| By Dushyanthi Hoole and SRH Hoole Minority rights of the Tamils of Sri Lanka have been fore-fronted around the discussions at the United Nations Humans Rights Council in Geneva, as well as the Indian Parliament. Yet, many Tamils in Sri Lanka demanding that the government respect the rights of minorities are the very people who as supporters of the LTTE suppressed Tamil rights. As Tamils rightly accuse the Sinhalese majority of Sri Lanka of rewriting history and school texts to cast Tamils as invaders and the Sinhalese as settlers, it is pertinent to ask if we Tamils too do not exhibit similar tendencies of selective historiography. A case in point is the usurping for Arumuka Navalar – the mid-nineteenth century Saiva revivalist from Jaffna – of British-born Methodist missionary and Tamil scholar the Reverend Professor Peter Percival’s accomplishments, particularly his revision of an existing translation of the Tamil Bible. The myth that Navalar taught Tamil to Percival and translated the first Tamil Bible is so fully swallowed that even Christian Today, a worldwide trans-denominational daily news portal with an Indian edition and The Hindu, one of India’s most prominent English dailies, have repeated these claims. Percival’s Revision The Tentative Union Version of the Tamil Bible, commonly known as the ‘Percival Bible’ or the ‘Jaffna Bible’ was published in 1850 by the American Mission Press in Madras. The word ‘tentative’ was used because when the British Bible Society authorised the revision in 1845, the Madras Auxiliary was doubtful that Jaffna had the scholarship for the task and had been blocking Percival’s efforts until then. Percival’s product is historically one of the most abused and misunderstood books in Sri Lanka. That it was mainly Percival’s revision of an existing translation is evident from his own letter to the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS), dated July 6th, 1849 where he records that he was gifted a mahogany desk with a brass plate with the following inscription:
Although Williams uses the word ‘translation’, we know from the minutes of the Jaffna Auxiliary that they were seeking permission for a revision: “Mr. Rhenius’ translation is the basis of the version, which we propose, as that which be uniformly adopted for the Tamil people.” The style of the revised Tamil translation, which was carried out for about three years from July 1846 onwards, has been widely described as ‘majestic’ – a questionable claim for a revision showing little difference from the original (Rhenius) version. But Dennis Hudson of Smith College goes on to claim that the so-called majestic style was shaped by Navalar. Percival was no literary savant in Tamil poetry, and in line with the prevailing missionary tradition, Percival promoted prose. He used as a school reader the Instructions to Catechists by Constantino Giuseppe Beschi, S J (1680-1747) which he considered the best specimen of Tamil prose at the time. Even Hindu Saivite literature was rendered in prose and taught in the mission schools. However, Percival and the missionaries of Jaffna also promoted less explicitly religious Tamil texts. Percival and the missions developed Tamil prose by translating Tamil classics such as Nalan-Damayanti and Kanthapuranam. His goal was to give his students “a thorough grammatical knowledge of their own language and acquaintance with classical literature.” Percival’s Anglo-Tamil dictionary (1838) and A Collection of Proverbs in Tamil with their Translation in English, published by the Jaffna Book Society are among the earliest Tamil books in print. His The Land of the Veda: India Briefly Described in Some of its Aspects, Physical, Social, Intellectual and Moral was published in 1854, around the time that he got his doctorate. Some of his other works include the Telugu-English Dictionary (Madras 1862), Aphorisms of the Poet-Saint Auvayar; and the Tamil journal Dinavartamani from 1855 onward. In addition to his command over the Tamil language, Percival was an excellent teacher and administrator. The schools that Percival ran in his capacity as Methodists’ Chairman for North Ceylon received high praise from British colonial officials. In a letter written on March 23, 1848 after observing the examinations being conducted at the America Ceylon Mission’s Batticotta Seminary and Percival’s Wesleyan Seminary, Colonial Secretary Sir James Emerson Tennent wrote:
In 1857 Percival was appointed first Professor of Sanskrit and Vernacular (Tamil and Telugu) Literature at Madras University and was also Registrar of Madras University from 1860. To quote Percival from Madras University, “I had the superintendence of the Public Instruction Press on my hands; and, aided by the Pundits of the Presidency College, and other competent native scholars, had the responsibility of editing, among the works that issued from the Press during this period, seven dictionaries, some of which have since been re-printed.”After his retirement in 1869 he continued to live in India and died in 1882 in Yercaud in present-day Tamil Nadu. Making of the Myth Percival’s considerable achievements in the Tamil language and the field of education pose a problem for Tamil-Hindu nationalists, mostly belonging to the Saiva sect who stake a claim to all literary accomplishments in the language. As the late Prof. K. Sivathamby of the University of Jaffna, in his Sri Lankan Tamil Society and Politics (Madras: New Century Book House, 1995) explains:
Further, the anxiety to forefront the Saiva impetus in all Tamil literary works led to Navalar being cast as the chief translator of the Jaffna Bible with Percival merely his supervisor. Navalar’s biographer, Yohi Suddananda Bharati, says “that the [Bible] turned out under Percival’s supervision was really Navalar’s handiwork.” Yet another biography by Varathar commended by the late Professor S Kanapathipillai in the foreword, tells us that the Bible was translated by Navalar. Twentieth century Tamil scholar and ‘grandfather of Tamil’, UV Swaminatha Aiyer goes to the extent of claiming that Navalar wrote the Bible.
Once Arumuka Navalar is positioned as the translator, ‘his’ Jaffna Bible is held up as the first Tamil Bible. This myth is swallowed even by modern scholars like Shanti Pappu, despite several complete older versions being available in universities and even on the Internet. In fact, the first complete Tamil Bible was translated in 1723 by the Danish Lutheran Bartholomeus Ziegenbalg (and Benjamin Schultze who completed it upon Ziegenbalg’s demise). The translation of the German Lutheran Johann Philip Fabricius followed – the New Testament in 1772 and the Old Testament in 1791. What Percival did was to revise the translation by the Reverend Charles Rhenius (1790-1838) which had already been posthumously revised and published in 1840. The impossible claims by Tamil Saivite nationalists stemmed from Wesleyan missionary Jewel Robinson’s assertion that Navalar “had been for a long period, day after day, the worthy companion and valued assistant of the gifted and plodding Mr. Percival in preparing and editing treatises and hymns in Tamil, and translating the Prayer-Book and the Holy Bible.” Robinson having arrived in 1847 when Navalar quarrelled with Percival and left the mission, the only consistent explanation – surmising from Navalar’s sympathetic biographers’ claims that he was an unpaid teacher under Percival – is that Navalar was a poor student whom Percival helped by employing him as his valet after school to keep his papers and things in order and accompany him on the preaching circuit carrying his bags. It is this passage by Robinson that Yale’s Bernard Bate states, is “foundational to almost all subsequent writings.” Still, Christian writings were more cautious until Bishop Sabapathy Kulandran of Jaffna on seeing the Percival Bible for the first time and, despite admitting that he had only heard of its existence until then, inexplicably began to refer to it in 1957 as the ‘Navalar Bible’ although there is no record anywhere of Navalar being on the Translation Committee in the carefully kept minutes of that Committee or elsewhere in the Church archives. The simplest explanation is that Navalar had no part to play. But Kulandran was of the pre-independence generation that failed to take a balanced view of missionaries. He wrote of Percival as “a racist” for not acknowledging Navalar: “Western scholars of those days had a firm opinion that work of Eastern scholars could certainly be availed of, but that their names were scarcely worth mentioning.” His status as Bishop lent his views undeserved credibility. Says the widely-quoted Harvard professor John Carman, “Since Bishop Kulandran has been decidedly more positive about Western theology and Western missionaries than some other Tamil Christian scholars his summation must be taken seriously.” Kulandran’s was an unkind cut indeed against Percival, one of whose reasons for leaving the Methodist mission around 1852 was his firm belief in native abilities while the authorities in London were “reluctant to support his views of ‘native ministry’.” In judging Kulandran’s serious charge it must be remembered that the tradition in Bible translation is not to mention anyone by name and accordingly even Percival is not mentioned in the Jaffna Bible. It is also difficult for the racist charge to stick to Percival whose appreciation of the eastern mind is clear in the preface to his Cural (classic Tamil couplets):
Percival, in his book on Tamil Proverbs also acknowledges his dependence on native contributors. We believe that Percival’s rare reference in Bible translation records to collaborators was mainly because the Tentative Version was his own handiwork, and a fine example of his mastery over the language. Who taught Percival Tamil? It is commonly claimed that Navalar “at a young age, tutored his Principal in Tamil at the Jaffna Central School of Reverend Dr Peter Percival” in any event Percival was still Mr., not yet a Doctor then. This “young age” is four years, Navalar’s age when Percival arrived in 1826. Navalar’s nephew T Kailasapillai says “Navalar was Pandit to Percival.” Saiva Periyar S Shivapathasundaram is more expansive in the style of ancient texts or puranas: “The Rev Gentleman […] availed himself of this opportunity to study Thamil literature and Grammar under Navalar. He [Percival] was so much benefitted by his teachings that he often referred to him [Navalar] as his Guru.” Similarly in the Pirapantatirattu it is claimed by Navalar that, “Percival … had his Tamil education in Jaffna.” The early Navalar biographies were not by scholars, not even by university graduates, but his admirers and a nephew. So they take the form of puranic or epic story-telling. These get embellished with time. Saiva Periyar Shivapathasundaram, the Principal of Victoria College in the 1930s (who is held up as a great Tamil leader by TamilNet an extremist Tamil web-newspaper run by Tamil-Saiva nationalists), begins his oft-cited Navalar biography thus:
This hyperbole typifies the tone of early Navalar biographies which fed into later formal writings. It is not for us to say if these are a product of deliberate lies and selective history, or one careless mistake having an avalanche effect. But the Tamil tradition of heaping praise on kings, unmindful of facts, and untruthful funeral orations becoming ‘fact’ has something to do with viewing as treacherous any attempt to question histories and narratives that take away from the Tamil self-image of greatness. Far from being tutored by Navalar, Peter Percival in Tamil Proverbs with their English Translation (Dinavartamani Press, Mylapore, 1874), says “Almost immediately after my arrival in this country [Ceylon] in 1826, I entered on my Missionary work among the Tamil people, having acquired the rudiments of their language in England from a gentleman who had spent several years in the South of India and North Ceylon.” This gentleman was the Reverend Elijah Hoole who had spent years among Tamils as a Methodist missionary. Percival converted and baptised an ancestor of these authors who rejected his Hindu name Srinivasan and took on the name Elijah Hoole. This Hoole became one of the Anglican Church’s first Tamil priests in Ceylon. He was regarded as a prize catch because of his training in temple ritual and the Hindu Shastras and therefore his conversion is described in detail in the book by JW Balding, One hundred years in Ceylon; The Centenary volume of the Church Missionary Society in Ceylon, 1818-1918, CMS, London, 1922. The CMS archives at the University of Birmingham show that this Hoole was employed as ‘Pandit’ or scholar by Percival from 1847 to revise the Bible translation and spent 1849-50 with Percival in Madras finalising the revised translation and defending it before the Madras Auxiliary. When Percival switched from the Methodist Church to the Anglican around 1852, Elijah Hoole also did. Initially Percival was in Trincomalee, from where we see a report from him dated March 1827. But all biographies today say that Percival came to Jaffna in 1826. This is a necessary corollary of the mythical claim that Percival learnt his Tamil from four-year old Navalar in Jaffna. However, Methodist archives make it clear that Percival’s Jaffna station began only in 1833 when he returned after a four-year stint in Bengal. Once in Trincomalee, Percival engaged a teacher and learnt The Mahabharatha and mastered The Nannool, a standard manual of Tamil grammar, and promoted the latter’s study which, along with several other great Tamil works like Chilappadikaram were earlier prohibited texts for Tamils as they were written by Jains. Journal entries from Percival dated April and December 1827 from Trincomalee, record that he was preaching in Tamil, English and Portuguese. The same source shows him in Trincomalee in 1828. Two years after his arrival in 1826, Percival was able to write, from Trincomalee with Navalar six years old and in Jaffna, “I feel little difficulty in preaching in Tamil. I feel equal liberty as well in my colloquial intercourse with the people.” Percival would soon acquire the reputation of being “unsurpassed as a preacher in the Tamil language.” Christian Priest, not Agnostic In the face of Percival’s achievements and role in popularising Tamil literature, the theory of Saiva inspiration in all good things Tamil would inevitably collapse. But in order to uphold the myth, Percival the European must be portrayed as an agnostic who was against mission goals. Thus TamilNet falsely suggests that Percival “deviated from evangelism” and thereby “contributed to the quality of education in Jaffna” and the founding of many schools. What TamilNet implies is that education under an apostate is better than that under a Christian. These claims about Percival’s loss of faith are incorrect. It was the time of Anglo-Catholic revival and he merely joined the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the Anglicans’ high-church wing around 1852. It was a zealous missionary society restoring Catholic articles of faith jettisoned by the Anglican Church. The case cannot be made, as TamilNet has vainly tried, that the supposed apostasy of the principal at the premier Methodist school affected the quality of education in all of Jaffna. Percival was an Anglican priest to the end and his last will and testament in 1882 has him down as a Clerk in Holy Orders, Anglican formalism for priest. Percival was the officiating minister at the baptisms of his grandchildren close to his death and never stopped being an active Christian priest. Even the official history of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society written by G G Findlay and W W Holdsworth in 1924, shows the high regard in which he and his faith continued to be held by his previous Church:
Navalar the Casteist Arumukam, later Arumuka Navalar with the title of ‘Navalar’ meaning ‘powerful-tongued’, joined Percival’s school, the Wesleyan Mission School, when it opened its doors in 1834. He was 12 years old and did not graduate after 13 years of mission school studies and in 1847 organised a walk out of more than half the students when a Gabriel Jerony, a 15-year-old boy of an ‘inferior’ caste was admitted. Affirming that reputation as a casteist in his book in Tamil, The State of Religion in Jaffna, Navalar strongly berates a person for having drunk coffee at the missionary’s house because the cook was a pariah. TamilNet has taken on the impossible task of showing that Navalar who taught children that meritorious charity is only that which is directed at relatively higher castes like the Vellalahs, Chetties and Brahmins, was not a casteist. They say attributing caste prejudice to him goes against “the spirit of Navalar’s own writings in Pirapanthath-thiraddu”. Prof A R Venkadachalapathy of the Madras Institute of Development Studies avers that even generally liberal Marxists like the late Prof. K. Kailasapathy “betray their pro-Saivite ideological position in papering over Arumuka Navalar’s virulent anti-Buddhism/Jainism.” Because of the way in which Navalar has been built up among Jaffna Hindus, even lower caste Hindus below Vellala Sudras adore him, showing the brain-washed-from-school intellectual climate in Jaffna. Despite valiant attempts to make Navalar the translator of the Jaffna Bible, there are three good reasons why Navalar could not have had a hand in revising the translation of the Bible. First, until the end, he was a pupil at the Wesleyan Mission and not a teacher as claimed. This is clear from an article titled “Absurdities of Caste,” dated November 25 1847 in The Morning Star from Jaffna a fortnightly Protestant bilingual newspaper and probably the first Tamil newspaper which was launched in 1841:
The emphasised words show he was a student. Colonial Secretary Sir James Emerson Tennent, quoting directly from Percival’s “MS. Notes of the Wesleyan Mission,” repeats this Morning Star account with the additional explicit detail from Percival that the leader, Aroomoogayar [sic.], was a student and the rebel students elected him as their “Assistant Teacher” in the rival establishment they opened. Thus for Navalar the break with Percival afforded his first opportunity to enter the teaching profession, albeit only as an Assistant Teacher in a school off a verandah that soon failed. After breaking with Percival was it possible for Navalar to have worked with Percival in translation? No, given that he was busy immediately with his failed verandah school, he then went off to Madras to buy his own press and he in his pamphleteering was calling missionaries Mleccha (barbarian)] and Christianity ‘the foreign Devil religion’. Nationalists who claim that Navalar was a credible translator had to undertake immense mental gymnastics in order to stake a responsible position for Navalar under Percival. For example S Thananjeyarajasingham, senior lecturer at the University of Ceylon (Peradeniya Campus) writing in 1974 first complains that one had to be a Christian to teach at a Christian school and then claims that Navalar was a teacher at the Wesleyan school. Indeed Navalar’s nephew T Kailasapillai says that at Percival’s request Navalar worked without wages as an English teacher in the lower classes and Tamil teacher in the upper classes. This in itself should raise a red flag to any critical scholar. In fact we find Kailasapillai waffling when he writes that “Navalar was known to have been a student until the age of 22 [i.e. 1844] and little is known about whether he was a student after that.” This appears to be an attempt to hide the fact that even at age 25 in 1847 Navalar had not managed to graduate. Prof RF Young and The Rt Rev S Jebanesan (The Bible Trembled: The Hindu–Christian Controversies of Nineteenth Century Ceylon, Sammlung de Nobili, Vienna, 1995) relying on Kailasapillai say “Eventually [emphasis ours] he was hired to teach Tamil and English at the Wesleyan mission school in Jaffna.” The word “eventually” suggests some delay in the process. Kailasapillai reports a supposed conversation where Percival says that “he cannot find a teacher like Navalar even if he is paid”. This conversation is repeated by Dennis Hudson, a Harvard-trained academic from Smith College who more than any other has spread these myths about Navalar, carrying them from their Saiva nationalist sources into formal western academic literature through his numerous papers. However, less sycophantic interpretations of this exchange go towards showing that Navalar was not paid and only kept at school as a favour despite lack of progress in studies. As for the second reason why Navalar could not have translated the Bible, it is the dates in Percival’s brass plaque (three years from July 5, 1846) when Percival translated the Bible. Navalar left as soon as the work began. The minutes of the Jaffna Auxiliary of the Bible Society show Percival’s endeavours with that Society from 1836 (mainly in printing and distributing Tamil Bibles). This is used to claim that Navalar as a young boy was a translator when in fact he was a student. The Failed Translation Percival’s nascent attempts at revising the Fabricius version of the Tamil Bible under the Jaffna Auxiliary of the Bible Society with Rev Charles Rhenius as consultant did not take off because the Madras Auxiliary which handled Bible distribution for the larger body of Tamil Christendom blocked it on grounds of its non-adherence to the 1611 King James’ text which was then the standard. The first Fabricius manuscript of Genesis translated by Jaffna had been sent to Madras in October 1840 for comments and approval, but the Madras Auxiliary had been sitting on it for almost four years. Percival got his go ahead for the translation when Jaffna bypassed Madras with Rev Dr Elijah Hoole’s help and applied to the parent society in London for permission to revise and publish an edition independent of Madras. By the middle of 1845, Jaffna was given the requested permission from the parent society to print its own edition of Tamil Sacred Scriptures and grants of paper and Bibles. Given shipping times, the permission and grants were not received till the end of 1845. Accordingly there would now be a revision of the Rhenius version, but Rhenius had just died and was no longer available as a consultant. The little work done on the Fabricius version seems to have been abandoned by this point and nothing is known of what happened to seven of the 66 books in the Fabricius translation of the Bible that Percival had revised. What was the difference between these versions? There were minor differences in words hinging on the use of Sanskrit (for example whether to use jalam or thanneer for water) and theology. Vedanayaka Sastri of Tanjore, standing up for the Fabricius version as soon as the Rhenius version appeared, argued that in the first chapter of the Gospel according to St Matthew, 46 words found in dictionaries had been replaced by Rhenius with “ugly and improper” words used by the lower castes or hunting tribes (as he put it), destroying the meaning, sweetness and grammar of the older translations. As a result, for example, so-called Sudra words like ‘thanneer’ have been replaced by the Sanskrit ‘jalam’ Tamilised into ‘chalam’ by Percival. As for theology, for example, the previous translations used Tampiran (the Absolute), Paraparan (Protector) and Sarveswaran (Lord of All) for God. Percival uses ‘Thevan’. This had been justified before Percival by the Reverend H Bower (Biblical and Theological Dictionary, SPCK, Madras, 1841). As Young and Jebanesan point out, ‘Thevan’ for God was in line with the policy of North Indian translators. But many disliked the word because Thevan is Sanskrit and conjures up images of multiple gods, so Hindu nationalists, who claim that Navalar translated the Bible, must distance him from this piece of work. Accordingly the myth is created (and given respectability by Harvard’s John Carman) that Navalar had promised his mother “not to teach the correct word ‘Iswaran’ (Lord) to the Christians.” Indeed, if true this would be kuru-ninjai (abuse of teacher) by Navalar against Percival that Navalar stoutly declared as one of the five major sins.
Reading the actual Bibles we recognise how Tamil had evolved under the missions. Fabricius and Zeigenbalg are difficult to read because the missions had not yet reformed writing. Thus words run together. Without the dots on top of consonants, to give one example, the letter ‘n’ stands for both ‘n’ and ‘na’. The letters ‘ke’ and ‘kay’ are written the same. Further the verses are not numbered. The Rhenius Bible had evolved somewhat, and made some changes in script for enhanced readability, while the Percival Bible used the modified prose script with the expanded set of letters. Percival continued Tamil-letter numbering for pages and verses. [See table here] The third reason why Navalar could not have translated the Bible is revealed on the cover of the Percival Bible which explicitly says that it was translated from the root languages and Navalar did not know Hebrew or Greek. TamilNet writers who have probably not seen the Bible have tried to wriggle out of this problem in their anxiety to make the Church obliged to Navalar, claiming he translated from English and the Jaffna translation was the first Tamil Bible. C Rudra, a Colombo-based writer, also asserts without an iota of evidence in Colombo’s Daily News that “What Navalar translated was from the English version into Tamil for which a [sic] knowledge of Hebrew or Greek was not required.” Moreover, the Church which puts so much into what every word in the Bible means would never have given such an important task to someone who had not even finished high school at the age of 25, and had no Christian faith. At the time the Church had many native Tamil scholars who were Christians to whom they could have turned if there was a need. Ironically, despite the Percival Bible’s so-called majestic use of language it failed in so far as it ceased to be used because of its Sanskritised Tamil. No sooner had the Tentative Union Version left the press, than provision was made in Madras for yet another revision. The Rev D Holden, a missionary in Tinnavely, comments on the acceptability of the Jaffna revised translation:
Others took the same view. “Major missions, particularly the Anglicans of Tanjore [Society for the Propagation of the Bible or SPG, the Catholic Wing of the Anglican Church] and Tinnavely [Church Missionary Society or CMS, the Protestant Wing of the Anglican Church], did not accept it.” It was used chiefly at Jaffna in Ceylon, and in a few of the American Missions.” Even in Jaffna, according to Kulandran, it ceased to be used after 50 years. Only Hindu extremists in Jaffna believe in the revised translation’s greatness and its continued relevance. Their sense of superiority is premised on a belief that the Christian Church was unable to do anything without Navalar’s involvement and prompt Tamil textbooks today to claim that Navalar translated the Bible. Irresponsible North American Scholarship To perpetuate this myth, everything about Navalar is exaggerated. The tradition of uncritically repeating mistakes in print and relying on polemical and sectarian histories as if they are factual is seen even in contemporary Western scholars like Dennis Hudson of Smith College (a prestigious American women’s college), John Carman of Harvard and Bernard Bate of Yale, commiting these fables into staid journal texts. The late AJ Wilson of the University of New Brunswick, a Methodist and son-in-law of Tamil federalism’s father-figure SJV Chelvanayagam, states that the Bible was translated from English and “Jaffna Hindu College is an enduring monument to [Navalar’s] untiring efforts” whereas it had started only in 1890 as Hindu High School, 11 years after Navalar’s death. Lakshmanan Sabaratnam, a Sri Lankan Tamil Christian who is on the South Asian Studies faculty at Davidson College, another elite American institution perpetuating Navalar myths, goes on to list Peter Percival as Charles Percival and states that Navalar was hired as a monitor/teacher in Percival’s mission school and was “soon persuaded to read the English Bible and help translate it. The Tamil translation was published in Madras and distributed widely in recognition of Navalar’s own proficiency.” In reality, the Percival Revision was overall a failure as already noted and at the mission schools, reading the Bible was compulsory as Percival himself states in describing the activities for a day and therefore no ‘persuasion’ was necessary for Navalar while a student to read the Bible. As if every South Asia studies program in the US has to praise Navalar and attack Percival, the charge of colonial paternalism has been directed at Percival by Sascha Ebeling of University of Chicago’s South Asian Languages and Civilizations Department. Ebeling unfairly calls Percival’s content editing of Tamil literature “colonizing the realm of words” without mentioning Percival’s reasons for editing texts meant for schools. Prior to the missions Hindu scriptures were read out, put out as plays and taught in the thinnai (verandah) schools only to so called high-caste men among the Tamils (as Vellala Sudras in Jaffna call themselves). Women were prohibited from even hearing them, claiming that education would ruin a woman’s chastity – no doubt in part due to the erotic content of these texts. For example, according to Percival even in a text like Nalan-Damayanthi which was part of the epic Mahabharatha, he had to excise about 500 out of 1100 stanzas to make the text presentable to children. Auvayar, the poetess, too could not be presented to children without cuts. The debate over reading to children racy, raunchy stories from the puranas and the Kanthapuranam is very old. The decision that children should not be exposed to such stories is something that nearly all Tamil parents, Hindu and Christian, agree on and cannot be laid at Percival’s door. Challenge for Tamils Unfortunately, a critical sense of history such as that which Tamils have demonstrated in the sciences, engineering and medicine is missing when it comes to religious history. After all, even if all the other misinterpretations about Percival and Navalar are overlooked, what cannot be excused is this: a community continuing to teach its children that the 1850 Tamil revised translation of the Bible is the first ever when the frontispiece of that Bible itself says it is a revision. There seems little or no hope for such a community without the willingness to re-examine and self-correct. That desire is integral to the scientific method, the scientific method that Peter Percival struggled to inculcate in all of us. Dushyanthi Hoole and SRH Hoole are professors at the Michigan State University, USA. SRH Hoole was briefly Vice Chancellor of Jaffna University in 2006, until the LTTE’s death threats forced him into exile. |
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The Truth About the Jaffna Bible By Dushyanthi Hoole and SRH Hoole
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