Natural philosophers from the devil: Astronomy, alterity and mission in Southern India, 17th century

Abstract

The long process of “invention of Hinduism” to early-modern European audiences (which was to be completed only in the eighteenth-century British Orientalist movement) was informed, from the start, by travel narratives, historical chronicles of the exploits of Western nations in several parts of India, and, evidently, by missionary literature in various genres (letters, relations, grammars, treatises, maps etc.). Seventeenth century sources of these kinds abound in expositions of customs, rituals, “mythologies” and denunciations of idolatry (especially when it comes to missionaries’ writings), and they even give some useful information on local natural-historical knowledge, but they are scant in representing local cosmological traditions. In this regard, the Jesuit Jacome Fenicio’s treatise Livro da Seita dos Indios Orientais, written in the first decade of the century (but only published, partly, in the 1930s, although having circulated in manuscript quite widely until the eighteenth century), is a notable exception. The book already starts with the presentation of cosmological conceptions of Malabari Brahmins (whom the author calls “the natural philosophers and theologians” of those parts), and proceeds to their refutation on the basis of contemporary European astronomy, which is taken as self-evidently correct. Natural knowledge is thus clearly identified as a key cultural trait and, concomitantly, as a cultural weapon to be deployed in the representation of the other, which is the main function of the book. Here we examine the details of Fenicio’s exposition and the place he accords to European and Indian cosmologies in wider Jesuit policies and ways of proceeding, reflecting also on the uses of science to reinforce cultural and religious identities and divides in early-modern contact zones.

Keywords: Astronomy (17th century), Society of Jesus, Portuguese Estado da Índia.