Abstract
The Indian counterpart of ‘orientalism’ should be ‘Indology’, the roots of which can be traced to the mid-eighteenth century but which became full-blown by the middle of the nineteenth century. Its main historical impact lay in the genesis of evolving a historical framework based on race, language and culture. It was racist throughout, and still is. 1 In the context of ‘Catholic Orientalism’ of the present monograph, there can be an initial problem. The concept of race and racism might have begun in the eighteenth century but it became powerful and all-encompassing only in the succeeding century. ‘Catholic Orientalism’ is unlikely to have been framed by race and racism; however, many of the Portuguese pirates ravaged the Indian coasts. The authors do not raise the issue of race at all, which, however, I do not find surprising because the Third World experts of various sorts in the Western institutions and their Third World peripheries carefully keep ‘race’ away from their discussions on ‘Orientalism’ or on ‘Indology’.
What was the driving force of Catholic Orientalism then? Imperial interests and the urge to convert the natives into the Christian fold? One need not be shamefaced at all about the second aspect. As late as 1867, the first professor of Sanskrit in Cambridge was hoping that India under the British rule would share the blessings of Western civilisation and Christianity. In fact, that was the universal attitude of the Western scholars at that time and also in the later periods. In 1922, in the first volume of Cambridge History of India, I, Ancient India, E.J. Rapson—another Cambridge University Sanskritist—wrote that the human energy with which Indian civilisations were created ‘had invariably come into India from the outside’.
Although ‘Western civilisation’ and ‘Christianity’ do not overtly figure in the Western Indological discourses on India in modern times, that has been replaced by an emphatic and arrogant urge to retain power at all costs in clinging to most of the old ideas regarding the Indian past. 2 Behind the discussion of the universality of knowledge, the division between the current crop of Western Indologists/Orientalists and self-respecting Indian professionals in the concerned subjects is so high that it is very doubtful if there will be a common ground anywhere.
Two Portuguese Orientalists are mentioned in Chapter 1: Joao de Barros (1496–1570), an official in Lisbon who had access to the information coming in from the Indian empire, and Joao de Castro (1500–48) who actually served in India. Barros wrote Decadas da Asia in four volumes where ‘the descriptions of the local customs were placed frequently in specific chapters concerning geographical, political and cultural aspects’ (p. 21). Castro was more of a scientist than an official. His Roteiros or ‘itineraries’ ‘helped synthesize the accumulated knowledge’ with which ‘Castro staged his debate with classical science, mainly the knowledge enshrined in the Ptolemy’s Geographia’ (p. 23). It is interesting to note that according to Castro ‘the Portuguese and their kingdom were the true successors of the Greeks and Romans’ and that both Castro and Barros were ‘inspired by Italian and Erasmian humanism’ (pp. 30–31). It is also interesting that Castro counted collection of Indian antiquities among his hobbies and that he used superlatives while describing Elephanta. Two more authors of the same period are important, Duarte Barbosa and Tomé Pires whose significance is both historical and geographical (and in many cases ethnographical). Both insisted on the truthfulness of their accounts, citing the sources of their information. This was also the period when one gets Portuguese accounts of the kingdom of Vijayanagara.
Chapter 2 is titled the ‘empire and the village’ and focuses mainly on mapping the resources of the empire with enviable thoroughness, predating the much later surveys of this type by Francis Buchanan in Mysore and some east Indian districts. For instance, for palm orchards, they recorded the size and the number of trees that could be planted, that existed already or existed before, the exact position in the field, and the neighbouring lands. Then, they listed the ownership, the value of the land, and the revenue paid or to be paid. (p. 65)
The authors further point out (p. 67) that these documents confirm that in the sixteenth-century Goa, the temples, divinities, and their servants enjoyed and profited from the most productive lands such as palm orchards of all sizes, paddy fields of one or two rabi crops (vanganas), areca nut plantations, mango and tamarind orchards, gardens, salty estuaries, waste land, sea shore, salty forests.
Chapter 3 deals with ‘Natural History, Physicians, Merchants and Missionaries’. The diverse natural world of their possessions and their potential either as agricultural products or as medicine to combat diseases were actively investigated and mapped out, creating a kind of base for the subsequent Western investigations of the Indian plant and animal world.
Chapter 4 is titled ‘Religion and Civility in “Brahmanism”, Jesuit Experiments’ and discusses the methods of acquiring knowledge about the local religions and paving ground for the spread of Christianity. Temples were described, but destroyed as well. Pagan books were not ignored and offered help in exposing idolatrous falsehoods. Chapter 5 deals with the activities of the Franciscan monks who were also operatives in the Portuguese territories along with the Jesuits. The printing press was introduced in Goa in 1556 and there was some active encouragement of the local language Konkani. Again, the model was accepted much later by William Carey who started the Bengali printing press for the easy dissemination of religious tracts. I find one aspect of the authors’ observation regarding the theological understanding of the Franciscan monks individually interesting and important: ‘In the question of theology, the Franciscan concluded that in spite of the fact that local religions were organized around a series of divinities, they were basically monotheist.’ Thus the Trimurti, the equivalent to the Holy Trinity, was composed of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva, ‘kings and rulers of the world’, who received their own power from the supreme/divinity…who was ‘the supreme unique God, spiritual, immense, eternal, immortal’. In view of the modern Western Indologists’ recurring emphasis on the non-existence of Hinduism before the British/Europeans came and began to call us Hindus, the foregoing theological understanding of the Franciscans is an important point.
Chapter 6 deals with the Portuguese study of the local languages and its consequences including ‘translation and conversion’. Chapter 7 (‘Orientalists from Within, Indian Genealogists, Philologists and Historians’) finds space for Indians who collaborated with the Portuguese and helped them find feet in Indian matters. This is rather equivalent to trying to find ‘pundits’ in some recent Anglo-American Orientalist literature. The final two chapters (7 and 8) discuss the final phase of ‘Catholic Orientalism’ with reference to its aftermath.
This is a very learned, well-researched volume and will be of great service as an introduction to the Portuguese sources on India during the intervening period of the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries.