13 - The Unexpected Dynamics of Christian Text Transmission in Colonial South Asia and Myanmar

Summary

BEFORE WRITING, THERE WERE long and widespread traditions of oral composition and aural reception … So begins the litany of textual transmission as a ‘one-way’ linear progression: from orality–aurality to manuscript, print and now digital. This ‘technologically determinist’ continuum dictates that each succeeding technology replaces its predecessor, but research is making it more and more clear that an earlier mode or modes of transmission may not be abandoned altogether but persist in parallel to their successor in a reduced or subordinate role. The dissemination of Christian literature in India, Sri Lanka and Myanmar during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provides a prime example of the way that different materialities and modalities of transmission could coexist to overlap and interplay. But let us begin at the other extreme, with a phenomenon that apparently propelled print to a stratospheric level of superiority.

In July 1833 The American Tract Magazine carried a communication from the Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson in Myanmar lamenting the death of a Karen man and his wife ‘near the head of the Pa-tah river, who, though not baptized and never seen by any foreign missionary, both died in the faith’. The man's dying wish to his friends had been to have the printed Burmese tract entitled View of the Christian Religion ‘laid on his breast and buried with him’. Judson was so moved by this incident that he composed a poem:

---------------------------------------- He never saw

The book of heavenly wisdom and no saint

Had told him how the sinner might be saved.

But to his hut a little tract, a messenger of love,

A herald of glad tidings, found its way:

Borne over rapid streams and deep blue lakes

Embower’d in trees and o’er the waving woods,

Perchance upon the pinions of the breeze,

At length it came. It was not like the bunch

Of brittle palms on which he learn’d to read;

Its letters were more nice, its texture fair;

Its words – he wonder’d as he look’d on them.

There was some holy love he never knew;

There was a spirit breathing in each line.

He felt unutterable thoughts, as now

He scann’d the whole, now read each wondrous word.

It told of God the Maker and of Him

Who died for man's salvation.

He wept and pray’d and mourn’d a wretched life

Of constant sin; and gave himself to God.