When faiths meet and sing as one

Pope Francis, who died on April 21, was not only the first Latin American pope, but also the first pope born outside Europe. As the world marks his passing, it seems like a fitting time to peek into an interesting and surprising corner of religious history – the intersections of Christianity with Sanskrit. Christian missionaries in India in the 19th century took a great interest in Sanskrit, hoping to make the teachings of Christianity popular in an idiom familiar and prestigious in the subcontinent. As a result, important Christian texts came to be translated into Sanskrit, and many original Christian devotional hymns and prayers have been composed in Sanskrit since then. Multiple translations of various Gospels, and even just translations of the Sermon on the Mount have made their appearance in Sanskrit since then.

The first Sanskrit translation of the Bible, entitled Dharma-pustaka, was published in 1808, an undertaking by the English missionary William Carrey, who also simultaneously worked on translating the Ramayana into English. There were others, much earlier on, who took greater creative liberties – like Thomas Stephens in the early 1600s, who rendered the story of Jesus Christ into the Sanskrit puranic genre in Marathi and Konkani lyrical verse in his book called the Kristapurana!

Chevalier I C Chacko, in the twentieth century, composed the Kristu-sahasranama, modelled after the popular Hindu sahasranama hymns to Vishnu, Lalita, and the other gods. If recited, this hymn with a thousand epithets of Christ would sound familiar to many Hindus – it is, after all, in the standard anushtubh meter of the Vishnu sahasranama!

More recently, a short poem called the Sri-yesu-saurabha by Soma Varma Raja was published in 1974, and it draws freely from classical Sanskrit literature in its prayers to Christ. Soma Varma Raja’s syncretic approach may be known from the fact that the poem even begins with an invocation to the Goddess of Learning! The poem’s descriptions of Mary’s lamentations upon her son’s crucifixion are particularly touching; they draw from Kalidasa’s phrasing in his two famous lamentations, the Ajavilapa in the Raghuvamsha, and the Rativilapa in the Kumarasambhava.

P C Devassia’s Kristubhagavata, a mahakavya that narrates the story of Christ in thirty-three cantos, published in 1980, is likely the crown jewel of this genre – it won the renowned Sahitya Akademi Award in Sanskrit. Interestingly, it blends the conventions of Sanskrit epic poems with the story of Christ from the Gospels, giving rise to striking imagery – for instance, comparing the Baptism of Christ, who was already pure, to the whitening of a crystal palace. Devassia tells us in his introduction that this merging of the two cultural worlds is only to be expected – his background and work as a professor of Sanskrit contribute to the poem – and he sees his role as that of promoting harmony by drawing from the two traditions that shaped his thinking.

At a time when religious identities can seem rigid or polarised, these texts remind us that traditions have always borrowed, adapted, and spoken to each other in ways that are as unexpected as they are beautiful.