Literature and Culture Seminar: Professor Anindita Banerjee, Cornell University, "Eurasian Contact Zones and the Limits of Identity: The Journey of the Russian Columbus from Imperial England to Global Bollywood"

In 1469, a Russian merchant called Afanasy Nikitin sailed to the Indian subcontinent on a commercial expedition. The account of his travels, A Journey Beyond Three Seas, was written in an amalgam of Arabic, Persian, and Turkic invocations to Allah and the Prophet Mohammed, which vie with and threaten to overwhelm the merchant's native Russian. Nikitin's travelogue is both an embodiment and a performance of Eurasia as a network of contact zones, which Mary Louise Pratt, following Mikhail Bakhtin, defines as "social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.” Centuries later, two translations of Nikitin’s travelogue — one published by the Hakluyt Society of London in 1857, and the other a 1957 film adaptation and the first collaboration between Bollywood and the Soviet studio Mosfilm — transformed the fifteenth-century merchant from an obscure traveler into a "Russian Columbus." I will discuss how translation, first into Victorian English and then into the film language of global Bollywood, transformed the heterogenous voice of Eurasia's contact zones into unified constructs of modern national identity and imperial aspiration across the very diverse yet interconnected contexts of Britain, the Soviet Union, and postcolonial India.