Abstract
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.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Murdoch (1865: 234), ‘the first periodical issued in India seems to have been the Tamil Magazine,’ published by the Madras Tract Society.
- 2.
Single language journals (in Bengali and Marathi) began to be published from before the 1840s. There was also a bilingual (Bengali and English) Protestant journal published in Calcutta, The Gospel Magazine, in 1819, but from January 1820, it changed to a Bengali magazine.
- 3.
See note 1 on The Gospel Magazine.
- 4.
In several Indian languages, the term for translation (anuvad) means ‘repetition’ rather than carrying across.
- 5.
Ziegenbalg (1709)
- 6.
See for example, Morning Star 1843, the editors’ response to a letter: ‘We ask our readers to account for this difference between Protestants, the Catholics, Sivas, and Mohammedans. Since there are many religions in the world, all claiming to be true; and since, if either one is true, the others must be essentially false, it is an object of the highest importance to every man, to learn which is the true religion; for this knowledge is as essential to man’s happiness in the next world, …We cannot obtain this knowledge, if the books from which the different religions are derived, are forbidden to be generally circulated.’ (Morning Star, 25 May 1843, III [10]: 115).
- 7.
For more details please see Israel (2011), ch. 4.
- 8.
There are several examples of such linking of scripture translation to the Protestant faith and opposition to scripture translation as representing the Catholic position. For example, the article, ‘Opposition of the Papacy to the Circulation of the Bible,’ March 1845, contrasts the ‘benevolent efforts of the Protestants to circulate the word of God’ to the ‘deep rooted abhorrence’ of ‘Popery’ to the Bible, listing their persecution of Bible translators as evidence.
- 9.
The Hindi term panth denotes denomination, sect, religion, church, or creed.
- 10.
Tamil has a long history of ‘dictionary’ compilation (called nikantukal) resembling the modern Thesaurus in style but with metrical glosses.
- 11.
- 12.
Goa, currently a small state in Western India, came under Portuguese Catholic influence in the early sixteenth century and has since been predominantly Catholic.
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Israel, H. (2016). Improving the Public: Translating Protestant Values through Nineteenth-Century Bilingual Print Journalism in South Asia. In: Blumczynski, P., Gillespie, J. (eds) Translating Values. Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54971-6_10
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