Hephzibah Israel's cultural history of Protestant Tamil translations of the Bible is also a history of the transformations in language and social order that laid down the linguistic infrastructure for modern social identity in Tamil-speaking lands. Dutch Pietists of the Halle Mission first arrived at the port of Tranquebar in southeast India in 1706, and within eight years the first New Testament in Tamil (or any Indian language) and by 1727 the first Old Testament were printed at Tranquebar. By 1772 the Tranquebar mission had established a Tamil Bible of sufficient literary power that revisions and new versions would be introduced only amidst vigorous and fateful debate thereafter.
Israel's book is a history of those translations and the debates between and among European and Tamil Protestants over some 300 years. And like other recent studies of Protestant translation of the Bible under colonial and postcolonial contexts, Israel's argument demonstrates how these practices and debates were central not only in the establishment of Protestantism but in the formation of linguistic and even political modernity.Footnote 19
Following a thematic and theoretical introduction, Religious Transactions in Colonial South India is divided into four chapters. The first outlines the terms of the debate and offers a larger comparative history of the institutions that were directly involved in translation across India. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 each deal with a set of controversies over, respectively, language, version, and genre.
First, what terms would be most appropriate to convey the Christian God or notions of the sacred? How were they to differentiate themselves from other traditions, doctrines, and practices? Israel extends previous scholarship on Tamil translation well beyond etymology to parse the semiotic indexes of different terms and the historical processes by which a singular Protestant sacred vocabulary was established. Second, Israel shows how debates over versions of the Bible were interwoven with debates over which community—or even civilization—was inflected by the Bible's language. As a younger generation of European missionaries prepared, in the early nineteenth century, to bring out a newer version of the Bible complete with a new register of Tamil, the poet and polemicist Vedanayaka Sastri objected that the 1772 version by “old missionaries” preserved a literary form of language that matched the status of Protestantism within established aesthetics of the wider Tamil literati. Sastri's defense of a literary register of Tamil simultaneously encoded his dissent from the “new missionaries'” promotion of inter-caste marriage and other critiques of the south Indian society. Israel demonstrates how this earliest surviving evidence of dissent by Tamil Protestants from European missionary practice over language registers was simultaneously a defense of upper-caste hegemony. Likewise, the more Sanskritic Union Version of 1871 with its unconventional mixing of colloquial and literary elements that people came to call Christian Tamil eventually became the language of Protestant identity; even today, it serves as the language of sermon and prayer (if not secular discourse in Protestant colleges). Finally, the post-Dravidian movement language of the Revised Version of 1956 signaled a new kind of social and historical imaginary, one that embodied the ethnolinguistic ideologies of a non-Sanskritic Tamil history and civilization.
The most striking debate over translation concerned genre differences between poetry or prose. Israel's account is based on the intuition that “translated texts generate meanings in target cultures not only through content and language but also by their choice of particular genres and formal conventions” (p. 169). Traditional Tamil stylistics favored poetic over prose forms—the latter being suitable for scientific or commentarial purposes, the former being where real literary, and thus sacred, power lay. Vedanayaka Sastri appears again, this time as a champion of the poetic, the musical, and the Indic vis-à-vis European missionaries whose Bible was based on the referential fixities of prose. For missionaries brought with them that peculiar bias against the poetic as a form of fiction; for them, the Bible's prose served as a transparent medium for truth fit for universal interpellation of all Tamil speakers. Despite Sastri's achievement in melding a centuries-old aesthetic of Tamil bhakti into his new hymns, it would be prose that would win out as a form of language fit for addressing a Protestant Tamil community.
Israel locates Protestant transformations of language as the central process not only for the production of Protestant Tamil identity but also for a larger Tamil identity. For it was not only Protestants who adopted the new Protestant ideologies and aesthetics of language. Non-Protestant actors, especially among Tamil Hindus, also began to produce the same kinds of prose forms fit to interpellate general audiences far wider and more varied than any that had been imagined before. This new prose pioneered by Protestants “contributed to the new social and later political movements that dominated Tamil politics and public debate for most of the twentieth century” (p. 191). Religious Transactions in Colonial South India is thus important for understanding a much larger history of Christianity and India, as it provides a well-wrought and superbly researched argument about the infrastructural role of language transformations in the formation of modern social imaginaries more generally. True to a Protestant ethos, Israel's prose is plainly written and thus fit for a broad audience of students and professional scholars alike. I recommend this book for scholars and teachers of the history of religion, language, and politics in colonial and postcolonial South Asia and beyond.
