It is by now a truism to say that global encounters always happen in local spaces. The shorelines of the Indian peninsula were fragmented but overcrowded places where, at the turn of the eighteenth century, European trading companies, missionaries, and merchants tried to peddle their wares and calculate their investments and profits. We focus in this article on the Danish enclave of Tranquebar (Taraṅkampāṭi) on the Coromandel Coast, which became a theater of German Pietist evangelical proselytism from 1706 onward, and by way of analytical mirror, on the long-established, if shifting and politically endangered Jesuit Madurai mission and the newer French Jesuit Carnatic mission, established in the hinterland of Pondicherry from the late seventeenth century. Our goal is to understand how bitter rivalries, entanglements, and unacknowledged resemblances between the Catholic and Protestant missionary methods and their effects contributed to global networks of knowledge.Footnote 1 During the first decades of the eighteenth century, just before the colonial scramble for India pitted the British against the French as the rising European powers in the region, Protestant and Catholic missionaries in the Tamil country confronted their knowledge practices and intellectual production. They exchanged information, bitterly competed for informants, and collaborated with various actors such as local savants and other go-betweens already experienced in dealing with European knowledge-seekers.Footnote 2 These connections have been obliterated by historiographies of Christian missions that operated through a complete separation between Catholic and Protestant networks, often in conjunction with various national agendas. Importantly, not until history of science turned its attentions to “local” and religious networks was it possible to imagine that “a Christian mission” could be a legitimate object of study and a locus of scientific activities and scientific communities.Footnote 3
Our aim here is to open a dialogue and widen the comparative framework between these missionary experiences and historiographies. We want to work out invisible and visible links—forged at times in bitter quarrels garnished with verbal punches—between the early eighteenth-century Pietists and the Jesuits operating in South India. Our claim is that these missions were a kind of “communicating vessels” with asymmetrical chronologies, steered by both an encompassing geopolitical logic and local micro-processes. This was before British colonialism and the emergence of the classificatory category of Hinduism, and both Jesuits and Pietists fit into local socio-religious puzzles as separate and independent religious communities, sharing cultural space with other sampradāyas, or religious “sects,” as they came to be known in scholarship.Footnote 4 In this context of entrenched religious pluralism, smaller or upstart religious communities such as these could only survive by maintaining clear and strict identity boundaries. At the same time, both Jesuits and Pietists were caught in European political and religious divisions and distinctions that were programmed to be translated into their local mission fields. They worked under the torn but proud umbrella of Christian universalism, which continued to feed European imperial aspirations.
On the local scale, Jesuits and Pietists were forced to borrow and learn from each other and appropriate each other's archives, which depended completely on indigenous helpers and converts. Yet ultimately, all this was done to construct their very different social, cultural, and religious identities. This is why it is possible to compare them at particular moments in time based on their similarities, which resulted nevertheless in programmed difference.
South India. Map by Nadia Guerguadj.
In this article we examine how they competed for linguistic/philological and medico-pharmacological knowledge, two fields in which Christian missionaries around the world excelled because they were useful as missionary tools. Their pursuit of this knowledge took different forms and unfolded in specific media. For example, unlike Pietists, Jesuits lacked resources to print their scholarly productions, from grammars and dictionaries to catechetical literature in Tamil. Unlike Jesuits, Pietists initially lacked reliable knowledge and so they often used Jesuit manuscripts, some of which they published at their Tranquebar printing press. Not all texts were meant to be printed, however, and an important distinction was made between the knowledge for the mission and knowledge of the mission.
The encounter between these two missionary teams was important because it transformed both of them, and their headquarters in Europe took seriously the lessons they learned. Jesuit missionaries disappeared when the Society of Jesus was abolished in 1773, but the Propaganda Fide in Rome, which took over some of the missions in India, certainly understood the importance of printed books and language manuals, and for at least a short while tried to compete with the Protestant presses.Footnote 5 The Protestants, on the other hand, realized from the start that Jesuit missionaries had prepared the ground successfully and so they focused on converting Catholics and adapted themselves to certain inherited, Tamil Catholic social routines.
Both missions in early eighteenth-century South India were laboratories, connected yet competing, in which social and scientific procedures were tested and repackaged, either to be reutilized locally or dispatched to the European and global “enlightened” market of ideas. The devil is in the detail here, and so in what follows we will work to disentangle the immediate social context of this “missionary” encounter, as well as the intertextual linkages, in the face of scattered, fragmented, and insular archives.
JESUITS AND PIETISTS: PARALLEL ITINERARIES, METHODOLOGICAL RESEMBLANCES
Historiography of Christian missions in India until two or three decades ago operated under the assumption that before the Protestant missions there was nothing worthy of the name. Three major factors were proposed in defense of this notion (though hardly anybody questioned it): (1) the number of converts; (2) the quality of conversion; and (3) the institutions and knowledge the missionaries created. Writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, historians of the mission, most of whom were of missionary and/or Protestant backgrounds, wrongly perceived missionary origins in India solely through a Protestant lens because, by that time, many Christians in India belonged to Protestant sects and Protestant-inspired institutions, and were an integral part of the British imperial landscape. It therefore seemed natural to entitle a book It Began at Tranquebar when speaking of the importance of Christianity and its history at a time (1956) when India was working to forge a new, secular self-definition and keep at bay what was perceived as foreign religion imposed through colonial domination.Footnote 6
Even well-respected and informed contemporary histories of Christian missions typically forget or minimize Catholic mission history and construct the originary moment, or the “true” missionary movement in India as an “explosive” blend of evangelical pietism and enlightenment.Footnote 7 According to Frykenberg, the first wave of evangelical missionaries into the world was charted by the “Second” or “Pietist” Reformation, attributed to the spiritual and theological guidance of Johann Arndt (1555–1621), Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), and August Hermann Francke (1663–1727). For Frykenberg, the visual pedagogies of the Pietist Orphanage and Halle University inaugurated “radically” new institutions and what was referred to collectively as “the Halle method.”Footnote 8
For Kelly Joan Whitmer, this kind of Whiggish explanation is unconvincing and tells only part of the story. The Halle method was an effort to reconcile competing epistemological stances and teach the eye and the heart to work together, fused “into a single entity that observed, reconciled, loved.”Footnote 9 The perfection of mankind was the ultimate goal, to be achieved by acquiring “true” knowledge “via experiment and demonstration, sensation and intuition” and by dissemination through global networks.Footnote 10 The knowledge of basic literacy, numeracy, and experimental laboratory work was seen to be the means to this end, and it required the recruitment of missionary pedagogues who possessed both evangelical zeal and elementary scientific capacity.Footnote 11
However, Whitmer also insists there was a symmetry between the Jesuit and Pietist projects in terms of their insistence on education, sensual spirituality, and the development of experimental approaches.Footnote 12 Indeed, a century before the Pietists, the Jesuits dreamed of a utopian society in which devotion (contemplation) and charity (social action) would create a harmonious world with the possibility of salvation for all. Like the Pietists, the Jesuits saw this idea in terms of embodiments—in the cooperation of “the mind, head, and heart.”Footnote 13 In his Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius of Loyola proposed instructions on how to use one's senses in the act of spiritual meditation to imprint one's memory and remembrances with pious examples.Footnote 14
Both the Pietists and the Jesuits drew their inspiration from the late medieval Devotio moderna and works such as Ludolf of Saxony's Vita Christi.Footnote 15 Both therefore shared the goal of improving the heart. This commonality is reflected in the artwork of the period; Jesuit emblem books are replete with images of large hearts from which sweepers brush away frivolous clutter.Footnote 16
The Jesuits and Pietists, despite their divisions, clearly belonged to the same European lineage of Christian piety and devotional tradition, and they shared methods and goals in a way that partisan historians chose to minimize. In addition, at the time the first Pietists settled in India, the Jesuits’ missionary experience and the knowledge they had collected had already been disseminated in Europe, if only fragmentarily. Moreover, the founders of the Pietist mission early on gained access to a trove of texts produced in the Jesuit missions that profoundly shaped their own mission practice, especially with respect to language. Thus, the Pietists began their missionary work possessing an epistemological advantage that the first, sixteenth-century Jesuit missionaries did not have.
Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, and his first colleague, Heinrich Plütschau, arrived in Tranquebar in July 1706, the first of fifty-six Pietist missionaries sent to India in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Staffed almost entirely by Germans educated in Halle, the mission was established by Danish King Frederick IV, and was mostly funded by private benefactors from Germany and England. After Tranquebar, other stations were established in territories under the control of the English East India Company in Madras (1728), Cuddalore (1730), Thanjavur (1762), and Tiruchirappalli (1766). The new stations were formally under the authority of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, but they looked to Tranquebar and Halle for direction and personnel.Footnote 17
Ziegenbalg's linguistic talent and the many texts he produced in Latin, German, Portuguese, and Tamil made him a missionary star in the Pietist histories and hagiographies.Footnote 18 His letters attest that many of these writings were partly inspired or directly written by his Tamil informants such as Modaliappa, Watthiar (a spelling of vaittiyar, a title colloquially meaning “teacher”) and his son Kanabadi, Aleppa, and others with whom he corresponded. Yet one detects a rehearsed reluctance to mention Catholic actors, especially missionaries like himself, who had been in the Tamilnadu for over a century.Footnote 19
COLLECTION, EXCHANGE, AND DISSEMINATION OF KNOWLEDGE
From Ziegenbalg's correspondence and printed texts, the quantity and quality of which is permanently celebrated by Protestant hagiographic historiography, a comparison between the Pietists and the Jesuits in terms of philological, literary, and pedagogical production, especially of printed books, clearly favors the Pietists.
In August 1708, Ziegenbalg compiled an annotated catalogue of the printed books and manuscripts in Tamil that he had acquired in the little more than two years he had been in India. This Bibliotheca Malabarica has 165 entries in four sections. The first section includes fourteen entries of Ziegenbalg's own works (sermons, hymns, letters, and two dictionaries) and his translations into Tamil of the catechism and other theological works. This was the only section of the work published during Ziegenbalg's lifetime. The remaining sections—twenty-one entries covering Catholic works, 119 of “heathen” works, and eleven of Muslim works—were not published until 1880.Footnote 20 A little over a year later, Ziegenbalg noted that the library now contained “three hundred Malabarian [i.e., Tamil] books,” although only a handful of the additional works can be identified.Footnote 21
From their earliest years in India, Jesuits sent under the Portuguese padroado had also made attempts to obtain religious texts. In 1548, António Gomes, head of the recently established Jesuit College of St Paul in Goa, received texts seized by a bailiff acting for the Bishop of Goa, the Franciscan Juan de Albuquerque.Footnote 22 The Governor of the Portuguese Estado da Índia, Garcia de Sá, ordered that these be returned, but a decade later further texts were obtained by seizure under rules forbidding the possession of “heathen” artefacts in the Portuguese territory. One year later, in 1559, additional books were obtained by theft. A young Brahman who had converted, taking the name Manuel d'Oliveira, led an expedition to steal books belonging to a Brahman living not far into the hinterland.Footnote 23 These were translated and soon put to use in sermons and refutations that the Brahmans in Goa were compelled to listen to. Over the next fifty years they were also used in a variety of other ways: as models for Christian works in Marathi like Thomas Stephens's Kristapurāṇa (1616) and Etienne de la Croix's Discursos sobre a vida do Apostolo Sam Pedro (1629),Footnote 24 and for vocabularies like those composed by Diogo Ribeiro (1626) and Miguel d'Almeida.Footnote 25 They also served as sources for the accounts of Indian religion in early Jesuit histories by Alessandro Valignano (1584) and Sebastião Gonçalves (1614).Footnote 26
The Jesuits in the early phase and under the Portuguese padroado made no systematic attempt to collect Indian texts in the manner that Ziegenbalg did. The French Jesuits, with their headquarters in Pondicherry and sent by the French king, started assembling a large collection of manuscripts for the royal library in Paris in the late 1720s and early 1730s, but they were divided about the value of doing so. In 1726, Étienne Souciet, librarian and professor of mathematics at the Jesuit college Louis-le-Grand, had written to Étienne le Gac, superior of the Carnatic mission, asking him to obtain copies of the Vedas.Footnote 27 Le Gac was conscious of the cost and doubtful of the benefit, especially “for the conversion of souls,” but his colleague Memmius René Gargam saw much greater value for the texts in “refuting the errors of the Gentiles” and by 1728 had managed to obtain “a summary of the Vedas.”Footnote 28 Two years later, even Le Gac could not refuse a direct commission from the royal librarian. He remained skeptical, however, even when sending copies of the Vedas, among other texts, to Paris in 1732.Footnote 29
Ziegenbalg's apparently precocious Orientalism was zealous not just in converting souls but also in acquiring knowledge for the sake of advancing “sciences” and pedantically cataloguing every book he collected, read, or wrote. Can this be interpreted as part and parcel of a more “enlightened” approach on the part of the Pietists?Footnote 30
In fact, these apparent differences can be attributed to particularly important chronological and geographical factors at work. When the Pietists arrived in Tranquebar in 1706, they profited from both the general disarray of the Jesuit missions in the interior and the problems they were facing in the French settlement in Pondicherry. For the next four decades, the Jesuit missionary field was fraught with conflicts, not only those directly related to the volatile political situation in which the Mughal and Maratha armies competed for the South Indian territory, but others stemming from an internal Catholic quarrel, the so-called Malabar Rites controversy.Footnote 31
Starting with the visit of the Carlo Tomaso Maillard de Tournon to Pondicherry in 1703, who issued an order against the accommodationist method put in place a century earlier by an Italian Jesuit Roberto Nobili (1577–1656), the consequences of the Malabar Rites controversy were twofold: The Jesuits, chronically understaffed in their missions, had to concentrate on their defense rather than missionary work and studies. The French Jesuits, in particular, wrote treatises and traveled to Rome on several occasions to defend their case against the sanctions imposed on them. On different occasions Pierre Martin, Francisco Lainez, Broglia Antonio Brandolini, and Jean Venant Bouchet went there to plead with the Pope to allow their Christians to keep practicing what they presented as certain “civil” or “political” ceremonies such as frequent bathing, the use of the marriage tāli for women, and keeping the kuṭumi (a tuft of hair) for men, and the use of certain words that had formerly designated “pagan” entities. According to the Jesuit argument, not allowing the new Christian communities to hang on to some old traditional customs that were not purely “religious” was an impediment to further conversion and a sure way to lose already established communities.Footnote 32
The combination of the war turmoil in the interior of the Tamil country, the lack of Jesuit priests, and that they were obliged to impose a newly reformed type of Christian worship by omitting or adding certain ceremonies pushed the Catholic castes and lineages to search for new patrons.Footnote 33
The Tranquebar missionaries benefitted directly from the Jesuit disarray. In September of 1707, Ziegenbalg first mentions acquiring Catholic books. Among them was a Tamil grammar in Portuguese, and sections of the Gospels. He goes on to say that by reading these and other Catholic works he was able, within eight months, to read, write, and speak in Tamil. This would place his acquisition of the works at the latest in February 1707, just seven months after his arrival in Tranquebar.Footnote 34 The grammar was given to Ziegenbalg by the Danish Commandant, Johann Siegmund Hassius, but of the other texts Ziegenbalg says only and somewhat obliquely that “it was wonderfully arranged” that he should come upon them. The books had belonged to a Jesuit “who went about among the heathen in the dress of a Brahman,” who had left the books in Tranquebar for safe-keeping during a time of Christian persecution in Thanjavur.Footnote 35 While it is impossible to identify which books Ziegenbalg acquired, or when the persecution which necessitated their deposit in Tranquebar occurred, it is clear that in this way Ziegenbalg benefitted directly from the Jesuits’ trials.
Moreover, many of the Pietists’ early converts, as well as some of their catechists, were also former Catholics and their conversion may have been linked to the fortunes of the Jesuit missions. Ziegenbalg was well-aware of these difficulties but preferred to attribute them to Jesuit “dissimulation and subtle manipulation, which was eventually exposed with the result that they are no longer publicly tolerated by the inhabitants of the country, so that now even their church in the capital Madurai stands waste and their Christians go around scattered everywhere.”Footnote 36
Ziegenbalg acknowledged that the Catholic texts, despite being “full of dangerous errors,” contributed greatly to his learning Tamil. It was from them that he was able to develop “a proper Christian style … as until then, I did not know what words and turns of speech I should use to express spiritual matters, so that nothing smacked of heathenism.”Footnote 37 Ziegenbalg was probably not the first Protestant cleric to benefit from Catholic works in Tamil. The copy of Henrique Henriques's Flos Sanctorum (Cochin 1586) now in the Royal Library in Copenhagen once belonged to the Dutch chaplain Philippus Baldaeus (1632–1671) and may have helped him learn Tamil.Footnote 38
Ziegenbalg returned to the Catholic Tamil books over and again, especially when he was working intensively on his translation of the New Testament.Footnote 39 When told that a Catholic translation of the whole Bible into Tamil was available in Nagapattinam, Ziegenbalg even risked a journey there to see it.Footnote 40 Tamil works by both Ziegenbalg and his successors clearly reveal the imprint of the Catholic Tamil vocabulary developed primarily by the Jesuits in the previous century.Footnote 41 When Ziegenbalg found time during his return voyage to Europe in 1715 to set down a grammar of Tamil, he followed closely the model of the Portuguese grammar Hassius had given him, already identified as the Arte Tamulica of Balthasar da Costa.Footnote 42
This early pattern of resourceful “borrowing” or appropriating knowledge from others, be they Catholic, Protestant, or non-Christian, continued through the eighteenth century. Since the Pietists saw their mission as both converting the “heathens” who practiced a corrupted version of Christianity and reforming the corrupt Catholic religion that had a “great affinity with heathenism,” it made sense to use whatever Jesuit books they could lay their hands on.Footnote 43 In the 1720s, during the famine that followed the Maratha occupation, the Catholics of the Madurai mission went en bloc to the Pietists. As the Jesuit annual letter in 1729 bluntly states: “This year a large number of neophytes, mostly of low caste, attracted by money more than by arguments, passed over to the camp of the Danish heretics.… They received from the Danes rice and other necessaries of life and thus sold their souls.”Footnote 44
The printing press in Tamil and Portuguese was probably as important for the conversion of Catholics. It was, in fact, the closest to the Pietist ideal of combining, conciliating, or “uniting Hearts and Hands.”Footnote 45 The act of writing itself was equally important. Just as missionary writing and reporting was part of the Jesuit global information network system designed to connect the Superior General of the order and the Pope in Rome with the missionaries scattered around the world, so too were the Pietists called on to regularly report about their missionary progress. Unlike Jesuits, the Pietists trusted the printed word and preferred the mechanical reproduction of identical texts for the largest possible audience. They recognized the book as an object of powerful possibilities. When the cargo consisting of the first printing press, the printer, and 250 printed copies of the Gospel of St. Mathew in Portuguese and some “mathematical instruments” were captured by the French near Rio de Janeiro in late 1711, the books destined for the Portuguese school in Tranquebar were, according to the missionary narrative, scattered among the Brazilians where “perhaps under the gracious influence of Heaven, they may prove helpful towards the Conviction of some of those, in whose Hands they were left.”Footnote 46 The printing press was ransomed and ultimately found its way to Tranquebar, where Ziegenbalg expressed hope that it would contribute to the mission's work just as printed texts had accelerated the Reformation in Europe.Footnote 47
From the Jesuit accounts, it is unclear whether they had the capacity (or cared) to produce large numbers of books in their printing presses in Goa, Cochin, Kollam, and Punnaikāyal in the sixteenth century, and in Ambalacattu (Ambalakkadu) in the seventeenth. Neither is it clear whether they were specially engaged in producing palm manuscripts, ōlais, as Ziegenbalg was before the arrival of the press, when he employed scribes to copy identical texts.Footnote 48 It was the word and the body of the priest that conveyed the power of the Catholic religion and mediated between the saeculum and the divine. The Council of Trent was not favorable to translating the Bible into vernacular languages precisely to preserve the priestly monopoly of competence, which was denied by the Protestant Reformation. In that respect, the rituals and church ceremonies that the Jesuits ardently fought for during the Malabar Rites controversy were a centerpiece of the Catholic mission, while books or written texts were mostly used as instruments by missionaries and their catechists. They were certainly not all meant for wider dissemination among the faithful. In fact, Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi remarked sarcastically on two occasions that the Pietists’ Bibles were useful for all kind of indecent acts such as wrapping fish and other edibles. His epic Tēmpāvaṇi on the life of St. Joseph was disseminated by word of mouth and public recitation, and often learned by heart.Footnote 49
JESUIT RESPONSE TO PIETIST PRESENCE
Everywhere, printing and books were beginning to make a difference in the missionary field. The printed booklets and tracts that started to circulate in Tamil and in Portuguese began to create confusion about the connections between the Jesuits and the Pietists because the Catholics in the Tamil hinterland missions were not all properly instructed about the details of Christian divisions in Europe. In 1731, Beschi reports having had three long meetings with a Mudaliyar who as minister to the last of the Madurai Nayakas, Vijayaranga Chokkanatha (1704–1731), had persecuted Catholics. The minister had read works printed in Tamil in Tranquebar and was threatening to expose the Jesuit sannyāsis as followers of the same religion as the pranguis on the coast.Footnote 50 It was only after reading Beschi's work “exposing the shameful origin of Lutheranism” (Vēta Viḷakkam, 1728) that he was convinced they represented “two religions,” exclaiming “what a hatred this missionary has for the sect of the Danes!”Footnote 51
Beschi's work was part of the Jesuits’ somewhat belated response to the challenge of the Pietists’ printed books. After a few scandalous defections of zealous catechists—such as of a certain Rajanayakan who left Catholic fold to join the Tranquebar church—most of whom attributed their “conversion” to reading printed books, the Old and New Testament in particular, the Jesuits had to take action.Footnote 52 Rajanayakan, a Catholic and an officer in the army of the Maratha king of Thanjavur from the Parayar caste, got hold of the book of the Acts of the Apostles printed in Tranquebar in 1725. Three years later he approached the Pietists and subsequently became a prominent Protestant catechist, incurring a formal excommunication by Beschi.Footnote 53 It was at that moment that the Jesuit superior, Domingo Madeira, ordered Beschi, who had already completed his Tamil epic of 3,615 stanzas relating the life of St. Joseph (Tēmpāvaṇi), to respond with a counter attack, which he did with his Vēta Viḷakkam (Tamil, “explanation of religion”). Having read this, Rajanayakan asked the Tranquebar missionaries to explain their separation from Rome, which they did by publishing in Tamil a short text entitled Tirucapai Pētakam (Tamil, “Schism in the church”). This was an abbreviated version of a Portuguese work, Differença d'a Christandade, which Johann Kistemacher had begun translating as an exercise.Footnote 54 The Portuguese work, which is listed in the 1714 Catalogo of the mission's library, was itself a translation from a Spanish work, made in the mid-seventeenth century by João Ferreira D'Almeida, a Portuguese convert who had become a minister in the Dutch Calvinist church in Batavia and later worked in Ceylon and on the Fishery Coast in Tamil Nadu.Footnote 55 Beschi responded with a point-by-point refutation of the twenty-four articles in Tirucapai Pētakam in his Pētakamaṟuttal (Tamil, “Refutation of the schism”) and in another tract entitled Lutterinattiyal (“The essence of Lutheranism”).Footnote 56
Even as the two missions were exchanging volleys through their writings, they were collaborating in other areas. In 1732, the Tranquebar mission doctor, Samuel Benjamin Cnoll, cured one of Beschi's catechists and was thanked by the Jesuit in a letter: “I thank you for the great services of compassion done to my catechist and implore the common Lord that he himself who deigned to promise mercy to the merciful may sumptuously return grace for the kindness.”Footnote 57 There were nevertheless clear limits to their cooperation, at least from the Jesuit point of view. Beschi wanted to print some of his Tamil philological works, such as Caturakarāti (Tamil, “Four-part dictionary”), which was written in 1732 and later became an important tool for nineteenth-century Tamil scholars. Yet he refused an offer from the Tranquebar press because they refused to print it without amendment or addition.Footnote 58 Beschi had been annoyed when they had published his Grammar of Common Tamil in 1738 bound with a philological commentary by Christoph Theodosius Walther.Footnote 59
He also must have considered that the Tranquebar missionaries, in addition to being quite successful rivals and heretics, were completely illiterate in proper literary Tamil. It is true that Ziegenbalg and his followers chose intentionally to address Tamils in the common, spoken variety and in prose, while the Tamil literary canon required the use of the versified high Tamil. The Jesuits, on the other hand, were stuck in their conception of conversion as a top-bottom action, and the use of Tamil literary language or, even better, Sanskrit, according to some, was their ideal. They preferred investing in converting a few Brahman or high-caste individuals and lineages to mass-converting the low-caste Parayars.Footnote 60 The Pietists were, initially at least, relatively indifferent to caste status, although this was more likely a consequence of the fact that virtually all their early converts were low-caste, than of any principled egalitarian stance.Footnote 61 But the fact that, unlike the Jesuits, they did not privilege the conversion of the highest and the most learned castes may have skewed the type of linguistic knowledge, useful for the mission, that they acquired and promoted during the first part of the eighteenth century.
MEDICINE FOR THE MIND, MEDICINE FOR THE SOUL
Philological knowledge traveled easily between Catholic and Protestant missions through local informants, faithful or unfaithful converts, missionary exchanges, and printed texts and manuscripts. Even if it may have been considered strategic at one point, there was no way to stop its flow. Other types of knowledge—medical, botanical, pharmaceutical, and so forth—produced by the missionaries for and at times in the mission, had less visible itineraries. They are often absent from major textual sources, such as public and private missionary letters and reports, and could surface in unexpected places and hands.
Although an exhaustive archival and historical research on both Jesuit and Pietist medico-pharmacological involvements in the early modern period in South India has barely begun, and although it is not clear yet how the two teams shared (or did not) the results of their research, there are certain common patterns in the treatment and development of these important early modern scientific fields.
Niklas Jensen has recently worked on the life and work of a physician, Samuel Benjamin Cnoll, who arrived in Tranquebar in 1732. During his thirty-five-year tenure there, he established his own apothecary shop (laboratorium chymicum) in which he tested local plants and substances both to discover new, better, and cheaper medicines for tropical India as well as Europe and to enhance his status as a physician and scientist.Footnote 62 He became a member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in 1740, an appointment that may have been directly linked to his work on the chemical process in the manufacture of borax.
Cnoll was the second Tranquebar mission doctor, nominated by the Francke Foundations in Halle with the consent of the Mission Board in Copenhagen. The first, Caspar Schlegelmilch, had upon arrival in India died of dysentery. The Jesuits knew that the Danish king had sent “a certain famous physician, heretic of course” and were perhaps fearful that he would, as he promised, be able to heal the King of Tanjavur's “hideous ulcer,” with predictable consequences for the fortunes of the respective missions. In the annual letter for 1730, José Vieira notes that with Schlegelmilch's death “at once all the vain display, jubilation, and hope of the Lutherans vanished: mourning and lamentations took their place, and it was the turn for Catholics to rejoice.”Footnote 63
The Tranquebar missionaries had not sought a European doctor,Footnote 64 and in the earliest period had reported that nearly all Europeans in Tranquebar used local doctors since they better understood the climate and diet.Footnote 65 But they did see the potential for someone competent in surgery, at which the Indians were less skilled, and in pharmacy.Footnote 66 During his thirty-five years in the mission, Cnoll not only cured his mission charges, but also provided services in his private medical practice, thereby earning a separate salary.Footnote 67
The primary purpose of the mission doctor was to maintain the health of the missionaries, and the Pietist documents never put forward the specific task of healing in the conversion of the “heathens.”Footnote 68 In this respect, Cnoll's role in the mission was very different from the one of Jesuit physicians. First of all, Ignatius of Loyola made an early decision not to have medicine taught in the Jesuit colleges. Physicians and surgeons were admitted into the order, but only as temporal coadjutors. In Valignano's time, in the late 1570s, the Pope issued a special permission for the ordained priests to act as physicians under special circumstances in the Indian mission.Footnote 69 However, most of the physicians aspired to become priests and were ready to renounce their profession. Such was the case of Luís de Almeida, who introduced hospitals in Japan in the late sixteenth century, trained local physicians in new ophthalmological techniques, and left altogether “healing with his hands” when he got a chance to be advanced to the level of an ordained father. In addition, the way the Jesuits proposed to heal the body was by establishing hospitals and other medical services that cured by installing order into what they perceived as an uncertain tropical climate, landscape, and politics. The Hospital of the King in Goa was an exemplary institution in the seventeenth century (despite some travelers’ contrary voices) that the Jesuit administrators organized as a convent. They instituted a regular schedule of meals, visits, and sleeping hours, as well as hygienic practices such as changing the chamber pots and bed linen.
The Jesuits also had hospitals and dispensaries attached to every mission, although they privileged local pious converts and the specially constituted confraternities to take care of patients’ temporal and medical needs. On the Fishery coast, Henriques described in his correspondence the working of these hospitals administered by the Confraternity of the Rosary.Footnote 70
If they avoided curing with their own hands as surgeons and preparing medicine as apothecaries because of their priestly status, Jesuits and other Catholic religious orders in the early modern period developed a set of thaumaturgical objects and practices that were considered very efficient in the conversion of the heathens. As its history was narrated by the Jesuit actors, the Madurai Mission was a magical place of miraculous healings and miracles. The reliquaries, the consecrated water and oil, the breviary, the cross, and the images and statues of the saints were all powerful healing agents. For the majority, Christianity appealed only during life- or social crises. The learned Brahmans, so often celebrated in the Jesuit historiography, never numbered more than a dozen. If we look closer into their case histories, these Brahmans joined the Jesuit missionaries out of dire need, usually due to dwindling financial resources, illness, family problems, or loss of social status, rather than religious curiosity. That said, some did become staunch Christians, such as those who first supported and then betrayed Roberto Nobili. In Goa, under Portuguese administration, the situation was quite different; the Goan Brahmans, who were also landlords and the local political elite, became stakeholders in the Portuguese Empire once they converted.
The Madurai and Carnatic missions in the hinterland (today the states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh) were never under Portuguese rule, and the Jesuit missions were never able to impose Christian hegemony there. Christianity always had to compete with other religious formations: Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava sects, Islam, Jainism, and local religious practices that we anachronistically categorize today under “popular Hinduism.” The most important deities in the local pantheon were apotropaic, that is, they inflicted and cured illnesses, but also threatened social and agricultural catastrophes. Tamil religious expectations were therefore centered on thaumaturgical effects that newly introduced “gurus,” “sannyāsis,” and “paṇṭārams”—the terms the Jesuits appropriated from the local religious nomenclature—were ready and able to provide.Footnote 71
It has been argued that the Jesuits identified one of the most important techniques of the self in South India, possession, with a special kind of illness provoked by the Devil and therefore made it the target of their healing efforts. Since possession was and is a ritual performance, it was opposed to and “cured” by another Jesuit ritual performance—the confession.Footnote 72 Finally, the Jesuits equated conversion primarily with the healing of the soul. Hence their obsession with baptizing ailing and dying children. Curing the body, however, proved to be politically important and was taken as a visible proof of the power of the sacraments.
The Protestant missionaries had no spectacular thaumaturgical and performative sacraments to offer. They trusted in the power of their books, charitable institutions, and education, and also, of course, in divine grace and natural law, to work out the conversion of the heathens and of the Catholics in the Tamil country. They provided the “medicine for the mind,” rather than for the soul. Still, at times the sacraments did help, when combined with divine grace. A series of such stories, in which illness works as an inductor into a higher spiritual consciousness, are brought together in Niekamp's history from various places in the Halle reports.Footnote 73 One such story, schematic and almost identical to other stories in Jesuit correspondence, describes a terminally ill woman receiving the sacraments from an Indian pastor and, with them, a confidence in her salvation.Footnote 74
Even though Catholic and Pietist methods and edifying stories closely resembled each other, there were points on which their opinions were diametrically opposed, such as image-worship and poetry, which the Pietist missionaries, and their translators in England, castigated as producing disorderly imagination. In one of Ziegenbalg's debates with a Brahman, he is depicted in the contemporary English translation by Jenkin Philipps as saying, “I am all Amazement when I see your Blindness in not discerning spiritual Things; as if you had sworn Eternal Allegiance to the Dictates and Poetical Fictions of Lying Bards; who riding upon the Ridges of Metaphors and Allegories, have rhymed you into the Belief of lying incomprehensible Perplexities.”Footnote 75 Although he often bemoaned the effect of poetry on the otherwise rational Tamils, Ziegenbalg's own words on this occasion were not quite so colorful,Footnote 76 but they clearly played into a Protestant preference for plain speaking that would echo through the later literature. Some Jesuits may have agreed with them, but those who became learned Tamil scholars, such as Beschi, saw all efforts to clean the Tamil language of poetical garnish as a sign of ignorance, even worse than knowing only a kīḻ ticai moḻi, translated by Blackburn as the “eastern tongue.” It is most likely that this is how Beschi labeled the language that the Jesuits defined both geographically and socially as “lower.” Kīḻ in Tamil also means “low,” such as in low lands, since the Coromandel Coast in the east is a lowland, compared to the mountain range of Ghats in the west. Beschi may have played on this ambiguity in his favorite game of discrediting the Tranquebar missionaries. For the Jesuits in Madurai, the worst kind of Tamil linguistic varieties (and the worst kind of mixed people) existed on the coast in the Portuguese, French, Dutch, and Danish enclaves. This Jesuit opinion, from Nobili onwards, reflected the opinions of their “high” caste converts in the Madurai region who, according to Jesuit correspondence, considered the “coastal” area to be socially impure.
A distinction between “coastal” and “interior” missions is very much present in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit correspondence. The major difference, in the Jesuit view, was in the rites and customs assimilated from pre-Christian tradition and built into new Christian life-cycle rituals. The coastal converts that were found in Pondicherry and other European enclaves, among them some hundred Christian Paravas (migrants from the Fishery Coast), whom Ziegenbalg encountered in Tranquebar upon arrival, and other “low”-class lineages such as fishermen, were outside the “accommodationist” Madurai Mission. When the Malabar Rites controversy started in 1704, these communities were held up as examples of Europeanized (prangui), hardly edifying Christian lifestyles.
The distinction between these two areas is also important because it was in Pondicherry and other European enclaves that the Jesuits had to face other Catholic religious orders such as Capuchins, Discalced Carmelites, Franciscans, and Missions Etrangères de Paris, and other colonial actors, all of whom resented the Jesuit monopoly of the interior missions. From the end of the seventeenth century, the French Capuchins sent by the Propaganda Fide fought bitterly against the French Jesuits in Pondicherry and Madras.Footnote 77
Pondicherry became a center of the French Jesuit missionary administration and a place where Jesuits came to rest from arduous missionary life in the accommodationist missions of Madurai and of the Carnatic. It was also a haven where Jesuits had time and means to put in order the libraries they collected in the mission, write up their treatises, and prepare reports to be sent to Europe. It was from Pondicherry that, in the 1730s, the Jesuits dispatched Indian manuscripts to the Bibliothèque du Roi (dispersed later with most of other books and manuscripts and found today in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris). Pondicherry subsequently became something of a “center of calculation” from which information was sent to Rome and Paris. It was also where foreigners such as Cnoll and others—including later Theodor Folly, from 1786 head surgeon for the Danish Company in Tranquebar—were welcome to come and stay, and share at least some information, since it was common in the Republic of Letters.Footnote 78
Both Catholic and Protestant missions acceded to demands from various patrons and their friends, some of whom belonged to prestigious institutions in Europe such as the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. The Pietists even entered a deal with Gottlieb Siegfried Bayer under which they would provide data and natural history specimens to the Russian Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg in return for access to publications of the Academy and assistance in publishing their own work.Footnote 79 Bayer also corresponded with Jesuit missionaries in China and with Souciet in Paris. The French Jesuit mission in India started with the sending of seven Mathématiciens du Roi, whose destination was the Court of Siam. Although some ultimately made it to the Beijing Court, another branch settled in Pondicherry after the mission to Siam was lost when their plans there were frustrated by the 1688 coup that removed King Narai from power.Footnote 80
The missions produced a steady flow of letters and treatises commissioned by the “savants” and patrons in France and Germany.Footnote 81 Already in 1709, Father Papin wrote to Le Gobien in Paris: “I understood … that I would greatly please your Reverence if I had communicate remarks I did on various things that struck me in this country.”Footnote 82 The “things” Papin mentions were “arts mécaniques” and medicine. After discussing textile coloring, certain chemical procedures about the burning of metals, silver crafts, and other “arts,” Papin turned to Indian medicine. He wrote about the same topic in a 1711 letter.Footnote 83
That same year, the Pietist Johann Ernst Gründler completed a treatise on medicine titled Malabaricus Medicus,Footnote 84 which he described as a collection of excerpts from Tamil medical texts translated into German.Footnote 85 He sent the manuscript “over to a Friend at London” with other treatises, just as Papin sent his for the delectation of his co-religionists in Paris. The role of “friendship” in dissemination of learned treatises is well known and was consciously cultivated from the Renaissance onwards. Gründler's friend in this case was Anton Wilhelm Böhme, chaplain to Queen Anne's consort Prince George and a member of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Böhme was responsible for the publication in English of missionary letters sent, like Gründler's manuscripts, so that they “may prove both useful and entertaining to the Readers in Europe.”Footnote 86
The purposes of Papin's letters and Gründler's treatise were more than just comparable—they were identical. The texts are also comparable, although Papin wrote from Bengal and Gründler from Tamil country. Papin's texts are short and schematic and consist of a string of medical cases with descriptions of remedies used in the cure. For example, he claims that Indians treat patients only with the simples, except in a few cases such as the use of lime dissolved in water against stomach worms. The same remedy is used against wound worms, mixed with a drop of tobacco juice.Footnote 87 In general there is no Indian medical procedure that Papin considers strange or unreasonable. He even finds that foreign physicians have studied and adopted certain local remedies, such as the use of “Bengali beans (haricot du Bengale)”: “I don't know where a German surgeon, who was on Dutch ships, had learnt that beans were good against scurvy. He ordered soup for the most afflicted; he made them fried (fricassés) with oil and they all recovered.”Footnote 88 What impressed Papin the most—and he went so far as to brag about his own skill in it—was taking the pulse of patients: “A physician is not allowed to treat a patient if he does not guess his illness and what is the predominant humor in the patient; they recognize it easily by touching the pulse of the sick. And you should not say that it is easy to err, because it is a science in which I have some experience.”Footnote 89
Gründler's text is much longer than are Papin's letters, extending to 188 pages in manuscript,Footnote 90 and while parts of it are very similar to Papin's—short accounts of remedies for particular conditions—it includes also an account of the principles underlying Tamil medicine.Footnote 91 His second chapter gives details of how diagnoses are to be made by detecting the three different kinds of pulses and their combinations.Footnote 92
Papin's treatment of Indian illnesses and their cures is similar to texts written a century and a half earlier and almost a century later.Footnote 93 Even some emblematic illnesses reappear, like mordechin (associated with cholera, also written in French as mort de chien). The Portuguese and all those who operated under the Lusitanian colonial venture acquired an important knowledge of tropical diseases throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Garcia da Orta and Cristóvão da Costa—whose texts were printed and became world bestsellers, as appropriated and embedded in Charles de l'Ecluse's works—wrote about similar phenomena in a similar manner, in more detail than Papin's summary.Footnote 94 The humoral medical theories of the Indians (ayurvedic and yunani) made sense to European practitioners, who also reasoned within the same humoral system.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Paulinus (or Paolino in Italian) a Sancto Bartholomaeo printed his Viaggio alle Indie Orientali. His chapter on “Medicina, e Botanica Indiana”—a fragmented, helter-skelter compilation of all the Indian medical and botanical knowledge he had access to from the books, manuscripts, and secret recipes possessed by the missionaries—demonstrates that he was equally confident in Malabar simples and remedies. He defines Indian medicine as based fundamentally on medicinal herbs: “The reader will have observed that the study of Botanica is the highest among the Brahmans, and it surpasses the study of Mineral in the Medicine, and almost all remedies are prepared from vegetal simples.”Footnote 95
From the names and titles quoted in Paulinus’ Viaggio we can compile a missionary medico-botanical library as it existed at the end of the eighteenth century. Unfortunately, some of the authors and titles are now missing or not yet accounted for in the archives: the “herbolario” of Father Feraz, the manuscripts of Fathers Giovanni Alvarez and Antonio Gomez, as well as those of Mr. Queiros and Mr. Ambrosio Lopez, and Vapu, “all of whom were botanists and physicians native of Malabar.”Footnote 96 In addition to these native Malabar works, Paulinus quotes all his predecessors in the missionary field in Kerala, from the Jesuits such as Johann Ernest Hanxleden, to Bernhard Bischopinck, Don Antonio Pimentel, and the Discalced Carmelites, Vincenzo Maria di S. Caterina da Siena and Matteo di San Giuseppe, who had printed their own travel narratives in the seventeenth century with important chapters on Indian natural history or prepared horti sicci (albums of dried plants) and drawing albums of Indian plants, such as Viridarium Orientale.Footnote 97
Most of these works were commissioned by the superiors in Rome to be given as presents to important well-wishers of the missionaries or to be printed as propaganda materials for recruiting new members for the enterprise and to enhance the Order’s prestige. Similarly, according to Jensen, the Tranquebar mission physician Cnoll was commissioned in 1733 by Dr. August Johann von Hugo to compile a botanical collection, which he completed within a decade. Over his long career he collected four “herbaria viva” (for Hugo, for King Christian of Denmark-Norway, for the Office of Missions in Copenhagen, and for the Halle Foundation). It would be interesting to compare Cnoll's Herbarium vivum or Hortus siccus, the one still extant in the University of Göttingen, with the one that Paulinus saw in Rome produced by Cnoll's predecessor, Vincenzo Maria. Unfortunately, the Discalced Carmelites’ archives were sacked and burned at the close of the eighteenth century by a crowd during the Roman Republic under the French. It would even be more remarkable if we could find links, or confirm a lack thereof, between various patches of European colonial and missionary territories and intellectual endeavors that were commissioned and executed in South India in the early modern period. The historiography of the Christian missions has compartmentalized their history into watertight compartments and colonial and postcolonial historiography, especially in English, have consistently ignored it.
METHODOLOGY FOR READING THE ENCOUNTER
The lack of direct evidence of, or a simple historiographical blindness to, cooperation between various European actors, divided along religious or political lines, may be circumvented by taking as objects of study other types of documents than those traditionally used, and by finding, reading, and thinking harder about the production of “technical” texts such as dictionaries, grammars, herbaria, calendars, astronomical and other treatises dealing with arts and crafts, medicine, chemistry, and similar subjects. These texts can be important even when in fragmented form. Whether they were written by Protestants or Catholics matters only marginally for their content. They were all formulated under the authority of their Indian informants. Though there have been efforts to reclaim these Indian voices, usually by simply picking them from the missionary texts, it is often hard to pin these names to the texts written or co-authored with the missionaries. In both cases they are always portrayed as, or simply taken to be, agents fixed at a specific place, such as Tranquebar, Pondicherry, or the Madurai mission.
Therefore, while knowledge and European actors circulated and shared (or hid) information, local actors continued to play the role of rooted and traditional savants who retained immobile and unchanged knowledge. Yet from fragmentary and sometimes anecdotal evidence it appears that the European demand for knowledge—philological, medical, or any other type of practical knowledge such as cloth-weaving and cloth-dying—attracted these local practitioners, who were ready to travel to the European enclaves to provide their services. They may have established invisible networks and lineages uncaptured by historians. For example, both the Jesuits and Pietists laconically mention local interpreters who spoke Portuguese and sometimes provided more than linguistic services.
The case of the Pedro Luís Bramane is a typical case in point.Footnote 98 Not only did he become a Jesuit informant and the only Indian Jesuit, but from his correspondence we can also glimpse his family connections and relatives, who were all employed or eager to be employed by the Portuguese.Footnote 99 Nobili's major Brahman informant, Bonifacio Shastri, or Śivadharma, quarreled with Nobili and at one point left Madurai. His name surfaced on a funerary stele in Goa. It seems that he had fathered a daughter Maria Nobre (Nobili!), who married João Gomes and died in the “indigenous” parish of Santa Luzia in Goa in 1691.Footnote 100 Paulinus's list of “native” Malabarians with Portuguese names also refers to a clique of local physicians and botanists who probably sold their services to the missionaries and in the process reformulated their own “traditional” knowledge. Some may have used their superior knowledge of Portuguese to pretend they were also physicians or some other type of qualified practitioner. There was a space for self-fashioning by Indians as well as by all sorts of Europeans. One need only think of mountebanks such as Niccolao Manucci (d. 1717), who pretended to be a Frankish physician at the Mughal court. On the other hand, the Jesuits often denounced their own Brahman informants as not being as learned as they expected. The Jesuits who sought the Vedas in the 1730s blamed the Brahmans for duping them into buying “false” Vedas. This was more likely the result of a combination of the scarcity of Vedic learning and the flexibility of the idea of Veda—“vedic” in a broad sense meaning little more than “orthodox.”Footnote 101 The more information was solicited, the more those who were collecting it had to be learned themselves. The uneven quality of texts collected by the French Jesuits is evidence of this.
Another way to reconstruct these networks of Indian middlemen is to look carefully into the texts. For instance, missionary dictionaries and grammars show that there are two varieties (or three?): those following Indian lexicographic and philological practices and those already Latinized by the missionaries, or mixtures of both. Henrique Henriques’ grammar of Tamil is based on João Alvarez's Latin grammar and João de Barros's Portuguese grammar. On the other hand, Johann Ernest Hanxleden followed as much as possible Indian grammatical tradition in his Sanskrit grammar. Beschi wrote two grammars, one for Europeans wanting to learn Tamil, in which he explained Tamil in terms of Latin grammatical forms, and another based on Tamil grammatical conventions. Beschi also wrote dictionaries that followed both the Tamil and Roman alphabets. Scholars have ignored all these texts, excepting some technical linguistic studies.Footnote 102
In the eighteenth century, with so much knowledge already available and reprocessed by the Indian middlemen, the texts missionaries were able to procure were a mixture of known, textual, and newly invented methods. Such was, for example, Herbarium Tranquebarense, a small dictionary of Tamil simples written by the Pietist missionary Christoph Theodosius Walther, who was more of a philologist and historian than a botanist. Walther compiled a Tamil-Hebrew dictionary, published a commentary on Beschi's grammar, and, like any other Jesuit missionary of his day, dabbled in antiquarian chronologies. As Niklas Jensen has shown, the Herbarium Tranquebarense remains something of an enigma, but what is clear is that it combines various types of knowledge, various hands, and various languages. Most of it is in Tamil, Sanskrit, and Latin, with occasional Portuguese and even Greek words. The text resembles a notebook, with well-spaced entries between which additional information was added afterward, such as references to the printed version of Hortus Indicus Malabaricus (Amsterdam, 1678–1703) by Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede tot Drakenstein.Footnote 103
This notebook's appearance, with space for adding information, is a standard missionary/scholarly format. From the text we can infer that the author had some knowledge of both Tamil and Sanskrit (in the Grantha script), with their (German) phonetic transliteration. The Latin glosses follow in the same hand. The entries follow Tamil alphabetical order while the presence of Sanskrit indicates that Walther's principal informant was a Brahman. That he wrote in Grantha locates him within the Tamil cultural sphere.
The later addition of references to Hortus Indicus Malabaricus was probably a way to crosscheck and justify Walther's collection with an already canonical work on Indian plants. What may have escaped an inattentive reader is that Hortus Indicus Malabaricus itself was a mixed work, constructed out of different pieces of information and by different informants. Among them were Ezhava herbalists, Konkani Brahman pundits, scribes, and translators for Latin, Arabic, and Portuguese, and even an Italian Discalced Carmelite missionary, Matteo di S. Giuseppe.Footnote 104
A brief comparison between the entries of Herbarium Tranquebarense and those of Hortus Indicus Malabaricus shows that Walther's text was based on a local Tamil taxonomy of plants, and even the Sanskrit names, which are supposed to be identical according to the standard (then and now) wisdom about Sanskrit as a supra-scientific language, are different. Van Rheede's informants, the Konkani Brahmans (originally from Goa), used Devanagari script and, for just one example, the first word in the Herbarium Tranquebarense (akatti in Tamil, atasi in Sanskrit) is very different in Hortus Indicus Malabaricus, where it can be transcribed as agasta. The hand that in the Herbarium Tranquebarense jotted down the exact page number for the drawing in Hortus Indicus Malabaricus failed to mention, let along explain, the difference in the Sanskrit name.
This may be the proof that these notes were added upon Walther's return to Germany, where such “small” differences no longer counted, and nobody could compare the Sanskrit in Grantha and in Devanagari. Yet differences in script can be crucially important for studying different informant networks. For instance, many Sanskrit texts written by the Jesuit missionaries were recorded in both the Telugu and the Grantha scripts and for that reason remained unstudied and unknown. Finally, Sanskrit written in Grantha was all but rejected by the early British Orientalists in Bengal. They even denied that Paulinus a S. Bartholomaeo knew any Sanskrit when he published the first Sanskrit grammar in Rome at the end of the eighteenth century. They claimed that the language he described in his grammar was simply Malayalam because he recorded Sanskrit words in a Malayali version of the Grantha script. The Orientalist quest for pristine Indian philosophical knowledge rejected missionary texts (Catholic in particular) as products of “religious mongrels,” and dismissed the valuable early efforts of missionaries and their informants aimed at understanding and translating Indian realia and spiritualia. These texts were thus left to collect dust in European archives or succumb to the elements and white ants of Indian repositories.
Perhaps, if we compare notes and take a long and informed look into forgotten missionary manuscripts, both Catholic and Protestant, we can come closer to identifying invisible links that the Indian informants wove between the social and intellectual hotspots that the missions truly were in the early modern Tamil landscape.
