Hindus and Their Christian Bible

R. S. Sugirtharajah

2024. g. febr. · Bloomsbury Publishing

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R.S. Sugirtharajah shows how at the height of European colonialism whilst the colonizers were studying the sacred texts of Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and Zoroastrians, the Hindus were themselves scrutinizing the invader's book – the Christian Bible. Sugirtharajah examines how these Hindus transformed the Bible into what they deemed fit for and suited to their contexts. The result was that the Bible acquired a totally different form and lost its authority as the Book of the Empire. Sugirtharajah shows how the resistant, subversive and at times antagonistic readings of the Hindus went beyond what the colonizer had intended. Sadly what these Hindus made of the Bible went largely unnoticed and was ignored by Western scholarship.

This volume seeks to rectify this regrettable omission and to place both the Hindu reformers and nationalists attitude to the Bible in their own specific context and to allow them to speak on their own terms rather than reading them with Christian preconception. The Hindu reformers covered include figures such as Raja Rammohun Roy, Arumuga Navalar, Keshub Chunder Sen, Swami Vivekananda, Ponnambalam Ramanathan, M. K. Gandhi and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and nationalists such as Dhirendranath Chowdhary, Sita Ram Goel and Ram Swarup. The book contains the interpretative context; the textual negotiation that went on between these Hindus and the missionaries and orientalists; examples of their Hinduization of the Bible; and the hermeneutical impact on mainstream biblical interpretation.

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R.S. Sugirtharajah is Professor Emeritus of Biblical Hermeneutics at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is the author of many books, including The Brahmin and His Bible (T&T Clark, 2019).