Pictures are fascinating. When we look at the same image again and again we discover new things or think of new stories behind the picture. Although the message of an image often seems obvious, most pictures have more than one dimension and inspire to tell various stories. Because they are fascinating and open to interpretation, pictures can be very powerful. With the photographs and sketches on our website, we wish to invite you to reflect together with us about the issues of our project.

Don’t worry if the pictures don’t speak to you at first sight. Come, let’s look at the image that appears when you open www.ctla.llc.ed.ac.uk (if you open the link in a new browser window, you may see the image while reading on).

What do you see?

An exotic structure with a funny arrangement of unrelated animals and human figures? The lotus dome of a Hindu temple with the surprising addition of European looking statues? A part of a Christian church with strange Indian ornamentation? A unique combination of Hindu and Christian images?

I will not tell you now where this picture was taken (this will be revealed in a later post). The point here is that there are many different perspectives on this image which all have their own value (despite the fact that this structure has been built with a particular intention). We have selected this image for our website because it plays around with religious and cultural symbols we usually attribute to either Hinduism or Christianity. Depending on your background and interests, particular items will catch your eye.

Perhaps you will consider the crude combination of Hindu and Christian symbols irritating or offensive – even more so the cross with the Tamil ‘Om’ on the page describing the project? Brilliant! You raise an important issue. The picture points to a controversy that has been hotly debated for centuries in many religious circles: How far can one go without losing one’s religious identity, what are the core values, the central doctrines, the valid symbols and rituals, last but not least: what are the trusted narratives and stories that must not be compromised?

This question is at the heart of our project in which we look for new perspectives on religious conversion by examining stories converts wrote about their own experiences. For a convert, who has the intention to change her/his religion this question is equally troubling, only from a different angle. He/she must answer the question “Where is the ‘red line’ that I must cross to break with my old religion; and how do I convince my new companions that I am serious about joining their faith?”

I will address this issue in one of the following blog posts when discussing another picture on our website. In the meantime, let me know how you see the pictures we have selected for the website – simply send me a message though the “contact” page.

Matthias

Some of our friends have been intrigued by the images we’ve used to construct our website and we wondered if perhaps others too are curious about the visual contents of the website. So we thought we’d run a short series of blogs to take you through some of the thinking behind our choice of images and what we think they say.

Now, one of the things you learn very quickly when setting up a website is that images can either make or sink your website. No wonder we began to discuss what images we should use very early on. We started with the three main conceptual terms of the project—conversion, translation and autobiography. We realized very quickly that since all three are quite abstract they don’t lend themselves naturally to visual representation. The only obvious images we could think of were front covers or title pages of published conversion autobiographies. But this conjured up an image of a dreary website peppered with dull black-and-white images of books. Who (apart from ourselves) would wish to visit such a website again?

Finding images that are striking and yet speak beyond the immediacy of their own visual content is hard. The challenge has been not to use the many colourful images related to religions in India: they may be stunning but with no direct conceptual link to the themes of the project, they wouldn’t be saying much. One solution appeared to be to use images to evoke some of the ideas of the project tangentially and thereby provoke viewers to engage with the themes of the project. To ask: what does this image have to do with the project?

Take for instance the image of the tree with bright strings tied to its three branches that you may have seen on the ‘project’ page: it is a very familiar sight in India and instantly brings to mind hundreds of sacred sites all over the subcontinent where one might see ‘prayer’ or ‘wish’ strings tied to monuments, tombs or trees. Such sites have attracted people from across the religious spectrum and often held up as wonderful examples of the religious tolerance and liberality of the subcontinent. But surely this requires further unpacking and thinking about. It is hard to link this practice to any particular religious tradition because there is a shared realm of practices and experiences, an underlying fluidity or even ambiguity where it’s hard to say where one person’s faith ends and another’s begins. This raises pertinent questions regarding what kinds of sacred boundaries are set up or crossed and when. What conceptual parallels across religions allow individuals from very different sets of belief systems to put their faith in one simple action—tying a string around a tree and ‘praying’ or ‘making a wish’—at a site collectively recognized as ‘sacred’? Does this faith act operate at the edge of words, inner faith translated into outward action, by which individuals speak of themselves beyond language…and yet in a manner comprehensible to a million others?

Hephzibah

The most exciting phase in historical research is to explore new archives. If you are a historian, I hope, you agree with me. The thrill is particularly high in archives with rudimentary documentation, where you can only guess what might be behind a particular shelfmark. Sometimes you have to find your way by trial and error. It’s like treasure hunting – there is a vague promise to find something highly valuable, but you never know whether and when you will find a grain of gold. The fun of treasure hunting, however, goes much beyond looking for the one piece of precious metal. While digging you will find many items you would never have thought of before, rubbish, curious artefacts, stones, and perhaps a silver coin. Similarly, in archives you come across many unexpected documents, some more, some less valuable for your research.

I love the moment when the archivist gently places a box with scarcely described material before me, and I feel the excitement rising like a child in front of a large birthday present. True, the contents of the box may be a disappointment, and many disappointing boxes are frustrating. But there are also lucky draws and surprises. Recently I sat in the Bodleian Library at Oxford and delved into the archive of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) in search of conversion stories. Among a lot of rubble and some valuable documents for the project I came across curiosities which offer an unexpected glimpse into the past, undocumented in any catalogue or register.

Do you know this situation: You are sitting in a business meeting, that is equally unproductive and lengthy; your mind wanders off, you have to control yourself not to pull a face, you begin to scribble with your pen instead. That’s how a gentleman attending the SPG ‘Business for India Committee’ in November 1830 must have felt. His sketchy notes of the meeting have been preserved in the archive. The recorded contents of the meeting is less remarkable than the small masks and portraits over which he forgot to document the meeting more accurately – see:

Matthias

Welcome to the ‘Conversion, Translation and the Language of Autobiography’ project blog. That’s quite a mouthful, I know! As you rightly suspect, academics spend an inordinate amount of time thinking up catchy titles for their books and projects: a descriptive, stodgy title is certain death (yes, even in the academic world) but it can’t be quite so cryptic, in an effort to be cool, that potential funders are put off either. So what does one do? Play around with the order of words, use a noun as adjective to arouse interest (note ‘language of autobiography’) and perhaps leave the boring details to a subtitle, banished after the very useful colon, and if possible hide it in a corner….(I wonder if you’ve managed to spot ours in the website yet?) And what else can one do? Ah yes, create an acronym. From now we’ll use the acronym ‘CTLA’ to refer to the project.

If you’ve stayed with us until this blog, I suppose you must be interested in at least one of the words in the project title? Whatever your particular interest or combination of interests might be, we do hope that you enjoy the website and getting to know how our research progresses. We plan to lighten some of our more serious discussions with amusing anecdotes and discoveries over the life of the project.

By way of introduction to the CTLA blog, since this is a joint research project my colleagues, Matthias, Milind and I will take turns to write a blog post, approximately once a month. But if we have something particularly exciting to share we might appear more often, so watch out! If you are a regular visitor, please be prepared for different styles of writing and formats. Since we work with different languages and different aspects of the project, we would like to bring you a flavour of what each of us is doing. But while you get to see something of the workings of the project through each of our eyes, you might also stumble upon some differences of opinion and even (dare I say) disagreements. But that’s what will make for some stimulating conversations over the next twenty months or so, and I’m certainly looking forward to this.

Meanwhile, we also hope that you have something to say. Please do join our conversation either on the main ideas of our project, the contents of the website or perhaps in response to one of our blog posts. Please write to us through our ‘contact’ page, we’d love to hear from you.

Hephzibah