If Asians, especially Indians read and try to understand the Bible,
independent of the West, what are the likely results.? Will it suffer the fate
of Buddhism ?
Here is a book review, which appeared in todays (08/10/2013) of The Hindu.
The Book title is “The Bible and
Asia, From the Pre-Christian Era to the
Post-colonial Age: R.S.Sugritharajah;
and Published by the HARVARD UNIVERSITY
PRESS, Massachusetts. $ 29.95.
We have no reason to doubt the reviewer Shri K.R.A Narasiah.
In this review I am primarily interested in the condition of India before
the machine age and colonialization. In India, of that age,
work/labour/karma/production- were organized on the basis of the ‘Karma
Theory’. And India was prosperous and rich. The sentences highlighted in green give credence to such a
view. India was the sink of world’s
gold and silver bullion. Indian manufactures, made using simple tools
and ‘contraptions’ were sought across the world. And consequently India was
rich. (Apart from this book, statistics are available on the net proving the
fact that India was a rich country, and the situation prevalent at that time
made this richness distributive.).
The sentences marked in yellow,
suggests to us, that our approach to our own culture and religion were
negatively influenced by a comprador class, who had contributed to shaping the
official education in India. These academicians, gave us wrong ideas about
ourselves. And it is still continuing !!! To win the hearts and minds back, now
is a Herculean task.
The sentences marked in Red
, shows the direct intrusion of the
religion of India, in the Bible. Two possibilities exist for the Indian
presence in the Bible. In those ancient days, when the intellect had not waned,
knowledge & ideas were never written down, but transmitted orally. This
tradition had continued for a long time, but then there was a slow
deterioration in communication, the waning of the intellect being a primary
cause. When knowledge had to traverse a far distance from the epicenter(India)
it got distorted. Alternately we may also consider, that all over the globe,
Vedic religion/knowledge was prevalent,
and it slowly started receding from the
various parts, with a trace existing only in India, due to the efforts of the
Brahmins in preserving the same . Supplementary to what is in the book-review,
are two blog-postings which show the Indian influence in the Bible.
Prosperity of a country and its
religion are important, because many consider it interrelated. Before the
advent of machines, it had been going good for India. Now ? Should we abandon our ancestral religion
? According to the Protestants, God chooses those, whom he favours with riches. http://msradha.blogspot.in/2013/06/the-protestant-work-ethic-and-spirit-of.html
But many failed to see the corollary to this predisposition by God. Maybe God
himself failed to anticipate what is coming. God’s place has been usurped by riches.
The Bible according to Asia - Book review
by K.R.A. Narasiah
When the Periplus of the
Erythraean Sea was written in the mid-first century, the West thought all
beyond the Mediterranean was Red Sea. Likewise geographically it was difficult
to describe Asia as a continent. The author starts from here and points out
that the first group that took the Bible to the East was that of the Nestorian
or the Church of the East. Asia was a different region as per Jews’ noting and
by the time of New Testament the geography is seen differently. While earlier
Asia was portrayed as a place of riches, in the portrayal of the New Testament,
Asia is not so appealing. In fact, colonialism created a collaborating comprador class, which subjected
itself to the Westerners and conveyed a different meaning to both the people
and religion of the West.
The book highlights the three
features of this pre-colonial reception of the Bible in the East. First, the Bible did not come
from a superior civilisation; the people that brought it were mostly on the
fringes of the society and the East was already part of a superior civilisation.
Secondly the Bible remained un-translated and therefore not understood.
Thirdly, it was not the aggressive instrument as handled by the colonialists,
who came much later.
Hinduism & Buddhism
In the seven chapters of the
book, the author Sugirtharajah, Emeritus Professor of Biblical Hermeneutics at
the University of Birmingham, takes the reader through various stages of the
reception of the Bible by the societies of the East. He notes that the
Christian writings were affected by Merchandise and Asian Fiction, and material
contributed by the important people of the countries practising Hinduism and
Buddhism. He also deals with intellectual-converted Christians and their
reaction to Bible.
The book on the whole makes an
interesting study, not just of the religion but of the people who were in
direct contact through religious practices, of other regions and their
reactions. He asserts, “No culture is pure; it draws on a variety of sources.
Such a hermeneutical to-and-fro does not allow one religious tradition to have
final say or claim monopoly of a thought or story.”
John Zephaniah Holwell of the
East India Company who acted as a temporary Governor of Bengal, was one of the
survivors of the Black Hole of Calcutta, and is quoted by the author. In
Howell’s Interesting Historical Events. . it is stated that the ancient
religion of Brahma was the most ancient and consequently most pure of
religions. In fact
Holwell appears to have claimed his Chartah Bhade Shastah could
act as a catalyst to reform Christianity
.
Books of Joshuas, Judges, Samuel
and Kings date several centuries before Christ, and from their time to the
first century, India was seen as a rich country with
fascinating people and material. In fact some of the fables and
personalities from the religious books of India have found their way into the
scriptures. Later it became a fertile ground for evangelisation long before
colonialism made it a prime target for conversion.
The author deals with the subject
dispassionately, and with a remarkable detachment; nowhere he seems to have
taken sides with the people he is dealing with, a point which makes the book an
excellent read.
The
author notes, in the Hebrew literature, one of the seven princes of Persia and
Media is called Carshena that could be Krishna of the Hindus. The author feels that the possibility of
the presence of Hindu deities cannot be ruled out if the geopolitical condition
of the time is considered. That shows that there was not only exchange of
merchandise but deities themselves, says the author. He convincingly argues
that the extension of Persian Empire to India and the presence of a Hindu
colony in West Asia point to the possibility of mixture of the deities long
before the common era as
in Syria the Vedic Gods were mentioned. The recently discovered
inscriptions in Quaseir al-Qadim, near the Red Sea in Brahmi characters refer
to two Tamil names.
That there was a strong presence of Indians in the area is proved. Several stories told in the Genesis
denote the influence of India.
The findings by the University of
Southampton during excavations between 1999 and 2003 at Quaseir al Qadim proved
this place to be Myos Hormos as mentioned in the Periplus and together with its
sister port Bernice articulated trade between Rome and India,
especially Muziris .
Tamil
influence
In
the Book of Kings, mention is made of Ophir and since some Sanskrit
names occur in the text, according
to Max Muller, Ophir could have been a seaport in India. Ptolemy
places it in the mouth of the Indus. Again mention of Almugwood could according to the author be
sandalwood from south India. The trade from India to Rome was much more than from Rome to India.
History records that Roman historian Pliny lamented how India was
draining Rome of Gold. During the reign of Augustus Romans finding it difficult
to pay the Indians tried to send counterfeit coins to India; but as Srinivasa
Iyengar notes, “Tamils proved to be too shrewd, for the silly experiment was
not repeated.”
Sugirtharajah
says that there is a possibility that the Song of Solomon could have
been influenced by Tamil poetry Ahananuru. He quotes Chaim Rabin, an
Israeli professor of Hebrew and Semitic languages saying it was “written … by
someone … and there became acquainted with Tamil poetry.”
In Chapter three, the views of
three Asians, Raja Rammohun Roy, J. C. Kumarappa and Hong Xiuquan are analysed.
Roy was proficient not only in Sanskrit, but in Persian, Arabic and in Biblical
languages. The Baptist missionary who confronted him Joshua Marshman was no
match for him. The author concludes that while Marshman was asserting the power of the conqueror,
Roy’s was well founded logically.
The importance, the author says, is in the cultural context — the
colonial milieu in which the controversy took place. Similarly the confrontation between J. C.
Kumarappa a Christian himself and the English Anglican bishop of Calcutta Foss
Westcott, in the context of Gandhian movement, makes for excellent reading.
This book is a stimulating work;
it explores the complex relationship between the Bible of the colonialists and
the conquered. It goes far beyond the conventional studies provided so far,
which were mostly one-sided and looked from the colonial point of view. In this work he packs a lot of information
such as the complex relationship between the Bible and the colonial enterprise
examining in depth some areas that have been overlooked in earlier studies.
The author concludes with a firm
conviction that Asian biblical interpretation has been informed by this ‘West’ and has evolved in
dialogue with it. Asian
biblical interpreters should break away from such a stranglehold now, however,
and should initiate and broker new conversations that encourage people to look
at scripture anew and transform their understanding.
( K.R.A. Narasiah is a
marine engineer who writes fiction and historical works )
