JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN INTELLECTUAL

HISTORY 2 (2019) 117–121

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“Translating Texts, Transmitting Tradition:

Continuity and Change in Hindu Traditions”
Introduction to a Special Issue of the Journal of South Asian Intellectual
History (SAIH)

John Nemec
Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies, University of Virginia,
Charlottesville, VA, USA
[email protected]

Nika Kuchuk
Department of Religion, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
[email protected]

It is well known that religious practitioners have engaged heavily (though of

course not exclusively) with written and oral texts across the history of South
Asian religions. How, precisely, textual lives—the histories of texts in their
production and use and their transformation or translation across linguistic,
geographic, sectarian, and temporal spaces—have served to define and shape
South Asian religious traditions and Hinduism1 in particular, however, remains
open to further investigation. The present, edited issue of the Journal of South
Asian Intellectual History (SAIH) proffers to examine just this, the ways vari-
ous linguistic registers and modes of textual transmission have been used to
encode and articulate social, ideological, and soteriological identities across a
diverse set of South Asian and particularly Hindu contexts.
In different but overlapping ways, the four essays here collected explore mo-
ments of rupture and continuity attending the strategic deployment of texts
and language, with particular attention to how multilingual, heterogeneous,
and polyvocal elements are resolved into synthetic or innovative paradigms.2

1 Fully aware of its etymology and complex history, we use this term as a short-handed ref-
erence to the myriad Śaiva, Śākta, Vaiṣṇava and other, often Veda-based but sometimes
extra-Vedic traditions commonly denoted thereby. On the formation of “Hinduism,” see, e.g.,
Nicholson 2010.
2 These essays were first assembled in the form of a panel of presentations at the 2018 American
Academy of Religion (AAR) National Meeting, the session in question also bearing the title

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118 Nemec and Kuchuk

In thus asking how traditions develop and change and how texts facilitate this
process, these essays zero in on the myriad intersections of text, language, and
identity, engaging a range of Hindu traditions: a medieval Kashmiri Sanskrit
work, a medieval South Indian, hybrid Sanskrit-Tamil text, a narrative of Hindu
identity in early-modern and modern Nepal, and the transnational Vedantic
articulations of Theosophy and Integral Yoga. With specific attention to lin-
guistic shifts and coding of social and soteriological identities, these essays ex-
plore what it is that texts, in particular, did and can do to make, and remake,
tradition: honing in on intertextual practices such as multilingual and func-
tional translation, adaptation and Sanskritization, and translational-discursive
techniques, the collected essays enquire as to how understandings of or ideas
about tradition emerge both in the context of and as a result of such textual
practices. The engagement of this collection with diverse historical, linguistic,
and geographical material, we propose, thus opens a broader discussion re-
garding the implications of narrative and linguistic continuities and disconti-
nuities for the religious and social categories that define Hinduism, and South
Asian religions more generally, from the medieval period and into modernity.
Each of these essays implicitly and explicitly shares in the recognition that
the strategies deployed in their translations and/or adaptations of particular
materials, narratives, or texts belong not to the academic scholars who exam-
ine them, but to the religious agents themselves; it is the particular choices of
the religious agents who make and transmit tradition, this is to say, that define
the practices in question and render them significant. We further suggest that
each essay in its own way tests a maxim that John Nemec has stated elsewhere,
namely, that change is not inimical to religion, even if many religious agents are
themselves inimical to change.3 The simple point is that these essays draw one’s
attention squarely to the particular strategies that the authors of the works
studied themselves wished to deploy. Change, where it appears, is intentionally

“Translating Texts, Transmitting Tradition: Continuity and Change in Hindu Traditions.” It

was offered as a joint session of the Hinduism Unit and the Religions in South Asia Unit of
the AAR. The panel was initially proposed in preliminary form by John Nemec and was devel-
oped and organized collaboratively by Nika Kuchuk and John Nemec, with the four essayists
as panel presenters and Nemec as Respondent. Subsequent to the AAR National Meeting,
Manasicha Akepiyapornchai approached Lawrence McCrea with the proposition of offering
these essays as a special issue of SAIH. Nemec drafted the proposal for the same, drawing
liberally from the AAR panel proposal that was co-authored with Nika Kuchuk in doing so,
and he offered editorial comments to the authors of each essay prior to final submissions
for peer review. He and Nika Kuchuk subsequently prepared the present introductory essay
collaboratively.
3 See Nemec 2020.

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“ Translating Texts, Transmitting Tradition ” 119

made; and very often no loss of authority or authenticity results from it, but
rather quite the opposite.
The essays are arranged chronologically. The first, by Tamara Cohen, exam-
ines the Mokṣopāya (MU), a medieval Kashmiri work, particularly its strategic
re-narration of the Bhagavadgītā (BhG). Recast there as the ‘Arjuna story’ or
Arjunopākhyāna (AU), the MU retains various correspondences with the BhG
both structurally and in terms of content: both the AU and the BhG are recount-
ed as sub-narratives within a larger text and both address despondent princely
heroes facing spiritual crisis, presenting a revelation about the true nature of
reality. Yet, Cohen argues, the nonduality at the heart of Vasiṣṭha’s teaching
in the AU is markedly different from the theology of the BhG. Suggesting that
this retelling is in fact a “a polemic style semantic translation” that transforms
“the discourse of the BhG into an entirely new conceptual language,” Cohen
illustrates how “the AU alters the BhG as it is rendered from the dualistic
Sāṃkhya-Yoga context of the MBh into the non-dualistic, idealist milieu of the
MU.” No mere repetition of the source text, then, the AU elicits new philosophi-
cal meaning from a precedent narrative context. Cohen closely examines the
role of translation in facilitating the same, drawing on the translation theory of
Anton Popovič to complicate our understanding of the natures of ‘source text’
and ‘metatext’ (or target text) in doing so.
The second essay, by Manasicha Akepiyapornchai, takes the theme of a
multi-vocal discourse and its implications for the soteriological and social
aspects of narrative a step further, by turning to examine a multilingual text
strategically composed in Sanskrit, Tamil, and Maṇipravāḷa, a hybrid language
comprising both Sanskrit and Tamil. Paying particular attention to the mechan-
ics of multilingual translation, Akepiyapornchai examines Vedāntadeśika’s
(c. 1268–1369 CE) Rahasyatrayasāra—one of the most comprehensive of the
Śrīvaiṣṇavas’ “Rahasya-granthas” or texts related to the interpretations of the
traditional mantras—composed in Maṇipravāḷa and furnished with Sanskrit
and Tamil opening and concluding verses. Significantly, Akepiyapornchai
notes that the Sanskrit and Tamil verses included therein are not mutually re-
iterative, but rather focus largely on different aspects of the tradition (philo-
sophical and scriptural elements in the Sanskrit, community relationships in
Tamil). And Akepiyapornchai argues that the Rahasyatrayasāra may be con-
sidered a translation insofar as it creates a single context accommodating both
Sanskrit and Tamil streams of the tradition.
Especially germane is the insight that the coexistence in question of the three
linguistic registers renders it impossible to designate either Tamil or Sanskrit
as an “original” or source language. What is offered instead is a unique, polyglot
framework, one that challenges Pollock’s simpler model of the “vernacular”

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120 Nemec and Kuchuk

language(s) modeled on a “cosmopolitan” one. Rather, Akepiyapornchai ar-

gues, “both [Sanskrit and Tamil] are translated into Maṇipravāḷa, and only
with all three of them together is the Śrīvaiṣṇavas’ imagination of a collective
religious community possible.” The multi-linguality of the community the text
serves, in the end, rendered the process of textual transmission linguistically
more complex than the extant models have so far allowed.
The third essay, by Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz, examines the dynamics of
textual formation as set within a broader context of the social history of a
Himalayan community, focusing on the interplay between textual adaptation
and identity-building, as well as the shifts that affect both as a result of societal
and political changes. Here, Nepal’s popular Svasthānīvratakathā (SVK) serves
as a lens through which to examine the shift from the heterogeneity of Hindu
identity in medieval Nepal toward a newly conceived, more politically driven
Hindu homogeneity in early-modern and contemporary Nepal.
The SVK originated as a Newari-language work in the late sixteenth century
among Nepal’s indigenous Newar Hindus, it being in its original form a short
legend celebrating the local goddess Svasthānī. Between the eighteenth and
twentieth centuries, however, the text and narrative were transformed into
an expansive, Nepali-language work and rendered in form close to a norma-
tive Purāṇa grounded in Sanskritic literature. The new SVK, finally codified in
mass-produced and generously circulated print editions, indexed an increas-
ingly dominant, pan-Hindu and high-caste, hill (Parbatiyā) ideology, practice,
and identity, one that incorporated not only its foundational Śākta elements
but also Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava narrative elements of pan-Indic provenance that
were also indexed to local sites in the Kathmandu Valley. Examining the forma-
tion of the SVK’s Purāṇicization as key moments of both rupture and continu-
ity in local and regional articulations of Hindu identity, Birkenholtz thus traces
the stages in a process that redefined the boundaries of local place and identity
for Nepal’s Hindus.
Finally, the fourth essay, by Nika Kuchuk, examines the roles of translation
in the invention of tradition in the transnational context of late-colonial (Neo)
Vedantic movements, taking Theosophy’s Vedanta-inflected teachings as a par-
ticularly illustrative case. Kuchuk examines the ways in which translation, and
more precisely the discourse of translation, served to frame both continuity
and innovation in the writings of Helena Blavatsky, one of the founders of the
Theosophical Society and its key proponent. The essay is striking for noting the
degree to which Blavatsky’s choices sought to obscure any changes she might
have introduced into the tradition she wished to document and define, all the
more striking for the fact that among the items surveyed in this collection of

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essays, it is the author historically closest to us who evidently was most inimi-
cal to (religious) change.
Of particular interest is Blavatsky’s self-positioning as a translator, inter-
preter, and keeper of sacred, and secret, texts. Indeed, real irony lies with the
fact that she buffered her claims of access to and interpretive insight into a
universalist and transnational body of learning by appealing to the very par-
ticularist and historically attuned instruments of classical Indological scholar-
ship, philology in particular. Kuchuk argues that the discursive technologies
she engaged, regardless of the authenticity of their claims, allowed Blavatsky
to locate Theosophical teachings both within Indic tradition(s) and, simultane-
ously, to advance a universalist program of intellectual-philosophical synthe-
sis. Documenting Blavatsky’s push of multivocality to its limit, then, this essay
underscores the panel’s core theme: language and texts in particular serve to
make tradition and (religious) identity.
Taken together, then, these essays excavate various ways in which language
and narrative have been engaged to encode religious identity and ideology, a
discussion, we propose, that is particularly germane to the polyglot, multilin-
gual context of Hinduism and Indic traditions more generally. These essays
suggest that the religious agents who made and used texts in South Asia were
deeply sophisticated in how they did so; it proffers, that is, that they knew
how to make change and often did, translating and transmitting tradition in
ways that were transformative. And while the present collection could hardly
capture an exhaustive collection of possible studies, we hope it signals the
degree to which the contours of cultural and intellectual history in and from
South Asia are fundamentally determined by the innovations of those who
made them.

Works Cited

Nemec, John. 2020. “Innovation and Social Change in the Vale of Kashmir, circa
900–1250 C.E.” In Śaivism and the Tantric Traditions: Essays in Honor of Alexis G.J.S.
Sanderson. Ed. By Dominic Goodall, Shaman Hatley, Harunaga Isaacson, and Srilata
Raman. 283–320. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
Nicholson, Andrew. 2010. Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian
Intellectual History. South Asia Across the Disciplines Series. New York and
Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press.

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