How various aspects of Asian society and religion were studied mainly to enable the expansion of the Portuguese empire and Catholic religion.

After the seminal work of Edward Said on Orientalism in 1978 there have been many interpretations of this subject by various authors. Emphasis has been changing according to the researcher, unlike the earlier authors for whom the cultural influences and ecclesiastical efforts were the basic drivers of gathering knowledge. This process of acquiring knowledge of the East kept changing in the centuries after the Portuguese first entered the west coast of India, as initially the Portuguese intention was just trade and the accompanying missionaries served the religious need of sailors and others who came with them. It was only after 1540 that mass conversions took place principally by the stimulus given by the Trent Council. The major religious Orders of the Franciscans and others who came to India as part of the ecclesiastical system established their bases and engaged in evangelisation, for which they learned the local language and traditions.

Network of explorers

In an extensive prologue the authors say their aim is to follow the path of knowledge production about and in India in the context of a decidedly Catholic realm. Thus the book takes a look at the Portuguese Empire gaining Indian knowledge in the 16 to 18 centuries disseminated through the network of early Portugal explorers. Under different Portugal kings, there were variations in accumulating, storing and usage of obtained knowledge. Set in three parts, ‘Imperial Itineraries’, ‘Catholic Meridian’ and ‘Contested Knowledge’, the authors chronicle the rise and decline of Portuguese power in India and with it, the effort to gather knowledge with a view to enlarging the empire. Till the English entered the scene the gathering and sieving through the knowledge gained from various personnel was exclusively the right of the Portuguese. Thus, Catholic Orientalism was essentially a means to gather information on various aspects of Asian society and religion. The King was informed of the knowledge thus gained. It was stored to enable the expansion of both the Empire and the Catholic religion.

The focus in the second chapter is on the effectiveness of such knowledge for the governance of local societies. The authors conclude that the great part of the information showed that besides religious matters, the Empire’s agents were interested in knowing and controlling natural resources as well. This led to studies of natural history. The authors discuss the people behind it, professionals, merchants and missionaries.

Dealing with Jesuit experiments, the part played by the missionaries in taking Christian thoughts to local communities in the larger context of Estado da India is explained. For Portuguese, it was necessary to destroy temple worship and idolatry not only because it was presumed demonic potentia, but alsothey were the centres of local sociability. The authors point out that powered by colonial desires, Estado da India never succeeded in annihilating Indian languages in favour of Portuguese, having experienced such attempts failing in Goa. In fact, the Portuguese ended up borrowing words extensively from Asian languages.

In the chapter Translation and conversion the need to learn local language and to draw support from it is addressed fully. Gerson da Cunha’s example is quoted here for Goa and Henriques who wrote texts in Tamil, for South India. Caldwell writes in History of Tinnevelly how several hundred Parathavars wereconverted to Christianity with the help of one Joe da Cruz, a converted Indian himself. Later to sustain the activity, Tamil had to be learned and some of the Jesuits mastered Tamil and Fr. Henriques not only learned the language but also wrote a treatise on the grammar of the language as spoken there.

Orientals within

In Orientalists from within, the authors explain the work of Indian genealogists, philologists and historians. An elite class developed — may be comprador in nature — in which certain group of Indians in Goa and other Portuguese colonial spaces played important roles. They were able to shape the empire according to their desire. The authors choose to call these as Orientals from within, who wrote history as a strategy to remain above the common lot.

Here the authors quote the story of Shri Vittal and compare him to Castro returning from Rome who was originally a Brahmin, converted to Christianity. They explain how Castro maintained his Brahmin pride, and appropriated strategies already used by the Christian preachers. The first-hand narratives of such people helped the authors to complete the map of Goan social organisation.

The knowledge accumulated through Catholic agents and imperial practices of that day, according to the authors, is Catholic Orientalism. The final chapter deals with its end. The diverse body of ‘Catholic’ knowledge so gathered lay scattered, still mostly unexplored in various European, American and Indian archives, from state and library collections, to archives belonging to missionary orders. The authors do not fail to point out that such is the case with the rival parties, like Protestant missionaries who had collected a vast lot of information following the Portuguese practice. But at this juncture, Catholic knowledge was being questioned by the arrival of ‘scientific knowledge’ a term used by later colonial historians shifting over to a Protestant-centred scenario. The authors note, “The fact remains that in the late seventeenth and especially in eighteenth century, texts written by Catholic writers in and about India were increasingly perceived by their eager readers in the Protestant countries — England and Holland in particular — as fatally mired in superstition and unable to discern fact from value, religion from science.”

Running out of steam

Thus the bulk of information gathered as Catholic Oriental Knowledge in various fields such as society, science, and religious practices were turned into nothing more than ‘raw’ information that needed to be “exfoliated from its religious and Catholic framework in order to be taken without further acknowledgment of authorship” Unfortunately, Catholic knowledge became a source that was needed when convenient and discarded when expedient by the British information order. Winding up their argument the authors lament in the epilogue that the old regime of Catholic Orientalism had run out of steam in Portugal though it lasted for another half a century in Italy and France.

The authors have relied on works of various authors, (35 pages of bibliography proves it) to analyse in depth the genesis, growth and the fall of Catholic Orientalism, in reality an epistemic source centre. The work is definitely one of the first of its sort and makes excellent reading.