Early Modern Renderings of Indian Texts in European Languages: A Seventeenth-Century Bhāgavata Purāṇa in English

​It has become common to suggest that early modern European authors on Hinduism systematically distorted—or even simply invented—the Indian texts they claimed to translate. This paper will examine a seventeenth-century English rendering of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa that is one of the earliest and by far the largest of several early translations of Sanskrit texts. It will be argued that the manner of its translation—from a written Sanskrit text but via an oral translation into Hindustani—together with the textual fluidity of Purāṇa as a genre, provide a better explain for the character of this text than the idea of distortion or invention. The paper will also explore briefly the circulation and possible influence of the text among the “latitude men” and freethinkers of late seventeenth-century England. 

Will Sweetman is Professor of Asian Religions at the University of Otago, New Zealand and Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at SAI/Religionswissenschaft, Heidelberg University. His primary research field is early modern European engagement with India, and particularly the Indian manuscripts collected by Europeans before the nineteenth century. He is currently working on two early translations of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. The first, into English, is from the seventeenth century and the second, into French and then German, was completed in the eighteenth century.​