Krītadāsēr Hāsi as a Pseudotranslation: Features of Foreignisation in an Original Bangla Novel

The novel Krītadāsēr Hāsi (1962) by Shaukat Osman, a Bangladeshi novelist and short story writer, was published when Bangladesh, the then East Pakistan, was ruled by Ayub Khan, a West Pakistani military ruler. This political allegory was a form of protest against and a satire on the Ayub Khan regime in particular and the West Pakistani rule over Bangladesh in general. To make the novel’s temporal and spatial settings – the caliphate of Harun al-Rashid and the city of Baghdad respectively – distant and dissimilar and thus to escape the eyes of the Pakistani military ruler, Osman employed a writing strategy generally known as pseudotranslation. This strategy is exploited in this novel to give the impression that the novel is translated from Arabic to Bangla and the story of the novel has nothing to do with the affairs of the then East Pakistan. Data collected through a textual analysis of the novel reveal that different features of foreignisation as a means of pseudotranslation are extensively used in this novel to create that particular impression. Along with using Arabic words and phrases, sometimes mixing with Bangla expressions, the novel has used such longer Arabic expressions, with or without clues, as are capable of challenging the readers’ linguistic and cultural knowledge and experience. In addition, the language of the novel is not made lucid and fluent but something foreign to the readers. Every now and then the novel reminds the readers of its supposed origin in such linguistic and cultural settings as are different from the readers’ and thus succeeds in carrying the readers of this Bangla novel to the language and culture of the supposed Arabic writer.