72 – Does faith speak only one tongue? Multilingual pathways of religious writing across South Asia and beyond, c. 1600-1850
The panel investigates the multilingual dimension of religious writing in South Asia between 1600 and 1850s CE, challenging the notion of a monolingual archive that confines religious identities to a single linguistic and cultural framework. Thus, it seeks to highlight the diverse, polyvocal nature of religious literature in the region and beyond.
Contrary to the view that faith is bound to a single linguistic and cultural community, the multilingual world of early modern South Asia (Orsini 2024) exhibited a vibrant ‘religious marketplace’ (Sheikh 2010), where religious and devotional texts crossed linguistic and cultural boundaries, facilitated by the mobility of religious and intellectual figures (e.g., sheikhs, gurus, sants, jogis). In the Mughal environment, texts were rendered from Sanskrit to Persian and vice versa, as well as into vernaculars (e.g., Brajbhāṣā, Avadhī, Dakhnī, Urdu), as adaptations to cater new audiences. Since the 14th century, Sufis expressed their mystical teachings through vernacular narratives (Digby 1975; Behl 2016), seeking 'equivalence' between their own conceptual repertoires and those of other traditions, rather than proposing direct translations (Stewart 2013). We invite papers examining ways of appropriating any religious text and ideas for distinct linguistic and cultural readerships through adaptation (interlinguistic, intercultural, and intertextual) between ca. 1600 and 1850 CE. We especially welcome studies examining the impact of such adaptations on the transmission and accessibility of texts across multiple genres—devotional poetry, religious narratives, musical compositions, spiritual manuals, and texts with commentaries or interpolations, in both handwritten and printed form. Contributions should emphasize the interplay between languages and religious semantics. The panel encourages approaches from fields such as literature, philology, history, and religious studies to reconsider the multilingual and multicultural dimensions of devotional practice within and beyond South Asia.
