Paper short abstract:

Adopting the outer form of Marāṭhī words with Hindu signification but altering the concepts they signify, Thomas Stephens SJ (1549-1619) constructs a language system, whose outer form is almost identical with the Hindu religious language on which it is based, but fit for expressing Christian ideas.

Paper long abstract:

Christian missionaries in early modern Goa faced the question of how to express their Christian message in new languages (Kōṅkaṇī and Marāṭhī) whose religious vocabularies were deeply infested with Hindu concepts, but that lacked a specifically Christian theological vocabulary. The most prominent sample of Marāṭhī literature conveying a Christian message using words with Hindu connotations is the biblical epic known as Kristapurāṇa, written by the English Jesuit Thomas Stephens (1549-1619) in the early years of the seventeenth century. What Stephens does can be understood within a Saussurean-structuralistic framework as keeping the visual/audial form of the Hindu religious words but altering the concepts they are used to signify. Altering the meaning of important and interrelated religious words leads to a reshaping of the entire language into a system where seemingly Hindu words express concepts that are in some way analogous to these Hindu concepts, but which fit in Stephens' Christian worldview. Without explicitly criticizing Hindu ideas (except occasionally), Stephens manages to form a language system which on the surface looks almost identical to that used by the Hindu authors he imitates, but which is used to build a distinctly Christian conceptual construction. Depending on bias, this can be described as an effort to enable Marāṭhī speakers to think new thoughts in their old language, or as a strategy for gaining upper hand in the Marāṭhī religious discourse by manipulating what is possible and natural to think in that language.