Hans Christian Andersen in Nineteenth-Century Colonial India

Abstract This paper studies the Bengali translations of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales during the mid-nineteenth century. It starts by looking at how the Vernacular Literature Society, Calcutta (established 1851) introduced Andersen’s tales to counter the lowbrow Battala literature considered inappropriate by the Bengali educated class, the bhadralok . The colonial archive shows that it was Clara de Chatelain’s English translation that Madhusudan Mukhopadhyay, the secretary of the Society, used as the source text. Departing from an instrumentalist way of looking at translation in terms of faithfulness to the original and building on the work of Lawrence Venuti, I examine the hermeneutics of Bengali translations of two of Andersen’s tales: “The Four Winds” and “The Story of a Mother.” I argue that the hermeneutics of these translations show that Mukhopadhyay’s interpretants are embedded in the complex process of colonial negotiation out of which a new Bengali identity emerged in mid-nineteenth-century India.