On the Many Lives of the Bible in Tamil

Sailen Routray

Discussions surrounding ‘religion’ are central to the way debates and concerns in the public sphere have shaped up in modern India. But what is often missing in these is an awareness of the ways in which the very terms of the debate have a ‘Christian’ flavor, that then go on to shape subsequent discourse in interesting ways. 

Therefore, the book under review assumes salience as it reveals to us the centrality of the processes of translation of bible in the ways in which Tamil identity (including of course, protestant identity) came to be historically imagined, and the ways in which social factors such as caste played a central role in such an imaginary.

Tamil was the first language into which the bible was translated, and it is the only language that has had a continuous three hundred year old history of bible translation. Israel identifies three major axes around which the process of translation of the bible into Tamil (and the narratives surrounding such a process) can be framed. 

These three being – i) the terminology in Tamil to be used that could give content to the truth of the gospel; ii) the use of language registers – whether to use ‘Christian Tamil’ (a curious mixture of high and colloquial forms of Tamil that use/used Sanskriticisms quite freely) or tanittamil or pure Tamil shorn of words of Sanskrit roots, and; iii) the choice of genres – prose or poetry – for translating the bible.

One key theme that emerges is the centrality of a narrative of difference. While translating the bible into Tamil, a key ‘problem’ that the translators faced was the following conundrum: if biblical truth is universal, then it should have been possible to find equivalent ‘sacred’ terminology in Tamil; but often such terms were found to be tainted with ‘Hindu’ associations.

Therefore, often Tamil terms, that were closest with respect to the biblical ‘theological’ meaning, were found dangerously inappropriate because of the apparent similarities these invoked between Protestant and ‘Hindu’ concepts. By doing this, the process of biblical translation seems to have provided a dominant trope of colonial engagement with Indian intellectual life – of a process of intellectual appropriation that has to walk a tightrope between the poles of similarity and difference; similar enough to make the project of translation possible in the first place, and different enough to make the process of creation of a protestant identity (as opposed to say Saiva or Muslim) around a ‘Tamil bible’ possible.

A key part of creating a narrative of difference between Protestant Christianity and ‘Hindu’/heathen ‘religious’ traditions through translating the bible was by writing the gospel in Tamil prose, a marginal genre well into the nineteenth century. The protestant bible in Tamil, by conscious choice, was a prose artifact. It sought to distance the plain, prosaic, ‘truth’ of protestant religion from the supposed poetic fancies of ‘Hinduism’ that gave most of its sacred literature a poetic form. But soon non-Christian Tamils started wielding prose for a similar purpose. Especially Saivaites, imitating the Protestants, started using Tamil prose for producing sacral truth effects.

But apart from creating a ‘Tamil protestant’ identity (important enough in itself), the project of ‘translating’ the bible into Tamil has had important impacts on Tamil social and intellectual life that are perhaps not foregrounded in a forceful enough manner by the author. Before bible translations, the process of carrying texts across the linguistic barrier into Tamil involved producing versions that recreated material through a recognizable narrative frame. The process of translation of the bible into Tamil created a dominant paradigm where carrying texts across languages came to be seen as involving a strict logic of equivalences.

Although this book does not tease out all the implications of the painstakingly collected material that is used for the book’s arguments, it foregrounds the need for relooking the effects that processes related to translating the bible into Tamil has had on the language's literary history (and possibly of other Indian languages). By doing this, it also brings to our notice the need to keep ‘religion’ at the center of discussions surrounding India’s postcoloniality.

Details About the Book: Hephzibah Israel. 2011. Religious transactions in colonial south India: language, translation, and the making of protestant identity. New York: Palgrave MacMillan; 2011, 269 pp + xiii, ISBN 9-780230-105621.

Note: This review was first published in 2015 in the journal Contemporary South Asia 23(3) in a slightly different form.