George Uglow Pope

George Uglow Pope (24 April 1820 – 11 February 1908), or G. U. Pope, was an Anglican Christian missionary and Tamil scholar who spent 40 years in Tamil Nadu and translated many Tamil texts into English. His popular translations included those of the Tirukkural and Thiruvasagam.

Quotes

• We are quite warranted in imaging Tiruvalluvar, the thoughtful poet, the eclectic . . . pacing along the seashore with the Christian teachers, and imbibing Christian ideas, tinged with the peculiarities of the Alexandrian school, and day by day working them into his own wonderful Kurral . . . the one Oriental book much of whose teaching is an echo of 'the Sermon on the Mount'.
  • Quoted from Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (Princeton, N.J.). (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines

• Christian influences were at the time at work in the neighbourhood, and that many passages are strikingly Christian in their spirit. I cannot feel any hesitation in saying that the Christian Scriptures were among the sources from which the poet derived his inspiration.
  • Quoted from Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (Princeton, N.J.). (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines

Quotes about Pope

• For example, Christian historian Stephen Neill rejects Pope’s fraudulent claim with a tone of empathy:
  ‘The brilliant imagination of Dr Pope has produced a beautiful romance. The sober verdict of historical judgment must be that any such Christian influence on Tamil literature is unlikely. . . Any extensive infiltration of Hindu thought by Christian influences must be ruled out as no more than remote possibility. Here, as elsewhere, what we seem to see is devout minds in different places working on similar problems and arriving independently at comparable results.’
  • (Neill 2004, 62)Quoted from Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (Princeton, N.J.). (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines