Conversion to Translation: Colonial Registers of a Vernacular Christianity

A few years ago, while working on missionary records kept at a small repository in Missouri, I came across a 250-page manuscript and two shorter pieces, written between 1908 and 1913 by "native" evangelical workers, designated as catechists, in central India. I skimmed over the longer manuscript, reading the author's recounting of the strange and the familiar as he preached the Word in towns and villages. Here people told the catechist (and each other) that "Jesus is only some kind of an English incarnation." Others "joked about such bad things"—libidinous and earthy comments about the Immaculate Conception—that he just "could not write." Not surprisingly, this lowly Indian evangelist turned down an invitation to attend a village festival, declaring that it was impossible for him to "take part in such wicked things for God hates idol worship, hence famine is now raging." Long before I reached the end of the manuscript, a question had begun to agitate me. How was I to read these texts?

In this essay, I discuss issues of colonial conversion and questions of vernacular translation, which lie embedded within processes of evangelical entanglements between Euro-American missionaries and non-Western peoples, focusing on writings of "native soldiers of Christ," the Indian catechists. Forged as diaries or daybooks that recount the dissemination of the Book in "heathen" spaces and "primitive" places, the catechists' accounts appear in tune yet out of tenor with missionary stipulation. They describe the everyday encounters and extraordinary experiences of the catechists, accessing and exceeding missionary determination. Here I would like to explore how these writings constitute salient registers of evangelical entanglements, critically articulating vernacular idioms, evangelical authority, and a colonial modernity.

Brief Beginnings

In 1868, the Reverend Oscar Lohr of the German Evangelical Mission Society initiated missionary work in Chhattisgarh, a large region in central India. Lohr and his evangelical brethren toiled the field, sowing the seeds of faith. ¹ Conversions to Christianity in the region progressed hesitantly, haltingly through ties of kinship, often within the confines of the paternalist economy of mission stations. Soon the missionary enterprise expanded. ² The converts to Christianity in the region—and central Indian folk, more broadly—continued to apprehend missionary injunctions and evangelical truths through the grids of quotidian cultures. Drawing in the energies of the Euro-American evangelist as witting accomplice and hapless victim, these peoples participated in the making of a vernacular and colonial Christianity. By the first decade of the twentieth century, when the catechists' wrote their accounts, the script of the civilizing mission was in place in central India. Yet, the black ink, the red letters, and the purple passages of this script, never secure, became rather the measures and means of other writing. The catechists' chronicles register the stipulation and the sabotage of this script—of civilization and the Savior.

Specters of Conversion

In commonplace conceptions, the writings of the catechists appear as mainly insinuating phantasms of conversion. ³ Immaculately imagined and methodically instituted, conversion betokens foundational rupture with prior faith and heralds inaugural displacement of religious affiliation. Not surprisingly, conversion is widely understood to intimate a singular life and indicate an exclusive history for the convert, individually and collectively. The provenance of this perspective extends from the conception of conversion as the personal exercise of self-determination among competing faiths, to representations that depict it as the collective search for meaning in the face of modernization. ⁴ The reaches of such reading straddle conversion as symptom and substance of bad faith in the body of the nation—a pestilent view that has wide currency in India today—through to a recent, radical rewriting of conversion as "the subversion of secular power" in front of modernity. ⁵ At the same time, in these different understandings, conversion serves to plot the narrative of the life and the history of the convert in a literal fashion, a distinct manner.

Here the enactment of...