Abstract
Languages have played an important role in the development of religious identities in contemporary India. As this article shows, Hindi Protestant Christian literature provides a unique insight into such processes. The literature proposes terms and translations that seek to separate out religious claims. As a term proposed in response to the prominence of avatār, the Hindi neologism dehadhāran does this for Hindu and Christian claims as it seeks to distinguish the latter from the former. Yet, polytradition words that function across religions help blur the lines between religious communities. Christian uses of terms like mandir and īmān serve this purpose. Taken together, these language choices reflect the deployment of a range of tactics like neologisms, borrowing, and adaptation in order to unite distinctive Christian claims with Hindi cultural idioms.
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