ABSTRACT
Christianity and Christian literature underwent a process of ‘translation’ during their early encounters with India’s indigenous culture. While there were churches where the Bible was an unknown book, some of the earliest writers on Christian themes and translators of the Holy Scriptures were poets who were not Christians themselves, but followers of Christ from within the Hindu community. Taking apocryphal and authentic accounts of the arrival of Christianity in India into account and using the translation of the Bible and Biblical literature into Telugu as an example, this essay examines the processes through which ‘the other’ was provincialized.
