Ines G. Županov

Disputed mission : Jesuit experiments and Brahmanical knowledge in seventeenth-century India

This text aims to take a fresh look at the social and cultural laboratories that were Jesuit missions in pre-colonial South India. Without Portuguese military support, which was confined to Goa and other trade enclaves, the missionaries in the heart of Tamil country found themselves both trapped under the jurisdiction of the local kings, and at the same time free from the increasingly impoverished and ossified Portuguese ecclesiastical authority in Goa. Confronted with social and cultural idioms which appeared to them as both strange familiar, Jesuit missionaries embarked on a titanic, utopian, somewhat naive and slippery project of cultural translation, social engineering and ethnographic description. Before they could effectively convert and establish spiritual authority over souls and bodies, the Jesuits had to ascertain that they possessed the right knowledge of Indian culture.

Quest for Permanence in the Tropics: Portuguese Bioprospecting in Asia (16th-18th Centuries)

The history of agricultural, botanical, pharmacological, and medical exchanges is one of the most fascinating chapters in early modern natural history. Until recently, however, historiography has been dominated by the British experience from the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, with Kew Gardens at the center of the “green imperialism.” In this article we address the hard-won knowledge acquired by those who participated in early modern Portuguese imperial bioprospecting in Asia. The Portuguese were the first to transplant important economic plants from one continent to another, on their imposing colonial chessboard. In spite of this, the history of Portuguese bioprospecting is still fragmentary, especially with respect to India and the Indian Ocean. We argue not only that the Portuguese—imperial officials, missionaries, and the people connected with them, all living and working under the banner of the Portuguese empire—were interested in gathering knowledge but also that the results of their endeavors were relevant for the development of natural history in the early modern period and that they were important actors within the larger community of naturalists.

Passage to India: Jesuit Spiritual Economy between Martyrdom and Profit in the Seventeenth Century 1

Abstract Historians today seem to agree that passions for spices and for acquisition of objects and territories from the late fifteenth century fuelled the “mercantile revolution” on a global scale. This article will argue that spirituality and commercial enterprise worked together to produce material objects, some of exceptional artistry. These artifacts, books, sculptures, paintings, and the attractive narratives written about or around them sparked spiritual enthusiasm wherever they reached their audience and became fundraising tools for further spiritual conquest and for creation of new material objects. In this case, I will trace the career of one particular Jesuit missionary, Marcello Mastrilli, who invented his own life and future martyrdom with a series of printed books and works of art, all marked by Mastrilli’s spiritual energy and his ability to fill the Jesuit purse.

Introduction: Cultural Dialogue in South Asia and Beyond: Narratives, Images and Community (sixteenth-nineteenth centuries)

Most of the essays in this volume were first presented as papers at a twoday conference held in Paris in 2009 at the Centre d’Etudes de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (CNRS/EHESS).1 Our aim in organizing the conference and publishing the present collection with substantially revised contributions was to provide a space for dialogue between scholars working on dialogic forms of cultural mediation in the early modern and modern world. We were interested in particular in confronting research in the history of South Asia with that on other areas in order to identify comparable locally important, yet often invisible, histories against the looming global context of trade, communication networks, imperial claims and developing political formations. Since from the sixteenth century, face to face cultural encounters, premised on perceived and assumed difference, became an inescapable part of social landscape and for some—such as interpreters, merchants, travelers, missionaries, etc.—a special field of expertise, they also defined and shaped textual and visual sources as well as rituals and practices.

“I Am a Great Sinner”: Jesuit Missionary Dialogues in Southern India (Sixteenth Century)

Abstract In this article I look into a Jesuit dialogical and catechetical text—a confession manual—published in Tamil in 1580. Written as instructions for Tamil Catholics and for Jesuit confessors, these kinds of texts were nodal points in which Tamils and missionaries reprocessed their knowledge of each other and established rules for appropriate social interaction and Catholic sociability. My claim is that the Confessionairo captured and condensed Tamil voices and arguments in a network of Jesuit normative vocabulary and offered a language of self-knowledge expressed in affective vocabulary. A confession manual should not be considered only a strategy for missionary manipulation but also an important tool for the social self-empowerment of the new convert.