Western intellectuals are not idiots
1. He says: “Doniger translates “dharma” as “religion”. Apparently, Indians should not criticize that because we know neither what the English word “religion” means nor do we know what “dharma” means because neither English nor Sanskrit is our mother tongue.”
First of all I do not say or imply that Indians should not criticize the translation. I merely point out that (a) there is indeterminacy in translation across two languages and therefore (b) we can only make ‘qualitative’ criticisms. That is to say, one must suggest how the word “Dharma” should be translated in all those different contexts that Doniger translates it as “Religion”. Otherwise, the criticism (“that it is not an ‘accurate’ translation”) is bogus.
Secondly, I did not say nor imply that we do not know the meaning of “religion” or “dharma”. That is, I did not claim that these two words are just as intelligible to us as the words ‘pif-paf’ and ‘paf-paf’.
2. He further says: “We may have the word dharma in Hindi but it may mean something different in Sanskrit. Besides, both these words are ambiguous –another reason we can’t criticize the translation since we don’t know all the shades of meaning of “religion” nor of “dharma”. Similarly when “brahmin” is translated as “priest.” Of course Doniger could have translated “dharma” as “perversion” and “brahmin” as “idiot” and since we don’t know what “perversion” and “idiot” mean either, we couldn’t really criticize that as well.”
Again, I did not claim nor did I imply that we must know “all shades of meaning” (whatever that means in the present context) in order to translate. Nor does it follow from anything I have said that one could then use any word in one language to translate any word from another language.
That there is indeterminacy of meaning in translation does not entail that one denies that words have meanings, surely. Words occur in a language and a language has rules, conventions, dictionaries, and such like. It has a syntax, semantics and pragmatics of communication. Who has denied this? Quine has not; nor have I.
It is the linguistic convention to translate ‘dharma’ as religion and ‘brahmin’ as ‘priest’. One cannot fulminate against this centuries-old practice unless one comes up with alternatives and shows why the alternative is better than the centuries-old practice. Until such stage is reached, wisdom counsels us to keep quiet. To reach such a stage, it is not Sanskrit or English that one should study but the relevant phenomena in the world to build a theory about the phenomenon in question.
3. The subsequent paragraph simply repeats the same misunderstanding without understanding my post. Of course, to understand my post and react to that, the presupposition is that one has read what linguists and philosophers of language have written about meaning and use. If one has not done this work, and has merely some vague common-sense ideas about translation, then one should have the minimal humility to keep quiet and not attack Doniger’s translation.
This, then, is the “point of my argument”. Do not think that western intellectuals are idiots and imbeciles. Being an Indian and a native speaker of some Indian language does not give you some marvelous ability to criticize the western intellectuals based on your common-sense ideas about the world. People like Wendy have put in years of serious effort to learn languages and theories and if one wants to take them on, one must make sure that one is their intellectual match. And that requires years (if not decades) of dedicated work. That is the “point of my argument”.