Centre for South Asian Studies

Profile

My main area of research interest is in literary and sacred translations in the South Asian context. I have examined evolving attitudes to translation and translation practices in the modern Tamil literary and sacred landscapes. My study of the translations of the Tamil Bible has focused attention on it as an object of cultural transfer within intersecting religious, literary and social contexts. I am author of Religious Transactions in Colonial South India: Language, Translation and the Making of Protestant Identity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) where I have drawn attention to three key areas of translation conflict—identifying a sacred lexicon, caste and language registers, and competing literary genres—in the translation history of the Tamil Bible and in the articulation of Protestant identities.