Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-century India

Abstract

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.

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