Competing narratives on Bible translation in India: Missionary linguistics, postcolonial criticism and translation studies

This article focuses on Bible translation in India as a form of biblical criticism. It points out some of the limitations in scholarly approaches to the study of Bible translation in India and highlights the critical perspectives that a postcolonial translation approach can bring to scholarship on Bible translation and biblical criticism. This article argues for a radical rethinking and contextualizing of Bible translation that focuses on hitherto marginalized Indian translators who undertook translation of large parts of the Bible into verse. The article’s premise is that translation across genres should be taken as seriously as conventional linguistic translation since this approach offers a significant challenge to the concept of “authorized” Bible translation and, more significantly, to continued philological scholarship focused on comparisons of lexical items that obfuscate histories of power and marginalization.