spaces are practically absent. The present interest in regional languages too tends to privilege a certain curated sense of “ancientness” as seen in the case of Bhakti poets. This has a direct bearing on translation practises that, when they do occur, seldom exhibit necessary critical shifts in the articulation of cultural difference. Hence, there is a pressing need to imagine translation as a mode through which the past may be rendered through renewed linguistic, aesthetic and epistemic registers; in other words, to conceive of translation as a way of configuring contemporaneity. I will illustrate this proposition through my engagements with two pre-modern compositions from Kerala—Adhyatmaramayanam Kilipattu and Nalacharitam Attakatha.
Malini Murali is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Devaswom Board College, Thalayolaparambu, affiliated with Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala. She is the 2026 Charles Wallace Fellow at the British Centre for Literary Translation, University of East Anglia, where she will undertake an English translation of Unnayi Warrier’s Nalacharitam Attakatha, the most celebrated composition in the Kathakali repertoire. Her doctoral work, Offering to Ezhutachan: An Annotated Translation of Adhyatmaramayanam Kilipattu, was awarded an Excellent Grade by the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, and is scheduled for publication by Rupa in 2026. Her talks on language, literature, and culture are periodically broadcast on All India Radio. Her research interests include critical humanities, literary and cultural studies, and South Asian studies. She is actively engaged in the study and translation of both pre-modern and contemporary Malayalam compositions.
