Rita Kothari, a multilingual scholar and translator whose work spans different disciplines, is Professor of English and Co-director of the Ashoka Centre for Translation at Ashoka University. Her questions emerge from observations of regions and communities in the western part of the Indian subcontinent—Gujarat, Kutch, and Sindh. Her ethnographic research on marginal communities—through religion, caste, occupation, and gender—focuses on narratives of identity, raising questions of both linguistic and cultural translation.
Kothari has translated extensively from Gujarati and Sindhi into English and occasionally vice versa. She is the Vani Distinguished Translator; recipient of the Fulbright, Rockefeller, Hughes and many other fellowships and awards. Her book Translating India: The Cultural Politics of English was the first seminal study of translation, and her study of the partition experience of the Sindhi community was also a pioneering study in Sindh scholarship. The edited volume, A Multilingual Nation, and the monographs, The Burden of Refuge and Uneasy Translations, are among her notable works. Kothari is working on a Hindi translation of Shah Abdul Latif’s Sindhi sufi poetry (Kahe Latif, Vani Prakashan, forthcoming).
Kothari is also currently working on a groundbreaking anthology project in collaboration with Ashoka University’s translation centre, and represented by A Suitable Agency, which brings together a diverse range of writings from across Indian languages and across time.