Riddles of Belonging: India in Translation and Other Tales of Possession

Christi A. Merrill's Riddles of Belonging: India in Translation and Other Tales of Possession is a rigorous and relevant intervention into South Asian literary studies, postcolonial and cultural theory, comparative literature, and translation studies. Merrill's wide-ranging book traces the dialogical connections among written and oral texts in Rajasthani, Hindi, Urdu, and Sanskrit. As the title playfully signposts, the book addresses questions of ownership and authorship in textual transmission. Merrill emphasizes an emic notion of translation from one etymological aspect of anuvāda, indicating repetition, or “telling in turn,” as she puts it. This shifts the logic of translation as something carried across (trans-latus) in favor of something shared and told again. This reading of anuvāda as “telling in turn,” although teleological, is generative in that it reveals the ways in which stories, riddles, parodies, and jokes all have their own trajectories separate from an urtext as the prime mover of...