The Krista Purana is a 17th-century Christian epic poem by English Jesuit Thomas Stephens that retells the Biblical narrative in the form of a Marathi–Konkani purana, using local poetic metres and vernacular speech. The article explores how the text adapts the puranic form and Bhakti poetic styles to translate Christianity into a Konkan cultural idiom. It examines debates over whether the work is Marathi or Konkani literature and which script, Romi or Devanagari, represents the “original” text. Finally, it highlights how caste, colonialism, and nationalist language politics shaped the reception of the Krista Purana and the status of Konkani-speaking Catholic communities.
In 1579, a 30-year-old English Jesuit, Thomas Stephens, landed in Goa with the aim of preaching Christianity in the Portuguese dominion. Stephens had fled an England where Catholics lived under constant suspicion. Over the next four decades, he became, in his own words, a devotee of the Marathi language, composing Christian poetry in the style of regional saint poets. His most ambitious work, completed by 1616 at the Rachol seminary press, was the 'Krista Purana', an epic retelling of the Bible.
Annie Rachel Royson, in In Search of the Kristapurana, traces the history, surviving manuscripts, and cultural significance of Thomas Stephens’s 1616 Kristapurana in Goa. The work runs to 10,962 stanzas divided into two books. The Pailem Puranna covers the Old Testament across 36 cantos. The Dussarem Puranna covers the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ across 59 cantos. Stephens composed it in the ovi metre, the same four-line form used by the Marathi Bhakti poets Dnyaneshwar, Eknath, and Tukaram.
Krista Purana was written in the spoken vernacular languages of the Konkan coast rather than in Sanskrit or Latin. In his prose introduction, Stephens states that he wrote in Marathi and mixed in Konkani so that the people of Goa could understand. The text also draws on Sanskrit, Portuguese, and Latin words throughout. While there are older South Asian literary traditions such as from Kerala in the first millennium, this is among the oldest such Christian Indian texts.
A Question Of Language
Whether the work is Marathi or Konkani literature has been debated. Marathi literary historians such as S.G. Tulpule and S.G. Malshe, place Stephens in the Marathi spiritual literary tradition. The nineteenth-century scholar J.H. da Cunha Rivara listed the text as Konkani literature, and Manohar Rai Saradesai’s 'A History of Konkani Literature' follows the same classification. When I tried to read the text, it was moderately intelligible and used words and sentences that are not modern Marathi and are very close to Konkani. Konkani itself isn’t a single language, but has a huge number of varying dialects across geographies and communities.
The most accurate reading is that the text sits at the boundary of both traditions. Marathi functioned as the literary language of the region, while Konkani was the spoken everyday tongue. As scholar Madhavi Sardesai notes, "'pure' Marathi was not intelligible to people," so difficult words were replaced by easier ones from the spoken local language.
A Biblical Purana
Scholars Annie Rachel Royson and Arnapurna Rath show that Stephens reproduced the classical five-part structure of a Purana, that is, creation, flood, and re-creation, genealogies, stories of patriarchs, and the deeds of saints. The dominant reception has treated Krista Purana as a landmark of local literature, the translation of Christianity into a local cultural and literary idiom.
Alexander Henn argues that the Jesuit production of Christian Puranas was part of a broader Portuguese strategy to replace indigenous sacred texts with Christian ones. Such readings reduce how the local people appropriate and revoice texts like the Krista Purana within their agency. Catholic communities from lower and middle/intermediary castes along the coast used Christian language, liturgy, and texts like this one to negotiate space within a social order.
The Script Debate
There is also disagreement about which version of the text is the original. When Devanagari manuscripts were discovered in 1925, some scholars argued they were more authentic because they contained "purer" Marathi. However, Roman script manuscripts are clearly older, and Stephens himself said he wrote in a mix of Marathi and Konkani.
Anthropologist Jason Keith Fernandes argues that nationalism and upper caste politics combined tried to create an idea of Konkani as “one language, one script, one people". The modern idea of a single, unified “pure” Konkani language is itself a construction, a product of orientalist scholarship and upper-caste politics. He points out that Roman script Konkani and the speech of labouring Catholic communities were stigmatised, while Devanagari Konkani associated with Saraswat Brahmins was elevated as “proper”.
Beyond Krista Purana, Stephens wrote Doutrina Christam (1622), the first Konkani book ever published. Parts of the Krista Purana itself circulated in oral form, its verses were sung in Goan churches until at least the 1930s, while communities would gather through the night before funerals to recite from it. The Thomas Stephens Konknni Kendr in Goa, founded in 1989 and run by the Jesuits, continues to preserve his legacy and holds two manuscripts of the text.
If you’re curious, the 1907 edition of the Krista Purana in Romi Konkani, edited by Joseph L. Saldanha, can be read here at the Internet Archive.
A modern dual-language edition of the Krista Purana, containing an edited text and English translation by Dr. Nelson Falcao, is available here for purchase.
If you enjoyed reading this, here's more from Homegrown:
The Mirror Exiles Of The Last Mughal Emperor & The Last Burman King
Beedi Wars: How The Humble Beedi Sparked Decades Of Bloody Conflict In Kerala & Karnataka
Blood In The Open Skies: The Murder That Grounded India’s First Private Airline