Religion, Translation, and Cultural Adaptability: Placing World Christianity’s “Translation Principle” into Comparative Perspective

This paper examines the driving concerns behind Andrew Walls and Lamin Sanneh as they developed what became World Christianity’s “translation principle”: as Christian scriptures can be translated into any language, Christianity can be “translated” into any culture. For instance, they shifted scholarly attention from “Western” missionaries to the agency that new Christians (often in the majority world) exerted in “indigenizing” Christianity into local cultures, making Christianity their own. Arguing that this is how Christianity had always spread (even Europeans had “indigenized” Christianity into local cultures millennia ago), they contended that new, indigenous forms of Christianity were authentically Christian. This paper offers three brief examples that Walls and Sanneh give of how Christianity was “translated” into new cultures. It also explains why Walls and Sanneh considered Christianity’s translatability to be *sui generis*, detailing the facet of the “translation principle” that this panel places into a comparative perspective.

For the tradition at large, Buddhism’s truth claims are universally valid. As recorded in the canonical scriptures, Buddhism is understood as providing a collection of objectively true teachings. These, in turn, can be directly experienced and verified by anyone who wishes to wholly engage with them. Because the tradition’s claims carry universal validity, Buddhist truths can readily translate into any socio-cultural settings. In this perspective, the question is not whether there may be a Buddhist equivalent of the “translation principle.” Rather, this paper contends, we should consider what we mean by translation, from what perspective, and to whose benefit. Ultimately, we must distinguish two opposing approaches to cross-cultural translation: an emic Buddhist one, for which Buddhism is translatable because of its universalist claims; and an etic scholarly one, for which cross-cultural translation of Buddhist truths is incommensurable with a social-scientific approach to comparison.

It is no longer a novelty in Religious Studies that translations play an integral role in questions of (inter-)cultural contact, comparison, and identity. But the question of what translation means, how it relates to interpretation, and the role of text, language, and practice has not been adequately addressed. In recent years, feminist historical research has published some ground-breaking work addressing this very question. This paper uses a cross-disciplinary (literature studies, feminist translation studies, and religious studies) approach to examine four different *Rāmāyana* versions in late colonial Ceylon and India (1900–1930) written by the Theosophists Annie Besant, Marie Musaeus Higgins, and Leelawathy Ramanathan for the purpose of girls’ education. The differing portrayals of Sita as the “perfect wife” will be used to highlight the importance of theories of translation for the study of global religious history.

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.

Drawing from thirty-seven in-depth interviews, this paper examines how Sikhs make sense of their religious identity and practice in the context of the US as both a demographic minority and a minoritized faith. Although undertheorized by scholars, processes of religious minoritization can influence not only how Sikhs practice their faith, but also how they engage with the broader society. Further, it compares two Sikh communities to study these themes: a community of Indian Sikhs in the US and a community of people who converted to the Sikh faith and are part of a New Religious Movement known as 3HO/Sikh Dharma. Through this comparison, this paper considers how different Sikh communities make sense of the Sikh faith, engaging in a reinterpretation of Sikhi situated in the cultural and structural context of the US through a multifaceted process of agentic assimilation that adapts, and sometimes resists adapting, to U.S. socio-cultural mores.