Jonathan Koshy Varghese, an associate researcher at the CSH and an Assistant Professor at Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi, wrote an article entitled “Mārggakār: States of Conversion and Unbelonging in Kerala.” published in Philological Encounters, on 07 November 2025.

The article is available at: https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-bja10070

Abstract: This essay examines the term mārggakār as a site of semantic and political instability within early modern and colonial Kerala. Positioned at the intersection of caste hierarchy, Christian conversion, and colonial governance, mārggakār exemplifies the condition of the untranslatable as conceptualized by Emily Apter, resisting assimilation into missionary lexicons and colonial bureaucracies. The essay traces the term’s shifting meanings across three registers: Hermann Gundert’s Malayalam–English Dictionary (1871), which encodes caste within religious categories; Raju K. Vasu’s Malayalam novel Polappatham (2021), where mārggakār marks the complex figure of Thomas, a Pulaya convert; and eighteenth-century petitions from the Dutch East India Company archive, which document the legal precarity of low-caste Christians. Through these diverse sources, the essay argues that mārggakār functions not merely as a linguistic artifact, but as a conceptual prism through which to view the contradictions of translation, subalternity, and colonial rule. The term’s instability illuminates how language mediates, and often obscures, structures of power, and marginality.

Jonathan Koshy Varghese