Notes on some incarnations of Don Quijote in India

Cervantes’s Don Quijote arrived in India comparatively late, and for this, as shown in this paper, Sir William Jones (1746–1794) cannot be held responsible. When towards the end of the nineteenth century the Spanish classic finally started appearing in various Indian incarnations, the numerous publications which followed seemed to prove vividly the prophetic words of the great Spanish author about his own book that “no ha de haber nación ni lengua donde no se traduzga” (“no nation or language will be without a translation of it”). Yet, many of the Indian translations and adaptations—most of which were done from English and not from the original Spanish—did not circulate widely in India and soon fell into oblivion. Thus, the earliest complete Indian incarnation of Don Quixote, namely, a Gujarati translation from Charles Jarvis’s English version of the text, has entirely evaded the attention of Hispanists in India. The present paper throws some light on this translation which the Parsi publisher Jehangir Bejanji Karani (1850–1897) released in the mid-1880s in Bombay. While briefly mentioning other translations of Don Quijote in Indian languages, the paper concludes by highlighting the recently published edition of a partial Sanskrit translation which two Kashmiri pandits prepared in the mid-1930s. The work of Pt. Jagaddhar Zadoo and Pt. Nityanand Shastri had remained largely forgotten in manuscript form for more than eight decades until it was edited by the author of this paper. The edition of this remarkable incarnation of Don Quijote was published in 2019 in Pune.