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Playing the Double Agent

Abstract How may one write an Indian story in English without replicating the violences of colonial narrative practices? Historiographers, novelists and translators often find themselves caught in the same double bind, responding to (and responsible for) two distinct audiences whose response to (and responsibility for) the other has been decidedly unequal. A similar disparity plays out between indigenous language communities within India as well, as the folktale-inspired fiction of Rajasthani writer Vijay Dan Detha shows. Detha’s narrative strategies play with these fixed divisions that trouble so many postcolonial critics, using humour to establish a more flexible, self-conscious narrative community necessarily in transition. This article suggests a more complex approach to postcolonial concerns regarding the question of agency in the project of translation, by showing how one may follow Detha’s lead in adapting storytelling techniques to a version of his work in English translation.