"Musk among Perfumes": Creative Christianity in Thomas Stephens’s Kristapurana

Abstract

The complexities of scriptural translation intensify in colonial, multilingual societies. In this study, we examine Thomas Stephens’s Kristapurana (1616) as a significant moment of cross-cultural encounters in the history of Bible translation in India. Stephens (1549–1619) was an English Jesuit, who worked in Goa, India. The Kristapurana is written in the Marathi language, in Roman script. Stephens’s Purana can be considered the first attempt to bring the biblical story into an Indian language, although in poetic form. This study aims to bring out the significance of this early Christian work in the Marathi language by analyzing Stephens’s translation of the biblical story into Marathi. The Kristapurana is studied as a site where Christianity and indigenous Hindu practices come together to form a “creative” expression of Christianity strongly reminiscent of the region that it was produced in.