The fifth IATIS regional workshop titled “Translating Disability Across Cultures: The Translation and Representation of Disability in Modern Indian Short Stories” was organized by the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study (JNIAS) from the 14th to the 16th of September 2016. Disability centric short stories from twelve different Indian languages – Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Assamese, Gujarati, Oriya, Marathi, Malayalam, Telegu, Kannada, Punjabi and Tamil - were translated to English by participants from fourteen different states of India – Delhi, Chandigarh, Gujarat, Assam, West Bengal, Orissa, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Goa. Some of the stories translated included ‘Subha’ (Rabindranath Tagore), ‘Drishtidaan’ (Tagore), ‘Koobad’ (Khalid Javed) and ‘One Eyed Uncle’ (Laksmikanta Mohapatra). There were approximately 30 speakers and the workshop was organized into themed panel presentations and a panel discussion.

Translation studies have shown a special affinity to marginality discourses – race, caste, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. However, disability is often lost among other discourses on the aforementioned minority-based subjectivities. The idea behind the workshop was to come up with a comprehensive theory on the translation practices involved in creating wider access for a text on disability written in any Indian language. Disabled characters have been a part of Indian literature since its inception. Dhritarashtra in The Mahabharata or Shravana Kumar’s parents in The Ramayana are characters that the Indian reader is familiar with. However, the Indian academia is still to evolve a body of literature that can be referred to by the rubric "Indian Disability Literature". The workshop provided all of us with a unique opportunity to think in terms of creating such a discursive category. The three days saw participants raise essential questions like: what qualifies as disability literature? (A text written by a disabled author on any theme or a text written on disability by either a disabled or a non-disabled author?) Why do we need to translate these stories? Who are we translating these stories for? (The disabled reader who does not have access to this particular language? The non-disabled reader who does not have access to this language? Or to Disability as an academic discourse?)

During the course of the workshop the participants, advocating the act of translation as a form of social activism, came to the realization that translation studies can indeed grant a certain degree of visibility to the area of disability by either disrupting narratives structured by the hegemony of normalcy or by bolstering those which are ideologically committed to promoting the cause of the disabled. While the workshop produced English translations of short stories on disability from various Indian languages, it also generated theoretical and critical discussions on the need to translate disability texts from these languages to English in India. It also delved on the different challenges that such translations pose and pondered upon possible translation strategies to meet these challenges.

Translation is not simply a process of conveying meaning from one language system to another. It is also about translating cultures and has a larger academic and political purpose. The discussions on translating disability texts enabled the participants of the workshop to explore how disability is constructed and conceived of in different languages and cultures and the possibilities of evolving a suitable idiom that could aptly represent the discourse on disability and present this narrative as an alternative to the ‘ableist’ hegemonic notion of disability as a clinically diagnosed medical condition. In this sense, the workshop created some disturbance around the subject of disability in the Indian academia.

The momentum gathered at JNU is being carried forward by the Center of Advanced Studies, Department of English Jadavpur University; which is a holding a conference on similar lines from the 18th to the 20th of January 2017.