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Attitudes to literary translations from South Asian languages underwent several changes during the last forty years of the twentieth century. At first, in the early Sixties, there was a marked prejudice on the part of those concerned with English Studies, with translations into English from the languages of the Commonwealth immigrants from the Indian Subcontinent. The direct method of teaching English as a Second Language eschewing translation and the ‘poor’ and ‘stilted’ translations as viewed by English teachers both contributed to a dismissive attitude towards translations from Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu, the commonly used languages of the British-Asians of the time. (Tamil immigrants were to come later from the 1980s when the troubles began in Sri Lanka.) There was also the pervasive assimilationist tendency, though rarely admitted, which felt that the immigrants speaking their native or mother languages and reading their literatures hindered integration. If ‘community languages’, as the South Asian ones began to be called, were to be retained by older members of the ethnic minorities their rôle should be restricted to communication within the linguistic group. For outside or external relationships nothing besides English would do. For South Asians, specially those from the Punjab, divided though it was between India and Pakistan, there was a common language – Punjabi – which they used for talking to one another. The written form could not be shared as two different scripts were used (Gurmukhi for Indian Punjabi and Urdu or the Persian script for Pakistani Punjabi). But most of the community’s socialising and cultural events were oral/aural with many hours devoted to rhetorical speeches and much-loved poetry. The only occasions when translating became a necessity were the ‘multicultural’ ones when there might be a few members of the ‘host community’ (English speakers) and friends from other ethnic minorities who spoke some other language of the Subcontinent, or from the Caribbean.

Within a few years of such assimilationist trends and the primacy of English to ‘integrate’ immigrants into British society, another and possibly more popular development began: the need for maintaining the first languages of second-generation immigrants and to develop a truly bilingual culture in Britain with the two-language social reality of Wales cited as a British model. That Britain had never been and was certainly not monolingual in the last quarter of the last century had to be pointed out to those who refused to accept the bilingualism of large sections of the new Britain. Throughout the 1970s there was much debate and public discourse on the advantages of bilingualism and the need to maintain and promote the first language of children before and during their acquisition of English. Voluntary groups like the National Council for Mother Tongue Teaching (officially formed in 1978 but in reality an important pressure group for several years before that) included English and non-English members, some of whom were influential linguistic experts such as Arturo Tosi, now Professor of Italian at London University and then coordinator of the EEC-funded project on mother tongue teaching in Bedford College (1976-81), and Professor Mahindra Varma at York University. Other members were drawn from teaching and educational administration, men and women helping to promote mother tongue teaching from the earliest stages of education. Various research projects were used to test the value of bilingual versus monolingual education and the possibility of adding the languages of non-European immigrant children to the Modern Languages – mainly French, German and Spanish – curriculum. This change did materialise and students can take Urdu, Bengali, etc for the ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels, ‘O’ now replaced by GCSE.

Literary translations entered the cultural scene through the need for broadening the educational curriculum to embrace multicultural education, the most enunciated concept throughout the Seventies when the major education administration in Britain – the ILEA (Inner London Educational Authority) – went energetically into developing an educational scene which broke away from the narrow anglo-centric syllabus and attitude of traditional British education. Multiculture, cultural diversity and bilingualism became important criteria for judging the truly broadbased cultural reality of both educational and social culture. While for some the main emphasis was on having non-white writers and performers to break the existing monopoly of native British ones, the major thrust was on the ‘other’, the languages other than English, the literatures other than dominant English Literature (Eng Lit, the usual abbreviated form). While the books and resources for children had tended to be broader than merely English stories and poems there was now a desire for introducing the languages used by the immigrant families. Publishers began to work on dual texts, stories for children written in two languages sometimes printed side by side or else with one language following on the second. However, the most popular of these bilingual efforts were the dual texts in parallel volumes, the same story being printed in three and four languages with identical illustrations and pagination. The latter caused some difficulties since translations into the various languages including English did not always fit into the same number of words.

The other change directed by the recognition of bilingualism and multiculture was the new attitude to translation. The prejudice of Eng Lit practitioners against translated material began to alter, not very dramatically at first, but gradually, to persuade educational publishers to commission anthologies and texts which were translations from languages other than English. While translated works from European languages, especially French and German, had been accepted as part of the wider reading of children and adults, often without British readers being aware that the works were translations, there was now a planned programme, aided by subsidies from the Arts Council of England, for publishers to bring out works of fiction, poetry, drama and general matters like biographies and travel diaries written in languages other than English and now available in English translation.

The real novelty of the 1970s and 1980s lay in the possibility of getting literary works from non-European languages translated into English and published by well-established British publishers. UNESCO’s translation programme with its well-financed project, ‘Collection of Representative Works’, which had separate translated titles for its Indian and Pakistani series, was possibly the most important publishing venture for literary translations throughout these decades. Through UNESCO sponsorship British publishing houses could be protected from financial loss should the modern classics from Hindi, Urdu or any other South Asian language being translated into English not succeed commercially in the book-buying market. Some of the best translations from South Asian languages were able to receive high profile reviews and bookshop promotion thanks to the UNESCO connection. One could cite many examples but a few should be illustrative: The Gift of a Cow, the English translation by C Roadarmel of the famous Hindi novel, Godaan (translation sponsored by UNESCO and first published in London in 1968); a companion volume, selected stories by Premchand, translated as The World of Premchand by David Rubin (London, 1969) with the imprint of Indiana University Press, part of the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works, Indian Series and Speaking of Siva, a translation of religious lyrics in Kannada by the great and much lamented A K Ramanujan, whose death in 1993 was a sad loss to scholarship, poetry and translation.

Translations were no longer by the end of the 1970s regarded as literary exotics. Multiculturalism, extended to multilingualism, began to be recognised by educational and wider cultural circles. The political integration of Britain into Europe has already started and gradually the growth of modern European languages and studies in the academy spread to publishing and the reading public. A major newspaper started awards for the best literary translation of the year. For non-European languages the translation scene remained marginalised until the Arts Council of England began its special subsidies to publishing houses ready to bring out new translations from these languages. Heinemann, a major publisher, was subsidised for its Asian series of eight fiction titles published in 1993-94 through an Arts Council grant. While the commercial success of the venture was less than expected, the novelty of unfamiliar titles by Asian novelists unknown to British readers in the windows of major bookshops of the land, and of reviewers having to take notice of a literary world they had hitherto ignored, proved a landmark in British publishing and the popularisation of literary translation.

Since then there have been occasional ventures into translation from non-European fiction and poetry, generally through subsidy and some other inducement. Until commercial publishers are confident of economic security and the British reading public can be persuaded to venture into literatures which are not exotic but serious creative work, there can be no real progress. Translation, the most valuable and necessary of communicative arts in our diversified world, is still regarded with ambivalence. But there are small signs of changing tastes as British society receives newer entrants from other lands and cultures widen. An anthology of short stories from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, first published in 1980, is still being used in Further Education colleges and new collections are being commissioned by publishers with a mixture of original writing in English and translations from South Asian languages, especially those in use in Britain.