Translation, the Untranslatable, and Resistance

The chapter engages with translations in Christian traditions from a “non-Western” context in order to understand Christianity in translation. It focuses on the powerful minority community of Syrian Christians of Kerala, who claim apostolic and Brahminic origins dating back to CE 52, and trans-regional ties with various “Eastern Churches,” especially Persian. The texts under study are translations in Malayalam and English from the Portuguese, old Malayalam, Garshuni Malayalam and Syriac. The chapter examines the Synod of Diamper (1599) to understand how the Roman Catholic Church used translation to posit Catholicism as the only legitimate religion and form of Christianity by expunging “heathen” customs from the “vernacular Church.” However, this universalization of a particular form of “Western” Christianity was resisted and rejected consistently in the “vernacular” textualities through which the “native” Christians restored their affiliation to “Eastern” traditions. Therefore, translations of select “vernacular” texts from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries are analyzed to delineate untranslatable elements that became sites of resistance against a homogenized and monolithic understanding of a universal Church. At the same time, this chapter makes clear that South Indian Christianity has a long and complicated “translational genealogy” in which many cultures and languages have played a role.