Naturally, Indians had their own cultural experiences, linguistic practices and semantic schemes. Trying to make sense of the queries of the coloniser, Indians learned to use English-language words (‘religion’, ‘revelation’, ‘God’, ‘worship’, ‘priest’, ‘idolatry’), without having access to the background theology that related these terms to each other in a systematic way. For instance, while puja rituals are not in any sense the equivalent of worship in Christianity, Europeans misunderstood these rituals as worship and mistranslated ‘puja’ as ‘worship’.
