international journal of asian christianity 1 (2018) 177-197 brill.com/ijac

Was the Sanskrit Bible the ‘English Bible-in-Disguise’? Postcolonialism Meets Philology in William Carey’s Dharmapustaka (1808)

Richard Fox Young Princeton Theological Seminary [email protected]

Abstract

The essay explores Bible translation in early nineteenth-century India as a compre- hensive and under-appreciated site for intercultural and interreligious interactions ­involving Christians and Hindus in a complex context of asymmetrical colonial ­relations. Postcolonial theorists are interrogated for theory-driven approaches that lopsidedly rely on English-language resources without taking into account the actual Indian-language artefacts of translation projects that came into being. Using a philo- logical approach, the essay treats the Dharmapustaka, the Sanskrit Bible translated at the ­Serampore Baptist Mission, as a case study in ‘transculturation’—a multidi- mensional process catalyzed by an English missionary, William Carey, on the edges between India and Europe.

Keywords

Bible – mission history – philology – postcolonialism – Sanskrit – translation – transculturation

Without first of all clearing away several conceptual obstacles, my intention of getting a conversation off the ground on a little-known literary artifact of early colonial India—the Sanskrit Bible of William Carey (1761–1837), a figure ­revered and reviled in the Anglophone world—is surely doomed to failure.­ Once these hurdles are surmounted, I embark upon a philological tour of the Dharmapustaka, as the Sanskrit Bible was called, pausing in the Pauline book of Romans where the word dharma, newly christened, signifies ‘­holiness’

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178 Young

­rather than ‘righteousness’, as it (mainly) does in the Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa that Carey was translating into English simultaneously. Lastly, I draw on recent work by Tamil literary historian Sascha Ebeling to put forth an argument based on ‘transculturation’, understood as a set of ‘mutually transformative processes’,1 to frame some thoughts on what changed, who changed whom, and why. Overall, I do this because I find Bible translation to be a more pro- found site for interreligious interaction than Homi Bhabha allows for in his much-read ­essay, “Signs Taken for Wonders.” There, Bhabha makes the claim that India’s­ colonized peoples invariably looked upon the Bible as ‘the English Bible-in-disguise’,2 whatever language it was in.3 That the Bible was a tool of domination; that the Apostle Paul was an agent of empire; that missionaries such as Carey, the chief of sinners, were responsi- ble for the invention of ‘Hinduism’—all such axioms prevalent in the ­academy and voiced most vigorously in the field of Postcolonial Biblical Criticism,4 first and foremost by R. S. Sugirtharajah, contain both truth and error in almost equal proportions. That being the case, I begin with an easier obstacle to over- come: namely, the confusion propagated by certain scholars of World Christi- anity that missionary translators invariably preferred the Indian vernaculars (among others, globally) to elitist literary languages such as Sanskrit. If that truism were true, a Bible in the ‘language of the gods’ might not have been attempted. As my discussion of the Serampore translation project unfolds, I try to model an approach that avoids Postcolonialism’s lopsided dependence on English-language resources by performing a kind of stereoscopic reading, putting texts on both sides of the Sanskrit ecumene, the classical Hindu and the emergent Christian, into conversation, given that translation at Serampore was being done not only into but also out of Sanskrit. In so doing, I hope to open up the possibility that translation, not only as a philological but also as a cultural and social process, can result in meaningful moments of eclaircisse- ment for the parties involved, despite contrastive faith commitments and the

1 Sascha Ebeling, Colonizing the Realm of Words: The Transformation of Tamil Literature in Nineteenth-Century South India (Albany, ny: State University of New York Press, 2010), p. 5. 2 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 167. 3 For a long-overdue critique of the flawed historiography underlying Bhabha’s relentlessly semiotic analysis, see the brave essay by literary historian Bill Bell, “Signs Taken for Won- ders: An Anecdote Taken from History,” New Literary History 43 (2012), 309–329, and my own critique (forthcoming): “Lost in Ellipsis: A Guerrilla (Re)Reading of the Sources for Homi Bhabha’s ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’—What We (Re)Gain from a Second Look.” 4 Seesengood Paul. “Wrestling with the ‘Macedonian Call’: Paul, Pauline Scholarship, and Nine- teenth-Century Colonial Missions,” in Christopher D. Stanley, ed., The Colonized Apostle: Paul through Postcolonial Eyes (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), pp. 189–205.

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Was The Sanskrit Bible The ‘english Bible-in-disguise’? 179

­impediments and constraints of colonial-era power asymmetry. Once the texts are read that way (among other ways), a helpful brake can be put onto totaliz- ing, aprioristic theories from above that make such a possibility on the ground appear unfathomably remote, if not altogether improbable.

Vernacularity, Philological Inconsistency and Book-Religion

‘[T]he case for translation was built into Christianity from its origins’ writes Lamin Sanneh,5 one of the vernacularity paradigm’s most ardent proponents, whose learned disquisitions often elaborate on the claim that, ‘Christians are unique in abandoning the original language of Jesus and instead adopting Greek and its Koine, and Latin in its vulgar as the central media of the church.’6 While the paradigm helps explain Christianity’s diffusion and while it finds partial confirmation in Sheldon Pollock’s acknowledgment that pre-­modern India ‘showed very little concern for making religious texts more widely ­available’ (through vernacularization),7 my concerns have more to do with the ­exceptions rather than the general rule. Of these, ironically, the Sanskrit Bible is the one most often overlooked, despite the fact that no missionary is more emblematic of the paradigm than William Carey, whether the source consulted­ be a nineteenth-century Sunday School biography,8 or The Cambridge History of the Bible. In the latter, an essay giving him pride of place titled “The Bible and the Missionary”, can be found in every edition since the 1960s.9 Still, to be fair, Sanneh’s generalization about vernacularity is not all that far off the mark, and only a few corrections need to be added. Below, I will add three, and none of them will be that Carey envisioned an emerging church of converts speak- ing Sanskrit as their mother-tongue. One (the social) would be that eighteenth-century Non-Conformists from the British working classes were particularly ‘obsessed with the importance

5 Lamin Sanneh, “Bible Translation as Intercultural, Historical Enterprise,” in David G. Burke, ed., Translation that Openeth the Window: Reflections on the History and Legacy of the King James Bible (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009), p. 157. 6 Lamin Sanneh, “Gospel and Culture: Ramifying Effects of Scriptural Translation,” in Philip C. Stine ed., Bible Translation and the Spread of the Church (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992), p. 1. 7 Sheldon I. Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 479. 8 Parna Sengupta, Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), p. 26. 9 Eric Fenn, “The Bible and the Missionary,” in S.L. Greenslade, ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 387–388.

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180 Young of the individual’ and contemptuous of religious domination whatever form it took, whether symbolized by Latin in Europe or by Sanskrit in India.10 ­Another (the linguistic) would be that like his contemporaries, Carey believed (mistakenly) that Sanskrit was the matrix out of which vernacular ­vocabularies had been largely formed (even of languages now called Dravidian), making a Bible in the ur-language an indispensable template for the others.11 That way, not only could the Lord’s Prayer in Sanskrit be translated ten different ways, each one equally good, they would all have a pan-Indian versatility.12 And the third (the religious) would be the sheer missionary audacity of the project. ­Later, I will return to this. Here, it helps to know that ‘translation’ in Carey’s ­India was still a fairly alien concept, not so much because Sanskrit had no words for it (anuvāda, etc., would eventually fit the bill), but rather, because translations were so rarely attempted, into Sanskrit let alone from Sanskrit. As the whole of Sanskrit was a corpus that Carey compared to a jewelry box empty of real jewels, the vision that had him fired up was to fill it up with the 100-carat—Christian—variety.13 The important thing about the metaphor, as Robert Yelle rightly understands, is that Sanskrit’s relationship to ‘Hinduism’ (i.e., to ‘idolatry’) was ‘circumstantial and correctable’.14 ‘Even as there seems to be a general historical agreement’, Parna Sengupta writes, ‘that there is no single way to assess the general question of mission- aries [during India’s colonial era], scholars still tend to come down on one side or another of the debate.’15 With this, I am now able to segue from World Christianity into Orientalism and the lively debate over Bible translation and its entanglements with empire. On one side, Brian Pennington’s Was Hinduism Invented? calls the legacy of Christian missions ‘speckled’ (checkered?)16—and

10 Eli Daniel Potts. British Baptist Missionaries in India: The History of Serampore and Its ­Missionaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 244. 11 By saying that the Sanskrit Bible was an ur-text, I do not mean that it came out before the Bengali. Pride of place goes to the Bengali Dharmapustaka, but it had neither the cachet nor the pan-Indian utility and versatility of the Sanskrit. 12 Richard Fox Young, “Deva in Sanskrit Bible Translations: Rammohun Roy’s Contribution to Christian Hermeneutics in India,” Studien für Indologie and Iranistik 5 (1986), 135–138. 13 Anand Amaladass and Richard Fox Young, The Indian Christiad: A Concise Anthology of Didactic and Devotional Literature in Early Church Sanskrit (Anand: Gujarat Sahitya Prakash, 1995), pp. 34–35. 14 Robert A. Yelle, The Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Literalism and Colonial ­Discourse in British India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 79–80. 15 Sengupta, Pedagogy for Religion, p. 9. 16 Brian K. Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construc- tion of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 77.

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Was The Sanskrit Bible The ‘english Bible-in-disguise’? 181 so it was. When, however, Carey and his Baptist brethren are blamed for the fabrication of a ‘Hinduism crazed by blood-lust and devoted to the service of devils’ (idem), and when ‘eerie’ is the author’s word of choice for the small- ish Christian community that emerged at the Serampore Mission (upriver from Calcutta on the Ganges/Hooghly), one simply has to wonder, Was Carey Invented? And while I am aware that ‘missionary activity was one of [metro- politan Britain’s] main connections to empire’, as Sengupta also states,17 and while I find it troubling that Serampore’s English-language publications made India look ‘barbaric and backward’ (idem), I also feel that its Sanskrit and other Indian-language translation projects have to be kept in mind as well. Without material on both sides of the language divide, our fate, academically, may be to listen for the sound of one hand clapping. And again, as Urs App observes, much of the earliest Orientalist (and Ori- entalizing) scholarship ‘occurred in the context of Christian missions’,18 of which a prime instance would be the Indological research of William Carey in fin-de-siècle Bengal and the early 1800s.19 Grammars and dictionaries could, of course, became the tools of domination, and a book that explores such things, Robert Yelle’s The Language of Disenchantment (2013), subtitled Protestant ­Literalism and Colonial Disenchantment does so helpfully without making a priori assumptions about Carey’s Bible projects. There, Yelle argues—not at all implausibly—that to be christened for Christian purposes Sanskrit had first of all to be ‘disenchanted’ (through symptomatically Orientalist strategies, ­including codification). Just as reductively as Pennington, who talks of ‘idola- try’ as the great Serampore bugaboo, Yelle makes ‘vain repetition’ the thing about ‘Hinduism’ that most got under the missionaries’ skin. There is a differ- ence, though, because Yelle grounds his thesis in the Bengali Dharmapustaka’s translation of Mt. 6.7. There, mimicking the King James Bible, where ‘vain repetition’ is associated with the ‘heathen’, Carey rendered ethnikoi (ἐθνικοί) as devapūjākerā (‘worshippers of the gods’), when the original term was actu- ally neutral. In this, Yelle sees a heathenization of ‘Hinduism’ that subsequent Serampore translations ‘conserved and disseminated well into the nineteenth century’.20 While I appreciate his attention to extra-English resources, a more consistently philological approach reveals that apart from Mt. 6.7, the several

17 Sengupta, Pedagogy for Religion, p. 12. 18 Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2010), p. xii. 19 John Brockington. “William Carey’s Significance as an Indologist,” Indologica Taurinensia 17/18 (1991–92). 20 Robert A. Yelle, The Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Literalism and Colonial ­Discourse in British India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 118.

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182 Young terms for ethnikoi in the Sanskrit Dharmapustaka (and, thus, for ‘Gentiles’) mean—literally— ‘people of other lands’ (anyadeśiya, Mt. 18.7; Rom. 2.24; ii Cor. 11.26; Gal. 1.16, 2.9, 3.8) or simply ‘other people’ (anyaloka, Acts 4.25; Rom. 1.3) or (once only) ‘the Greeks’ (yavana, Rom. 3.9). On the whole, then, the terminology seems unobjectionable enough, and the claim that Carey’s Bible translations were infused with inferiorizing, anti-Hindu innuendo seems a stretch. ‘For the missionaries,’ Miles Ogborn writes, ‘printing was a ­sacramental act’, and to back this up he adduces a well-attested anecdote, told by the Ser- ampore missionaries about a chapel service where the newly-issued New ­Testament in Bengali had been placed on the altar and all present ‘felt them- selves ­utterly transformed and elevated by what they had done with words, books, and print.’21 This was certainly so, and is congruent with Postcolonial Biblical Criticism as well, except that critics such as R. S. Sugirtharajah, who claims, ­similarly, that ‘The introduction of Christianity as a book-religion by missionaries in the colonies, especially in India, had its repercussions’,22 are naturally harder than Ogborn on the Bible as a tool of empire. Up to a point, I concur with Sugirtharajah and believe his contention can be philologically confirmed, starting with the pustaka of Dharmapustaka, which is Carey’s name for the Sanskrit Bible. On the outside, the dominant—semiotic—impression one gets from the title page is that pustaka signifies something new to India, something imprinted, mechanically, on paper instead of on palm leaves, with (in effect) a colophon at the front instead of the back, drawing attention both to the place and the process of dissemination: Śrīrāmpure mudritaḥ (‘print- ed at Serampore’). On the inside, even though pustaka serves as a perfectly good equivalent for the Greek biblos (βίβλος) right at the very beginning of the New Testament (Mt. 1.1, ‘The book of the generation of Jesus Christ’), it seems plausible that the Dharmapustaka was more often judged by its cover than its ­contents. Curiously, when the Bengali New Testament was about to roll off the press and some pre-publication marketing was needed, Carey’s munshi, Rām Rām Basu (b. 1757), composed a Bengali tract in which the word of choice for the Dharmapustaka was śāstra, traditionally associated with texts considered sacred or at least authoritative. Revealingly, Rām Rām says that since the Bible is a mahāśāstra (a ‘great śāstra’), not a mlecchaśāstra (a ‘Barbarian śāstra’), it

21 Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 208. 22 R.S. Sugirtharajah, “Postcolonial Notes on the King James Bible,” in Hannibal Hamlin and Normal W. Jones, eds, The King James Bible after 400 Years (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 2010), p. 156.

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Was The Sanskrit Bible The ‘english Bible-in-disguise’? 183 therefore deserved a fair hearing.23 In Bengal’s emerging ‘culture of print,’ does the Serampore substitution of pustaka for śāstra suggest that the śāstras were increasingly associated with the atrophy of past traditions? Genealogically, the antecedents of R. S. Sugirtharajah’s 2010 essay “Post- colonial Notes on the King James Bible” are easy enough to find; they arise out of the same view that I oppose and Homi Bhabha espoused—that India’s colonized peoples invariably looked upon the Bible as ‘the English Bible-in- disguise’, whatever language it was in. That the language referred to is that of the King James Bible (1611) is far from accidental. As Sugirtharajah argues, this English Bible of Bibles came to be imbued, almost eucharistically, with the ­Divine Presence (as it were). That it had become a ‘sacrosanct cultural icon’ is also the view of David Bebbington, who argues that by the third quarter of the eighteenth-century rank-and-file working-class communities had adopted it as their own (including Northamptonshire where William Carey was raised).24 I also concur with Sugirtharajah’s claim that, ‘In the colonies, the King James Bible acted as a cultural powerhouse which determined the value and accura- cy of various vernacular versions’,25 since it is absolutely true that the Sanskrit Bible and the King James are syntactical twins, clause by painful clause. For confirmation of the supporting evidence adduced—that conformity abroad was enforced from home by the British and Foreign Bible Society (founded in 1804, the year Carey began his translation into Sanskrit), recourse can again be had to Bebbington, who discusses its global role in the ‘growing esteem [of] the King James version’.26 On the other side of the scale, however, several of Sugirtharajah’s conten- tions should be taken cum grano salis. One, based upon comparative philologi- cal evidence­ culled from Liah Greenfeld,27 has to do with the different terms

23 From vv. 25, 27, 32–33, 40 of ‘The Gospel Messenger’, Dharmmapustaker dūt [Dhormo Poostaker Doot, in the handwritten transliteration on the title page], by Rām Rām Basu [Boshoo], reprint, 1804 (originally issued ca. 1800). Facsimile in the author’s collection. On Rām Rām, a non-brahmin Kāyasth, see Richard Fox Young, “Was Rammohun Roy the ‘True Successor’ of Ramram Basu? A Critique of Certain Statements by David Kopf,” in R. Larviere and R. Solomon, eds, Festschrift for Professor Ludo Rocher (Madras: Adyar ­Library, 1987). 24 David W. Bebbington. “The King James Bible in Britain from the Late Eighteenth Century,” in David Lyle Jeffrey, ed., The King James Bible and the World It Made (Waco: Baylor Uni- versity Press, 2010), p. 49. 25 Sugirtharajah, “Postcolonial Notes,” p. 154. 26 Bebbington, “The King James Bible,” pp. 52–53. 27 Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).

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184 Young found in the Greek New Testament for non-Jewish population groups and how these terms were flattened out in the King James and rendered by the word ‘­nation’. From there, ‘nationalism’ must inevitably follow.28 This may all be so. It may also follow, as Sugirtharajah claims, that this was the very kind of ‘­textual takeover’ that helped catalyze Britain’s preoccupation with its destiny as a na- tion of empire-builders. On the face of it, however, such an analysis should seem suspect, philologically, insofar as Carey’s Sanskrit Bible is concerned. ­Already, for instance, we have seen that ethnikoi was actually translated fairly accurately compared with the King James without flattening out the differ- ences in the Greek text. A more consistently philological approach, focused on extra-English resources such as the Dharmapustaka, would also confirm that the same is true of the term ‘nation’, even though Carey had no compunctions, in English, about the word as a good one for India’s diverse ethnolinguistic cohorts.29 Revealingly, rājya, commonly used in the Sanskrit Bible for king- doms of all kinds, terrestrial and celestial, is as close as it comes to ‘nation’ in the proto-nationalistic King James sense. Instead, the preponderant rendering in most passages is jāti, meaning, unambiguously, ‘birth group’ or ‘caste’. Of this, Rom. 1.5 would be symptomatic, where Paul speaks of being called to his apostleship, not on behalf of ‘all nations’ but on behalf of ‘all castes’ (sarvajāti). And with this, we circle back to where we started, with Carey’s vision of Chris- tian faith, inflected Sanskritically and inclusivistically available to one and all regardless of birth. Not only, then, was the Sanskrit Bible not the ‘English Bible- in-disguise’. In fact, as a fillip to empire, it would have been a flop.

The Bible as Book-Religion and Religion-Book

When pressed into the service of Christian missions, philology may of course have unanticipated real-world consequences, especially in a context like ­Bengal’s in the time of William Carey, and no lexical decision was more mo- mentous than the one to call the Bible not only a book—a pustaka—but also a dharmapustaka—a book about dharma. Imagining that such a hallowed term could be appropriated without protest was nothing short of audacious. Protest had been expected and was the reason why Rām Rām Basu went straight to the point: ‘[Carey’s] Dharmapustaka is no mlecchaśāstra’ says v. 40 of The Gospel Messenger, ‘for the way of salvation is found therein.’ Given that the British like

28 Sugirtharajah, “Postcolonial Notes,” pp. 153–154. 29 Robert Fraser, Book History through Postcolonial Eyes: Rewriting the Script (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 129.

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Was The Sanskrit Bible The ‘english Bible-in-disguise’? 185 all Europeans, lumped together with other ‘Barbarians’ and called mlecchas (with virtually identical connotations) were still the ‘repugnant cultural other’ in the Sanskritic ecumene of fin-de-siècle Bengal, the author’s plea may well have fallen on deaf ears. From this perspective, book-religion, as such, was less of a shock than the idea that Christians would dare to talk of their Bible as a religion-book—a dharmapustaka—and emblazon that kind of claim on the front cover. For us to have a purchase on why this was so, the Indological stud- ies of the late Wilhelm Halbfass help in several ways. First, ‘Dharma is the core concept of a rigorous ethnocentric self-assertion’, being ‘the standard used to demarcate [Hindus] from the mleccha’.30 This ­suggests that in Bengal the Bible of the Barbarians might have looked a lot less like the religious book of a nation of empire-builders than a kind of manual for the demolition of an empire of nations. Second, as ‘the principle behind the hierarchical ordering of society’ and the one that ‘distinguishes the castes from one another’ (idem), the dharma propagated by the Bible might have seemed—and surely did—subversive of normative notions regulating caste interactions, resulting in mixing, miscegenation, and other evils (jātisaṅkāra). Third, as Sanskrit was thought of as ‘the language par excellence of prototypical correctness’ and alone capable of enshrining the dharma (idem), the ­mlecchas who did not speak ‘the language of the gods’ were ipso facto, to be kept at a safe distance from ‘the world of men’. It may therefore not have made much of a difference that the Dharmapustaka had become available in Sanskrit, since syntactically, it was an ‘English Bible-in-disguise’, because of the King James template in the background. Imagine, then, what the textual reception (as it were) of the Sanskrit Bible might have looked like when instead of eschewing the inferiorizing rhetoric of mlecchahood, Carey embraced it, uninhibitedly. Examples are found in Col. 3.11, the classic Pauline passage that in Christ ‘there is neither Greek (yavana; Ἕλλην) nor … Barbarian (mleccha; βάρβαρος)’, and most provocatively in the Book of Acts (17.26): ‘[God] made of one blood all nations of men’ (akaroc caikaraktāt sarvaṃ varṇaṃ manuṣyāṇāṃ). An eccentric mix, the Sanskrit drops the ‘nations’ of the King James (where the Gk. says ἔθνος) and substitutes for it something more eyebrow-raising: the whole of humankind, universally, is comprised of a single varṇa—a significant move, theologically, since varṇa is the term for the classical division of Hindu society into Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras. On top of that shock comes another: now following the King James, the Sanskrit says that human beings not only belong to the same

30 Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany, ny: State Univer- sity of New York Press, 1988), p. 331.

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186 Young varṇa (and, in effect, are unclassifiable in terms of caste), they have been made ekaraktāt, literally ‘of one blood’ (i.e., having a common ancestor; or, as the Gk. says, ‘from one man’, τε ἐξ ἑνὸς), and on top of that by an act of God! Umbrage was taken at this ‘textual takeover’ of the dharma concept, alarms went off in the Sanskritic ecumene, and well into the 1800s a backlash was felt. ‘Takeover’ may sound too strong, but this was the era—the 1780s thru the 1830s—when dharma was just on the cusp of an important lexical makeover. Missionaries mainly (but Hindus, too) were becoming more able to make claims about the salvific efficacy of the Hindudharma compared with the Khṛṣṭīyadharma, because dharma was now becoming a genus with a variety of species. That the globalization of an originally European notion of ‘religion’ made this inevitable, catalyzed by colonial-era interactions, makes it no less unpalatable. It is from here, in a postmodern point of view, that essentializa- tion and reductionism begin, adding to the complexities of India’s contempo- rary ‘hermeneutic situation’.31 In this makeover, dharma’s reconfiguration at the hands of Christian missionaries was a major catalyst; although less than might be expected, the Dharmapustaka both reflects the change underway and contributes to it. Despite the infrequency of the word ‘religion’ in the King James (which, of course, pre-dates the Enlightenment), an overview of the Sanskrit Bible provides a degree of confirmation that dharma remained (rela- tively) supple with meanings on at least three lexical registers. On one, Paul refers to himself as a Pharisee of ‘the straitest? sect of our religion’ (τῆς ἡμετέρας θρησκείας; Acts 26.5), using the word dharma. And when he speaks of his prior involvements in ‘the Jews’ religion’, he calls it the yahodīyadharma (τῷ Ἰουδαϊσμῷ; Gal. 1.13–14). On this same trajectory are ex- amples in the Epistle of James (1.26–27) where ‘pure (nirmala) religion (dhar- ma; θρησκεία)’— charity to ‘the fatherless and widows’— is commended and those who pride themselves on being ‘religious (dhāmika; θρησκὸς)’ but fail to help the needy are rebuked. On a second lexical register, the antonym—­ adharma—occurs in the Epistles to Timothy, and while these seem more ­redolent of dharma’s classical meanings, they are also the most unhelpful, an- alytically. There, Timothy, a young Christian, is admonished to avoid ‘profane (adharma; βεβήλους) … old wives’ fables’ (1 Tim. 4.7) and—à la Yelle—‘profane (adharma; βεβήλους) … vain babblings’ (1 Tim. 6.20; 2 Tim. 2.16). On yet a third register, where both dharma and its adjective, dhārmika, occur, ‘religion’ and ‘religious’ cannot be ruled out. The meanings, however, appear to rupture off in a new and seemingly different direction. Simeon, for example, a ‘devout’ man who blesses the child Jesus in the temple of Jerusalem, is called dhārmika

31 Halbfass, India and Europe, p. 342.

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Was The Sanskrit Bible The ‘english Bible-in-disguise’? 187

(εὐλαβὴς; Lk. 2.25). So also are God’s ‘holy prophets’ (τῶυ ἁγίωυ προφητῶυ Acts 3: 21) and Cornelius, the Roman centurion, ‘a devout man’, whom Peter con- verts (εὐσεβὴς; Acts 10.2). Certain ‘aged women’ on the island of Crete whose behavior fell short of the kind that ‘becometh holiness’ (ἱεροπρεπεῖς; Tit. 2.3), are admonished to become more dhārmika (−ā, fem.). Jesus himself needs no such admonition and is identified as dhārmika by the demoniac of Caper- naum, who calls him ‘the Holy One of God’ (ὁ ἅγιος τοῦ θεοῦ; Mk. 1.24). And toward the end, when Jesus prays to the Father, he calls out dharmapitar! ‘O, Holy Father!’ (ἅγιε πάτερ; Jn. 17.11). Most problematically and yet also symptomatically, the Sanskrit New Testament talks of God the Holy Spirit (or, as in the King James, the ‘Holy Ghost’; πυεῦμα ἅγιου) as the dharmātmā (dharm’|ātmā). As we shall see, the masculine gender of the word ātman is the least of its problems. Already, however, it looks increasingly doubtful that ‘re- ligion-book’ could have been what the title of the Sanskrit Bible meant. While ‘religion’ (in a European sense) has a place inside, dharma meant vastly more. Even on the outside cover, a second look reveals important clues about the ‘more’ that was meant, and how little it had to do with alien notions of ‘book- religion’ imposed from above. In words that are Carey’s own, the Sanskrit Bible claims, right on the front cover, to contain the ‘whole word of God’ (īśvarasya sarvavākyāni) and reveal the way of ‘salvation’ (trāṇa). As such, these are routine claims, but also—and more significantly—it also claims to reveal the way for humankind to ‘perfect [its] moral conduct’ (kāryasādhana). As an advertisement, it may have helped; it signified that social ethics formed part of the core of the dharma of the Dharmapustaka. While a more standard word for ‘moral conduct’ than kārya would have been ācāra, the lexical loss was more than made up for through the association with classical Hindu concerns about the kinds of human com- portment that are regarded either as ‘lawful’ by India’s legal literature (the dharmaśāstras) or as ‘righteous’ by the epics, its foremost repositories of moral wisdom. Since Carey was translating the Rāmāyaṇa out of Sanskrit at the same time that he was translating the Bible into Sanskrit, reading the two translations in tandem might seem a good way, stereoscopically, of getting more depth and perspective out of both, except for another Postcolonial conceptual roadblock. This one, again erected by R. S. Sugirtharajah, argues that this was the kind of colonial project that turned ‘living texts’ into ‘authorized and expurgated versions’ that were then ‘subjected to a modernistic scrutiny’.32 That Carey’s concerns were in no small part textual and historical, cannot be gainsaid; he did, however, immerse himself in the Rāmāyaṇa, found it captivating, and

32 Sugirtharajah, “Postcolonial Notes”, 156.

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188 Young gave it a profoundly theological reading. While a more aprioristic openness to the possibility of transculturation would be nice, so that a conversation could open up on what changed, who changed whom, and why, philology will have to shoulder the burden of argument and adduce the evidence that translating out of Sanskrit made a difference to the way Carey translated into Sanskrit. To take stock, though, of where we are, it can at least be said that on both sides of the Sanskritic ecumene, the classical Hindu and the emerging Christian, there was more agreement on dharma as a moral sine qua non than on what kind of dharma and why. Speaking as a Sanskritist who made a translation of the Ayodhyākāṇḍa, the Rāmāyaṇa’s second book and one that Carey also translated, Sheldon Pollock writes that he had to start ‘from the ground up—in fact from the very word dharma’.33 Two centuries earlier, without antecedent translations to compare with his own, Carey’s English lexicon for rendering this most troublesome of words was about as diverse as other translators, until Pollock: they include ‘reli- gion’ (but only once), ‘the duties of life’, ‘morality’, ‘justice’, and ‘the immutable laws of virtue’. While Carey‘s translation is fluent and accurate enough (though based on a Sanskrit commentary, not the Bengali recension34), the Rāmāyaṇa’s representation of Rāma as the ‘comprehensive model of behaviour’ par excel- lence lacks the salience that Pollock manages to bring out.35 There, the phrase ‘righteous’ Rāma (Rāmo dharm’|ātmā) appears on almost every page. And since ‘righteousness’ is really the only term for dharma missing from Carey’s toolbox, we might have a prima facie case that the reasons for its omission were not only lexical but also theological. The same grand obsession of British Non-Conformists with the individual could also have played a role, since the dharma of a prince/ruler like Rāma is caste-specific36—and among the things that dharma is good for, as Halbfass explained, is keeping the different castes different. Here, my argument coalesces around the idea that Carey was casting about for the kind of word that lexicographers call a ‘superordinate’, one whose meaning includes the meaning of other words. By juxtaposing a passage from the Rāmāyaṇa with one from the Sanskrit New Testament, his probable trajec- tory will seem clearer:

33 Sheldon I. Pollock, trans., The Ramayana of Valmiki (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 76. 34 Brockington, “William Carey’s Significance”, p. 93. 35 Pollock, Ramayana, p. 20. 36 Pollock, Ramayana, pp. 68–71.

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Rāmāyaṇa 2.30.10 Benevolence, compassion, learning, good character, restraint, and equa- nimity—these are the six virtues [ṣaḍ|guṇāḥ] that adorn Rághava [= Rāma] the best of men.37

Philippians 4.8 Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue [dhar- ma] and if there be any praise, think on these things. (Dharmapustaka/ King James Bible)

For comparative purposes, the parallelism of six virtues apiece seems striking, but the real point is that Carey took the virtues of ‘righteous Rāma’—called guṇas in Sanskrit (‘properties’ or ‘qualities’) and performed a remarkable feat of superordination, making dharma an even more inclusivistic category—­ lexically and theologically. After this, one thing remains: to highlight the most symptomatically ‘Christian’ word for dharma in Carey’s English, none of the candidates mentioned above being in all respects suitable. For that, the thing that beckons is the Sanskrit Book of Romans into which a philological excursus must now be made. On this whirlwind tour of Romans we should keep in mind that the Sanskrit Bible was neither isolated, hermetically, from other projects—the Rāmāyaṇa translation in particular—nor an overnight wonder. Revenants from earlier periods of trial and error occasionally resurface in Romans, but overall it looks fairly uniform, terminologically. That would be true of the distinctively Pauline words for ‘righteous’ and ‘righteousness’. One holdover comes out of Carey’s massive Sanskrit grammar (1806), which included three chapters of Matthew­ as a reading exercise. There, in a crucially important passage, Jesus tells John that his baptism would ‘fulfil all righteousness’ (sarvadharmapūraṇa; πληρῶσαι πᾶσαυ δικαιοσύυηυ; Mt. 3.15). Thus construed, dharma conveys the kind of ‘righteousness’­ Carey had learned from the Rāmāyaṇa’s ideal of good conduct. In the Dharmapustaka, the Matthew passage still reads that way. In Romans, it appears one last time where the fulfilment of dharma refers to the ‘righteous- ness of the law’ (dharmaḥ śāstrasya). Earlier, when I drew attention to how

37 Sheldon I. Pollock, trans., Rāmāyaṇa, Part two, Āyodhya (New York: New York University Press, 2005), p. 195.

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190 Young the word śāstra is associated with sacred texts, I wanted to acknowledge that Serampore’s almost sacramental valorization of book-religion may have been a reason for the Dharmapustaka’s being called a pustaka instead of a śāstra. That, however, now seems almost irrelevant, since the thing that matters most is Carey’s overt association of the Hindu śāstras generally and of the Hindu codes of law specifically (the dharmaśāstras) with the Mosaic code. Scattered throughout Romans, where references of this kind abound, the word śāstra sometimes appears in compound with karma (karmaśāstra; e.g., Rom. 3.28, 4.13–14); in the Sanskrit ecumene, karmaśāstras are the kinds of texts, ­Vedic and extra-Vedic, that are basically injunctive, ritual action (a core aspect of the dharma concept) being their primary concern. But to cut a long Pauline story short, the greatest sayings of all in Romans have to do with ‘the righteousness which is of faith (pratyayāt)’ and not of the law (śāstra; Rom. 9.30). And with this kind of passage, a new word for ‘righ- teousness’ appears—yāthārthya or ‘conformity to things the way they are or should be’—rarely attested and deliberately called out of obscurity, christened for double duty as the word for difficult Latinate terms such as ‘justification’. Yāthārthya always appears with a properly Pauline verb in the passive voice, hammering home the point that human beings are made ‘righteous’ by a divine act impossible of human attainment, even by ‘righteous Rāma’. With, then, ‘righteousness’ hived off the dharma of the Dharmapustaka, the only possibil- ity left is that dharma has had ‘holiness’ added to its evolving lexicon of mean- ings. Its having been superordinated, however, does not mean that dharma stands alone; depending on the context, pavitra/pavitratā, puṇya/puṇyatva, and sādhu/sādhutā likewise have their role, wherever holiness has to do with the exterior ‘purity’ of space and place or the interior ‘purity’ of the human heart. Having now come this far, it has become a virtual certainty that the real meaning of Dharmapustaka, the name of the Holy Bible in Sanskrit, is exactly that—the Holy Bible.

‘Paul was a True Pŭrŭm-hŭngsēē’

‘Translation it is that openeth the window’, says the preface of the original King James Bible (1611), ‘to let in the light, … that we may look into the most holy place’. While much remains to be known about the Sanskrit Bible’s indig- enous reception history, it seems likely to have been read almost exclusively by Christians, and that, mainly by Europeans literate in Sanskrit whose exog- enous views on the ‘stilted’ and ‘wooden’ quality of the Dharmapustaka are

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Was The Sanskrit Bible The ‘english Bible-in-disguise’? 191 on record already.38 Historiographically, the Sanskrit ecumene has left us with- out much to go on, but there is some evidence of what the Dharmapustaka translation project looked like as a cultural and social process. Once assessed, that evidence­ will show what a red herring it is to argue, as R. S. Sugirtharajah does, that Carey exemplifies ‘the idea of the missionary as a heroic translator’ and that his indigenous collaborators have been air-brushed out of history.39 However true that may be of metropolitan Britain, and despite the perversely ­un-modern propensity for anonymization that still prevailed at Serampore, quite a lot is known about Carey’s indigenous collaborators. Carey himself took full responsibility for the Dharmapustaka when, for example, correspond- ing with the Bible Society, saying that he had done it ‘with [his] own hand’,40 but that was different from taking credit. Elsewhere, he was unstinting in his praise of his elite Bengali bhadralok collaborator, the formidably learned Mṛtyuñjaya Vidyālaṅkāra (1762–1814), his docent during the fifteen years he spent as ­professor of Sanskrit at the East India Company’s College of Fort ­William. Esteemed by the Serampore missionaries, whose veneration of his philological acumen bordered on worship, Mṛtyuñjaya was living testimony to the resilience of Bengal’s śāstra-based knowledge traditions and their rel- evance to book-religion of the kind being introduced into India.41 There is no way of knowing for sure, but Mṛtyuñjaya, an ‘orthodox’ (smārta) Hindu who was a bhakta—a devotee—of the Goddess Kali, may have recog- nized in Carey’s Christian faith a bhakti-like quality akin to his own. Redolent throughout of bhakti (theistic devotionalism)—the same ‘Hinduism’ that the Serampore missionaries are relentlessly portrayed as having villainously ­demonized—the Dharmapustaka can be helpfully understood as a classic instance, common among Protestant evangelicals, of ‘orthodox hybridity’: i.e., ‘selectively tolerated hybridity, with much of the latter being unacknowl- edged as such’.42 Not at all implausibly, the Apostle Paul is cast in the role of bhakta when he is called a dāsa (δοῦλος; servant) of Jesus Christ in Rom. 1.1, although the biblical-inflection is also unmistakable when mention is made of

38 Amaladass and Young, The Indian Christiad, pp. 36–39. 39 Sugirtharajah, “Postcolonial Notes”, p. 153. 40 Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, p. 81. 41 Brian Hatcher. “Pandits at Work: The Modern Shastric Imaginary in Early Colonial India.” Michael S. Dodson and Brian A. Hatcher, eds, Trans-Colonial Modernities in South Asia (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 52. 42 Edwin Zehner, “Orthodox Hybridites: Anti-Syncretism and Localization in the Evangeli- cal Christianity of Thailand,” Anthropological Quarterly 78 (3) (2005), 586.

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192 Young his ­calling to the mlecchas (1.14). On the whole, then, bhakti has a theological cachet in the Dharmapustaka where it stands for pistis (πίστις) and occurs with other virtues such as ‘charity’, ‘righteousness’, and ‘peace’ (2 Tim. 2.22). Congru- ent with the image of bhakti as a kind of all-or-nothing attachment to the Di- vine, an anecdote is told of a time when Carey and Mṛtyuñjaya (anonymized as ‘a learned native’) were ensconced in Serampore and huddled in consultation. Pondering such Pauline sayings as ‘I am crucified to the world [Gal. 2.20?]’, the pandit exclaimed, ‘This is pure voiragēēism[!]’, calling Paul a world-renouncer (Pŭrŭm-hŭngsēē, to replicate Serampore’s system of transliteration).43 Besides bhakti and vairāgya (asceticism), Mṛtyuñjaya was an adherent of Advaita, the Non-Dualism of Śaṅkara. That being so, a prima facie case can be made that his fingerprints are found on two passages of Romans (1.25 and 9.5) where God (Īśvara) is called ‘blessed forever’. There, instead of a modifier for ‘blessed’ such as dhanya, one finds saccidānanda (sat|cit|ānanda), a richly nuanced language reserved exclusively for the Brahman (note that the Greek εὐλογητὸς is hardly as theologically stratospheric). How this flash of insight might have occurred and which of the two philologists—one Hindu, the other Christian—had it, I am of course unable to say, much less whether a window might actually have opened for the light to come in—or on whom of the two it might have shone, if not on both. Before closing, instead of rehearsing the misgivings I am voicing about ­Postcolonialism’s reasons for thinking of the Bible in India as an ‘English ­Bible-in-disguise’, it might be helpful to (re)envision some ways of reading a text such as Mṛtyuñjaya’s Vedānta Candrikā (ca. 1815), written while the San- skrit Bible was still a work-in-progress. A hard-edged ‘orthodox’ Hindu defence of ‘The Present System of Hindu Worship’ (as the subtitle goes), the text was aimed at Rammohun Roy (1772–1833), the figure most identified with Bengal’s intellectual ferment. Complexifying India’s emerging ‘hermeneutic situation’ and mirroring India’s latest phase of pluralisation, Mṛtyuñjaya composed his treatise as a kind of triangulated dialogue between Hindu orthodoxy (his), Hindu heterodoxy (Rammohun’s), and the newly-arrived extra-Vedic religion (Christianity). Although Rammohun figures as the main villain, being resented in Mṛtyuñjaya’s circle for his opposition to bhakti-based theism, Christians are there, too, but anonymized. In all probability, they include Carey, with whom Mṛtyuñjaya had once experienced a clarifying moment of eclaircissement.

43 William Ward, A View of the History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Serampore: Printed at the Mission Press), p. lxix.

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On whether this was theological or only philological, nothing can be said, ex- cept a few closing remarks on methodology. One is that the kind of comparative reading I have attempted could also be tried out on Mṛtyuñjaya’s Vedānta Candrikā or with similar texts from the 1780s through the 1830s. Pairing it with the Dharmapustaka might bring out a depth of stereoscopic perspective similar to what I think I have gotten from reading Carey’s Dharmapustaka in tandem with the Rāmāyaṇa. Another is that Postcolonialism’s postmodernist bias against religious claims based upon ­revelation—missionary truth claims, in particular, based upon the Bible— may run afoul of philology, historiographically, when the present is used to (re)imagine the past. In the Sanskrit ecumene, instead of being alienated and offended, figures such as Mṛtyuñjaya, whose Vedānta Candrikā was itself based on Vedic scriptural authority (śāstrapramāṇatva), may have found such claims more readily intelligible than we allow. One could also argue, as I have here, that Bible translation as a cultural and social process—an interreligious ­process—was incredibly stimulating, intellectually, the ambiguity and asym- metry of colonial relations notwithstanding.

Concluding Extrapolations

‘Comparative studies’, writes Tamil literary historian Sascha Ebeling, ‘should … proceed from an intimate knowledge of the individual situations upward, as it were, rather than downward from larger generalizations or theoretical specu- lations which are then simply grafted onto local realities.’44 Being predisposed to the kind of inductive approach he prescribes, I focused on Bible transla- tion in fin-de-siècle Bengal and the early 1800s. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the Serampore Mission turned out to be a more profoundly interactive site for intercultural and interreligious exchange than Postcolonial scholarship envi- sions. To make myself heard, I first of all had to clear away a variety of con- ceptual obstacles. As I did so, I acknowledged that on their side of the scale, R. S. Sugirtharajah and other critics have some rather hefty arguments at their disposal (insights into the colonial ramifications of book-religion, print cul- ture, etc.). Assuming I have surmounted the hurdles, I want to work upward (as it were) and attempt a few of the ‘larger generalizations’ and ‘theoretical spec- ulations’ that remain unframed, about what changes, who changes whom, and why, wherever other ‘individual situations’ of a similar kind are encountered.­

44 Ebeling, Colonizing the Realm of Words, p. 250.

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194 Young

Although a pan-Indian or pan-Asian inventory would be impracticable­ here, such instances could be replicated almost ad infinitum in both the ­ pre- and post-Serampore eras. First, as for what changes, while words as such—Greek, English, or San- skrit—undergo a process of constant lexical hybridization that resembles ‘­conversion’, philology itself in certain locales—Serampore, for one—under certain circumstances may also function as a catalyst for transculturation. ­Second, as for who changes whom, with the right mix of variables even the asymmetries of colonialism cannot prevent an intersubjective relationality from emerging. As we saw in the case of Carey and Mṛtyuñjaya, the flow of change was anything but unidirectional—and that, too, despite contrastive convictions grounded in revelation. Third, as for why, even though a mono- causal explanation will not do, Ebeling’s concept of transculturation has ­advantages. One would be that a rupture with the past—a clean break—gets ruled out right from the get-go as untenable and unimaginable, culturally, ­linguistically, and religiously. Another is that by making the appropriation pro- cess selective instead of wholesale, a range of possibilities for thinking about change, growth, and development opens up, avoiding the pitfall of imagining either/or, all-or-nothing, zero-sum outcomes in the totalizing manner of Post- colonialism (conquest, subalternization, etc.). On the downside, like many of the concepts one works with in the study of religion, transculturation has its fair share of theological entanglements. Being blessed—or cursed—with the same Latin prefix as ‘transformation’, transculturation may imply the kind of dialectical process called Aufheben by Hegel, involving both a dissolutio (‘breaking down’) and an elevatio (‘building up’). Whether Aufheben helps us understand Bible translation as a process that comes into play when words from one language are transposed into another, a lively debate could be had. And to make sure that one gets off the ground, I submit that 1) words in translation—‘sacred words’ in particular, the Bible’s or the Rāmāyaṇa’s—undergo a kind of philological Aufheben, and 2) that this was the very kind of thing that happened to dharma (saccidānanda, etc.) in the Dharmapustaka. It simply cannot be helped, however, that what looks like elevatio on one side of the Sanskrit ecumene may look more like dissolu- tio on the other. Still, the possibility of a deep concurrence, however evanes- cent, cannot—and should not—be ruled out, aprioristically. That, it seems to me, is exactly­ the mistake that Postcolonial theorists are prone to make when they fail to take into proper account the actual Indian-language artefacts of missionary-initiated translation projects. It is, therefore, also the reason why we need more philology, not less. Not only that, comparative studies of Bible translation projects conducted across

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Asia would go a long way toward testing the thesis I have argued here, that the Sanskrit Bible was never, in any simplistic sense, merely the ‘English-Bible-in- Disguise’—any more than the Bible in any other Asian language. To assume otherwise, without adducing philological evidence based on inspection of the linguistic artefacts produced, would be undisguisedly Anglocentric as well as Eurocentric, and a demonstrable instance of downward over-theorization of the very kind that Ebeling eschews.

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