The Portuguese produced immense knowledge about India: Zupanov History looks towards understanding "Catholic Orientalism"
For THE PRINTED WORD|Frederick Noronha Catholic Orientalism? Can I hear you ask "what's that?" In a noisy Cafe Prakash, the unofficial press club of Panjim, Dr Ines Zupanov patiently explained to me of her plans for co-authoring a book on this subject the other day. Zupanov, an unusual name to find in the name of Indo-Portuguese history, caught my attention some time after she published work on the Jesuits, many years back. It was a pleasure to catch up with her via Facebook and email recently. This Croatian (former Yugoslav)-origin historian who studied in the US and is now based in Paris, is working on with Angela Barreto Xavier, the Margao-born historian now based in Lisbon and visited Goa last week. This is the way it gets defined in a non-technical corner of cyberspace: Orientalism is a term used for the imitation or depiction of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West by writers, designers and artists. Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said's 1978 work began to see it as a pervasive Western tradition -- academic and artistic -- of prejudiced outsider interpretations of the East, shaped by the attitudes of European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. Some modern scholars have used "Orientalism" to refer to writers of the Imperialist era who had pro-Eastern attitudes. Zupanov argues that the knowledge the Portuguese produced about India has been long underplayed or "minimised". The early Portuguese understanding of India was seen as not very relevant -- either because they dealt with only a small part of India (mainly based around Goa), or allegedly because it wasn't a "modern" kind of knowledge. On the contrary, the British, are seen as having 'invented' and understood everything that was about India. For instance, in Calcutta, Sir William Jones (1746-1794, the English philologist and scholar of ancient India) is now hailed as having done the most important work and translated, specially in Sanskrit. He is given credit with having 'discovered' the connection between Sanskrit and European languages. Zupanov says: "There's this whole idea that Orientalism is somehow a British creation. Protestant missionaries are also allowed into this 'creation' and description of Hinduism, or of Indian sciences." So how does one change the perception? "We are basically using Portuguese documents. Our findings are that from the 16th to 18th century, the Portuguese produced *immense* knowledge about India. They produced what we call Catholic Orientalism. It is a kind of Orientalism, in Edward Said's sense of the word -- knowledge and power connected. The Portuguese were equally producing knowledge and power, and producing power through knowledge, and knowledge through power." Zupanov and Baretto Xavier are working their way through documents in Portuguese, Italian and Spanish, among other languages. "The Portuguese Estado da India was, of course, Portuguese. But as they organised the travel from Lisbon to Goa, there were all kinds of other people 'coming in'" (via that route)," she says, specially Catholics like Italians and Spanish and others from all over Europe. "Somehow this knowledge has been exchanged among all of them," she adds. For instance, Italian travellers, come to Goa, write their books, go back. They get read by other Portuguese, other Italians. She sees this as a Catholic, Mediterranean or Latin kind of knowledge, compared to the later English or Dutch "kind of knowledge". "Basically (it predates English knowledge) by almost two centuries," she says. "For 150 to 200 years, the knowledge produced about India was really Catholic and Portuguese knowledge," she says. One part of this knowledge is produced by Catholic missionaries, and the Jesuits in particular. Zupanov sees the Jesuits as an "over-studied" religious order; in part as they left behind a lot of materials, which are accessible. "We study them because they can," she says. She also studied the Franciscans and Carmelites. Along the way, she says, Italy was trying to get into the colonies, through religion and through Rome. "The Florentines were also trying without succeeding, but Rome really tried to get in through their missions," she says. The goal? Not just to break the Portuguese monopoly, but, according to one of her students, they were even thinking in the late 17th century of establishing a kind of Papal East India Company. "That is a fantastic idea," she laughs, obviously surprised by the very idea and information that could be emerging. That is why, she suggests, they sent all the legates in the early 17th century, who created the Malabar Rites Controversy. The person who was sent also had a mission to see if the Papacy could get its hold as a trading partner, Zupanov adds. "Religion and politics go hand in hand. They always did, and they always will," she says. So where did all this knowledge disappear to? It's not very visible now. Is it just a question of being encased in the wrong language at the wrong time? "Well," says Zupanov patiently, "there are all kinds of answers. But let me talk as a historian. Your history depends on your historians. They produce history which becomes historiography. There is a kind of disappearance of Portuguese colonial knowledge from the historiographical market." British colonial and even post-colonial historiography overtook, and deleted, Portuguese history as somehow not relevant, she argues. "When you call something as not relevant, then you don't study it. From the 19th century onwards, historians saw the Portuguese stuff as (related to) just a small piece of land, and dismissed the Portuguese as fanatics, or pre-modern just as Indians were also dismissed as pre-modern." She adds: "Pre-modern people don't make science. They don't think rationally. They were left in this pre-modern, pre-rational world. While the British, and Dutch to a certain extent, were the ones who brought science, modernity and tried to improve those Indians who were seen as medieval. These are all Orientalist discourses. So, in a way, Portuguese history was put outside of the major..." Portuguese knowledge, she believes, was relevant in many spheres. For instance, in natural history, the Portuguese contributed to the building of the Materia medica (Materia medica is a Latin medical term for the body of collected knowledge about the therapeutic properties of any substance used for healing). They did significant work about illnesses, remedies, medicines, plants too. The knowledge is "enormous". One of the biggest chapter in her and Barreto Xavier's book, for instance, is called natural history and survival in the tropics. She points to the text called 'Arte Palmarica', written probably in the 17th century by an unnamed Jesuit lay brother, and now available on the Internet. He had "incredible knowledge". Everything in the book is agronomy, except for a sentence or two about religion, she notes. But Zupanov has done other interesting work too. Her earlier book 'Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in. Seventeenth-century India' is based on her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. It looks two Jesuit missionaries -- the Italian aristocrat Roberto de Nobili (1577-1656) and Goncalo Fernandez -- who found themselves all alone in mission in Madurai (in the heartland of what is today's Tamil Nadu), were living in the midst of a so-called "heathen kingdom". Nobili's approach was to convert the elites and the people who count. Goncalo, on the other hand, worked with the lowly Parava caste. His idea was to take care of those who were already converted. Nobili's suggestion was to try out a particular method. It had been tried out by others earlier, including Metteo Ricci (1552-1610), the Italian priest who founded the Jesuit China mission. Called *accommodatcionne*, the method focussed on learning about the people -- their knowledge, their philosophy, their religion -- and then to show them a "superior" knowledge, seen then as Christianity. Says Zupanov: "I wrote this dissertation in 1991. I was interested in the Jesuits. This is the beginning of the revival of lay Jesuit history, not Jesuit history written by priests. Now I know that I belong to a whole wave of -- at that time -- young historians who worked on Jesuit sources." She was interested in the way Jesuits were able to "accommodate" themselves. Not only in India, but in other cultures like in Brazil, in Africa, in Canada, in China. Says she: "They were able because they somehow got into the smallest pores of society." She notes that the Jesuits were a different phenomena in Portuguese-ruled Goa. Power was in Portuguese hands. For instance, she refers to how the Jesuits got the land of the Carambolim Aldeia. They were given the land of the pagodas (temples) for the Colegio of St Paul. Religious land was given away from one religion to new religion. "They way the Portuguese appropriated the land and redistributed it, is hard to face up to even today. It was the first violence," says Zupanov. "In Madurai, the Jesuits had no possessions. In Goa, they became huge landlords. As a colleague put it, the Monicas (the former convent) were a bank, as one of my colleagues put it. But I said that everybody knows that Indian temples too were banks. Religious institutions were even lending money then; they had lay brothers who were only in charge of finances." Her second book went further back in history. Since her first was in the 17th century, she felt the need to go back. She has a chapter on St Francis Xavier, and her interpretation of the man. She complains that her US-published second book is priced at $75 dollars, a price too high even for her! "You can download it from my website," she laughs, with a mischevious glint in her eye. Zupanov is clearly worried about the way the Goa archives is managed. "It's a shameful state," says she. She says some are so fragile that merely opening them would destroy them. "People who work there don't know what they have. They don't know the treasures. They have no idea. They don't know how valuable these things are. The people are nice; but specially (those at the subordinate level, handle things very badly)..." She believes that there are "very crazy rules which go against reason and go against any kind of archival rules." For instance, researchers get access to only a certain part of a document, not the full one. "We historians work in series, we need the whole thing or nothing. They don't allow you to take photographs or shots here -- everywhere else they allow to photograph, under certain conditions, without flash," she notes. Photographing documents carefully would in fact help. "That way they would be preserved. As things stand today, they archives are simply falling apart. From the time of (prominent Indo-Portuguese historian) Charles Boxer, who wrote an article on the documents of the Goa archives in 1970s, documents he described don't exist anymore." "This is specially true of documents on acid paper from the 18th or 19th century. Forget it! You use it, and they fall apart. The Central Library's Rare Books department digitised everything, which is very nice. But when I wanted to buy the whole document -- because I cannot work on just three pages -- around 2008, I was told that if we give you everything, you would not come again. But I would come again!," she adds. "I think Goa doesn't deserve good history, because it doesn't take care of its archives. Something should be done," she says, obviously hoping her strong words will jolt someone into action. Dr Ines Županov... on Catholic Orientalism http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnV670jOZqM Dr Ines Županov... on her books and work http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtaapOsIoYw [Published in: Gomantak Times]