Colonial and postcolonial historians writing in English relied upon an emancipated slave's eighteenth-century Persian text, Tahmās Nāma, to construct the history of the Punjab in the same period. In this process, they have mistranslated the text and the genre. Rather than reading Tahmās Nāma as factual history or as a moral text of refinement, this article argues that if we return to the original account, in Persian, we see that the text is primarily auto/biographical. While this auto/biography does provide some insight into eighteenth-century political history of the Punjab and Mughal Hindustan, it—more importantly—sheds light on the ethnic, religious, social, economic and gendered lives of the author, Miskin, and the people whom he includes in his narrative. These intersecting and overlapping identities have been erased, flattened or misrepresented in translations of the text. Based on a re-reading of the auto/biography in its original language, this article considers how identity and slavery—conceptual categories of the present that are elided in the mistranslations—function in the text, and how those categories were understood, negotiated and leveraged during the eighteenth century.

中文翻译：

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历史误译：18 世纪印度的身份、奴隶制和流派

用英语写作的殖民和后殖民历史学家依赖于一个解放奴隶的 18 世纪波斯文本，塔赫玛斯，以构建同时期的旁遮普历史。在这个过程中，他们误译了文本和体裁。而不是读书塔赫玛斯作为事实历史或作为提炼的道德文本，本文认为，如果我们回到波斯语的原始描述，我们会看到文本主要是自传/传记。虽然这本自传/传记确实提供了对旁遮普和莫卧儿印度斯坦 18 世纪政治历史的一些见解，但更重要的是，它揭示了作者米斯金和人民的种族、宗教、社会、经济和性别生活他包括在他的叙述中。这些交叉和重叠的身份在文本的翻译中被抹去、扁平化或歪曲。在重读原语言的自传/传记的基础上，本文考虑了身份和奴隶制——在误译中被省略的现在概念类别——在文本中的作用，以及这些类别是如何被理解的，