Scriptural, Cultural, and “Embodied” Translation: Testing the Translation Principle in Muslim-Hindu South Asia

Andrew Walls’ “translation principle” argues that the Qur’ān’s status as the “fixed,” unalterable speech of God stands as a primary obstacle limiting Islam’s translatability. The historical activities of premodern South Asian Muslim actors would appear to confirm Walls’ point: Qur’ān translations into Indian languages were exceedingly rare, suggesting Muslims’ overwhelming preference to maintain their scripture in its original Arabic language. And yet, Walls’ argument pushes beyond mere “linguistic” translation, insisting that a religion’s fullest translation must also reach into the domain of *cultural* translation. On this front, Walls’ argument for Christianity as the preeminently translatable religion becomes less compelling. To test this claim, I turn to three premodern instances of Islam’s “translation” into local South Asian contexts and into a predominantly Hindu lexicon – the Sufi epic romance (*premākhyāna*), the poet-saint Bulleh Shāh, and the Sufi tomb-shrine – aiming to illustrate the processes of Muslim-Hindu religio-cultural translation at work.