THE PROBLEM OF INDIAN CIVILIZATION IN RENAISSANCE EUROPE: A RETROSPECTIVE VIEW

The India made famous by seventeenth-century European travellers and which occupied an increasingly prominent space in the exotic imagination of the Enlightenment was essentially the India of the Muslim-dominated Mughal empire, with its syncretic court splendour and treacherous imperial politics set against the background of a brahmin-dominated society of naked ascetics, idolatrous temples and in–exible caste rules. Although Akbar's empire was first described in detail by Jesuit missionaries in the 1580s, the Mughal theme effectively belongs to a number of well-educated travellers of the seventeenth century. Some worked for the English or Dutch East India companies, although the majority were largely independent observers, mostly French. Their accounts can be conventionally classified as belonging to the post-Renaissance, a period when these travellers could work from a sophisticated understanding of the difference between the analysis of religious diversity and the analysis of diversity in forms of civilization. This is perhaps the key distinction which characterized early modern ethnology. Our question here will not be what these independent and curious travellers saw and wrote, but rather how they came to be able to describe non-European societies as they did in the light of the ethnological practices of the preceding centuries.

The most sophisticated European writers in the East in the sixteenth century were often Jesuit missionaries, and it is precisely when read against the images which they created that the post-Renaissance lay discourse becomes most meaningful.