Mediation of Indian Religious Literature in English

As trading interests yielded to colonial imperatives from the mid eighteenth century onwards in British India, the vast body of literature associated with the multiplicity of Indian religions was seen to provide a key insight into the varied social structures, beliefs, and practices of the subcontinent. Led by the Asiatic Society, British orientalist scholars commenced the task of mediating this literature to Europe. While this process of mediation has been powerfully critiqued by postcolonial scholars in recent decades on account of its ‘orientalist’ presumptions (pace Edward Said’s influential 1978 work Orientalism), much less attention has been paid to the close details of literary and theological transformation achieved by these works. Not only were epic texts such as The Ramayana and Mahabharata (translated by the Baptist missionary William Carey) varied and complex in nature, but also the agents involved in such transmissions - antiquarians, missionaries, and administrators – themselves represented a diversity of political, educational, and religious sympathies. This project will examine the literary and theological dimensions of their mediations of Indian religious literature, paying attention to stylistic, generic, and doctrinal factors.

The project is interdisciplinary in nature and applications are invited from suitably qualified candidates with a Master’s degree in any relevant subject area of the Humanities, especially, though not exclusively, literary, historical, or religious studies. Literary competence in one or more Indian languages, especially classical languages, would be an advantage, though this is not an essential requirement.