Bengal has been at the forefront of India's intellectual history and India's encounter with colonial modernity in early nineteenth century produced fascinating and complex responses from Indian social thinkers who grappled with the newly arrived western epistemes while retaining at the same time the redeeming features of our own civilizational claims. In any standard historiography of modern India, Bengal and its glorious social thinkers occupy a significant place. To put things more clearly, one may take the example of the Brahmo Samaj as a remarkable chapter of India's remarkable intellectual response to colonial modernity. Mainstream Indian history has already venerated the Brahmo Samaj for their pioneering role in ushering in transformative shifts in our social and cultural attitude. However, in this standard and conventional hagiography of the Brahmo Samaj we most of the times do injustice to individual Brahmo thinkers as almost all of them deserve separate scholarly engagement for their erudite command over different aspects of western and Indian knowledge systems and also for their unique positions on our anti-colonial social reform.
Furthermore, whenever we talk about the Brahmo Samaj, we generally, only refer to few illustrious members of this reform movement, including Rammohun Roy, Devendranath Tagore, Keshub Chandra Sen, Vidyasagar and Akshay Kumar Dutta. Beyond these familiar names there were many other outstanding members who evinced superb erudition and scholarly initiatives in reading western philosophy and theological discourses through decolonial and norm-deviant ways. Brahmo figures like Protap Chunder Mozoomdar, Brahmabandhav Upadhyay, to name a few, were radical visionaries who experimented with the concept of religion itself and demonstrated excellent abilities to innovatively argue for cultural translation and conceptual cross-fertilization. Being influenced by the influx of new Western ideas they leaned towards Christianity out of their love for the catholic and egalitarian spirit of Christianity but their approach to Christianity or to the western canon was not determined by the dictates of Western missionaries or the canonical scriptures. They interpreted Christianity and many other dominant cultural tropes introduced by the British in their own liberal ways. Protap Chunder Mozoomdar's. The Oriental Christ (1883) is one such example where Mozoomdar looked at Christ through the oriental lens, and de-Europeanized Jesus in that process. This is indeed quite remarkable because such innovative readings broaden the cultural spectrum and help us to transcend rigid ideological barriers.
I am immensely happy to note that one of the faculty members of ILSR has come out with a critical edition of Mozoomdar's 1883 book on Orientalizing Christ. I congratulate the entire ILSR fraternity for thinking about this book and I am sure this new reading of Mozoomdar's book will help us to revisit the Brahmo Samaj in a new way in today's context of global cosmopolitanism and democratic diversity.
Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha And ndrew Sartori's analysis of "Bengali culturalism" Lin his Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (2008), locates 'culture' in 19th and early 20th century colonial Bengal within the larger network of the "global concept history" of culturalism. Sartori's central hypothesis underlined the "translatability and transmissibility of key modern concepts like culture" (17) and this global circulation of culture as a force field or category and its translatability in specific geographical locations explains how the Brahmo Samaj or other native cultural-political actors in nineteenth century colonial India responded to their encounter with colonial power through cultural translation.
For Sartori, modern European intellectual history "ceases to be European" as it articulates "modern categories of practice that are global in their logic and salience" and culture emerges in this entire analysis as a "subjective moment of capitalist society" (232). The critique of "modernizing universalism" implicit within the logic of global imperial capitalism, according to Sartori, is "predicated on an ethical language of self-determination" and such subjective motifs of cultural self-determination is built into the agenda of postcolonialism or decoloniality. (70) My purpose here is to demonstrate how the Brahmo Samaj and its 19th century actors performed this "ethical language of self-determination" through translational textual practices and Protap Chunder Mozoomdar's The Oriental Christ (1883) exemplifies such an instance of ethical practice of translation.
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