Translating Faith

Abstract

This chapter examines the politics and poetics of Tamil Bible Translations by focusing on the competing hermeneutical approaches embodied in the Jaffna Tentative Version and the Chennai Bower’s Version of the nineteenth century. Through a comparative lexical and stylistic analysis, it explores how translation became a site of negotiation between colonial authority and vernacular agency. The Tentative Version, marked by its Sanskritized and poetic diction, reflected an elite literary Tamil tradition, whereas the Bower’s Version advanced a prose style that de-Sanskritized and simplified the language enabling a wider lay readership. This shift from sacred elevation to vernacular accessibility democratized scripture and produced a distinct Christian Tamil linguistic identity. This chapter situates these translation practices within the cultural politics of colonial South Asia and traces their entanglement with Saivite revivalism and missionary pedagogy. It argues that Tamil Bible translation was both a theological and political act and it transformed the Bible into Tamil, and also Tamil itself, into a language of Christian revelation.