Dissenting laughter: Tamil Dalit literature and translation on the offensive

Translating comedy has for too long been studied mainly in terms of the challenges of translating humour and by focusing on formal textual elements in jokes and puns. Recognizing the political function of comedy as a device that interrupts the dominant politics of marginalization, however, shifts our attention beyond the formal elements of source and target texts, and the reductive question of whether humour can be carried across languages, to the polemic, social and political functions of comedy. This chapter draws on contemporary Tamil Dalit literature, in particular Bama’s Karukku (1992) and Caṅkati (1994) and the anthology Dalit Ilakkiyam: E▁natu A▁nupavam (2004), to demonstrate how black humour, scatological and non-standard Tamil are employed to disrupt entrenched hierarchies of Tamil literary taste and challenge social and political oppression of Tamil Dalits. The English translations of these works of fiction cannot fully transfer formal elements of black humour or the idioms of the source texts; instead, they set out to painstakingly convey the grotesque, antagonistic nature of this writing in order to offend their target audience in a different way. Most Anglophone, especially Indian, readers belong to the ‘perpetrator sections’ of society. Target readers are therefore in the extraordinary position of empathizing with Dalit characters while becoming aware that they themselves are targets of the satire. Comparing translations of the three texts, the chapter argues for the importance of widening the study of translating comedy, defined not as humour but as a powerful and satirical political tool of resistance and radical questioning for writers, translators and their respective audiences.