Translating the Sacred: Colonial Constructions and Postcolonial Perspectives

Abstract

This essay demonstrates the centrality of sacred translations to both colonial and postcolonial discourses, using as an example translations of the Bhagavadgītā in the construction of “Hinduism” as a religion from the Indian colonial context. Discursive constructions and representations of religions through translations are some of the earliest examples of cultural inscriptions offered by Europeans of their colonized “Others.” Scriptures, “holy” texts, sermons, and other devotional literature were translated either to convert the colonized or for the colonizers to “understand” their colonized better. The essay draws attention to the many ways in which the colonized have been active agents in variously appropriating or resisting this shared archive of colonial discourse on the sacred for their own purposes well before the period of conscious “postcoloniality.”

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