Abraham Rogerius’ posthumously published De open-deure tot het Verborgen Heydendom is a remarkable book: for this is the first really systematic attempt by a European scholar to describe what he calls the religion of the Brahmans of India’s Coromandel coast, and what we now call Hinduism. It was widely circulated in the seventeenth century, in Dutch, German and French: the French edition in particular became well known, and was carefully read by John Locke, amongst others. The British Indologist A. C. Burnell reckoned in 1879 that Rogerius’ book was ‘still, perhaps, the most complete account of South Indian Hinduism, though by far the earliest’. But until now, only some excerpts have been translated into English. Even the standard critical Dutch edition, edited by Willem Caland in 1915, includes barely half of the original text, for reasons I will come to in a moment. Now, at last, we have a critical edition, giving the full, unexpurgated text in both Dutch and English. It is a fine production – although personally I would have preferred to translate ‘heydondom’, in the title and elsewhere, as ‘heathendom’ rather than ‘paganism’.

As Benjamin Leathley’s painstakingly careful, 120-page introduction points out, this is a complex text. Calling it Rogerius’ work is in fact a little misleading. The book’s core is a careful ethnographic description of Brahman cultural and religious practices, deriving from lengthy conversations between Rogerius and a Brahman named Padmanabha during the years 1632 to 1642, when Rogerius was serving as a minister at the Dutch East India Company (VOC)’s factory at Pulicat. It also includes, remarkably, a lengthy paraphrase of two ‘centuries’ (sets of a hundred sayings) by the fifth-century philosopher Bhartṛhari, based on the Portuguese version provided by Padmanabha: this is the oldest known translation from Sanskrit into any European language. In 1642 Rogerius moved to the VOC’s capital at Batavia (modern Jakarta) and apparently wrote the first draft of this book over the following year, titling it Baal’s priests; he returned to the Netherlands in 1647 and took up a cure in Gouda, but died in 1649.

His widow arranged for the book to be published, but it changed in the process. It was edited and extensively annotated by a mysterious ‘A. W.’, whose notes almost double the length of the text: Leathley carefully considers who this might be and settles on one Arnoldus Wittens, a lawyer and theologian from Dirksland. The annotations were left out of Caland’s 1915 edition, and you can see why. Whoever he was, A. W. had no first-hand knowledge of Indian matters, and filled his notes instead with comments comparing Rogerius’ account to classical and biblical paganisms, throughout treating India in a disparaging or at least condescending manner. In his preface, A. W. explained that the purpose of the book was to provide a primer of the know-your-enemy kind for ‘those … who are sent out with the purpose to lead the blind peoples away from their sinister paths, and to bring to them the bright light of the Holy Gospel’. Only with this training could such a missionary actually serve the heathen: ‘How else should they be able to believe that a different path than the one they used to tread is better, unless one proves them to this with good reason? And how else are they supposed to accept the demonstration of proof, if at the same time they know that their customs are entirely unknown to the other?’ A further purpose of the book, he added, was simply so that ‘everyone can see the thick darkness through which the pagans meander, and their spiritual blindness’.

The same veneer was laid on even more thickly by Jacobus Sceperus, Gouda’s Reformed minister, who added a dedication to the VOC. It seems that the book’s eventual title was his suggestion, since his contribution emphasised how the VOC’s mercantile ministry had providentially ‘opened a gate and a spacious door for the Lord Jesus Christ’ in India. This had an apocalyptic edge to it:

The purpose of Rogerius’ book, Sceperus insisted, was thus ‘to uncover the delusional religion of the pagans’, so as to enable others ‘to bring them over to the true knowledge of God and his son Jesus Christ’.

But this is not necessarily so. Rogerius’ own text is strikingly reticent about its purposes, and strikingly restrained in passing judgement on the ‘pagan’ practices and beliefs he carefully describes. He does admit that ‘I hardly dare’ describe how many wives a wealthy Brahman might have, but not, he says, because he finds it shocking, but because he fears Dutch readers might not believe him. The closest he comes to a moral assessment of Brahman beliefs is to insist that ‘no one should think that these people are like beasts, and do not know of any God’.

Not, of course, that we should imagine Rogerius was a modern multicultural relativist. But it was not unusual for those with extensive experience of real ‘pagans’ both to treat them with more respect than did the armchair missionaries back home, and also simply to be more interested in them. Rogerius’ successor in Dutch Jaffna, Philip Baldaeus, struck a similar tone in his writing. We should note that Rogerius was one of the handful of ministers to have studied at the VOC’s Seminarium Indicum in Leiden, an institution that the Company eventually closed down, apparently seeing it as a costly way of producing annoyingly independent-minded ministers. Its handful of graduates were distinguished by what one scholar has called their ‘contextualised theology’, Footnote ¹ pursuing Christian mission in a way that was sensitive to and even aligned with indigenous cultures (in conscious imitation of, or competition with, the Jesuits). Rogerius was very much part of that same culture. Neither his friends in the Netherlands nor his former employers in the VOC seem to have seen it quite the same way. Now, at last, Leathley’s edition lays the matter open for us.