Why Does Spivak Prefer Planetarity to Globalisation?
A Birthday Tribute to Anne Frank and Gitanjali Shree
#onherbirthdaytoday
12 June 2026
Today happens to be the birthday of two great writers who are celebrated the world over, thanks mainly to their works being translated into English.
Presenting Anne Frank and Gitanjali Shree, on their birthdays today, ladies and gentlemen.
There are quite a lot of similarities between Anne Frank and Gitanjali Shree, as regards their life and writing.
I am so excited to share yet another fortuitous coincidence here on this blogpost. Ms. Anne Dayanandan, the Founder of Campus School, presented me with Gitanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, three years ago, on this very same date – 12th June 2023! I can’t forget the valuable note that she had written for me, that came along with the book. So happy to present it here, for my dear readers.
Coming back -
Both Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl and Gitanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand deal with the impact of 20th-century geopolitical trauma. While Frank’s diary is set against the backdrop of the Holocaust and the violent segregation of European Jews, Shree’s novel, Tomb of Sand (Ret Samadhi), is rooted in the trauma of the 1947 Partition of India.
Both authors have achieved great global recognition through translation. While Frank’s diary (translated from Dutch) became a paradigm for humanism in the face of atrocity, Shree made history by becoming the first author of a Hindi-language novel to win the International Booker Prize.
As a warm-up to today’s post, me thought of recollecting the subtle warning that Spivak gives her readers on the ‘translation trap’ – a purely “market-driven push” for massive anthologies of world literature in translation, labelling it as interpretive violence!
So what is the translation trap?
In her seminal essay, titled, “The Politics of Translation”, Spivak argues that translation is not a neutral linguistic transfer, but a deeply political act tied to power, colonialism, and global capitalism. Hence she warns against the exploitation of “Third World” texts into easily digestible English!
Spivak calls this phenomenon as the “translation trap” - the danger of translating texts from marginalised cultures into English in a way that erases their unique identity just to make them comfortable for Western readers.
The translation “trap” happens when a translator prioritises a “flattening” and “smoothening” of the text to make it easily consumable and digestible in the target language (usually English). Although the goal is often commercial and at times well-intentioned as well, it is indeed a huge injustice for the text in its original, source language, feels Spivak. That’s because, by ironing out the linguistic quirks, cultural idioms, and structural complexities of the original language, the translator strips away the text’s unique “Otherness,” feels Spivak.
So how do we overcome this translation trap?
Globalisation and the market push want translation to be “transparent” - making the text feel as if it were originally written in English, thereby erasing its origins. However, Spivak resists this claim of ‘transparency’. She advocates planetarity (and surrender) as means by which we can overcome the translation trap. This allows the text to remain “opaque”, unique and distinct.
But before we do a Spivakian comparativist study, let’s discuss two key terms propounded by Said and Spivak, that I’m sure will help us skyhigh in our little attempt at comparing Anne Frank with Gitanjali Shree!
Well, Edward Said’s concept of the “worldliness” of a text, I’m sure musta provided the spark for Spivak’s concept of “planetarity.”
In his 1983 book titled, The World, the Text, and the Critic, Said boldly dismantles the “New Critical” illusion that a literary work is a pure, autonomous object existing in a transcendent aesthetic vacuum. Instead, he argues that texts are inherently “worldly” as they are events inextricably tethered to the dirt of history, political power structures, and the specific material circumstances of their creation and reception.
20 years later, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak introduced the concept of “planetarity” in her 2003 book Death of a Discipline as a radical alternative to “globalisation.” (although she had presented the concept much earlier, in the year 1997 in a paper presentation).
To Spivak, globalisation is the imposition of a uniform capitalist framework over the entire world. It exists to make almost everything – including currencies, cultures, literature, and land – quantifiable, measurable, exchangeable, and universally digestible. To this end, it flattens difference so that the global market can consume it!
That’s hence “planetarity” asks us to step off that framework. Hence, reading planetarily doesn’t mean a luxurious smoothing over of regional differences, cultural variations, historical traumas, and unique linguistic idiosyncrasies so that they sell well in English! 😊
Rather it exhorts the reader to preserve the friction in the fiction! It means reading a text from a marginalised culture and acknowledging that its specific vernacular, geography, and reality are distinct works of art, unique and have their own aura, and hence cannot be flattened for a globalised audience of readers and consumers.
With this in mind, shall we now do a quick comparativist (not comparative!) reading of Anne Frank and Gitanjali Shree’s key texts?
Spivak demands that the “new comparative literature” should engage with the friction of the vernacular and the geopolitical power-dynamics of language. She warns against the flattening effect of English as a master-decoder, which often erases the specific, material realities of the source languages.
She also insists that we should first look at the exact position the vernacular language occupies in the global hierarchy. In other words, she exhorts us to view both texts are battlegrounds of linguistic power!
Dutch is a minor European language, though one historically attached to a vast colonial empire. Anne Frank writes then writes from a position of subjugation - a persecuted Jewish teenager hiding from the Nazi regime. Her specific vernacular is bourgeois, and she uses the typical adolescent-dialect! She was not writing for a global audience; she was writing to construct a self (“Kitty”) while being confined in the Secret Annex.
When we look at the diary from the ‘battleground of linguistic power’ perspective, we find that, the Diary becomes a paradigmatic example of translational violence. Otto Frank, and subsequent translators, had heavily edited the original Dutch manuscripts, cutting off Anne’s harsh critiques of her mother and her raw, teenage sexual awakening, which she describes quite explicitly something akin to what Kamala Das does, in her My Story!
Translations have thus so subtly sanitised, smoothened and flattened her rebellious vernacular, so that, the translation industry can transform her into a universal symbol of “humanist hope” for the Western world – and thereby make her trauma consumable by a global audience.
This introspective comparativist study on the linguistic power, reveals harsh, harsher truths for the reader – that her voice was only allowed to “speak” after having been heavily mediated and curated by the patriarchal authority of her father and later, the publishing industry.
For example, Anne had edited her own writings about her crush on Peter and had harsh and critical thoughts about her mother, but Otto Frank deliberately chose to include them for its viral and sensational appeal!
However, he deliberately chose to omit passages Anne wrote harshly about his marriage to her mother, Edith, as well as some candid descriptions of her own awakening sexuality.
Now coming to Gitanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand –
Although Hindi functions as a state language in India, globally, it remains subaltern to Anglophone literature. Moreover, Shree subverts the state’s sanitised, Sanskritised Hindi by writing in a radically syncretic vernacular. Ret Samadhi is saturated with Urdu, regional dialects, and dhwani (Sanskrit poetics of resonance), actively resisting linguistic purity and colonial borders.
Quite interestingly, the translator Daisy Rockwell (sides with Gitanjali), and refuses to globalise the language of the text to tweak and tune it for the global reader. She leaves a lot of cultural markers, wordplay, and specific concepts from the source language untranslated, thus forcing the global reader to experience the friction of the Hindi vernacular in all its aura!
On a personal note, I felt bad that the Translator’s preface was relegated to the last pages of the book.
This apart, now, let’s look at textual examples from the English translation of Tomb of Sand –
Here goes –
No, Ma, no, the children insisted, look outside, the sun is shining, get up, pick up the cane, it’s hanging right here, try some roasted rice, it has peas in it. Maybe she has loose motions, give her a digestive powder!
No, I will noooot. No, nyo, nyooo, Ma mewls.
She’s tired, poor thing, alone and defeated, lift her up, get her involved; entertain her!
Sympathy flows from them immeasurable as the waters of the Ganga, washing over Ma’s back.
Noooot nooooow, Ma tries to scream. But her voice comes out a whimper.
Daadi’s no no no won’t fly here. What should the back do now? At this breath of fresh air?
She whimpers, but fondly. T’so cold. Whisperwhisper mut-termutter. She melts a little.
An excuse. But a true one. Once uttered, truer. Really truly. Trembling within the quilt, trembles tumbling loose like a mouse running through the dark, Ma tenses and hides, but Siddharth is Sid. Must give it a try. So she whispers her mother’s old rhyme of winter: chilla jaara din chaalees, poos ke pandrah, maaghpachees - bitter cold winter for forty days, fifteen for the month of Poos, twenty-five for the month of Magh.
Speaks, after silence, and quotes a melodious proverb. The voice sings. A wavy wave. That bbbitter cccold for fforty days ff ifteeen for Poos, twenty-five ff or Mmmmagh. Awesome, Daadi! You and me should enter the Grammies, we’ll win for sure!
Something must be said about the daughter. We’ll call her Beti.
The window had become so useful that Ma had also learned how to hoist herself up, pivot and jump out. She came out in the silence of night with snacks - shakkarpara, mathri, bati chokha, tied up in bundles - and she’d meet up with Beti, banished from home, hidden away in the dense karonda bushes along the boundary wall, where they’d giggle like little girls.
A cursory study of the above excerpts reveal the slew of translation strategies that the translator has used in the English translation of the original.
For example,
First, let’s take up the concept of foreignisation! By translating shakkarpara to “sweet biscuits” or Daadi to “Grandma,” the translator forces the Anglophone reader to step into the Indian cultural world.
On an aside, foreignisation is a concept coined by translation theorist Lawrence Venuti. It is a deliberate strategy where the translator breaks the conventions of the target language (English) to preserve the cultural flavour of the source language (Hindi).
Secondly, let’s take up the concept of Culture-Specific Items (CSIs) or “Realia”
Words like mathri, karonda, and bati chokha are classified as CSIs. These are concepts regarding food, kinship, rituals, or flora/fauna that simply do not have a one-to-one equivalent in English. Translators retain them because translating them would erase their specific cultural identity.
Finally, let’s take up the concept of Code-Mixing. In phrases like “Awesome, Daadi!”, the text is reflecting code-mixing (or code-switching). This is the natural linguistic habit of bilingual speakers blending English and Hindi together in a single sentence, which is a hallmark of modern Indian English.
Thus, by doing a Spivakian comparativist study, we find ourselves equipped with the curiosity to see beyond the marken-driven shine and sheen of world literature, and engage with the crude realities of the regional in all its aura. By choosing planetarity over globalisation, we refuse to cut out the traumatic, localised voices of these writers.
In fact, Spivak challenges us to embrace this linguistic friction – the aura of the untamed vernaculars! And for this, again, we are forced to unlearn our privilege and meet Anne and Shree at their own regional soil, language and culture.
I would like to conclude this post with a memorable quote by Spivak -
Translation is the most intimate act of reading. I surrender to the text when I translate.
“I surrender to the text when I translate”. Here, the phrase “to surrender” means to set aside one’s own ego, one’s own preconceived notions, cultural biases, and the urge to impose one’s own logic onto the text. It is an act of humility where the translator stops trying to be the “master” of the meaning and instead becomes a receptive vessel to receive the text’s own unique voice!
How true!
PS: You may want to read our past post on Kitty’s adult counterpart Etty, HERE on our blog.
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