The First Firangis

In about 1610, one Thomas Stephens decided to compose an epic poem about Christianity. There was nothing very remarkable about that, as a lot of people in the early seventeenth century busied themselves in leisure hours by writing bad poetry.

But this one was different; Stephens was an English priest who had been living for years in India, and he wrote his poem (which was not such a bad one), all 11,000 lines of it, in a strange language called Marathi mixed with some sections in Konkani, another language probably no one had heard of.