Disputed Mission

Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-century India

                        Ines G. Zupanov, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1999

                                                Review article, by dayanand bharati

Truth seems to be more an interpretation of the event than presenting the fact as it is.  What Nobili had done, wrote and defended, living in his situation —keeping all kinds of consideration for and against his approach what the author try to present as an objective analyses is difficult to evaluate.  Objectively the author may be right in all her assessment about Nobili whereas Nobilie was right subjectively in his struggle to preserve the culture of his converts as well contextualizing the gospel.  So who is true is more an interpretation than presenting the actual facts as they are.

Centered around the theam of the Jesuits’ writing which was, ‘an endless effort of re-tying (re-ligio) the strands of Indian alterity in order to prepare the ground for the grafting of Christian experience, the Jesuits forged—through disputes, discussions and writing—instruments (for better or worse) for understanding Indian social and cultural structures…(p. 247)’ the author presents a challenge not only before the (Indian) Jesuits to probe their history but also the Church in general and Mission in particular about their

‘interpretation’ of the facts in the name of indegenization in their efforts in presenting the gospel.

This book is a mine of information on Jesuits Mission.[1]  Anyone wants to have a comprehensive understanding about their life and Mission in a critical way can turn to this book.  But considering the complexity of materials involved (that too in various languages like Latin, Portuguese and French apart from the native languages in which the missionaries [like Tamil and Telugue, in case of Nobili]), research done and facts  arranged and interpreted, only a Jesuit Scholar can write a ‘proper’ review to this book.  For example, as the author says:

To the historian’s eye, these Jesuit texts are archival remains, often ruins, of larger structures of arguments, descriptions, pleadings, allusions and similar socially situated enunciations…(p.7) Since Jesuit missionary writers followed, more or less to the letter, Loyola’s four topical prescriptions[2], my intention is to illustrate the way in which these were put to use (in the form of letters and actions), and to show how they solicited a collusive relationship with the reader.  In a way, the Jesuit missionary audience in Europe, separated from the Tamils by a cultural and linguistic wall, was invited to participate in Jesuit texts as ethnographers, theatre audiences, trial witnesses, or even juries and judges and confessors. (pp.7-8, italics original)

What the author says about Jesuit writers and their audience (particularly as both juries and judges) is also applied those who read this book.

The material in this book is organized ‘around four epistolary writing modes: geo-ethnographic, dialogic/polemical, theatrical, and self-expressive.   These four modes correspond to four major textual interests, that is, messages directed to the European, Jesuit and non-Jesuit audience and clearly spelt out by Loyola—the kings and the nobles, the common people, the Company, yourself.’ (p.32, italics original) and the ‘main aim is to understand how the power of texts reworks both the social space and the space of the texts.’ (p.33)  For example:

Nobili’s accommodatio experiment introducing a certain amount of Hindu-Christian syncretism…. Were not descriptive, but prescriptive and speculative categories authored by theological minds such as Nobili, not Fernandes. The concept of the ‘religious’ sphere as separate from the ‘civil’ would become a powerful tool in Nobili’s hands/writing for the apology of Brahman ‘civilized’ customs and for the method of accommodation.  By insisting that Brahmanism was mostly a social system, as opposed to Fernandes’s ‘pagan machine’ (maquina do Bramanismo), Nobili unwittingly relativized the concept of religion itself.  Jesuit detractors in the 18^th century, the French Enlightenment philosophes, were nourished on and later ‘processed’ such and similar ‘ethnographic’ conclusions provided by missionaries in India and China.[3] The opening up of (and to) the ‘other’ proved to be a double-edged enterprise.  The rift between religion and morals, belief and ethics, created a new social space ready to accommodate modernity’ (p.35, italics original)

Thus to expose the ‘the power of texts’ of the Jesuits, Ines selected the ‘Disputed Mission’ of Madurai and presents the picture of Nobili’s mission in such a way that it looks more of her interpretation rather help us to understand the fact as it is.  Though the book is centred around the ‘Disputed Mission’ of Madurai, yet the Jesuits writing influence and their interpretation of facts is often highlight by the author.  In this review I want to focus more on the ‘interpretation’ of the fact which may distort the Truth than help us to understand the historical facts in their context.  However some highlights on other points will also help us to understand the over all spirit of the book as well as to understand how ‘interpretation’ of events become the truth than understanding the facts in their given historical context.

JESUIT’S WRITIG METOD AND INFLUENCE:

Naturally we have first turn to the Jesuits writing influence.  First of all they were ‘not merely modes of writing, but rather a visible (t)exterior of Jesuit institutional language’,(p.32) following the ‘four epistolary writings modes’(p.32) as mentioned above.  Limiting to the context of Madurai mission, Ines says that ‘In the Jesuit letters from the Madurai mission there are, strictly speaking, only four topics that are prefigured by the theatrical mode of writing: Jesuit encounters with local kings and chieftains, theological discussions with Brahmans, and miracles and conversions’. (p.38)  Once annual reports were prepared based on these information they were to be sent to Rome and there, ‘they were subjected to further retailoring and even rewriting, that is, extracts were made of them or whole passages were cut out and then inserted into general reports from the missions.  In this new, authorized, although author-less form, these texts re-entered circulation among the Jesuits’. (p.11) 

The natural out come of such ‘retailoring and even rewriting’ of the letters was ‘soon perceived as corrupting the original message.  Not only did readers/consumers complain that from one edition to another the same letters were not quite the same, the Jesuits themselves—those who saw their own letters published[4], … finally even those who prepared the publications—were all losing control over the printed word.  These alterations were partly due to a combination of printing errors and sloppy translations’.[5] (p.12)

However a solution was found by the Jesuits:

The problem of tightening control over the Jesuit literary heritage found its early solution in ‘historical’ works, from biographies of the founder Ignatius of Loyola to the histories of the Society.[6]  During the generalship of Francis Borgia (1563-73), Polanco wrote about the need to undertake the preparation of the history of the Society of Jesus: ‘Since some kind of history of the Soceity is desired from various parts, it would be appropriate if each college sent information (unless it has already been sent) concerning its foundation, as well as all remarkable events that have happened until now, making note of time and places’.[7]  In 1567, Goncalo Alvarez, who came to India as Visitor, had the additional task of finding local fathers able to write a history of the Society in India.  He found none, claiming that the missionaries in India would rather work than write.[8](p.14)

But here also two levels of writings were arranged one for ‘outward effusion’ and for ‘internal use’:

            Simultaneously, there was a movement to arrest this spectacularization of Jesuit ‘history’, its outward effusion, through the counter-production of a pious, disciplined literature, destined mostly for internal use.  Such is the compilation of short biographies of famous Jesuits, among whom were many missionaries,…. Similar projects were undertaken for and by important centres of Jesuit education…(p.15)

However, ‘In spite of the proliferation and exterritorialization of Jesuit correspondence in the form of secular histories and compilations, its intensive internal circulation managed to define and preserve a particular internal circulation managed to define and preserve a particular Jesuit epistolary morphology,’(p.15) says Ines and continues

Ignatius[9] and Polanco[10], as we have seen, provided a general and quite detailed blueprint of an ‘ideal’ Jesuit letter.  It was, however, the way in which the army of Jesuits responded to this initial call that inspirited their own epistolary grapheme.  Lest one be led to think that Jesuit reality consisted solely of epistolography and that their principal concern was description rather than action, it should be stressed that the Jesuits were well aware that their principal mission was not to describe the world, but (p.15) to change it.  Particular circumstances in which they found themselves played a decisive role in their choice of apostolic actions and practices.  These, in turn, were responsible for the choice of writing modes, rhetorical framing and topics.  For example, if one had to defend one’s conversion method against serious accusations, as Nobili did through a larger part of his missionary career, it was only natural to frame one’s arguments in a dialectic/polemical, rather than a confessional idiom.  Theatrical and utopian framing was employed, on the other hand, to rally support and enhance the enthusiasm of those far-away readers or future missionaries.  When Nobili had to oppose his ‘knowledge’ of Tamil culture, society and religion against that of Goncalo Fernandes, the ethnographic style of writing was indispensable.[11](pp.15-16)

Of course these letters were ‘apologetic and partisan’[12](p.31) in nature (like any mission report under the sun.).  What is interesting to us is that commenting on this ‘apologetic and partisan’,(see notes 12 please [‘However, while….Jesuit subjects.’, p.31—as foot notes will often change, this I note here for final change in the notes number.)] Ines says that ‘Meticulously researched work on Nobili by S. Rajamanicam suffers, perhaps, only from the excess of the author’s personal devotion to the subject’.(notes 2, p.31)  Whereas I find some kind of prejudice even in Ines’ writing whatever objectivity she may claim.[13]

It is true that

Acting in the world and writing about it became inseparable in the missionary conversion theatre because ‘reality’ never ceased to evoke past experiences, as if the scenarios had already been written in, for example, the Bible or in the Acts of saints and martyrs.  However, it was less the confusion between fiction and fact than the failure of analogical epistemology which rekindled incessant disputes within the Society about the nature of the foreign and the methods of its containment.  One way of tying together in a text or a letter the ethnographic, fictional and experiential, was to recreate for one’s audience the exemplary ‘dramas’ of missionary life.(p.149)

For example

In the changed political climate of the latter part of the 17^th century, when Nobili’s and Vico’s project of adaptation started to slowly collapse due to external pressure from Portuguese colonial authorities and ecclesiastical superiors, and the internal strife between rival Telugu and Tamil poligars, the theatrical scenes in (p.188) Jesuit letters became more dramatic, describing tortures, imprisonment and even martyrdom. (pp.188-9)

The writings of the Jesuits’ letter become more influential once they included ‘biographemes’[14] of their converts.  Though ‘The missionary, in fact, allowed them [converts] to speak for themselves rather then having to explain in an orderly way their intentions, actions and motivations,’ says Ines and continues, ‘By couching their biographemes in a theatrical mode, Vico was able to suppress and ignore facts about their everyday lives which were of a more non-Christian flavour’.[15](p.192)

What Ines says as ‘non-Christian flavour’, again for me is merely an interpretation of several cultural and social traits of the ‘converts’, limited to their (historical) context.  Remember, that the ‘non-Christian flavour’ found in the life of every convert remains only ‘non-Christian’ to the Christians and not necessarily to the convert himself/herself.  The synthetic aspect of the new believers life assimilating the ‘biblical value’ in their lives is most of the time termed as ‘compromise’ and ‘syncretism’ by any outsiders.  Of course to the church and Missions following their so called ‘Christian traditions’ by the converts may be considered as the genuine mark of the conversion.  Whereas understanding their ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ context, what Nobili and Vico ‘permitted’ is the genuine attempt of contextualizing the gospel.  Even those ‘non-Christian religious’ forms and expression in any converts life, in their devotion to God and Christ, not necessarily ‘Hindu expression or form’.  Faith and devotion to God can be expressed in any form and there exist no ‘paganism’ as such in such worship.  For example using oil lamp (instead of candle), using incense sticks, flower etc., are not ‘non-Christian’ but indigenous expression (bringing the gift of God in Nature back to Him).  If such expression of devotion is called as ‘non-Christian’ or even ‘paganism’, then all the ‘un-Christian’ practices still we find among the (Indian) Christians are no way biblical or ‘Christian’ in strict sense.  (One can see lot of superstitions and blind faith in the day to day life of an average Christian of any brand in India as well as every where in the world).  Mere objective evaluation (or criticism/judgement) of their lives by any outsider looks more an interpretation of their situation than help us to understand the Truth/Fact as it is in the life situation.

For example after mentioning the incident of a husband who recited ‘a prayer to Our Lady, which he had composed for’(p.166) the occasion of child birth for his wife, not bowing to the pressure to ‘an offering to the demon’ by his relatives for the difficult confinement of his wife Ines says:

…Reciting a prayer for the purpose of healing {by the convert} is unique among the standard items of missionary pharmacopoeia. On the one hand, it could be interpreted as the Christian convert’s complete independence from the Church, since he communicated with God directly, through his own word and without priestly mediation, which smacks of ‘heretical’ or Protestant, notions.  On the other hand, such independence could be interpreted as a ‘ripening’ of the Christian word in the Tamil language.  The ambiguity inherent in the interpretation of this story makes it more powerful than a one-way signification.  What was probably not transparent to European readers was that the Christian convert’s action could also be interpreted in a third way, that is in terms of the indigenous religious or bhakti practices.  The responsive God who takes a personal interest and can be pleased and propitiated by a beautiful song resembles Siva more then a Catholic divinity. (p. 166)

This can be a good example for the author’s own interpretation of the fact apart from presenting the exact fact.  The third way interpretation of ‘indigenous religious or bhakti practices’ of reciting a personal prayer through a song that too composed by the convert, though a common Indian practice need not be unique as such songs are found in the Bible also.  Next, at least in the bhakti school of thought in Tamil, the songs are sung not to please or propitiate any personal deity, but always understood as a prayer.   ‘Pleasing and propitiating’ is a part of animistic form of worship where ‘fear’ rather than ‘love’ demands such action.  In bhakti school, out of love and sometime even as a ‘right’ of a bhakta such songs are sung the by the devotee.  (Abiramibhattar risking his very life, to prove his devotion, wrote, ‘either if you do good to me or allow suffering, I least mind about it as I have surrendered myself totally to you.  Like wise Tirunavukkarasar (known as Appar) says, ‘Your duty is to take care of me and my duty is to serve you’.  Hardly one can see any kind of ‘pleasing or propitiating’ to their personal God here but expression of pure bhakti and love).

            Similarly writing in the context of ‘bhakti substratum’(p.227) of Gnani’s devotion (see below) another best example of the author’s interpretation of such bhakti.  Ines says:

…At times, Gnani would ‘pray standing, without leaning on any support, keeping the arm in which he held his rosary stretched out without ever relaxing’…

            The inventory (mostly literary) of Hindu, especially bhakti, praying or worhsipping  postures is due to a particularly complicated relationship between the deity and the devotee, the patron and the client.  Harsh and extraordinary postures assumed by the client were considered efficacious in coercing the patron/God to grant boons or act on a client’s behalf.  From standing for years on one foot, like the mythological evil hero, Hiranyakasipu (The antagonist in the story of Visnu’s Narasimha, or Lion Avataara), such that an anthill grew over him, to gouging out one’s eyes in order to heal the bleeding eye of the Siva-Lingam, as did Kannappa Naayanaar[16], acts of self-laceration were one of the most prominent devotional techniques, whether performed out of some pragmatic necessity or out of the bhakta’s ‘pure’ love (anpu). (p.227)

A lot can be said about such interpretation of ‘bhakti’.  Hiranyakasipu was not a devotee but an ‘antagonist’ who performed the austerity (tapasya) to gain more power and not done out of devotion.  Regarding Kannappar story the ‘gouging out of ’ his eye was the climax of his love which Siva revealded his devotion to the Brahmin priest who was disturbed by Kannappar’s form of puja to the Linga (offering meat and pouring water from his mouth on the Linga) and not a ‘devotional technique’ adapted by Kannappar.[17]

Whatever may the understanding and interpretation of the ‘faith expression’ practised by the converts of Madurai, for me it is a success on the part of Nobili if his convert’s devotion to Mary or Jesus ‘resembles’ local form of worship.  This is the mission and aim of Nobili in one way who pleaded and fought for the right of the new convert to have his/her own form of expression of ‘Christian’ faith.  There is no point of explaining everything to his European readers as they cannot understand his situation.  Even at present several Western Missionaries find it difficult to explain what all they want to do in indigenizing the gospel to their supporters back in their country.  I know one such a missionary who told me in person that he cannot explain or write what all he does in India, as his supporters and prayer partners are not familiar with certain cultural and social facts including technical terms.  This doesn’t mean that he is not ‘transparent’ to his Western readers.  Like Paul, it is enough for him to explain his ministry to a handful of people who can understand him than to convince every one.

Of course Christian Missions of every brand are guilty of projecting their mission as always successful and inspired by God.  Even their failures and mistakes were either hidden or explained to their supporters in such a way which violates their own conscience and integrity.  What Ines says about this about Jesuits is equally applied to all Christian Missions even in this 21^st century:

In general, the knowledge which the Jesuit missionaries collected, constructed, tailored and generated for their European audience within the limits of the theatrical mode is more interactive and heteroglottic than the one produced by the geo-ethnographic writing mode….

Theatrical effects were, nevertheless, regularly applied not only in epistolary narratives, but in all types of missionary genres.  The treatises composed by Nobili and other Jesuits in the Madurai mission at the same time repose, for example, on a different epistemological basis.  No ‘native’ voices were allowed to obstruct a smooth interpretation except in the form of quotations from indigenous texts and eventual signatures of approval by the indigenous literati.  Such fragments did not function as dialogues with the missionaries but as proofs, arguments or mirrors of firmly entrenched Jesuit positions.(p.192)

…Individual desires and projections of martyrdom ad majorem dei gloriam very often became self-fulfilled prophesies, and in that sense appeared ‘real’ even before they actually happened.  In addition, if martyrdom ultimately did not take place, the portents, omens, signs of their imminence still lived on in the missionary letters.  Like the trompe-l’oeil cupola of the church of St. Ignatius in Rome, Jesuit letters often worked as substitutions for real missionary encounters.  Such a synecdochic relation to reality neatly fits the general directives guiding Jesuit economy of spatial mobility.  Each missionary stood for the Society as pars pro toto.  A Croat missionary in Goa, Nikola Ratkaj, in his letters to his family and his friends in the Jesuit college in Zagreb, wrote about the mission in Tibet to which he was destined but never reached, as if he had already been there.(p.193) (See Krizman, M., ‘Pisma isusova Nikole Ratkaja, misionara u Indiji u provoj polovici 17.st.; Filoloski pristup’, in Hrvatske Indije, The bridge, Zagreb 1990.)[18]

Several times such missionary writings (of Jesuits in our context) either written as report or spiritual literature often ‘turned into utopianism in the missions’.[19](p.196)  Regarding this Ines says

…While spiritual literature revealed Jesuit private self, the utopian fragments produced by the missionaries configured the position of a very Jesuit public selfhood, grounded in social know-how and well equipped to assume leadership within the indigenous communities of new converts.

…It is in written accounts, in particular, connected closely and indivisible from the ‘real’ missionary action, that the strands of some arbitrary, provoked or imagined events began to metamorphose into utopian designs—turning losses into victories, hardships into divine ordeal, converts won over with difficulty into angelic figures, and the writers themselves into saintly candidates.

…The configuration of utopian mentality is instantly visible in the missionary’s ‘natural;’ impulse to describe, upon arrival at the chosen mission, the perilous passage, maritime and overland, from the known to the unknown world.    A sense of divorce from the given system (European) was articulated in order to restore it where it was lacking (in ‘paganism’), giving futuristic, reconstructional incentives to each mission and each missionary. (p.196) This was all the more so, as the urgency of Catholic ‘restoration’ loomed over the home front, as well as over alien frontiers.  The reality-transcending elements were, therefore, the tools for interpreting and constructing reality itself.(pp. 196-97)

Such utopianism was not limited to the personal life story narrated by the Jesuit Missionaries but also in the ‘indigenous Christian biographies.  ‘In the first three decades of the new Madurai residence, Nobili and Vico followed at least a dozen indigenous Christian biographies.  The impulse behind these life stories was to provide a utopian refuge for European imagination, and to re-territorialize the Madurai mission as a geographical space’.[20](p.215)  And what further Ines writes on this utopianism is not limited to Nobili or Jesuits but even a reality today in the Missions, which most of the time existed only their report.  Telling the story of ‘Aleixo[21], one of Nobili’s first converts, [who] played the major role in the failed coup against the Jesuit missionaries in the New Madurai residence [viz. Nobili and Vico’s residence and church away from Fernande’s old residence] Ines says:

Aleixo’s case went against his [Nobili’s] efforts to establish the Madurai mission as an experimental utopia, a model of Christian piety which would not only attract the non-Christians, but also teach and improve the decadent Christian Europe.  What he was not able to put into texts or into practice, Nobili simply ignored or obliterated.  There is no trace in his extant correspondence of his refuting the seduction accusations or his troubled relationship with certain neophytes.(p.234)

However, ‘In the final death scene, Vico reproduced Aleixo’s last pious monologue in which he entrusted the spiritual being of his wife and his “little child” to Vico himself.  In this way, Vico recaptured and re-enclosed Aleixo’s biography in the utopian space which Nobili had delineated in his early letters from the Madurai mission’.(p.234)

            The story continued even after Nobili and Vico.  Concluding on this utopianism Ines writes:

            Until the suppression of the Jesuit order in the middle of the 18^th century, all the Jesuits in the Madurai mission followed Nobili’s adaptationist method of conversion and continued to rely on the utopian mode in their writing whenever they wanted to situate of permanent weakness and insecurity without direct institutional or military support, the missionaries were doomed to live and write a utopia in order to bridge the gap between the strange and the familiar, the mute and the loquacious, the ‘pagan’ and the Christian.  The writing of utopia is a destruction of reality and/or imposition of the writer’s frame on the ‘strange world’, a total separation of the name from the thing.  However, even textually a prefigured site such as a utopia bears the traces of the silenced cultural ‘stuff’.  That is, besides learning about the Jesuits themselves, we can also extract marks, lines and notches revealing the indigenous culture.(p.235)

In this writing skill, all Jesuits were not successful.  For example Fernandes, Nobili’s co-worker and opponent of his methods and ‘unschooled in learned grandiloquence,’ ‘he ‘retells Nobili’s story from the perspective of an “outraged” outside observer’.[22](p.134)  Whereas ‘Nobili was not only learned in Indian matters but also an excellent theologian and had the status of a professed father’.(p.139)  That is why he could even influence his fellow Jesuits to change their opinion in his favour,

…The colourful ‘ethnographic’ world of indigenous cultural or, in Nobili’s vocabulary, ‘political’ differences was communicated to the solemn assembly in Goa through a treatise, written by Nobili, but signed by Ros, ‘Narratio Fundamentorum, quibus Madurensis Missionibus institutum caeptum est’.

            And a very special text it was, according to Nobili, since it succeeded in reversing the opinions of the most learned among the theological investigators.  Andre Palmeyro thus conceded that

While I was in Coimbra, I publicly taught the contrary opinion; I hated the thread with a more than Vatinian hate….But after weighing the arguments and reasons of Father Roberto, I felt bound to give in and change my opinion….[Nobili to Pope Paul V (Lat.), Goa, 15 Febrary, 1619, ARSI, Goa 51, ff. 286-90]

Nobili’s text was, therefore, powerfully persuasive and capable of ‘converting’ opinions, convincing incredulous sceptics and sweeping away suspicions.  Even the Iqusitor, Dom Joao Fernando de Almeyda, succumbed to its scriptural force:

I have read and studied the treatise Narratio fundamentorum and have come to the conclusion that the emblems (signa) under discussion, being stripped (p.239) of all superstitious ceremonies and rites, not only may, but also should be allowed to the neophytes of Madurai.

Nobili’s self-serving verbatim quotations of other peoples’ opinions were a typical epistolary strategy of discursive appropriation and ventriloquy.  From the mouth of an Inquisitor, this was not an innocent aviso, but a legal pronouncement carrying the weight of the sword of justice.—pp. 239-40

And in conclusion Ines says:

In a fine textual weaving and patterning, these controlled hybrid spaces (of texts) serve to distil, preserve and rewrite missionary experiences in a double turn of the shuttle from local to global, and vice versa.  In addition, they seek, retrospectively, to authorize and, prospectively, to foster a Jesuit way/mode of proceeding (noster modus procedendi or nuestro modo de proceder) folding neatly into a Jesuit mode of writing, that ramifies in at least four basic tropolocial and narrative frameworks as have been examined in the preceding chapters.(pp. 240-1)[23]

Thus:

…Jesuit missionaries endeavoured to appropriate, possess and control the indigenous textual and cultural tradition by compiling dictionaries and grammars, by translating and refuting non-Christian concepts, and by projecting it on to a larger European theological and teleological frame.  The play of differences, analogies and allegories varied with each and every epistemological move inscribed in the chessboard of time.  ‘Brahmanical’[24] knowledge, as it came to be generally defined, would thus resemble, oppose or configure European expectations, depending on political and geographical circumstances, and tropological transformations.  Under the rubric of the rise of Orientalist discourse and Indological disciplines, this process is well documented if not always well understood. (p.245)

INTERPRETATION OF THE FACTS:

So far we saw about the writing skill and influence of the Jesuits (along with their interpretation of the fact).  Though we saw some points about the ‘interpretation’ of the facts, now we will specifically turn to those ‘interpretation’ of the facts (which is the main subject of this review).  The Jesuits writing skill and influence depend upon the ‘interpretation’ which they read in the facts.  This was not limited to the subject with which they were dealing, but also extended to the circulars, letters and responses which they received from the superiors. For example when General Claudio Aquaviva, the fourth General of the Society of Jesus (1581-1615) pronounced his judgement in 1612 ‘about the new conversion methods in the Madurai mission, each of the disputing parties interpreted his letter in a completely different way.  Therefore, the referent, Aquaviva’s will or opinion, (p.71) lost itself or was lost in the distance between Rome and its overseas mission.  Hence, various actors, Pero Francisco[25], Nobili and Vico, read into the General;s response their own desires.  Each of them “transported”, in a Greek sense of metaphorein, Aquaviva’s text into their own field of expectation’.[26](pp.71-2)

It is interesting (and also important for us to understand the subject of ‘interpretation’), how the drama ended based on the ‘interpretation’ of Aquaviva’s[27] letter.  Though Francisco Ros, the Arch Bishop Archbishop of Serra (Cranganore)[28] wrote supporting Nobili’s methods[29],

Before Aquaviva even received the letter from Ros, Pero Francis issued an ‘Order which ought to be observed in the new Madurai Residence’,[30] taking no notice of the alleged ‘divine inspiration’ which underscored the mission and, instead, dissected it along the seams.  In a surgical impulse, Francisco, cut through and removed all the limbs and muscles of the new Madurai mission in thirty-four points.  He imposed his control, at least textually, over Jesuit bodies, over their way of dressing, acting, talking and writing.(p.77)

If the Jesuits could read the message they wanted from the official letter of their superior, how much more they can dig out their own messages from the information which they collected from the natives on which they developed their missionary strategy and conversion methods.  Writing about the famous ‘Nobili controversy’ of presenting the ‘last veda’ (Rajamanikam in His Star in the East, gives a different picture) Ines says:

. ..The motif of a ‘hidden’ or ‘lost’ Veda enthralled Nobili and appeared to him providential, both for his historical task of implanting Christianity and as a sign and proof that Indian religion bore traces of the true revelation which had been lost or forgotten.  What he as not aware of was that by accepting this classical Hindu concept of truth as ‘won from transcendence’, in David Shulman’s words, and elaborated in various Tamil temple myths, he entered the Hindu world of incessant cultural rewriting.[31]  In tying to substitute his truth in place of the ‘lost’ one, Nobili inscribed himself into a genealogy of Hindu revivalist gurus, making Christianity appear to his Tamil audience as another Hindu dissident movement.  The only local informants who substantiated and advocated ideas corresponding to Vico’s and Nobili’s expectations were learned Brahman teachers who, in turn, attuned their interpretations of Hindu religion and culture to suit missionary assumptions.  Therefore, not all information was valid, and a simple ‘seeing with one’s own eye’ was a necessary, but insufficient requirement for Nobili’s and Vico’s epistemological construction.(p.74)

Though Nobili and Vico’s interpretation was challenged by his opponents, equally they were also supported by people like Francisco Ros.  It is interesting to note that the personal vow of ‘obedience’ taken by the Jesuits also depends upon this eternal principle of interpretation and regarding this Ines says ‘Fernandes, who was also ordered by the Provincial, Alberto Laerzio, to participate in the inquiry, left no sign of his presence either in the form of a comment or of a signature.  Obviously, obedience to superiors was always a subject of interpretation.  The lack of his signature is perhaps a statement that he did not agree with the converts’ statements (as they were recorded in the text)’.[32] (p.86)  What further Ines says about this though bit long is important for us to understand how the facts were interpreted by various methods of documentation and preparing the participants well in advance:

Visually, the document is bursting with different voices, or more precisely, hands.  The questions were written on a separate sheet of paper in legible handwriting under the title Artigos que se haao de preguntar (Points which should be asked), and they constituted a kind of religious quiz for Nobili’s Christians.  In fifteen extended questions, every single point or accusation advanced by Goncalo Fernandes was refuted by each convert’s signed confession.  While the questions were written in neat handwriting, the answers were almost (p.86) illegible, as if written in haste, and their legibility deteriorated even more towards the end of the document.  There were also two or three different qualities of ink used: one for writing questions, one for answers a, perhaps, another for the signature of Manuel da Cunha and the converts.  Buccerio’s signature was written in the same ink as were the answers, which probably means that he wrote down and perhaps helped translate these confessions into Portuguese.

In spite of this variety of hands and inks, the answers, those which can be deciphered, were almost identical.  This is quite incredible given the differences in age, education and social position of the converts.  Furthermore, the arguments employed to justify Nobili’s conversion method[33] have the same theological sophistication as the treatise Nobili was to sign two months later under the title Responsio ad ea quae contra modum quo nova Missio Madurensis utitur ad ethnicos Christo convertendos obiecta sunt.[34]  Therefore, either his converts had already internalized all the categories, like the distinction between political and religious, which had been developed with help of local knowledge provided by his Brahman teacher Bonifacio Xastri/Sivadharma and amply used by Nobili as a response to his European adversaries, or Buccerio tailored their answers to suit Nobili’s categorial apparatus.  Did Buccerio also write them in such a terrible scrawl (from his other letters it is clear that his handwriting was quite legible) because he wanted to add further authentication to the ‘field inquiry’, performed without a table to write on, in haste etc.?  These questions have lost their historical answers, for there are no additional documents to illuminate them.(pp. 86-87)

Of course not only ‘these questions have lost their historical answer, for there are no additional document no illuminate them’, but also Ines’s own interpretation as she too has to ‘document’ her opinion based on speculation than with authentic historical evidence (about converts being ‘internalized’ or Buccerio ‘tailoring’ the answers).

            But such documentation of information about Hindu religion and society became ‘the basis of knowledge about Indian culture, religion and society’ (p.90) because of various interpretations of those information:

            Hindu ‘wrong’ answers to Jesuit ‘wrong’ questions formed the basis of knowledge about Indian culture, religion and society.  A further welding of these two sources of knowledge took place in disputes among the European religious figures, Jesuits and non-Jesuits.[35](p.90)

It is true that ‘The division between the political and the religious was a dichotomy produced within the confines of European cultural experiences’,[36] (p.90) yet relating every Indian value (political/social versus religious) with ‘European cultural experiences’ can be claimed as mere interpretation by these European writers.  Of course in India the division among cultural, religious and social is very thin and some time does not even exist.  But one has to remember that ‘religious criteria’ become the basis for presenting most of the cultural, political and social values in India (even in Oriental countries).  For example though appoint of a King is purely a political cum social institution, yet in India (even according to the Bible also refer the verse) such institutions are created or appointed by God.  Rather the origin of Kingship itself is divine (in Mahabharata there is the story that God instructed the creation of a King, refer that story).  So living in his situation ‘For Nobili, the dichotomy was a crucial explanatory handle.’(p.90)

            Though Nobili’s method of conversion (based on the dichotomy of ‘political’ from ‘religious) was temporarily stopped (by Pero Francis, see above), yet Nobili’s methods were approved not only by Pope Gregory XV, through his Bull issued on 31 January, 1623,[37] but even ‘The Inquisitor General of Portugal, Fernao Martins de Mascarenhas, approved the adaptationist method and endorsed Nobili’s interpretation of Indian customs and customs and ceremonies as divided into political (social) and religious’. (p.95)

How Nobili won his cause which even paved the way for the famous ‘golden age theory’, which was to evolve in colonial period, Ines says:

            By mixing Nobili’s ethnographic information with his knowledge of the Church fathers and the ‘Ancients’ about India, Fernao Martins Mascarenhas, the author of the document,[38] had another point to make:

…it is also apparent from what the Ancients thought of the Brahmans, because they spoke of them in the same way as they spoke of the wise men of Egypt and Persia, as we gather from what St Jerome reports when he praises the diligence of Apollonius of Tyana [was a neopythagorean philosopher]in his search of the wise men of the world.  However, it perhaps happened through usage and the ignorance of succeeding generations that the string became contaminated with some pagan superstitions and was made to distinguish the worshippers of idols. (p.96)

This proof by origin serves also to establish the golden age theory which was to evolve in many different directions during the later colonial period, and is, as a matter of fact, still a workable cultural concept, invoked or disclaimed by contemporary Indian actors.  The proposition that the Brahmans were in a distant past, before superstitious practices ‘corroded’ their knowledge and customs, analogous to the Greek and Roman ‘sapientes’, contained also the idea that the goal of the Jesuit mission was to restore the pristine state of Indian society before adding to it the ‘crown’ of Christianity.—pp.95-96

Not only this ‘golden age theory’, but also other ‘“scientific” investigation developed in the 19^th century through disciplines such as Indology and ethnography, the two categorial poles elaborated by Nobili remained the basic and undisputed axioms.  The major product of this initial analytical split as probably  the development of theories concerning the caste system.  Various Protestant missionaries, from the German Pietists to Lutherans, Baptists, Anglicans, etc., produced their own theories and explanations of the origin of caste, but all of them were already based on the distinction between the social and religious. […] The result of this particular Jesuit controversy,…was that the distinction between the religious and the political defined the field of enunciability respective of India.  This dichotomy still safeguards all possible statements about caste or any other Indian social, cultural or religious institution.(p.101)

            This controversy mainly centred around not only in the missionary approach of Nobili and Fernandes but also their ‘interpretation’ of the Tamil culture and society:

Nobili, a Roman aristocrat and a learned theologian, saw the world of ‘pagan’ Madurai as ‘similar’ or ‘analogous’ to the world of the European past.  Tamil culture became for him a tree of signs primarily in need of correct interpretation.  Fernandes, on the other hand, in response to Nobili’s analogical approach tried to promote, prematurely, another perspective. The difference between ‘pagan’ Tamils and Christians was in his view absolute.  He would not have denied that through conversion the first could be transformed into the latter, but he thought that the change had to be total.  Nobili’s experimental, accommodationist method appeared to Fernandes as a outright dissimulation and geared primarily towards disposessing him of his seat in the Madhurai mission.  Older than Nobili and longer in the mission, Fernandes felt threatened and was ready to fight.

            Nobili defined the rules of this espistolary battle.  He rapidly produced in his treatise and letters explanations and interpretations of Tamil customs.  Not only did he select one group of people, the Brahmans, as both representatives of Tamil society as a whole, and as the highest and the most important caste, but he also framed their origins in the idiom of European history.  Henceforth, Brahmans were made by Nobili into the descendants of a lost Jewish tribe and their ‘sacred books’ into fragmentary witnesses of the lost Christian message.  Fernandes accepted the challenge and, in 1616, wrote his only treatise on Brahman life-cycle ceremonies.  In his effort to transpose into writing the plentitude of differences, his text ends up in enumeration, resembling more a directory of ‘foreign’ concepts and words.  European audiences in the 17^th century found Nobili’s interpretative hermeneutic approach more persuasive, and Fernandes’s treatise remained little known until the 20^th century.—p.104

Not only the Tamil culture and society, but even Hinduism was and to day also considered as an instrument of ‘dveil’ to cheat people by most of the (evangelical) Christians even today.  Then how much more Nobili won’t be an exception to this misconception:

‘Paganism’, which in the 17^th century signified a demonic, corrupting force, rather then {than?} a ‘different’ religion, was considered as capable of affecting, if one were to be longer in contact with it, the mind of the Christians. Consequently, Nobili saw Fernandes and his supporters as falling into the possession of the demon when they denounced him to his superiors in Goa and Roame…–p. 204

Though calling other’s faith as ‘demonic’ is every way wrong, yet reviling others’ faith and their followers are a common thing among Hindus too.[39]  This basic human problem and error should be viewed from the fact that one can view other’s worldview based on his personal conviction alone.  There is nothing wrong in it.  But the way the author often ‘interprets’ Nobili’s letter as if he had a hidden agenda based on Jesuits’ tradition will only lead us to interpret her agenda of slandering on Jesuits as a whole.  What all Nobili wrote, in his letters and reports were limited to the historical and mission context of his days.

Though this is not the place for us to go in detail about the ‘controversy’ of the ‘Disputed Mission’, yet it is important to know what made Nobili and his opponents to force their own interpretation on several facts of Hindu culture/society and religion. The main reason for this dispute over the Madurai Mission is an integral nature of Jesuits’ nature of Mission which always ‘kindled controversy’. (p.51)   Because,

The rules and regulations of the Jesuit order were, in an indirect though significant way, responsible for kindling the controversies.  The obsession with mutual supervision and surveillance of missionaries bred all sorts of denunciations…(p.51)[40]

And the ‘controversies of this kind were kept alive even when their initiators had long since passed away’[41].(p.44).  Of course this particular controversy of Madurai Mission was mainly based ‘Nationalistic’ in nature (Portuguese vs. Italian).[42] ‘Later, as the controversy grew in scale and intensity, further opposing interests and issues were associated with the controversy, such as Jesuit “nationalism” ( Portuguese vs. Italian, Spanish vs. Portugues, etc.), and the role and limitations of the Portuguese political authority in India.’ (p.44)

First of all ‘nationalism’[43] played an important role in this controversy,

…Nobili’s refusal to identify himself as a frangui, the name usually attributed to the Portuguese in Madurai, but also to all otherwise unidentified foreigners, provoked an outcry among the Portuguese Jesuits and other religious figures.  Therefore, the description and interpretation of Tamil culture was from the beginning a result of polemics and contestation which forced Nobili to both sharpen his ideas and couch them in etymologies and casuistry…(pp.114-5)

Now considering his aristocratic background and his anxiety of not identifying with the word ‘frangui’,[44] he declared himself as a member of the ‘warrior community’,[45] but dressed like a Brahman sannyasi.  It is important to note that while Ines says that, ‘Just like Nobili in his letters, Fernandes referred to the controversial term frangui (or frangue) used by Tamils to designate all Europeans and Christians.  However, while Nobili interpreted the native category as a humiliating and abusive term directed against those who used it as a self-appellation, Fernandes saw nothing wrong with it’, (p48) in real sense it is a humiliating term even today and Nobili was right for refuse to use that term for himself.  What Nobili pointed is not his ‘interpretation’, as Ines says but it is the fact and interpretation given by the general public.  While Ines in between the lines accuses Nobili as if he interpreted the term ‘frangui’, Ines ‘interprets’, the historical fact to suit her purpose.  And Nobili’s refusal to identify himself with frangui is not his own imagination but also shared by other Jesuits even outside Madurai:

In September of 1609, Rubino [another Jesuit jissionary from Chandragiri mission in Andhra]  wrote to Aquaviva: ‘It cannot be imagined how great is the aversion and how intense the repulsion we inspire in the Indians, simply by the fact of our being the priests of the Portuguese.  From the time this Mission was founded till now, only fifteen have been made Christians, and they are the dregs of society.  Their lives are so scandalous, that I have resolved not to baptize any other, unless he bears marks of a special vocation from God.  Hence I have repeatedly entreated Fr. Laerzio, the Provincial, to be allowed to go away to some other place, where I shall be unknown and dress, eat and conduct myself in political things as an Indian (vestire, mangiare, o nelle cose politiche trattare come loro)’. Cited in Ferroli, The Jesuits of Malabar, vol. 1, p. 338—(Notes no. 37, p. 206)

            It is important for us to understand the meaning of the word ‘Frangui’ used in its historical context (the same is the truth today).  About this Rajamanickam[46] (His Star in the East) says:

Anyone going about in trousers and wearing a coat and a hat, whether born on the banks of the Tagus, or on the backwaters of Travancore was a Paranghi.  Paranghism became in the eyes of Hindus, the refuge of criminals who had fallen foul of the laws of their country, of social rebels who sought to shake off the discipline of caste and the Hindu rules of decency. (p.43).  [And] The Portuguese were well aware of the opprobrium attached to that name, but, far, from resenting it, they welcomed it as a means of swelling their ranks and strengthening their hold on their followers.  They would not trust the sincerity of their converts unless it was guaranteed by a participation in their banquets, loss of caste, change of name and dress, and the adopting of Portuguese customs.  Once a man had become a Paranghi he was irretrievably compromised in the eyes of his own people; he was looked upon as a traitor, ostracised and castaway; he had no choice but to cling to the Portuguese.(p.44) [And] …Father Concalo Fernandez was perfectly certain that no name was more glorious than that of Paranghi and he used it, without the least qualm of conscience, to describe his religion.  He would, in his most ingratiating way, invite high caste Hindus to adopt the Paranghi religion, and, when his invitations were met with contempt, he could find no other explanation than the ignorance of those poor people who could not appreciate what was good for them.  Indian customs and Indian ways were to him nothing but a bundle of superstitions which were to be carefully avoided.  To suggest that they could go very well with a sincere profession of Christianity sounded blasphemous to him.  The more his disciples discarded their ancestral customs and the closer they adhered to Portuguese ways, the better Christians they would be.  Paranghism, to him, meant Christianity, and he held that none could enter the latter unless he bore the authentic hallmark of the former.  It never occurred to him that what his hearers rejected was not Christianity but the hated Paranghi customs with which it was identified; that he never realized this was his life’s great tragedy.  As a pioneer of the faith among the Badagas he had proved an unqualified failure. (p.44)

Of course this adaptationist method was not completely accepted by the Madurai populace.  But the Ines impose her idea as if Tamilians of Nobili time were not aware of any distant place other than Tamilnadu:

…Only when he was forced to reveal who he was, he evasively declared that his place of origin was Rome and his family, Roman aristocracy.  However, these geographical places were as distant and vague to his Tamil audiences as Kailasa (³½Þiva’s celestial abode) was to the Hindu devotees.  It was a beyond-space and Nobili tried to keep it that way.  He also tried to disconnect it from the Portuguese space, which was equally a-topical but, on the contrary, considered as highly polluting.(p.210)

The people of Madurai already had trade connections with Greeks and Romans.  Therefore Nobili cannot hide too much about his origin.  For an Indian of Nobili time both Portuguese and Romans were equally ‘polluting franguies.’ His distancing from the ‘highly polluting’ space was not in degree but in kind ‘frangui Christians’ from ‘native Christians’.  Regarding the ‘Portuguese space of pollution it was not only Nobili but also Rubino also had the same opinion, as we saw already.

            Like the interpretation on term ‘Frangui’, another important controversy in Nobili’s mission is about the ‘last Veda’ for which he ‘proclaimed that he s the teacher of the fourth, lost Veda which deals with the question of salvation.’ (p.116)  It is beyond the scope of this review to go in detail on this subject and Rajamanickam deals about this in his book (cf. pp. 79-80). It is suffice for our purpose to see how the facts being ‘interpreted.’  Ines was careful enough to say that, ‘By December 1608, Nobili was told by the most learned of the country that there were many sects within the three Vedas or Laws (leggi), “the Laws of Brahma, Vishnu and Rudra” and each one of them was taught by a particular Brahman master, and that the fourth (p.115) law was no longer extant.’(pp.115-6)  But doing this kind of meticulous  research and even living in South India (at present at Pondichery) she could not even mention the fact that the South Indian Brahmins in general and Tamil Brahmins in particular accepted only three Vedas (Rig, Yajur and Saman) and refuse to accept the Athervaveda.  That could be what the Brahmin informants might have told to Nobili.  Even if Nobili was wrong in replacing that last Veda with the bible, yet it is doubtful whether Sivadharma [Bonifacio Xastri] could manage to ‘transcribe’ or ‘write down’ the rest of the three Vedas which was ‘the most grievous sin’ for Tamilians. (p.116)

            Writing down the Veda is ‘the most grievous sin’ not only for Tamilians, but every Brahmin in India.[47]  Next Ines says that Sivadharma ‘had not yet started transcribing the “sacred texts” for him [Nobili]’.  After one line she says that ‘Sivadharma was “no longer held back by scruples’, that is, by the interdiction on writing down the Vedas, the “most grievous sin” for the Tamils.’(116)  There is some difference between ‘transcribing’ and ‘writing down’ the Veda.  Because in general the Tamil Brahmins use a script called ‘Grandam’ to write down the Sanskrit and not ‘Devanagari’.  Does Sivadharma ‘transcribed’ the three Vedas that much quickly in ‘Grandam’ or he wrote down them in ‘Devanagari’? And if ‘each one of ‘the three Vedas or Laws’ were ‘taught by a particular Brahmin master’ (p.115), how Sivadharma managed to write down/transcribe  all the three within the short period of three months?  These are some of the (natural) questions that arise in one’s mind while reading these information given by Ines.

            Interpreting the facts based on wrong information is dangerous it is equally misleading if it is done on pure speculation.  After pointing out the ‘most important prerequisite for the true understanding of Indian culture became an “original”, “authentic” text, that is, a text presumably old and written on a palm leaf in appropriate characters, or a text written from memory by a learned and “honest” Brahman’, (p.128) [which were to emerge in the 18^th century ‘the Indianist/Orientalist  disciplines’ (pp.127-8] Ines says how both Fernandes and Nobili adopted that discipline to prove about their respective view about ‘tilakam’ (applying sandal paste by Nobili’s converts).  Refuting Fernandes’s translation about a text which read, ‘lalate tilakam drstva nirasam pitaro gatah’,(p.128) Nobili translated it as, ‘Si tilacam in fronte mortui parentes aspexerint cum tristitia abibunt (If the deceased parents see the tilacam on the forehead, they will depart in sorrow’.(p.129)  Now commenting (or interpreting) Nobili’s translation Ines says:

It is not entirely clear how Fernandes interpreted this fragment, except that it was against Nibili’s claim that tilakam was a purely social sign.  According to Nobili, Fernandes’s Brahman informant misunderstood the word niracam…. It is probable that Fernandes’s informant read nirasam, not as niraacai (without desire) as Nobili did, but as Niraacaaram, which means impurity, want of ceremonial purity [Tamil Lexicon, vol. 4. P. 2267].  If this is so, Fernandes’s reconstructed translation should have been something like this: ‘If the dead parents see the tilakam on the forehead, they leave with impurity.’ (p.129)

Now Ines’s this interpretation is based on speculation first (‘It is probable that Fernandes’s informant read…’)  Next if Nobili read ‘nirasam’ as ‘niraacai (without desire)’, then ‘Nobilil’s translation of the “correct” text’ should be, ‘If the deceased parents see the tilacam on the forehead, they will depart in “without desire” and not as “sorrow.”  So if Nobili used only ‘sorrow’ and not ‘without desire (niraacai)’ then it could be ‘nirvisaaram’.  Giving any meaning or interpretation on certain Tamil word only based on Tamil Lexicon won’t help.  Because the same word could mean one thing in one (Tamil) community and another thing in another community.  As a Tamil Brahmin I know that we use the word ‘nirvisaaram’ [a Sanskrit word nir + visaaram = worry, care] even today which mean ‘without minding or without seriousness’.  This word also won’t suit in the context as the departed parents seeing the tilakam on the forehead of their children while performing the final rites, will leave only with ‘sorrow’ (and not with nirvisaaram = without minding it).  Even today, in most of the caste communities, first twelve days from the death of any person (except the widow, who will keep her ‘pottu’ till ten days and will remove it on the 11^th day morning), all the immediate relatives of the deceased person won’t keep any tilakam on their forehead (even the married daughters cannot keep their ‘pottu’ and ‘sindur’ (kunkum) till that twelve days).  As it is a mourning period, if the deceased person saw the tilakam on the forehead of his children, definitely he will go with ‘sorrow’ and not with any ‘impurity’, as all the ‘impurity’ during the time of final rites is attach with the living person and not with the dead person.

Whichever the word that Nobili or Fernandes’s informant is not that much important considering the fact that ‘In any case, a word-by-word translation, whether Nibili’s or Fernandes’s version, would have remained completely obscure to European readers without additional ethnographic information’.(p.130).  However Nobili’s following explanation is correct one, as it is even practised today:

It is a question here of the merchant class when they perform the funeral rite in honour of their deceased parents.  If on such an occasion they present themselves conspicuously bedecked with mundane ornaments, the first and most prized being the tilakam, the deceased parent (…) will be deeply grieved, seeing that his surviving children, at a time for mourning, go in for signs of joy such as the tilakam, so little in keeping with feelings of bereavement and sorrows. (Nobili,R., S.J.,  ‘Informatio de quibusdam moribus nationis indicae’, ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico, 721/II/2 and Fondo Gesuitico, 400/2 ff. 43-83, 85-88, original and English translation published in Rajamanickam, S.J., (ed.), Roberto Nobili on Indian Customs, Palayamkottai, 1972, pp. 120-1) (p.130)

However what Ines further says and interpret on this Nobili’s explanation exposes her prejudice against Nobili’s methods without doing any practical ‘research’ on such customs that still previles in Tamilnadu:

This statement was derived neither from the logic of the argument, nor from a plausible etymology or other translation, but it sounds extremely persuasive.  There is, however, no visible proof that it was true, since the evidence has a deus ex machina quality about it and does not appear to refer to experience, but rather to another text.  Nobili certainly had not seen what he described happen before his eyes. Who could have invited him for a funeral where this kind of transgression would have occurred? The quoted fragment stands, if anything, for the universality of morals.  It bids for deep sympathy with a world that denigrates cultural delinquents such as children who do not respect their parents.  However exotic the dress requirements for the funeral occasion, the meaning of that social performance was the same as in Europe.  A skilfully inscribed cultural analogy produces in Nobili’s text an effect of authority and ‘science’. (p.130)

None need to be invited for observing certain social cum religious rituals in any particular community.  Particularly in India (I hope elsewhere also) no one will invite people to participate in the final rites (of course information will be given and people will go on their own).  So there is no point in asking the question, ‘who could have invited him for a funeral..’.   Next though a Sannyasi (and also a widow) is not much welcomed for marriage, they can go to console the members of a family where some one died.  And for this none will wait for any formal invitation to be given.  Above all a person like Nobili, who lived and closely observed the ‘cultural’, ‘religious’ and ‘social’ manners of the Tamils, that too particularly about the so called high caste people (‘merchant class’ stands for Vysya, and they too like Brahmin observe all traditions in similar way), could never missed such thing as the mourning period extends minimum 12 days (on 13^th day, after the ‘subastu’[wishing good or well] is performed, except the widow, rest of the family member will began to use the bodily decoration).  So again it is only Ines interpretation in saying that ‘Who could have invited him for a funeral where this kind of transgression would have occurred?’  So, ‘The acquisition of knowledge about India was tantamount to balancing on a tight-rope between truth and falsehood,’(p.131) because, ‘Misinformation, misquotation, ignorance and forgery are as much the building blocks of discourses as are “authentic” texts.’ (131)

            One main reason for the ‘disputed Mission’ was that it was not only the ‘interpretation’ of the facts provided by the informants of both Fernandes and Nobili carried out for long time but also those informants were mostly Brahmins, ‘Both Nobili and Fernandes, although disagreeing on the interpretation, took the Brahmans as the key group for understanding Indian religion and society, and found all too many informants willing to corroborate their arguments.(p.145)  And as we have already noted this tendency of referring ‘Brahminical’ knowledge and source continued even in British time. (cf. notes 23 ‘It was only with the establishment….to know the “facts”.)

            Every faith, however ‘scientific’ and ‘rationalistic’ has its own superstitious expression attached with it.  And ‘accommodating’ such superstitions in the growth of a new believer is part of ‘adaptation’ and ‘contextualizing’ the faith in their cultural and religious background.  But not agreeing with Nobili’s such methods again Ines narrates the way Nobili first ‘Christianized’ the Pongal festival and then allowed the ‘converts’ to keep the superstition of ‘boiling ponkal rice.’ (pp.168-9)  ‘Ponkal rice which does not boil is a bad omen’(p.168) for the converts, he encouraged them to plant a cross and ‘do like the others’ (p.169).  Knowing that this is merely a superstition, yet he permitted this because ‘these trifles are very big things in the eyes of the neophytes, and are of great importance since they serve to bind them to’(p.169) the new religion which they accepted. Now commenting on all this Ines says:

The logic of this utterance has a tendency to contradict Nobili’s claim that there is nothing superstitious about ponkal as performed by the Christians.  What (p.168) Nobili does to cancel such an interpretation consists in a double move.  First, he undervalues any Hindu religious ceremony…. And second, Nobili attributed to God the effort of adapting himself to Hindu customs, which makes Nobili a simple vessel of the higher will and the question as to what is superstitious and what is Christian ceases to be an issue which can be resolved in a ‘this-worldly’ context, and has become a matter of divine discernment. (pp.168-9)

Though there is truth in this comment, yet providing ‘functional substitute’ for certain cultural and religious traits cannot be termed as ‘undervaluing’ the converts’ former religious faith.  And ‘adapting’ Hindu customs both by the gospel and God is a question of great debate. Though we can reasonably criticise Nobili’s idea of ‘planting a cross’ to make the ponkal rice to boil and thereby allowed the converts to keep their superstition, yet instead of rejecting their cultural and social (religious) background altogether, what Nobili has done shows his sensitivity to the needs of his converts rather than undermining their Hindu customs.  It is important to note that most the family festivals (called pantikai[48](p.168)) are more social and cultural oriented than religious (it is a harvest festival).  For example though Ponkal is celebarated in different forms in most parts of India, it has different customs from region to region and even in one region from community to community.  What Nobili attempted shows his eagerness to keep the birth right of his converts than just using them only as a means to the end.  Because it is only Ines says that ‘what is permitted … [to the Tamils] hold on to their superstitions, would not have been permitted to grownups.  His message is—let them play Christianity for a while, for soon through persecutions they will “grow up”’.  Whereas while writing to Laerzio, A Nobili simply said that he allowed them to follow the superstition of boiling the ponkal rice to ‘strengthen their faith and prepare them to bear the persecutions which God will send them, and which perhaps will not be long in coming.’(p.169) (Nobili, R. to Laerzio, A., Madurai, 15 January, 1609, in Laerzio, A. to Aquaviva, C., Cochin (It.), 20 November, 1609, ARSI, Goa 54a, ff. 17-75)

Festival itself is not superstitious as they are more cultural and social events (otherwise the very life which we live become superstitious).  Whereas certain rituals and believes attached with them can be superstitious—like boiling of the rice.  So poÎóãkal as performed by a Christian is not superstitious, where as planting a Cross before the fire can be superstitious. Sentiment and superstition are part of lay people’s life.  Some kind of accommodation is needed in the early part of their faith, till they can overcome them to have a higher understanding of their faith in God (here also ‘the higher or philosophical’ understanding of God is the sentiment and superstition from their point of view.)

            Ines’ interpretation of the facts not only limited to what Nobili has done but also what he became.  Throughout the book the author often says that Nobili’s one life aim was to become a saint and keeping this end in his mind he done everything in his life.[49]  Commenting (rather interpreting) about Nobili’s claim that ‘learning Tamil weakened his Italian…[and] he was forgetting his mother tongue after having learned other languages, first Portuguese and then Tamil,’(p.200) Ines says:

            His claim to be forgetting Italian would appear to have been more then a simple statement of fact.  It was a part of Nobili’s both apostolic and epistolary strategies.  The oblivion of the mother tongue was a ‘sacrifice’, in the ritual sense of the word, in which Nobili renounced his former identity for the sake of acquiring a missionary body, which was a step towards his saintly goals…. In Nobili’s mind Italian was probably also associated with his Roman past and the general, ‘corrupted’ Roman space in which he saw very few chances of acquiring sainthood.  The Jesuit concept of (p.200) sanctification had a very strong cosmopolitan component and just like a perfect Jesuit, a would-be saint, at least in theory, had to forsake his regional, national and family ties, or at least subordinate them to the highest divine or Jesuit (terrestrial) authority.  The loss of his mother tongue, therefore, was one of the requirements for saintly metamorphosis, but it was also considered as a commodity which could be exchanged for another, a pay-off…(pp.200-201)

Here is another example of over-exaggerated interpretation of the fact.  The author is reading too much in his analysis in ‘Nobili forgetting Italian’.  This is a common experience of Indians too.  Including my sister, who lives in Andamans, several Indians after living in another language area, cannot speak their mother tongue as perfectly as before as they moved away from their natural surrounding.  In my life too, in order to keep a common identity as an ‘Indian’ I speak more Hindi when I am outside Tamilnadu.  Several times I have refused to reveal my ethnicity (as a Tamilian) to others and say that I am an Indian and that is more than enough.  This I do because as a Sannyaasi I have to (at least in theory) forget my ‘home’, which includes language.  (Those who cannot speak other than their mother tongue, forgetting their ‘home’ means not talking about their native place).  After living in North for several years, several times I too mingle Hindi words, unintentionally while I talk with other Tamilians.  Whatever may be the intention of Nobili to say that he is forgetting Italian, this is not an uncommon experience.

Like wise Nobili’s desire for sainthood is universal in Christian mission.  But what the author shares demostrates her prejudice against Nobili in what he has done:

Nobili shared the desire for sainthood with most of the members of the Society of Jesus.   What differentiated him from the others was that he felt elected.  His ability to attract other Jesuits to participate in his personal saintly project was remarkable, and had he died a martyr’s death, he would have been eligible for canonization.  Half a century later, JoÁõão de Britto, a paÎþãÔþáÁõãracÁõãmi missionary in Ramnad (Ramanathapuram), was martyred and, consequently, (relatively) easily qualified for canonization.(p. 199)

This desire for martyrdom is a common goal of every missionary even in this 21^st century.  I remember even in One Protestant Organization (FMPB) calling those missionaries died in the mission field due to some sickness as ‘martyrs’.   In the First Trinial Conference of FMPB, held in Danishpet, Salem in Tamilnadu, the President Dr. Sam Kamalesan, while presenting some momento, requested the widows of such martyrs to stand where they are in the auditorium and went there to give the presentation, to honour the ‘martyrdom’ of their husbands, whereas others went to the stage to receive their momento.  And most of the missionaries consider ‘martyrdom’ as the highest reward for his service for the lord in this world, (with which I personally do not agree.)

            And Nobili’s choice to become a sannyaasi (which is a Hindu form of sainthood) has its own several limitations.  But as an outsider in his ‘adaptationist procedure’ he ought to be selective as no one can adapt every element of other cultural form in toto:

            The role Nobili ultimately developed was a mixture of all three models, [raja, Brahmin and ascetic] but his major outward presentation followed the model of an ascetic—sannyÁõsi.  Nobili found this indigenous model to be closest in form and performance to that of the Jesuit missionary.  In his usual manner of adaptationist procedure, Nobili picked and chose elements that suited his purpose and discarded the rest…. The concept of ‘world-renouncer’ such as the sannyÁõ si helped Nobili to construct his indigenous performative model.  A few centuries later, in a different context, a body of social theory initiated by the French sociologist Louis Dumont, would also privilege it in Homo hierarchicus.  Not unlike Nobili, Dumont understood Indian society as a highly hierarchical system in which any effort towards indivduation is thwarted by the structure.  The only way out of the hierarchy would be, according to this theory, to become a ‘world-renouncer’.(p. 208)

In any ‘adaptationst procedure’ particularly by an outsider like Nobili, cannot choose all but should be selective. If he ‘picked and chose elements that suited his purpose and discarded the rest’, he would have and need not remained a Sannyaasi till the end of his life.[50]  For him the Sannyaasi vocation is not a ‘means to an end’, by a volunteer vocation chosen by him accordance to the spirit of contextualisation of the gospel.  Above all though it is true in theory that ‘the only way out of the [Indian society] hierarchy would be, according to’ the theory of Dumont is ‘to become a “world-renouncer”’.  But in practice even the Sannyaasis have their own hierarchy as well their vocation is also a part of the social hierarchy in India.  Of course:

            When Nobili depicted the sannyaasi model to his European audience, he imposed his own syncretistic definitions based on Sanskrit (p.208) texts, Tamil classical and folk poetry and his own adaptive performance of the role…–pp. 208-9

It is very difficult to give a final definition to Sannyasi.  Even from Sankara time, they constructed big mathas and lived like kings.  All Nobili might have done is to show how his adaptive vocation is also accepted by Indian tradition.

            Apart from what Nobili try to become (as a saint) several things what he has done also didn’t escape this art of ‘interpretation’, though there is definitely some truth behind it.  For example:

…{In October 1609} Again ‘the chief Brahman of the temple of Cokkanaatan’, among other complaints against Nobili, accused him of being a ‘vile man and a Frangui’.  The affair ended quite unheroically.  The Jesuits discovered that the Brahman was after money and paid him 15 scudi for his ‘friendship’.  The Brahman’s last words were: ‘Propagate your religion as you please, and make as many disciples as you like; in future I shall stand by you like a brother’.  Leitaao’s report betrays his growing disenchantment with Nobili’s methods and with his ‘new’ Madurai mission.  Nobili, of course, never wrote about such down to earth (p.177) ruses as bribing.  For him and for his readers, the progress of Christianity in India evolved as a divine, not human, endeavour and, therefore, every new effort or obstacle was treated as an exercise in holy semiotics. —p. 177-78

Aagain one more problem of interpreting the fact.  Such a problem as giving bribe, telling some lie and not mentioning certain ‘down to earth ruses’ in their survival in the mission fields are happening even today both in the Church and mission, which are every way wrong.  The progress of Christianity not only in India but everywhere in the world, through various strategies—including crusades etc.—are treated as divine endeavour, irrespective of human errors.  This is not only the problem with Christianity but every other religion believed the same regarding the expansion of their respective faith.  The author either as a secular scholar or liberal Christian may find problem in Nobili’s methods, which are right from his point of view.  But to the Christians or followers of any other faith, such human errors are always explained away while acknowledging the divine ‘intervention’ in the expansion of their faith.

            Not only the personal life and writing of the Jesuits but even that of their converts’ life is not spared from the art of ‘interpretation’.  For example, ‘The description of Gnani’s daily spiritual routine is couched in such a way [by Vico] that images already fixed by the history of Christian mystic experiences immediately come to the contemporary European reader’s mind’. (p.226) says Ines and continues, ‘Regarding Gnani’s “austerities in matters of food and bodily mortification”, wrote Vico, “he increased or decreased them as we directed him, never following his own opinion”’.(Vico,A. to Mascarenhas,N. (Port), Madurai, 15 December, 1624, ARSI, Goa 53, ff. 91-102). Of course it is true that,

To what extent were the Jesuit missionaries able to control the religious practices and devotional excesses of the Madurai neophytes?  Not as much as Vico would like us to think.  Most of the ‘angelic’ characters, like Amator, Gnani, and many others, whose biographical fragments remain scattered in various letters written by Nobl and Vico, appear to have had very much a will of their own.  In the document entitled ‘Testimonio’ (1617)[51], Gnani and his son Amator/Iesupattan are mentioned, among others, as participants in neophyte rebellions against Nobili several of which occurred from late 1614 until 1617.(p.228)

Definitely there might be bit/lot of exaggeration in the report of the Jesuits about their converts, but it is too much to say that the, ‘biographical fragments … appear to have had very much a will of their own’.  At least in India, most of the disciples try to follow the instruction given by their spiritual mentors at the maximum level.  For a (Indian) disciple instruction given by his preceptor even in ‘bodily mortification’, is also part of their sadhana (spiritual culture).  But even this role of guru is not escaped from the author’s interpretation:

…A guru in Hinduism is not merely a withdrawn religious specialist, but one of the foci of the local political network.  Depending on his power to attract followers and distribute honours and gifts, a guru may ritually and juridically extend his control over a whole cluster of castes.  His principal attraction is his ability to integrate local communities into a larger, galactic Hindu polity.  For castes such as the one to which Amator belonged, considered ritually low, connections with a guru who claimed such supra-local ties meant an enhancement of status.(p. 220)

Whereas in practical sense a guru is not necessarily a Sannyaasi, but even can be a family man with or without polity’.  The Hindu society in villages is not much changed by this ‘enhancement of status’ because of any connection with a guru.

            Thus all the Truths/Facts about the ‘Disputed Mission’ of Madurai Mission (in general) and Nobili’s life and methods (including his writings, which is also a part of his mission) is more of an ‘interpretation’ of the fact not only by the actors of the Drama (including all the Jesuits involved both in India and outside) but also by the author of this book ‘Disputed Mission’.  Even this review itself is an ‘interpretation’ of the truth/facts already ‘interpreted’ by the author.  So not only any writing but all our life on this earth is more of an interpretation than presenting the fact as it is lived by each one of us in that particular context.  This is not just a philosophy but down to the earth reality.  That is why I consider all the (auto)biographies are in one way ‘interpreting’ the life of that individual than help us to understand his/her life by him/her in the life situation. 

            However what all the author says—rather interprets—about the Jesuits, particularly of the previous centuries are based on her research on the materials available about them plus her interpretation on these materials.  Considering the fact that several hundred volumes of such materials available that too written in Latin and Portuguese Italian and other languages, here we have to depend upon her honest research and sincere interpretation of these materials to understand the Jesuits in general and Nobili in particular.  Only another scholar of her kind alone can correctly asses this book.  But based on some of her interpretation, which is within our reach—as a Tamilian as well as a Hindu Christ bhakta—I feel that some of her interpretation of the facts violate the very spirit of interpretation, than presenting the fact as it is.  After all her research is ‘objective’ whereas Nobili’s writings in particular and Jesuits in general—whatever may be their hidden agenda—are more subjective.  Though we cannot deny the hidden agenda of the Christian missionaries (that of present day too) of every kind, yet our personal understanding of historical and social context of Tamil landscape, I feel that the author has some kind of hidden agenda for her over exaggerated interpretation and extreme criticism of Jesuits as a whole and Nobili in particular.  But only another scholar of her kind alone can prove this.

As an outsider and objective scholars what the author try to present about Nobili through his interpretation of the facts to his European readers may be right from her point of view.  But as a Tamilian as well as a bhakta of Christ with a subjective understanding of what Nobili tried to do in his mission, I too find the same problem in the authors presentation of the fact what she finds in Nobili’s life and mission.  Nobili has one advantage to the author.  He actually involved in the mission in spite of his hidden motives and agenda (to become a saint).  There fore his interpretation has a personal subjective touch and involvement.  Whereas the author has to depend upon the written records without any personal involvement with the situation in which they were written.  Apart from this considering the fact that out of hundreds of volumes of materials surrounded Nobili mission, what she presents in this one volume is again only an interpretation of the facts, rather presenting the fact as it is.

Dayanand Bharati, Hosur, 2000.

For Review

For Review:

Jusuit’s writing influence: Since Jesuit missionary ….. confessors.-p.8, The distinction….the world, p.10, apologetic and partisan-p.31, ‘texterior…. Language’-p.32; held public disputations—p.45, 148

This book is about: In each of the ….p.8, heterological approach-p.32 organized around four epistolary writing modes—p.32, ‘By reading Jesuit …aesthetic scheme.’—p.33 ‘By insisting that Brahmanism was mostly a social system, as opposed to Fernandes’s ‘pagan machine’, Nobili unwittingly relativized the concept of religion itself…. The rift between religion and morals, belief and ethics, created a new social space ready to accommodate modernity.’-p.35; Brahmins as the descendants of Abraham—p.71

Interpretation of the fact: p.11, ‘corrupting the original message’,–pp. 12,13  ‘…the publications after 1776 {the suppression of the Society}, when, instead of Jesuit editorial authority, anybody was able to abridge and refurbish these letters according his own taste.  After the reconstitution of the Society of Jesus in 1813, new Jesuit collections of unpublished letters appeared.’-p.13, F. Joshep Bertrand’s eition about the Madurai mission in 1830 is biased—pp.13,14, 15-16, the four topics of Jesuit letters: encounters, theology, miracles and conversion—p.38, 72-73, interpretation of information—p.74,75,80,83,86-87, 90,golden age theory—97,100-101, 104, 111, 114-115,129, 131-32, 133, 138, 143, 145

Jusits:

Adaption: 175, 179, body gestures, ‘modify it throug imitation’—p. 185, 185-86, 204

Jusits: ‘Indian recruits were ‘disabled soldiers, impoverished merchants, etc.’—p.34, Problem with in the society—p.39, Nobili cast…. Into paganism’—pp.40-41; ‘the issue of obedience was more talked about than practised’,–p.51, Jesuit deception created by Nobili was denounced by Protestant missionaries (trickling down from top to bottom)—pp.55-56,67, 76; 78;80,97, 129, 148-9;150

Persecution—179-181,

Nobili’s intention:  ‘intentionally ambiguous presentation’—p.20, ‘Nobili reversed this politics of conversion’…p.21, Tamil ‘holy man’ and advisor to the ‘king’.-p.21, 84, ‘his life … for exemplary biographies.’-118, 126,127; ‘Christianixe Tamil society’-133; 165-66, only a permission-169; Madurai Mission as a Site of Utopian Metamorphosis:211-12

Nobili’s ideal model: Brahminism, holiness, separation, renounciation etc. pp. 25-26,  his perfect missionary model: Brahman sannyaasi-p.27, later pantaaracaami model, p.27 but ‘undermined the Jesuit project of global conversion’, because of cult group surrounded around individual missionaries.-p.29 once the Brahmin sannyasi model failed Nobili practised other models, p.30; though temporarily their models failed,  yet the ‘globalizing project was never abandoned,’-p.30, later both the Britishers and nationalist’s reformulation of Hinduism as a global Indian religion never corresponded to local realities—p.30, ‘both kingly and priestly models’,–p.38; Nobili cast…. Into paganism’—pp.40-41; accommodation method… made it imperative for him,… to interpret Hindu culture as ‘mature’ and ready to accept the Gospel.—p.46, he divided Hindu customs as political and religious while the letter remained as superstitions the former become ‘necessary for the grafting of Christianity’.—p.47 ; 149-50; 189

Nobili’s influence: ‘behind-the-scene networking’,-p.34, encouraged to spread rumours about him—p.40,63, 239, 242-3

Nobili’s aim: to become a saint—p. 40, to become a guru in accordance with indigenous model to gain spiritual and political authority—p.40, 165-66, 177 180, 197-98, 199, 201-02, 205,207,208,209,211-12,214, 234

Nobili’s achievement: ‘opened a way for diversity and respect of local Indian culture within the Catholic proselytizing mission.’—p.46,97,97-98, Conversion Scenarios:157,

158,159, 179-181, 182, 187, 190-91, 203, 245,246

Nobili’s method: 217, 220,226, 230-1

Miracles: exorcism—p.38, 163, 164-65, 166, 168-9, 170, 172,236

Against Nobili:58, 59,60,61,62,65,70,77,78-79,87,89,93,132, 135, 205,219,232-33

For Nobili: 58,59,63,75, 76,82, 138, 206

What the controversy is about: An European conflict and explosive cultural baggage—p.34;   ‘it was ‘class language’, more than social class, was at stake—p.34, 237

personal class amplified-p.34, ‘the national, the political and the religious’,-p.35, Nobili’s accommodatio and civil versus religious sphere-p.35, Nobili’s Brahminical civility versus Fernandes’s view as fanatical pagans—p.36 because of their two opposing ethnographic perspectives—p.36 ,Nobili was proto-emic while Fernandes a proto-etic—p.36, Nobili’s analogical and Fernandes’s descriptive approach-p.37, ‘scientific discourse’ on India-p.37; ‘to interpret Hindu culture as “mature” and ready to accept the Gospel’.-p.46;

‘Nobili was simply not able to accept Fernandes’s status-niche.’—p.54; Nobili’s presence is a personal threat to Fernandes—p.53,54; 66,69, 134, 145

Public controversy:kept alive:‘Although the controversy…..passed away’.—p.44,

 ‘Jesuit’s rules and regulation kindled the controversy-p.51; Nobili’s ‘adaptationist moves and choices were, besides other biographical reasons, a product of his Jesuit education’.-pp.54-55; personal vengence:60,66; arguments based on slippery ground—p.69

How Nobili handled: 65,66,67,68, 73, 83,84-85, 89-90,91-92,99, Thus, Fernandes saw classifiable diversity where Nobili saw basic uniformity’.-p.116-117, 119,120,121, 122, 123,124,125, 138, 139, 142, ‘Those like Nobili…. Of assimilation’—144; 234, 239-40

How Vico handled:73

About Fernandes: he didn’t choose the Madurai mission.  ‘his experience as a soldier in the Portuguese army connected him much more than Nobili with the Portuguese colonial enterprise.’-p. 134, ‘untrained in the Jesuit art of conversion’-p. 134;  an ‘outraged’ outside observer.-p. 134, his treaty—135-36, 137, 139,140,142,143-44

between social versus religious—p.47,58,96

thread: 58,59,96,97,99,150

sandle paste:123-25

Obedience:‘The critical point he {Fernandes} was making was over the question of obedience’.—p.50-51, 56,57,83, 86

a division in the church: Fernandes accused Nobili for discarding the term Frangui and also tampering with Christian vocabulary used by other missionaries in South India—pp.48-49,65; 78-79; 134-35

Official response: variously interpeted 72,73, 80,80,83

Documentation86-87, 89-90, 113, 177-78,215,226

Role of converts: 88-89, 153, 177-78, 211,232-33,244, 244-5

---

[1] For Interesting information on Jesuits see pp: ‘Indian recruits were ‘disabled soldiers, impoverished merchants, etc.’—p.34, Problem with in the society—p.39, Nobili cast…. Into paganism’—40-41,51, 55-56,67, 76; 78;80,97, 129, 148-9;150, 170, 174, 189, 196, 197-98,235

[2] See notes 9

[3] ‘…Referring to personal communications from Nobili and Vico, [Pero] Francisco related the linguistic and genealogical contortions which the Fathers used in order to attract converts.  “The fathers found in the books of these people that the Brahmans are also called papus or papas” and therefore proclaimed themselves “of the caste of papas and their relatives”.[Francisco, P. to Aquaviva, C., Cochin, 4 November, 1612 (Port), ARSI [Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Rome (Jesui Archives)], Goa 51, ff. 181-2]  As a good logician, Francisco, not without irony, conceded that “the minor, so far as the two Fathers are concerned, may be affirmed because according to what I have heard, both are relatives of Popes.” (ibid. his was only the first of the two genealogies Francisco mockingly claimed not to have understood because of their obscurity.  Vico and Nobili, however, did not invent the second one.

(…) Brahmans come from Abraham and are their descendants according to the flesh, whilst we are his descendants according to the spirit, and also because the kingdom of Abraham extends to the Indians through Jesus (p.70) Christ, it is perpetuated in the Pope of Rome and also in the Bishops and priests. (ibid.)

There is little doubt that Vico and Nobili were less than eager to identify the notorious Guillaume Postel as the most vocal mouthpiece of this Judeo-Hindu analogy.⁷⁵—pp.70-71

75 Marco Polo called Brahmins—Abraiman.  By the beginning of the 17^th century, identifying Brahmans as the descendants of Abraham was quite common.  Guillaume Postel, an eccentric and prolific French savant from the middle of the 16^th century, disseminated this etymology in his many books.  He joined the Society of Jesus with great pomp in 1544, only to be expelled a year later…–p.71

75

 

[4]  ‘With the publication of the missionary letters, the process of intertextualization went even further.  The first collections of these documents—Annuae litterae—comprising letters from 1581-1654, appeared in print in 36 volumes between 1583 and 1658.  Concerning the missionary field in New France, 41 volumes of letters were printed in Paris between 1632 and 1672.  Letters edifiantes et curieuses, (p.11) a French compilation of letters, selected on the basis of their ‘curiousness’ and moral and religious examples, was published in Paris in 34 volumes between 1703 and 1776 and saw numerous republications in full or abridged versions up to the middle of the nineteenth century.  This particular version was then translated into English, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish, etc. with further alterations and braided with additions from other travellers and different editorial opinions.’—pp.11-12

[5]  ‘For example, one of the early Latin collections, Epistolae Indicae de stupendos et praecaris rebus, translated by Ioannes Rutilius Somberius, was denounced by Jeronimo Nadal as completely inadequate (p.12)…. In one of the letters by Alfonso Salmeron, it appears that Nadal ordered that some of the letters be corrected in Libon, their first stop in Europe, before being sent to Rome.(Salmeron to Nada, 28 September, 1561, in Epistolae P. Hieronimi Nadal Societatis Iesu ab anno 1546 ad 1577, Madrid, 1898, vol.1, p. 529)

               …Already in 1705 (February 2), an article in the Journal des savants criticized Le Gobien’s editorial policy of improving  the style of the letters to the point where their veracity was dubious.  Later editors took even more liberty with the texts.  One can imagine what happened with further translations of the Letters edifiantes et curieuses into other European languages, and the publications after 1776, when, instead of Jesuit editorial authority, anybody was able to abridge and refurbish these letters according to his own taste.  After the reconstitution of the Society of Jesus in 1813, new Jesuit collections of unpublished letters appeared. (pp.12-13)

[6] ‘The first printed biography of Ignatius of Loyola was written by Pedro Ribadeneyra, S.J., Vita Ignatii Loiolae, Societatis Iesu fundatoris, Naples, 1572.  The manuscript was completed three years before Loyola’s death (d.1556).’—notes, no. 41, p. 14

[7] ‘Sanctus Franciscus Borgia quartus Gandiae Dux et Societatis Jesu Praepositus Generalis tertius, Madrid, 1894, vol.2, pp. 738-9’.—notes no 42, p. 14

[8] Valignano, Alessandro, S.I., [S.J.,?] Historia del principio y progresso de la Compania de Jesus en las Indias Orientales (1542-64), (ed. By Wicki, J., S.J.), Rome, 1944, pp. 33-4’—notes no. 43, p. 14

 

[9] ‘A direct, clear and literal language, being itself a form of Jesuit active asceticism and obedience, was expected from a correspondent…. (p.6) epistolary topics prescribed by Ignatius of Loyola: ‘for the goal that we are aiming at: the service and glory of God, the common good and assistance to the Company, for the same goal especially in Portugal, in the Indias and Brazil you should turn your reflection and your efforts towards four points: the kings and the nobles, the common people, the Company and yourself.  Information on these four topics was, henceforth, made central to the Jesuit missionary correspondence’. [italics original]—pp. 6-7

[10] …The epistolary system that Loyola sketched out in his letter to Pierre Favre was put into practice and further elaborated and centralized by Juan Polanco.  The regulations that Polanco efficiently introduced into his office were based on secretarial and censorial impulses.  He prescribed the appropriate writing styles and textual organization closely following Loyola’s prescription.  The letters were supposed to ‘edify’ and ‘animate’ their readers and were framed as didactic, polemical, theatrical, ethnographic and often utopian (p.10) texts. [Monumenta Ignatiana, Epistolae et instructiones, Matriti, 1903-11, vol.i, p. 539.]  Further more, the edifying content was to be separated from the ‘hijuela’, an appendix in which one could write ‘that which is not to be shown, sometimes edifying, sometimes not, such as personal defects and those of others, and some other things, but not for everybody’ (ibid., vol.1, p. 547).  Juridical, controversial and confessional topics enlivened these ‘internal’ messages.—pp. 10-11

[11] ‘The source of the unstable and contested ethnographic descriptions and interpretations found in Nobili’s, Fernandes’s and many other missionary letters should not be attributed uniquely to their rhetorical failures or manipulations, but also to the  vicissitudes of political, cultural, religious and economic circumstances in early seventeenth-century Tamil Nadu’.(p.16)

[12]  ‘However, while the best aspects of Jesuit historical writing can be found in painstaking documentary scholarship. The monographs and histories tend to be apologetic and partisan, at times, to the point of silencing or downright suppressing contrary evidence or embarrassing details in the lives of their chosen Jesuit subjects.’—p.31

 

[13]  ‘…my intention is to propose a more heterological approach in which texts and actions serve as a medium for understanding interactions between various European and Indian actors and their cultural, social and epistemic consequences.’ (p.32)

 

[14]  ‘Biographeme in Roland Bathe’s sense of biographcal fragment rather than full biography.’—notes 87, p. 192

 

[15]    For example, Ines says

Appended at the end of Vico’s story about Amator’s illness is a paragraph which served as another signal of turbulent family relations, partly provoked and partly accelerated and enhanced by Amator’s conversion to Christianity.  When his mother-in-law died without a male progeny, Amator and his sons were designated to perform her funeral rites.  Vico’s insistence that Amator refused to comply in order to avoid performing ‘superstitious’ ceremonies might not have been the whole truth, since he could have easily performed them in a ‘Christian manner’.—notes no. 78, p.223 (italics added)

This is a common fact.  I have observed in several converts life that in spite of the lists of ‘dos and don’t dos’ given by their missionaries, often the new converts perform several such rituals, as they have to survive among their family and community.  When the truth came to the knowledge of the missionary, whatever may be his/her personal reaction, often explained in a different way or totally ignored in their mission report.

[16]  ‘One of sixty-three Tamil Saiva saints or Naayanaars.  See Hudson, D. Dennis, “Violent and Fanatical Devotion Among the Naayanaars: A Study in the Periya Pram of Ceekkilaar, in Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees, Ed. Hiltebeitel, A., New York, 1989, pp. 373-404.’—notes no 91, p.227

 

[17] ‘Tinnan a hunter when worshipped Sivalinga by offering leaves, flesh and water brought by his mouth and cleaning the lingam by his leg with shoes in it.  On seeing this when the priest felt hurt, in order to reveal the love of Tinnan God caused blood to trickle down from his right eye.  On seeing this Tinnan immediately removed his one eye and applied on the bleeding eye of the Lord.  To further prove his love God caused another eye also to bleed.  Without any hesitation, Tinnan was about to remove his another eye.  But once removed his another eye as he would become blind, he put his leg with shoes on the left eye of the lingam which is bleeding to make sure that he will fix his another eye properly and attempted to scoop out his another eye.  That time God appeared before him and asked him to stop and proved his love and devotion to the Brahmin priest and from that time Tinnan was called Kannappar, as he didn’t hesitate to sacrifice his “Kan” (eye) for his God.’— Pope,G.U., Tiruvaacagam, Oxford, 1900, reprinted by Madras University, 1979, third edition, pp. 141-145

 

[18] Thus:

The thin line between the real and appearance, between the event and the spectacle have often been transgressed, or rather confounded, in missionary actions and representations.  Theatrical effects used in their correspondence … found its natural expression in theatre.  By the end of the 16^th and especially during the 17^th century, Jesuit colleges staged theatre (p. 193) performances for lay audiences all over Catholic Europe.  The scenes of martyrdom of the early Japanese Christians were shown to the Viennese audience in 1614 … many more followed.  What started as an event, spatially and temporally singular, turned into repeatable spectacles and, by closing the circle—event (action)—text (letter)—event (theatre performance)–, reality became appearance in order to become reality.—p. 193-94

[19] ‘Utopia is a written genre and more often than not a literary genre.  Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) coined the term.  See Ricoeur, P., Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (ed. George H. Taylor), New York, 1986, p. 269)’

 

[20] ‘The will to create ex nihilo, to invent new origins through sudden religious rupture—geared to imprint durable effects on social action, while simultaneously documenting the whole process in the texts—was the foundation of the Jesuit utopian praxix.  The effective proselytizing process started, nevertheless, only when the will to change, to convert, to forget and to learn began fuelling the actions and the imagination of the Jesuit neophytes.  Tamil participation was crucial in Nobili’s utopian experiments’.(p.218)

 

[21] ‘Alexio is his Portuguese name.  In Italian letters, he is sometimes referred to as Alessio.  In the document ‘Artigos que se haao de preguntar’, he signed his name in Tamil—Alecu.  ARSI, Goa 51,ff.39-50; 51-62; 63-73’.—notes 94, p. 228

 

[22] ‘Structured by enumeration, Fernandes’s descriptions always looked as if they were shaved at the edges or could be extended beyond the scope of the text. (p.135)….Unable to ground his authority in the European theological arguments, Fernandes tried to parry Nobili with his knowledge of Hindu texts and practices.(pp.135-6)

 

[23] ‘…For Jesuit missionaries, an act of writing was a thaumaturgical experience, an exorcism and expurgation of unbearable otherness which progressively invaded and possessed their interiors and exteriors.  Who possessed, dominated, converted whom is uncertain, as Nobili’s case clearly showed.  If only interior intention and determination validates the exterior trappings, everything is possible in the best of all worlds.  Thus the Jesuit missionaries in Madurai assumed an unapologetically fluid identity which, coincidentally, fits well perhaps in the decentred, post-industrial cultural idiom of the 20^th century fin de siecle.  In the pre-modern Counter-Reformation context, however, Jesuit missionary strategies were at permanent risk of institutional slippages with formidable consequences.’—p. 241

[24]          The influence of this ‘Brahminical’ knowledge as ‘the’ normative for any understanding about social and cultural conceptions of Indian continued even after the Jesuit’s time:

It was only with the establishment of British colonial institutions that the Jesuit ‘nomadic’ knowledge of India—circulating in letters and moving from one learned treatise to another—became sedentarized through scientific procedures, legal administration and policing.  And even when British ‘scientific’ theories and methods threatened to undermine early Jesuit social intuitions and cultural conceptions, the learned ‘nobles’, first the Brahmans than other local literati, were there again to translate, advise and interpret for those who were eager or curious enough to know the ‘facts’.—p. 247

[25] ‘He [Pero] was appointed provincial of the Mlaa Porvicne in 1611 by Nicolau Pimenta’.—notes 69, p.69

[26] ‘By cutting and pasting together selected quotations from Aquaviva’s letter and then commenting on each point, Nobili came to his own conclusions as to the “true” intentions and prescription of the Father General…’ (p.72) […] ‘The tone and position assumed by Vico in his {Aquaviva’s} letter was that of a theological arbitrator.  By employing a dispassionate idiom, Vico tried to maintain two positions simultaneously: that of an “objective” Vico-cum-theologian passing judgement on the Vico (and Nobili)-cum-missionary, while at the same grafting this onto Aquaviva’s letter, which appeared to have be written as a theological opinion parceled out into points.  Ostensibly, the purpose behind these “pointed” letters was to minimize diverging interpretations.  However, the written word from the superiors in Rome turned out to be quite elusive and opaque once it had reached the distant missions, and vice versa.  Hence, Bico’s exegesis of Aquaviva’s letter is diametrically opposed to that of Francisco.  The difference comes out in the procedure of decipherment.  While Francisco waded through Aquaviva’s text in search of theological directions, apostolic orders and political advice, Vico sought the Father General’s deeper “desires” and implicit or implied opinions.  He found them, of course.’—pp.72-73

 

[27] ‘Aquavva’s letter, which Francisco and Nobili interpreted in quite different ways, did not consist of explicit orders and left enough space for contradictory “translations”.  Francisco wrote his orders making sure that all murky connotations were trimmed from their contents, at least those which might be open to multiple interpretations by the readers/actors who were to obey them’.—p.80

 

[28] ‘Francisco Ros was Catalan.  Portuguese authorities, and probably some Portuguese missionaries, looked on Spanish Jesuits with suspicion.’—notes, 39, p. 58.  And he, ‘might have faced problems somewhat similar to Nobili’s while working among the Syrian Christians in Kerala, also called St Thomas Christians, supported the opinion that “the thread (a linha) was not the emblem (sinal) of a religious sect (ceita) but of the caste”.—p.58

 

[29] ‘When Francisco Ros wrote to Aquaviva that, “the Madurai mission which is in my diocese is truly a supernatural work, very hard, and altogether worth of perfect religious and true sons of the Society”, [Ros, F. to Aquaviva, C., Cranganore, 4 July, 1613 (or 7 July, 1613) (Port), ARSI, Goa 51, ff. 195-9.] his message between the lines was that human agencies had no right to judge it.  In the light of (p.76) mounting controversy, it was one of the rhetorically strongest arguments, even if invalid, in the medical sense of the word, that is, amputated from a verifiable frame’.—pp.76-7

 

[30]  Franccisco, P., to Nobili, R. and Vico, A. ‘Ordem que se deve guardar na noua Residenca de Madure, 11 Aug. 1613, ARSI, Goa 51, ff. 191-2.—notes 922, p.77

 

[31] Shulman, David, ‘the Enemy Within: Idealism and Dissent in South Indian Hinduism’, in Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy and Dissent in India, Mouton Publishers, Berlin, 1984, p.25—notes no. 86, p. 74

 

[32] ‘On 18 August, 1610, Alberto Laerzio and Andrea Buccerio, both Italian Jesuits, arrived in Madurai, probably in order to help Nobili prepare the defense of his controversial method of conversions’.—p.86

 

[33]  Nobili’s conversion method involved in separating ‘religions’ from ‘political/social’ within Hindu ‘pagan’ structure.(p.99):

… In his work Narratio Fundamentorum, he proved by twelve arguments: 1) that the so-called ‘sacred’ thread and a tuft of hair, kudumi, were purely political/social signs; 2) that when an act had two ends; namely secular and superstitious, a Christian may do it for a legitimate reason since many similar customs were adopted by the Church (proved in six arguments); and 3) that even purely superstitious rites had been converted to Christian use by the church (illustrated by eight examples).  One type of proof consisted in accepted precedence, such as Pope Gregory’s instruction to Augustine, the Bishop of England not to destroy ‘pagan’ temples, but ‘that these should be sprinkled with holy water, altars built and holy relics placed in them’.  Others were a combination of rather abstract theological and ecclesiastical principles.  In his secundum fundamentum, Nobili claimed that ‘the Church never prohibited the diverse customs and practices observed by different nations’ and in quartum he derived the authorization for his enterprise from the fact ‘that the Sovereign Pontiff has the universal power to change any superstitious rites and customs into rites and customs of the true religion’.—pp.99

 

[34] ARSI, Goa 51,ff.125-44. See Dahmen, P., S.J., ed., Robert de Nobili, L’Apotre des Brahmes, Paris, 1931—notes, no. 119, p. 87

 

[35] ‘Part of the reason why Jesuit missionaries extracted contradictory information from their Hindu informants was their questions.  For example, when Nobili insisted on finding a textual corroboration that certain Hindu signs and practices belonged to the “political” and not the “religious” sphere, his question from the Hindu point of view was (p.89) illogical and irrelevant.  The division between the political and the religious was a dichotomy produced within the confines of European cultural experiences.  For Nobili, the dichotomy was a crucial explanatory handle’.—pp.89-90

 

[36] ‘See Verkamp, B.J., The Indifferent Mean: Adiaphorism and the English Reformation to 1554, Ohio University Press, 1971.’—notes no 127, p.90

 

[37] And,

            The Bull issued by Poep Gregory XV, Romanae Sedis Antistes (31 January, 1623), gave provisional approval to Nobili’s method ‘until the matter can be resolved and forever established.’  The Holy See permitted the usage of indigenous ‘signs of nobility’, such as the thread, kudumi (a tuft of hair), and sandal paste ‘provided that (…) all superstition and all alleged causes for scandal’ were removed.  Nobili’s definition of Tamil culture and religion won, at least for the time being.—p.97

[38] ‘In the Solution of the problem as to whether (p.95) the Brahmans of the East Indies should be allowed the string, the tuft of hair, and other ceremonies which they used before their conversion, signed by seven Portuguese ecclesiastical authorities…’(italics original)—pp.95-96

 

[39] ‘…Sankara was often accused of being a crypto-Buddhist because of his doctrine of illusion (Tantraavarttika of Kumaarila Bhatta; Yaajnavalkyasmrti), and this may be the basis of the myth taught by Madhva.(p.209)’ and ‘…The Maadhava’s identification of Sankara as a demon is particularly harsh in light of the fact that the Maadhvas, alone among Hindu philosophers, believe that the demons and heretics are doomed to eternal damnation in hell…. Sankara is said to be the bastard son of a widow; similarly, the Maadhvas satirize Sankara’s famous monistic philosophy by stating that as a boy he was so stupid that he could only count to one. (Grierson, G.A. “Maadhvas.” ERE [Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. Ed. James Hastings. 13 vols. Edinburgh, 1908-26]8:232-235, p. 235)—Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology, University of California Press, Berkeley, (1976) 1980, pp. 209-10

 

[40]  ‘Obedience, as a normative imperative, was built into the very foundations of the Society of Jesus precisely because the technologies of enforcing it were, paradoxically, and at the same time, breeding both dissent and disobedience.  Briefly, from the very start of the Society of Jesus, the issue of obedience was more talked about than practised and the controversies raging within the Society and without were based on a proliferation of disobedience.  The term itself was ideologically overdetermined in such a way that it became juridically vague and ambiguous.  Literally anybody could have been charged with disobedience and probably every single Jesuit at one time or another had to face a similar accusation.’ (p.51)

[41]  ‘Although the controversy, mostly epistolary, between Nobili and Fernandes was about “truth”—such as the nature of Hindu customs and ceremonies, or the correct apostolic missionary approach to Asian civilizations-,the means employed by both parties closely resemble judiciary procedure, obsessed less with reason than with winning the case.  The syntax of the arguments used follows a traditional rhetoric of both judicial and deliberative oratory: accusation, proof (witness, evidence, possibilities), refutations, conclusions.  In the absence of strictly defined laws, and considering the fact that the “jury” and the “judges” were often thousands of miles away, controversies of this kind were kept alive even when their initiators had long since passed away.’(p.44)

 

[42] pp: 44, 46, .52, 57, 59, 66,68-69, 91,94,95, 210-11, 243

 

[43] ‘Besides being an aristocrat, Nobili was Italian.  His nationality situated him immediately in two intertwined and ongoing controversies.  The first involved the antagonism between the Jesuits of different nationalities, in particular between the Portuguese and Italians.  The second, with much larger political ramifications, was the conflict between the Holy See and the Portuguese padroado (patronage).  At the heart of the conflict was the inability of the Portuguese (and Spanish) crown to administer efficiently its overseas missionary enterprises, and Rome’s effort to reclaim for itself the jurisdiction over distant missions.  This controversy, however, is a symptom of an even more important struggle between the Papacy and the rising nation-state’.—p.114

 

[44] ‘Parangui is a generic, xenophobic term for a European. In its many regional phonetic, semantic, and spelling variants (Frangui, Farangui, Firinghee, Ifranji. Parangi, Prangue, etc.), it was used throughout Asia and the Middle East from the medieval period (designating Franks, “European Christians”, crusaders, etc.) until today….—notes, 14, p.5

[45]  ‘When he [Nobili] proclaimed n the ole (Oolai) or palm-leaf strip, attached to the tree in front of his church in 1609: “I came from Rome; my family in Rome (p.113) corresponds to that of good Rajas in this land.  When I was young I became a sannyaasi and a man of religion”, he was on the right track, emulating a possible choice of behaviour as a member of the warrior community’. –pp. 113-4–[Oolai (Tamil) is a palm leaf used for writing. Vico, A. to Laerzio, A, 27 May, 1611, in Laerzio, A. to Aquaviva, C., Cochin It.), 25 November, 1611, ARSI, Goa 54a,  93-129]—notes no. 26, p.114

 

[46] Fr. A Sauliere S.J., Revised and Re-edited by Fr S Rajamanickam S.J., ,His Star in the East

[47] ‘O King, no Brahmin ever sold the Vedas, and none of them ever read them aloud before a Shudra’.–M.N.Dutt, (tr.), Mahabharata, Parimal Publications. Delhi, 1988,. Adi parva, Ch. Lxiv, verse 20, p. 88

[48]          About this Ponkal Ines says:

Besides ‘serious’ miracle scenes, Nobili presented with a patronizing smile two miracles which occurred during the local ceremony of poÎóãkal.  Embedded furtively in the preliminary description of the festival is Nobili’s adaptationsit method:

At the beginning of each year the gentiles are wont to celebrate a very solemn festival (pongal), offering the new rice to the gods.  It consists in cooking before an idol with great ceremony the rice mixed with milk.  According to them, it is a disgrace not to celebrate that festival.  I allow our Christians to cook the rice and boil the milk at the foot of a cross which they plant for that (p.167) purpose, and, to their great satisfaction, I myself bless the new rice which is to be used in that ceremony and then distributed it among them. {Nobili, R. to Laerzio, A., Madurai, 15 January, 1609, in Laerzio, A. to Aquaviva, C., Cochin (It.), 20 November, 1609, ARSI, Goa 54a, ff.17-75.}

This passage is divided into two parts: the non-Christian and the ‘Christian’ one.  The dividing line cuts through the obscure land of disgrace, loss of honour, through the wastelands of the social landscape.  At this point, a reader can tell that Nobili had only two choices, equally unbecoming, either to fall into ‘paganism’, or to walk on the edge of the Tamil social system.  The third choice, itself a product of Nobili’s Jesuit alchemy, of turning a ‘pagan’ ceremony into a Christian ceremony, appears immediately as the only viable solution.  Nobili’s gesture in practice and in language of allowing, blessing and distributing, stole the sacred from the Hindu gods and captured it for Christianity.  The adaptation of this ceremony was facilitated by the fact that is it a paÎþãÔþáikai, a  household festival, which is not officiated by any local religious specialist, unlike for example, tiruviÌüça, a temple festival which would have been impossible to translate into Christianity, not because of its ritual content but because it was the ‘property’ of the temple priests.  Another adaptable trait of poÎóãkal is that it is a cooking and eating ceremony, which in semiotic terms means that the referent can be left intact, since the action of eating is culturally universal, and only the signifier brings the weight of change to the signified, from the label ‘Hinduism’ to the label ‘Christianity’.⁴³

43 In a process of more complicated cultural adaptation, at times, the referent also had to be changed or invented. (pp.167-8)

 

[49] ‘…While Nobili counted on divine help for his survival and for the cultivation of the young Christian “vineyard” in Madurai, he also needed to suffer and (hopefully) die as a martyr for his ultimate saintly ascension.  He had to defect from his body in order to return as a saintly memory.

With his help I renounced and confess that I do not want any consolation and rest in this world; instead of that (I want) the good Jesus to make me share at least a tiny part of his holy cross, because then I shall begin to be his true disciple and I will have some hope of sharing his glory after having been made orthy to suffer for his sake’. (Nobili, R. to Sforza Boncompagni, C., Madurai, 3 Dec. 1607, Fondo Boncompagni E6, Biblioteca Vaticana; in AHSI [Archivum Historicum Societatis esu, Rome (journal)], 37, 1968)

 (p.202)

 

[50] ‘The failure of Nobili’s Tamil prose was, nevertheless, compensated by his well thought out and exemplary pose.  He continued to maintain his Brahman sannyÁõsi persona through vegetarian diet, appropriate dress code and by following a strict grammar of gestures at all times and on all occasions.  His striving for an authentic Indian body Christian was a total project of cultural translation or, in contemporary Jesuit terminology, inculturation’.—p. 246

 

[51] ‘Testimonio by Bonifacio Xastri, Cranganore, College of the Society of Jesus, 15 December, 1617, Cosigned by Francisco Ros, the Archbishop of Cranganore.  ARSI, Goa 51, ff. 261-5’.—notes 93, p. 228