Borders of Sorrow: Violence, Translation, and the Politics of Religious Identities Across Cultures
Borders of Sorrow: Violence, Translation, and the Politics of Religious Identities Across Cultures. A "We the People" partnership between HCH and The Manoa Foundation, featuring free public forums by Indian scholar Alok Bhalla on the role of translation and literature in the building of tolerance, reconciliation and peace in democratic societies, and publication of a translation by Professor Bhalla in Manoa Journal of the Hindi play Andha Yug, written by Dharamvir Bharati after the partition of India with its resulting times of ethnic tension and crisis, and illustrated by the 1598 Mughal Razmnama ("Book of War").
A public talk will be held Saturday, June 26, 2010 at the Doris Duke Foundation for the Study of Islamic Art, with additional public events to be scheduled during that week. Information: Frank Stewart:fstewart@hawaii.edu.
Humanities scholar Frank Stewart: "Written in 1953, Dharamvir Bharati¹s play Andha Yug is a response to what translator Alok Bhalla calls Œthe genocidal days¹ of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. Mahatma Gandhi had been assassinated, and humans had unleashed not for the first or last time a level of evil (adharma) and atrocity (atyachar) that, as Bhalla puts it, Œwe may not go (beyond) without inviting the wrath of the sacred.¹"