Conversion and Translation in the Kēraḷōlpatti

What demarcates one religion from another? This question lies at the core of the field of comparative religion, an academic discipline deeply rooted in orientalist approaches to religion, resulting in classifications that are informed by Eurocentric biases. Arguably, conceptual frameworks of conversion and translation offer Indigenous perspectives on religious demarcation, considering the translational processes involved with religious conversion, on the one hand, and the conversion of literary genres and linguistic registers involved with translation strategies across the world long before colonialism. Following the discovery of an episode translated from Arabic into Malayalam and embedded in the story of conversion from Hinduism into Islam, this article offers an analytical framework based on Indigenous conceptualization of conversion and translation.