Lust, Marriage and Free Will: Jesuit Critique of Paganism in South India (Seventeenth Century)

Studies in History

Volumn 16, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 199-220

  Županov, Ines G ^a  

^a CNRS   (France)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61049370840     PISSN: 02576430     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/025764300001600202     Document Type: Article

References (98)

1. John Correia-Afonso, Jesuit Letters and Indian History, Bombay, 1955.
2. See also Ines G. Županov, Disputed Mission, Jesuits Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in 17th Century India, Delhi, 1999.
3. Among the growing literature on Jesuit scientific missions and achievements, see Luce Giard, ed., Les jêsuites à la Renaissance: Système éducatif et production du savoir, Paris, 1995;
4. and John O'Malley, Gauvin A. Bailey, Steven J. Harris and T. Frank Kennedy, eds, The Jesuits-Cultures, Sciences and the Arts, 1540–1773, Toronto, 1999.
5. Sylvia Murr, L'Inde philosophique entre Bossuet et Voltaire, l'indologie du Père Coeurdoux: stratêgies, apologétique et scientificité, 2 Vols, Paris, 1987.
6. On the first seven founding fathers of the Society of Jesus and their conception of ‘mobile’ apostolate, see John W. O'Malley, The First Jesuits, Harvard, 1993.
7. On the displacement of the frames of reference from religion to ethics see Michel de Certeau's still unsurpassed statement in the chapter ‘The formality of practices: From religious systems to the ethics of Enlightenment (the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), in John W. O'Malley, The Writing of History, Paris, 1975, New York, 1988, p. 205.
8. For controversies raging over Latin American ‘Indians’ see Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, Cambridge, 1982.
9. Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (translation), Minneapolis, 1986, p. 68.
10. ‘Le libre arbitre’ (integral translation into French of the Diatribè sive Collatio de libero arbitrio), Erasme, Calude Blum André Godin, Jean-Claude Margolin and Daniel Ménager, eds, Paris, 1992, p. 763.
11. Deviod of morality, non-Christians were likened to a variety of inferior creatures, from childlike imbeciles to brutish beasts. It is important to note that this newly ‘freed’ human subjectivity was in fact increasingly seen as entrapped and enchained within a new golden cage of societal norms, rules and customs. See for example, John Martin, ‘Inventing sincerity, refashioning prudence: The discovery of the individual in Renaissance Europe’, The American
12. Historical Review, Vol. 102: 5, 1997, pp. 1309–42.
13. For a seminal work on the difficulties and solutions concerning the conceptualization of the status of American Indians in the sixteenth century, see Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man.
14. The rehabilitation of the subaltern (gendered, tribal, local, indigenous, etc.) agency silenced by colonial historiography was at the heart of the project professed by the ‘Subaltern Studies’ group of scholars and writers. For the recent critical discussion on epistemic results and inherent problems in this most prominent fin de siècle historiographical school in India, see Sumit Sarkar's recent essay, ‘Post-modernism and the writing of history’, Studies in History, Vol. XV: 2, 1999, pp. 293–322;
15. and the chapter, ‘The decline of the subaltern in Subaltern Studies’, in his Writing Social History, Delhi, 1998, pp. 82–108.
16. S.J. Ioseph Wicki, Documenta, Indica, Rome, 1975, Vol. XIII, p. 638. (Fenicio was born in 1558, entered the Society of Jesus in 1580 and went to India in 1583. He died in Cochin in 1632) Separate from the official provincial catalogue providing information on Jesuit personnel, another confidential catalogue was attached by the Provincial, Alessandro Valignano. These ‘secret’ evaluations were a common and accepted practice among the Jesuits.
17. Of all the versions of his name—Giacomo, Jacopo, Jacome, and Jácome; Fenicio, Fenizio, Phinicio—quite arbitrarily I have decided to use henceforth Jacome Fenicio: Wicki, Documenta Indica, Vol. XIII, p. 739.
18. For the history of the authorship attribution and the abridged published version of the text, see Jarl Charpentier, ed., The Livro da Seita dos Indios Orientais [Brit. Museum Ms. Sloane 1820] of Father Jacobo Fenicio, S.J, Uppsala, 1933 (henceforth Fenicio).
19. Manuel de Faria y Sousa, Asia Portuguesa, Lisbon, 1666–75, (EC.66.9, Archive Collection, SOAS, London).
20. A. J. de Jong, ed., Afgoderye der Oost-Indische heydenen door Philippus Baldaeus, The Hague, 1917. The fact that Fenicio wrote in Portuguese instead in his native Italian can be taken, perhaps, as an indication that his text was for the internal use of the missionaries in the Malabar regions, all of whom spoke Portuguese.
21. A fairly legible and leather-bound manuscript is preserved in Archivum Romanum Societatis lesu, Goa 58.
22. Published document is available in J. Wicki, P. Diogo Gonçalves S.I., História do Malavar, Rome, 1953 (henceforth, Gonçalves). Diogo Gonçalves was born in Vila Real in Portugal in 1561, joined the Society of Jesus in 1583, and arrived in Goa in 1591. He died in Kollam (Quilon) in 1640.
23. Gonçalves, p. 83, 85, 85–88.
24. Although the Council of Trent did provide a model against which to measure and judge all other forms, the situation was more complicated since even in Europe the assimilation of the new ecclesiastical canons was not fully accomplished before 1700. See John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700, Oxford, 1985, p. 25.
25. Fenicio, p. 4. tirikōṇam (Tamil) triangular figure, female pelvic triangle; cakkaram (Tamil) i.e. cakra (Sanskrit).
26. Egasourunam, or as it appears later as Egasourubão, is supposed to mean ‘the one and only true god’: Fenicio, p. 41. Curupam (Tamil of Sanskrit origin) i.e. nature, an image, that which is well formed. Ekam (Tamil of Sanskrit origin) i.e. one, unity: J.P. Fabricius, Tamil and English Dictionary, Tranquebar (1779), 1972, p. 420, 148.
27. Fenicio, p. 4. Tevere is probably an error collapsing two terms, tevaram (i.e. divine praises, songs) and tevalayam (i.e. a temple, sacred shrine); côvado is an old measure equivalent to 0.66m.
28. On José de Acosta, see the important work by Sabine MacCormack, The Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru, New Jersey, 1991, p. 264–270.
29. The case of Diego de Landa is discussed in detail by Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570, Cambridge, 1987.
30. Matteo Ricci and his mission has recently attracted a huge amount of scholarly attention. Still the most challenging reading on the question and an excellent introduction is Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, New York, 1983.
31. Fenicio, p. 5, 5.
32. See Sebastião Rodolfo Delgado, Glossário Luso-Asiático, Coimbra, 1919, pp. 395–98.
33. In the controversy between two Jesuits, Roberto Nobili and Gonçalo Fernandes, their Brahman informants often played one Jesuit clique against the other by switching sides and providing counter-information, often contradicting their former statements. See Županov, Disputed Mission.
34. Gonçalo Fernandes calls it ‘máquina do Bramanismo’. Joseph Wicki, ed., Tratado do P.e
35. Gonçalo Fernandes Trancoso sobre o Hinduismo, (Maduré, 1616), Lisbon, 1973.
36. Fenicio, p. 8
37. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, Oxford (1975), 1992, p. 40.
38. Gonçalves, p. 37.
39. David Dean Schulman, Tamil Temple Myths: Sacrifice and Divine Marriage in South Indian Śaiva Tradition, Princeton, 1980, p. 107.
40. Fenicio, p. 1, 21. and 9–10, 157, 10.
41. Klaus K. Klostermaier, A Survey of Hinduism, New York, 1989, p. 117.
42. Stricto sensu, according to the Jesuit description of, and prescription for, human subjectivity, personhood would not be an appropriate word at all for ‘Hindu’ and ‘pagan’ human beings because the field of ‘personal’ action and choice was too restricted. For an interesting view of the history and historiography of ‘Individualism’ in the Renaissance’ see Martin, ‘Inventing sincerity,’ pp. 1309–42.
43. An interesting collection of essays dealing with Indian subjectivity was published in Cahiers Confrontation, No. 13, Spring 1985, (Paris). Unfortunately, editorial misrepresentation of issues and authors made the project irrelevant.
44. Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Śiva, Oxford, 1973 (My citation from the French edition, Paris, 1993) p. 110.
45. In his effort at ‘configurating’ the field of the Indian inner-world by means of psychoanalysis, in his early study, The Inner World: A Psycho-analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India. (2nd edition, 1981) Delhi, 1989, Sudhir Kakar discerns in Hindu mythology, ‘sexuality [as] rampant flood of polymorphous pleasure and connection, disdaining the distinctions between the heterosexual, genital imperatives of conventional sex and sweeping away incestual taboos’ (p. 23). This statement is in perfect accordance with the ideas expounded by Jesuit missionaries (Fenicio and Gonçalves) on the topic. The context and the aims of these theories (Jesuit and Kakar's) on Hindu sexuality are, of course, quite different.
46. Fenicio, p. 22.
47. Fenicio's munis or rixis designate without distinction a combination of major ‘priestly’ roles in classical Hinduism, such as Vedic seers, sacrificers (Sanskrit yajamana), Brahman priestly officiants and renouncers. See J.C. Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual. Kingship, and Society, Chicago, 1985.
48. Gonçalves, p. 42.
49. On early Christian ideas concerning sexual continence, virginity and renunciation, see Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, New York, 1988.
50. Fenicio, p. 171, 134.
51. Gonçalves, pp. 63–66.
52. On Xavier's mission among the Portuguese in Asia, see Ines G. Śupanov. ‘The prophetic and the miraculous in Portuguese Asia: A hagiographical view of colonial culture’, in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ed., Sinners and Saints: The Successors of Vasco da Gama, Delhi, 1998, pp. 135–61.
53. Wicki, Documenta Indica, Vol. XIII, p. 271–72.
54. See James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge MA, 1997;
55. and Serge Gruzinski, La pensée metisse, Paris, 1998, for discussion concerning similar conceptions such as ‘zones of contact’ (Clifford) and ‘espaces de métissage’ (Gruzinski).
56. For violence against women, between spouses and concubines, and, ultimately, vengeance against violent husbands by means of stupefying drugs (datura) and poisons see, among many other narratives, Francesco Carletti, Voyage autour du monde, 1594–1606 (translation from the Italian manuscript), Paris, 1999, pp. 248–257.
57. Concerning the drug—datura—that became the epitome of tropical licentiousness, see Garcia da Orta, Colóquios dos simples e drogas da Índia, (Goa, 1563, facsimile edition of 1891), Lisbon, 1987, Vol. 1, pp. 295–301.
58. Timothy J. Coates, Degredados e òrfǎs: Colonização dirigida pela coroa no império protuguês. 1550–1755, Lisbon 1998.
59. François Pyrard de Laval, Voyage de Pyrard de Laval aux Indes orientales (1601–1611), Paris, 1998, 2 Vols;
60. Jean Moquet, Voyage en Éthiopie, Mozambique, Goa. & autres lieux d'Afrique & des Indes orientales (1607–1610), Paris, 1996;
61. Pietro della Valle, The Travels of Pietro della Valle in India (from the old English translation of 1664, Hakluyt, London, 1892), reprint, Delhi, 1991, 2 Vols.;
62. John Huyghen Van Linschoten, The Voyage of John Huyghen Van Linschoten to the East Indies (from the old English translation of 1598, Hakluyt, London, 1885), reprint, Delhi, 1988, 2 Vols.
63. Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws (1748), Book XV. (English translation by D. W. Carrithers, Berkeley, 1977, p. 47.)
64. Henriques, H., to Lainez, I., Mannar, 19 December 1561, in Wicki, Documenta Indica, Vol. V, p. 382.
65. Lainez, I. to Henriques, H., Trent, 12 December 1562, Wicki, Documenta Indica, Vol. V, p. 661.
66. Borja, F. to Quadros, A. de, Rome, 29 November 1565, Wicki, Documenta Indica, Vol. VI, p. 526.
67. Gonçalves, p. 56.
68. For the most recent overview of the period see Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal 1540–1770, Cambridge, 1998.
69. St Augustine, The City of God, Book XV, Ch. 12, New York, 1953, p. 350.
70. Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, Cambridge, 1983.
71. Bossy, Christianity, p. 25.
72. André Duval, Des sacrements au Concile de Trente: rites et symboles. Paris. 1985, pp. 281–325.
73. The Book of Duarte Barbosa, (translated from Portuguese by M. L. Dames, Hakluyt Society, London, 1918) Kraus reprint, Millwood, NY., 1967, Vol. II, pp. 43–45.
74. Gonçalves, p. 95, 8, 87.
75. Juncão (chumkam, Malayalam) i.e. a custom house in Malabar. Delgado, Glossário Luso-Asiático, p. 497.
76. John O'Malley is of the opinion that the Jesuit penchant for attracting elites was widely exaggerated. O'Malley, The First Jesuits, p. 71.
77. Alessandro Valignano, Matteo Ricci and Roberto Nobili defended their ministries among the local elites under the heading of ‘accommodation’ to indigenous cultures. See Alessandro Valignano, Sumario de las cosas de Japon (1583), Tokyo, 1954:
78. Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization, Durham, 1997; Śupanov, Disputed Mission.
79. Conçalves, pp. 11–12, 11.
80. See Kathleen Gaugh, ‘Nayar: Central Kerala’, in David M. Schneider and Kathleen Gaugh, eds, Matrilineal Kinship, Berkeley, 1961, pp. 306–12.
81. Gaugh, ‘Nayar: Central Kerala’, p. 319–23.
82. Gonçalves, p. 11.
83. Ines G. Śupanov, ‘Le repli du religieux; Les missionnaires jésuites du 17e siècle entre la théologie chrétienne at une éthique païenne’. Annales, No. 6, 1996, pp. 1211–23.
84. Gonçalves, p. 95, 95, 96, 88–90.
85. James Clifford, ‘On ethnographic allegory’, in George Marcus and James Clifford, eds, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley, 1986, p. 100.
86. Gonçalves, p. 97, 99.
87. Archivo Portuguez. Oriental, Fasciculo 4 (que contem os Concílios de Goa e o Sýnodo de Diamper), Nova Goa, 1862 (reprint, 1992), pp. 439–54.
88. See also Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Dom Frei Aleixo de Meneses (1559–1617) et l'échec des tentatives d'indigénisation du christianisme en Inde’, Archives de sciences sociales des religions, No. 103, 1998, pp. 21–42.
89. Fenicio, p. 165.
90. Conçalves, p. 102–3.
91. José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure (translated from Spanish,), Minneapolis, 1986, p. 157.
92. Baltasar Gracián, El discreto, in OC, Madrid, 1960, discurso 10, p. 103.
93. G. Fessard, La dialectique des Exercices Spirituels de Saint Ignace de Loyola, Paris, 1956, p. 191.
94. Gonçalves, p. 72–73.
95. Fenicio, p. 67.
96. Gonçalves, p. 115.
97. Liberation and Dalit theology is an effort at breaking away, but not complete success, from this entrenched principle. See Catherine Clémentin-Ojha, ‘Indianisation et enracinement: Les enjeux de “l'inculturation” de l'Église en Inde’, Bulletin de l'École française d'Extrême-Orient, Tome 80. 1, Paris, 1993, pp. 107–33;
98. Felix Wilfred, inculturation as a heremeneutical question: Reflections in the Asian contex’, Vidyajyoti, September 1988, pp. 422–36.