Hephzibah Israel

Religious Transactions in Colonial South India: Language, Translation, and the Making of Protestant Identity

The Terms of the Debate: Translating the Bible in Nineteenth-Century India Locating the Sacred in Terminology Symbolic Versions: The Power of Language Registers Prose Truth versus Poetic Fiction: Sacred Translations in Competing Genres

Narratives of Transformation: Religious Conversion and Indian Traditions of ‘Life Writing’

This special section focuses on Indian ‘life writings’ to examine the ways in which the conversion experience has been remembered and narrated in the Indian context, inflected by creative uses of old and emerging literary conventions of speaking about the self. It examines the multiple ways in which the writing, circulation and consumption of narratives of transformed lives helped to redefine individual and collective identities in South Asia. The articles look at autobiographical narratives to emphasise the importance of not just what about transformation is remembered, but how it is remembered, and to what purpose altered lives are remembered and reconstructed textually. What traditions of writing about the ‘self’ have developed in Indian literary traditions? And how have these been put to use by Indians writing about their conversion experiences? It appears that a wide variety of literary genres have been used to speak about religious conversion in the various religious traditions: from the Therigatha, the ‘inspired utterances’ of Buddhist nuns celebrating their experience of religious transformation in third-century-BCE South Asia, to medieval Tamil and Marathi bhakti poetry, and later to modern prose narratives in a range of modern Indian languages. In the introduction, we intentionally use the broader category, ‘life writing’, to indicate the wide range of overlapping textual genres that the different contributions examine. Individual contributors focus on specific forms of life writing (Frenz, Israel, Singh), or refer to the patchwork of expressive timbres drawn from several literary forms into a single text (Martinez, Mukherjee), and at times combine devotional poetic genres with prose (Dandekar), to reconstruct transformed lives and in particular to narrate the experience of religious conversion. This special section thus explores the tension between the assumed sincerity in introspecting inner transformation and the artifice of constructing narrative.

Conversion, Memory and Writing: Remembering and Reforming the Self

ABSTRACT Examining autobiographical statements left by South Asians converting to Christianity from the nineteenth century onwards, this article investigates the function of memory and literary narrative in three features common to several accounts: the translation of conversion accounts; the reconstruction of past events through narrative devices; and the re-formation of the Protestant individual conceived as part of a larger project of ‘reforming’ India as a state of progressive modernity. It argues that personal memory is inflected by conventions of writing about conversion, pressing into service specific tropes to exhibit the convert as ‘Protestant’. This economy of recall allowed converts to participate in wider public debates on religious and social reform by re-enacting conversion and confession in autobiography.

Imperial Babel: Translation, Exoticism, and the Long Nineteenth Century

inside (he is both an immigrant and an actor). His films explore the idea of “living in translation”, and a need to communicate the feelings, emotions, words, sounds and images seen in a “hybrid” community where many different cultural and symbolic codes collide. Finally, Alain Ricard’s article provides a thought-provoking insight into the work of Christian missionaries in southern Africa. It discusses translation as both a linguistic and a political activity from the early nineteenth century onwards, with a strong focus on the documentation of the histories of the Basotho people. The work of the Ellenberger family is of particular interest in its thorough and careful collation of traditional oral material and its transcription and translation across generations. Christianity then was seen not only as a one-way preaching of the gospel, but an exchange between the missionaries and the Sotho people. The Ellenbergers’ work sat aside from that of scientific institutions and particular national agendas, including the political order of the time, and profoundly increased understanding and knowledge of the history of Lesotho. This collection, then, embraces a broad range of subjects and approaches to the study of translation in the francophone postcolonial world. However, the book seems to be in two parts, with the first focusing on the theories of Glissant and translation in broad terms, and the second taking a more traditional linguistic approach. From this point of view, the collection does not perhaps gel as well as it could. That aside, this is a fascinating compilation of essays that engage with philosophical, metaphorical and practical translation issues and take a unique and multidisciplinary approach to our understanding of cultural communication across space and time in relation to the Caribbean, Africa and its diaspora.

Improving the Public: Translating Protestant Values through Nineteenth-Century Bilingual Print Journalism in South Asia

The term ‘Protestant’ is one that rose out of the specific religious and political contexts of Reformation Europe, but how did it travel to cultures outside Europe? In South Asia, the term ‘Protestant’ remained untranslated in most Indian languages. Israel explores the range of meanings, sacred and secular, that it acquired in nineteenth-century Tamil-speaking South India and Sri Lanka. Focusing on a bilingual (Tamil and English) journal Utaya Tārakai / Morning Star published from Jaffna (in present-day Sri Lanka) from 1841, she argues that the enterprise to shape a ‘rational’ and improved public opinion is possible by equating ‘Protestant’ with ‘rationality’ where the ‘Protestant’ position is the only ‘reasonable’ one.