Over the long nineteenth century, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678 and 1684) was extensively translated into Asian languages, from Tamil in 1793 to Korean in 1895. While Isabel Hofmeyr has traced how Bunyan’s book circulated in African languages and through the ‘broader space of the mission empire’, the circuits that The Pilgrim’s Progress followed across the Middle East and Asia have only partially been examined. This chapter reconstructs how Bunyan’s work was progressively translated into South Asian languages – especially Bengali, Hindi and Urdu – and reads these re-workings alongside versions in Arabic, Tamil and Oriya.

When we began reading the same text in multiple languages and from different contexts, we hoped to interrogate a South Asian portion of a global history of Bunyan’s circulation. Reality has proven to be more complicated. First, there was no single Ur-text for Bunyan: English versions appeared in many forms even in their circulation in the British Isles; moreover, certain translators working in Arabic and Urdu did not need to refer to Bunyan’s English at all, as they already had earlier translations (in Greek or Hindi) at hand. Furthermore, as we began to historicise the immediate conditions of translation work, and the forms of cultural ‘domestication’ involved in rendering this Christian allegory into local contexts, it became increasingly apparent that the different translators had extremely different audiences, priorities and literary approaches. Some translations were the work of small teams of missionaries and local consultants: they appeared to operate in relative isolation but were closely engaged with how their peers were working, and several were trying to make sense of how their Indian audiences might receive Bunyan’s mediated message. However, we found that by the end of the nineteenth century, Indian translators were developing work for highly specific missionary programmes, yet simultaneously departing from earlier translations to present their own interpretations of Bunyan’s narrative. This variety gestures to the challenges of thinking in terms of a global Bunyan, and drove us to move away from a uniform history of The Pilgrim’s Progress in north India.

This chapter introduces the multilingual context of nineteenth-century north India, and considers how missionaries and translators navigated languages, colonial agendas and genres in their projects.