D Tejaswini Niranjana physics involves a use of translation that shatters the coherence of the 'original' and the 'invariable identity of sense'. This coherence is constituted in part, as I have shown, through the operation of History and Knowledge in the colonial context. To deconstruct these essentializing discourses, therefore, is not only to disrupt the linear narrativizing of history, it is also to suggest that the practice of translation, far from collapsing of the economic and the political, can help us constantly interrogate ourselves and our right to speak as and/or speak/or. Since as post-colonials we already exist 'in translation', our search need not be for 115 origins or essences but for a richer complexity. It is here that translators can intervene to inscribe heterogeneity, to show origins as always already fissured. By illuminating through their choice of texts the conjunctures our 'present' forms with the 'past'/ translators can meticulously uncover the instability of the 'original'. The practice of translation thereby becomes strategic, practical, interventionist. The disruptive force of re-translation brings 'histor/ to legibility even as it opens up a post-colonial space. [I am indebted to Vivek Dhareshwar for his comments on earlier drafts of this paper.] NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. "... Power produces knowledge... [they] directly imply one another', says Michel Foucault (in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York, 1979, p. 27). He further suggests that the 'individual' or the subject is "fabricated" by technologies of power or practices of subjectification. 2. Niranjana, Translation, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context", forthcoming in (An)Ofher Tongue, (ed.) Alfred Arteaga. 3. See Hegel, Philosophy of History, 1837, (trans.) J. Sibree, New York, no date, pp. 203-35; and Mill, A History of British India, 1817, New Delhi, 1972. 4. Niranjana, op. cit. 5. Derrida, "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy", in Margins of Philosophy, (trans.) Alan Bass, Chicago, 1982, p. 230. 6. Gayatri C. Spivak, "The Rani of Sirmur", in Europe and its Others, I, (eds.) Frauds Barker et. aJ., Colchester, 1985, pp. 128-51. 7. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, (trans.) David B. AUison, Evanston, 1973, p. 99, cited hereafter as SP. 8. Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, New York, 1983. 9. Bhabha, "The Other Question", Screen, 24,6, Nov.-Dec. 1983, p. 27. 10. For two different but related notions of effective-history, see Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, (trans.) Adrian Collins, Indianapolis, 1957; and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, (trans.) Barden and dimming, New York, 1975. 11. Walter Benjamin's work, on the contrary, performs a similar critique of monolithic history, but is able to use, however elliptically, materialist historiography as a means of destabilization, preserving thereby some concept of historicity. I shall discuss this in detail in a forthcoming paper. 12. Derrida, "Sending: On Representation", Social Research, 49,2, Summer 1982, p. 298. 13. Derrida, Dissemination, (trans.) Barbara Johnson, Chicago, 1981. 14. Ibid., p. 193. 15. Trevelyan, London, 1838. 16. Trevelyan, On the Education of the People of India, Chapter 11. 17. Derrida, Of Grammatology, (trans.) Gayatri C. Spivak, Baltimore, 1971, p. 10. Numbers 17-18