Colonial Encounter

Telugu–English Literary and Cultural Interface

C. Vijayasree, M. Sridhar, Mahasweta Sengupta

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138363809
• eBook ISBN: 9780429884702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book focuses on transactions between English and Telugu through a study of translations and related works published from about the early-nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century. Moving beyond Edward Said's theoretical paradigms which suggest that these interfaces were driven by imperial and colonial interests, the essays in this volume look at how they also triggered developments within the indigenous literary and cultural practices and evolved new forms of expression.

The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of linguistics, translation studies, comparative literature, cultural studies and modern South Asian history.

1
A Religion in Translation

The Bible in Telugu

T. Vijay Kumar

Colporteurs, missionaries, and evangelists in India have spread the Word of God and the knowledge of Jesus Christ to an extent which is surprising to many. At the death of Gandhi the Hindu newspapers, in attempting to praise him, frequently likened him to Christ and never to any Hindu deity. This fact alone should make one realize the extent to which the message of the Book has entered the thinking of many even though as yet it may not have won their personal allegiance.

(Eugene Nida 167)

According to tradition, in the Acts of Thomas, which forms part of the Apocrypha (collected writings, some of which are included in the Roman Catholic Bible today), Thomas, one of Jesus’s disciples, a mason and master builder, was brought, albeit most reluctantly, to Taksashila (now in Pakistan) in about 46 AD, to the court of Gondophernes, the Parthian king. He was commissioned to build the king a palace of unrivalled splendour and was given unlimited gold and silver as payment for the work. Months passed without a trace of the promised edifice. Thomas, motivated by his Master’s parting injunction to tell everyone of God’s caring love for each person, zealously distributed the money among the king’s needy subjects.

When these unsavoury tidings reached Gondophernes, he decreed death by flaying alive and burning for the foreign swindler. That night, while Thomas awaited his fate in prayer, Gad, the king’s brother, died and went house hunting for himself in paradise. He set his heart on a wonderful palace made of gold and silver, but his angelic guide informed him that it had been constructed by God’s servant Thomas, who, by helping the poor and needy in his brother, the King’s name, had earned this unrivalled palace for Gondophernes.

In the palace, surrounded by weeping mourners, Gad’s corpse sat bolt upright. ‘Sell me that palace,’ he cried. Astounded, the king heard of his amazing celestial property. Thomas was set free with honour, and Gondophernes and his subjects received baptism at the hands of Thomas, the Apostle of India. This charming tale was generally dismissed as fiction until 1834, when numerous coins bearing the seal of Gondophernes, King of Taxasila, dated approximately 46 AD and others of Gad were upturned by the plough in the Punjab. Reconstructing later events, some historians are of the view that Thomas travelled down the Indus River to the island of Socotra when the devastations of the Kushans wiped out all the traces of Christianity from the Parthian kingdom of Gondophernes.

Thomas’s next and better known journey to India took him to Muz-iris (the ancient seaport believed to have been located near Cranganore, or Kodungallur, in present day Kerala) about 52 AD. He established seven churches along the west coast of India and converted members of four prominent Brahmin families to Christianity. Considered to be the earliest Christian families in India, these four families ‘namely Kali, Kaliankaru, Sankarapuri and Pakalomattam were the most important among Palur Community, and Sacerdotal classes in Malabar were drawn from these families from the time of the Apostle till the arrival of the Portuguese’ (Thomas 15). From Malabar, Thomas travelled across the peninsula to Mylapore in Madras, where, on 21 December 72 AD, he was done to death by a bigot’s lance outside the rock cave in which he lived, on a hill now called St. Thomas Mount. Here, one of the distinctive stone crosses attributed to him is placed.

In the absence of documentary evidence, the Apostle in India remains very much an aspect of folklore or of racial memory. A school of thought believes that there was actually more than one Thomas, each arriving at different times within the first four centuries from various ports of the Levant and the Mediterranean coast, culminating finally in the transit of Thomas of Canna (Canon) in the fourth century with a homesteading boatload of devout Christians. The merchant Thomas of Canna came and settled in the city of Cranganore, introducing the Syrian liturgy on the local Nazarene Christians and later bringing bishops from Mesopotamia and Persia.

One of the earliest references to Christianity in India mentions the visit of Alexandria’s leading theologian, Pantenaeus, to the Indian Christians on their invitation in 180 AD. Marco Polo, the thirteenth-century Venetian traveller, writes of St. Thomas’s tomb at Mylapore: ‘Both Christians and Saracens do hold the saint in great reverence. … When given a portion of the earth there from, sick men are incontinently cured.’

One of the links in the St. Thomas tradition was the chance discovery in March 1957 of a first-century church in the elephant-infested forests of Nilackal in Kerala. Later, in 522 AD, an Alexandrian merchant, Cosmas, the Indian Voyager wrote, ‘Even in Taprobane (Sri Lanka) is a church of the Christians … and such is also the case in Male (Malabo) … and in Kalliana (Quilon).’ It is from these early St. Thomas Christians that the Syrian Christian community in India traces its descent. The name ‘Syrian’ has evolved not only from the language (Syriac and Aramaic) used in their church liturgy and scriptures, but also from the influx of Syrians about 339 AD seeking refuge in South India from religious persecution in Persia.

By the time India entered the sixteenth century, the Indian Christian in Travancore Cochin was a person of consequence, commanding the respect and esteem of his contemporaries. ‘They are second only to Brahmins,’ writes a Portuguese of the period. ‘If anything be demanded of them contrary to their privileges, the whole unite immediately for general defence. If a pagan strikes one of the Christians, he is put to death on the spot.’

Succeeding centuries saw small minority groups make their way to India, fleeing persecution at home or seeking intellectual expanse abroad. Among them were groups of Armenians whose descendants form an interesting ethnic jewel in Calcutta. In about 825 AD, a Persian merchant, Marwan Sabriso, landed in Quilon, also in Kerala, with two bishops and a large group of Christians. In the north, there is less documentation of a Christian contact from across the Khyber Pass and the Indus or through the vast desert of the Sind. Stray references in travelogues offer some evidence that people in what is now Pakistan were aware of the philosophy of Christ and of his message on the eve of the Islamic tidal wave that was to sweep across the west Asian wastes to the banks of the Ganges.

But contemporary Christianity in the subcontinent in its modern form owes its expansion to the two swift political and missionary waves. The first flush was of the Europeans, the Catholic Iberians, Portuguese and Spanish, the French and the Dutch. The second was of the British, with the East India Company, the Church of England and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the many others who followed in their Protestant footsteps.

Two centuries before Vasco da Gama’s ships sighted the coast of Kerala in Cranganore, Franciscan friars had come to India for varying lengths of time in rather tentative missions. Franciscan John de Montecorvino came in 1293 AD, and, in the next twenty years, there were isolated Franciscan missions along the Western Ghats. Tragedy interrupted the Franciscan mission when four friars were murdered at Thana, near Bombay. The martyrdom of the four, however, did not dissuade the Franciscans, and there is a record of Oderico de Pordenone visiting Thana and Kerala. The Dominican Jordan Catalani of Serverac was appointed the first Latin Bishop of Quilon in 1329 AD, the Roman linkage reaching its early zenith with the coming of the Papal envoy, John de Marignolli, to Quilon in 1348. The first of the Portuguese missionaries had established themselves by the turn of the century and were thriving when the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama had his first official meeting with the Thomas Christians.

When Vasco da Gama disembarked at Calicut in 1498 in India which he thought to be a rich but pagan subcontinent, to be civilized as it was to be exploited for its fine calico and its rare spices, he encountered a powerful Christian merchant community with a sizeable army of well-trained soldiers and gunmen. Historian Amaury de Reincourt notes the profound geopolitical compulsions behind da Gama’s audacious journey to the other end of the world. As he says, centuries of struggle between the greater power of Islamic civilization and the small and weak Christendom had instilled into the hearts of the West Europeans a burning desire to outflank the huge Islamic domain stretching from Morocco to India. After the hopeless failure of the Crusades and the threatening establishment of Turkish power throughout the Muslim world, this desire literally conjured visions in the minds of European thinkers, setting their imaginations afire. But alongside there was curiosity, a great yearning to know other lands, to go out and convert the heathens, to trade and conquer.

The joy of da Gama and his men at meeting other Christians in an unknown corner of the world dissipated when they realized that these ‘local’ Christians knew nothing of Roman Catholicism, the Latin language or the Pope! This started violent conflicts between the Portuguese power as represented by the Roman Catholic Church and the indigenous Syrian Christians, which resulted in a large number of Indian Christians becoming Roman Catholic. Others held on to their beliefs and traditions. There were a number of splits in the remnant group.

The Portuguese presence is perhaps the best-documented chapter in India’s political and religious history, and it left an indelible mark on the ancient nation. The subcontinent had, in two thousand years before that, seen several invasions and expeditions. Alexander the Great had seen the sight of the Indo-Gangetic plains and retreated, his armies leaving but a few chromosomes of light eyes and hair in the genetic pool of the north. The Mongols and the Turks came, bringing with them the great tradition of Islam, and became thoroughly rooted in the culture of the subcontinent, enriching the vast plains all the way to the Deccan with the austere starkness of their faith. In turn, they were deeply influenced by the colour and the hot-house lushness of the moist subtropical forests, the exotic flora and fauna mellowing and ornamenting the Cartesian geometry of their calligraphy and architecture. The beautiful language Urdu is a living example of the depth of the Islamic fusion with the great Indian tradition.

With the Portuguese, the fusion was equally deep, but different. State power and the missionaries’ resolve to spread the Word of God sometimes worked together and sometimes at cross purposes. The Portuguese colonization saw the benign as well as the brutal face of a colonial presence. A harsh military regime, an exploitative commercial system and the dreaded inquisition all trod the lush landscape of Goa, spilling over northwards onto Daman and Diu and south towards Kerala along the Konkan Coast. Goa remains a cultural island, with a startling fusion of its Portuguese past and its Hindu antiquity. And enshrined in Goa remains the mortal body of the greatest man who ever breathed the scents of the frangipani in its monsoon air: Francis Xavier.

The arrival of the Portuguese missionaries marked the birth of the Second Church, as the Catholic Bishops Conference of India records it. Their missionary activity was carried out under the Padroado system, the patronage of the colonial power. The crown in Lisbon undertook to finance missionary activity, and the priests and missionaries converted large numbers of people both from the upper castes, specially in Goa, and from the fishing hamlets that dotted the rich coastline. At their prime, they converted over 40 per cent of Goa’s population, but the missionary zeal was somewhat marred toward the end with the use of state power and mercenary inducements. But if their methods were not always above board, they sowed their seeds in a fertile land. A distinctive culture flourished, reflected in the gold-encrusted altars of their churches and the languid lifestyle of the people. The Goan Christian community would, over the next four centuries, throw up many leaders of the Indian Catholic Church.

The other naval power of the day, England, had been watching the exploits of the Iberians and of the Dutch and the French in the Orient with increasing impatience and anxiety. The East India Company received its charter from Queen Elizabeth on the last day of the year 1600. The letter of commission signed on 31 December also enjoined on the commanding officers of ships to ensure that the sailors generally kept themselves to the straight and narrow path enjoined on them by Elizabethan puritanism. The ships sailed to Surat in the state of Gujarat with Anglican chaplains. The local ruler issued a royal firman giving the East India Company the right to trade. Surat became the English headquarters, from where pincer movements established bases in Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. The English acquired their first territorial possession in India when the Portuguese King ceded to them the island of Bombay as the dowry of the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza on her marriage to King Charles II. Hemmed in by the Maratha powers on the West Coast, the English focussed much of their attention and expansion on the East Coast, developing the mighty presidency towns of Madras and Calcutta as regional headquarters of their temporal and spiritual power.

The Anglican Church, when it came with the British, found the foundations to be strong enough to build Christianity in its own image. Surprisingly, the East India Company, which was importing priests for the moral well-being of its clerks and tea merchants and its private armies, did not greatly encourage the early missionaries, forcing many of them to initiate their work in the more hospitable nearby colonies of the Dutch or the French. Probably one reason for the company’s reluctance to encourage the missionaries too much was the belief of the directors that the Portuguese had failed to consolidate their position in India because of their involvement with the Church and their proselytizing zeal. ¹

William Carey, in many ways the ‘father of the Indian renaissance’, as the font of the printed word in the subcontinent, began his missionary work in the Dutch colony of Serampore in 1801, commencing his career as a professor of Bengali, which he had by then mastered, and then of Sanskrit, the tongue of the ancient Indian scriptures. Carey has earned his place in the hearts of Indian Christians for initiating the translation of the Bible into Indian languages.

I

All endeavours to translate the Holy Scriptures into another tongue must fall short of their aim, when the obligation is imposed of producing a Version that shall be alike literal and idiomatic, faithful to each thought of the original, and yet, in the statement of it, harmonious and free.

(‘Preface to the New Testament’, Revised English Bible of 1885)

The Bible as the indispensable accompaniment of the missionary is so much taken for granted today that it is good to remember that it was not always so. There were Christians in India long before Augustine went to Canterbury from Rome, and one of the most interesting byways of Church history is that in which the story of the Syrian Church in Malabar is traced from the dim days of the legendary coming of the Apostle Thomas to India up to the present time. When Dr. Claudius Buchanan, vice-provost and classical professor of the College of Fort William, visited them in 1806, he carried away with him an ancient Syriac Bible, dating probably from the twelfth century. How it came to be there no one could say, but the Syrian Metropolitan, in presenting it to Dr. Buchanan, said: ‘We have kept it, as some think, for near a thousand years.’ On linguistic grounds, it cannot have been written later than the twelfth century, and it contains a rubric proving it to be after the sixth. In the ancient Syriac Church, the Bible was an unknown book.

Among early Catholic missionaries there were a number of men of notable scholarship and linguistic gifts, but the attitude of the Roman Church to translations of the Bible did not encourage any advance in that field. But to the early Protestant missionaries, the central place of the Bible was a part of their faith, and it is no accident that the first Protestant missionary to land in India, Bartholomew Ziegenbalg (1683–1719), was also the first to translate the Bible into an Indian language. German by birth and recruited as ‘royal Danish missionaries’ in the service of King Frederick IV of Denmark, Ziegenbalg and his companion, Heinrich Plutschau, arrived at the Danish settlement of Tranquebar in 1706. He had to quickly learn the official language Danish and the work-place language Portuguese besides the language of the people of the land: Tamil. When Ziegenbalg began to learn Tamil, competent teachers of the language were hard to find, and there was no grammar or dictionary. But he had a remarkable gift for languages and was tireless in diligence, and, within five years of his arrival, he had completed the translation of the New Testament and publi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 A religion in translation: the Bible in Telugu
• 2 Between the translator and the reader: Brown’s translation of The Verses of Vemana and Sumati Satakam
• 3 The moment of transition/translation: Kandukuri Veeresalingam
• 4 Calibans and cannibals: Shakespeare in Telugu literature
• 5 Re/presenting poetry: translations in the Telugu–English interface
• 6 Translations and contexts
• 7 Translation that followed influence: Telugu–English interface
• 8 Gender in translations
• 9 Children’s literature in translation
• 10 Translation in the media
• 11 Urdu–English interface: a survey