Catholic Orientalism. Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge (16th–18th Centuries), written by Angela Barreto Xavier and Ines G. Županov

Between the early sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries a vast amount of knowledge about South Asia was accumulated by Catholics living and working in the Indian sub-continent.Some were Propaganda missionaries directly responsible to the papacy; others, especially towards the end of the period, had French connections.But the overwhelming majority comprised Portuguese, Indo-Portuguese or other European Catholics operating within the framework of Portugal's Asian empire.Among them were fidalgos, traders, members of the religious orders and Christianized Brahmans.At first they were predominantly laymen, but later-especially from the early seventeenth century-the great majority was made up of Catholic religious.Angela Barreto Xavier and Ines G. Županov call these cultural intermediaries, collectively, Catholic Orientalists.But, apart from a handful of well-known individuals among them, such as Dom João de Castro, Garçia de Orta, and Henrique Henriques, these Catholic Orientalists and their remarkable achievements have received from historians scant attention.In the present work, Xavier and Županov seek to make up for this neglect, presenting a mass of evidence to demonstrate the extraordinary depth of knowledge about Asia, Asians, and Asian cultures that was acquired, and transmitted to Europe by these Catholic, mainly Portuguese, Orientalist intermediaries, during the two and a half centuries after Vasco da Gama's great voyage of discovery.The first phase of Catholic Orientalism occurred during the early decades of the sixteenth century.This was pre-eminently an era of pioneer "imperial mapping"and interest in India and other parts of Asia was intense.In fact, as the two authors here remind us, many of the finest Portuguese literary classics of the era were replete with Asian subject matter-including João de Barros's Asia, Dom João de Castro's Roteiros, and the Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires, all of which were written in the sixteenth century by Portuguese laymen.However, after an initial period when most of the Portuguese involved in acquiring Asian knowledge were laymen, from the late sixteenth century the leading role was increasingly assumed by members of the religious orders, particularly the Jesuits.Of course their aims were tendentious.They studied Indian languages, and Indian religious beliefs and practices, to determine how best to dismantle the latter and replace them with Catholicism.So the Society of Jesus required its missionaries to learn Konkani, Tamil, and other contemporary Indian languages, at the same time encouraging the study of Sanskrit religious texts.This led in turn to the production of a plethora of uncoordinated grammars

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