In the aftermath of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), European representations of Eastern cultures have returned to preoccupy the Western academy. Much of this work reiterates the point that nineteenth-century Orientalist scholarship was a corpus of knowledge that was implicated in and reinforced colonial state formation in India.Footnote 1 The pivotal role of native informants in the production of colonial discourse and its subsequent use in servicing the material adjuncts of the colonial state notwithstanding, there has been some recognition in South Asian scholarship of the moot point that the colonial constructs themselves built upon an existing, precolonial European discourse on India and its indigenous culture.Footnote 2 However, there is as yet little scholarly consensus or indeed literature on the core issues of how and when these edifices came to be formed, or the intellectual and cultural axes they drew from.Footnote 3 This genealogy of colonial discourse is the subject of this essay. Its principal concerns are the formalization of a conceptual unit in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, called “Hinduism” today, and the larger reality of European culture and religion that shaped the contours of representation.Footnote 4
The colonial discourse employs “Hinduism” as a single category of analysis to classify a heterogeneous collection of traditions. It holds that a variety of South Asian traditions are united under a Brahman priesthood. Whereas its sacred scriptures harbor a monotheistic religion, the clergy masterminded new religious laws and ceremonies. This proliferation of modes of worship was the source and seat of their sacerdotal revenue and power. The colonial representation of Indian traditions thus consists of two distinct branches: “philosophical Hinduism,” and “popular Hinduism.” The former identifies an ancient and monotheistic religion in sacred scriptures, while the latter points to its corrupted manifestations in idolatry and ritual. Central to this simplified synthesis of manifold, crosscutting traditions stands the Brahman protagonist: the agent of religious change is identified as the priesthood, the nodal point in this colonial composition. Already in the 1760s, these elements structured the account of “the Gentoo religion” by the East India Company employee, John Zephania Holwell (1711–1798).Footnote 5 The notion of sacerdotal corruption also ran like a thread through the influential essay on Hindu customs by the French missionary Jean-Antoine Dubois (1765–1848).Footnote 6 The same ideas enticed eminent Orientalists such as Sir William Jones (1746–1794) to delve into India's past in search of its unadulterated religion.Footnote 7 This outline of spiritual decline also structured the representation of religion in colonial historiography and in successive Orientalist scholarship.Footnote 8
Once contemporary scholars had established that this unified outline of India's spiritual landscape is a creation of colonial forms of knowledge production, it seemed unnecessary for most to study the greater part of the archive of European images of India, which is neither British nor colonial in nature. Yet the subject is of considerable interest. Renaissance ethnography provides a fascinating case study in popular culture, and in particular suggests that the juxtaposition of “philosophical” against “popular Hinduism,” and the emphasis on a priesthood as the axis around which both revolve, can be traced back to two modes of representation that developed in the European libraries before the 1550s. Both images concern the Brahman protagonist. They are the central focus of this essay because they illustrate most crucially how European representations of Indian community life were framed for internal theological purposes.
The first section of this essay initiates my argument about the pre-Renaissance representation of the Brahmans by locating it within its wider Latin Christian context. The Brahman traditions were defined as the proto-Christian expressions of religion in the East. I then discuss the early-modern mode of representation, and locate a second vision of the Brahmans in the polemical vocabulary of Reformation thought. It defines the Brahmans as cunning priests responsible for the Oriental corruption of Christianity in the East. Both images hold a central position in the European discourse on India and have an impressive record in the popular imagination. My third section shows that both representations, when combined in the sixteenth-century cosmographies, provided a unified conceptual portrait of Indian traditions that corresponds in structure and content with the colonial representation of Hinduism. It will be my argument that our contemporary understanding of Indian traditions has less to do with the imbrications of knowledge and power—as found under colonialism—but more with the limitations of thought within a culture shaped by the Christian theologies long before the conditions of colonialism were established. Thus my goal is to illustrate a new critical approach to colonial forms of knowledge production in terms of cultural legacies. References will be made to precolonial sources in Latin and Italian, but the majority of works I draw upon are written in four northern European vernaculars: Dutch, English, French, and German.Footnote 9
I. TRUE RELIGION AND THE BRAHMAN EXEMPLUM
In 1520, the German scholar, Johannes Boemus (1485–1533/35), published his Omnium Gentium Mores (The customs of all nations), which was first issued at Augsburg, a leading economic power and a center for humanist scholarship. The book was warmly received by his contemporaries and in the sixteenth century alone ran through at least twenty-two editions in Latin, English, French, Italian, and Spanish. In 1555, William Waterman translated into English the first two books, concerning Africa and Asia.Footnote 10 The work's significance lies in the fact that Boemus stands at the transition in scholarship about the East where both ethnographic images of the Brahmans were soon to meet. A Hebraist and canon at Ulm cathedral, Boemus was united with his humanist contemporaries in their shared interest in classical literature that combined biblical lore and the Latin Christian tradition. To some extent then, Omnium Gentium Mores, which Boemus prefaced with a spiritual history of the world extending to the very beginning of Christian thought, was representative of the intellectual concerns of this milieu. He explains his position as follows: Whereas humankind once worshipped the Christian God, the devil made humanity bestow upon idols and images the honor that previously and appropriately was bestowed only upon God.Footnote 11 After Christ had sent his disciples “into the universall worlde,” and after the Gospel was thus “of all nacions received,” what was missing in this heavenly project was sustainability: Satan, returning to his natural malice, snared humankind again.Footnote 12 Boemus is clear about what he perceives to be the merits of his work: Continuing the medieval tradition of edifying scholarship, he explains the benefits of learning about the manners, laws, and rites of all the peoples in the world. Simply put, ethnographic learning should lead the way to the knowledge of the true (Christian) God.Footnote 13
Boemus effectively describes the Indian “commune wealth,” as Pliny the Elder (Historia Naturalis, ca. 77 c.e.) had portrayed it more than a millennium before.Footnote 14 Central to his ethnographic study lay the “Brachmanes,” that is, the Brahmans, known from their legendary dialogues with Alexander the Great. In Boemus' assessment, this community of ascetics was the utopian model specimen of Christian virtue and faith.Footnote 15 The English translator of his work agreed with this sentiment, concluding, “the unchristened Brahmanes” live by a code of conduct “wher with we Christianes are so farre out of love, that we are afraied leaste any man should beleve it to be true.”Footnote 16 The seamless incorporation of the Brahman community into the Christian schematic testifies to the theological impulse that structured the history of religion in the preface: all nations had known of the biblical God and Christian mode of conduct, including the ascetic Brahmans.
Influential and authoritative as this account proved to be, what remains striking is its inspiration. Boemus did not take recourse to the accounts of early-modern voyages that were then being printed in the German cities. He hardly needed these sources to write about the Brahmans in such laudable yet Christian terms, for they already had achieved great fame and reputation long before the Renaissance. To better understand the tenor of his writings it is necessary to retrieve the attitudes that preceded it, and this requires discussing a phase of European perceptions of India prior to the Renaissance. It is essential to understand the intellectual and cultural background against which Boemus' ideas developed if we are to come to terms with subsequent representations of Indian community life.
Boemus' history of religion was part of an intellectual lineage that traces to the very beginning of Christian thought. The early apologists of the primitive church assimilated the intellectual traditions of pagan Greece and Rome into their theological fold, recognizing the pagan thinkers such as Pythagoras and Plato to be an organic part of the Christian tradition. Justin Martyr, for instance, argued that Abraham and Socrates were Christians prior to Christ.Footnote 17 With intellectual dexterity, the famous historian of the church Eusebius of Caesarea (Præparatio Evangelica, ca. 315 c.e.) argued that Greek and Roman thinkers had been aware of the Christian God, the soul, the life hereafter, and the correct mode of conduct.Footnote 18 The Greco-Roman cults and local practices were similarly domesticated, yet transformed into vehicles of false religion: they embodied the devil's plan to corrupt the true religion and seduce humankind into idolatry.Footnote 19 Writing in the first decades of the sixteenth century, when Boemus recognizes the Indian Brahman as a proto-Christian manifestation of Christianity he illustrates the endurance of the analytical categories with which Christian thinkers and apologists of the church had since late antiquity understood their own traditions and those of others.
Boemus, like his contemporaries Desiderius Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, was writing at a time of religious turmoil. The period was marked by anticlericalism, and this sentiment found lucid reflection in the literature and popular culture of the period. The estates of the realm divided society into the clergy, the nobility, and the commonalty. Religion was the realm of the first: the clergy, or spiritual men. The priestly sacrament of ordination was a distinct expression of this division, which gave the priest an infallible character and elevated him to a higher plane of perfection and divinity. This perfection, in turn, empowered the priest to mediate salvation. Sacerdotal asceticism and saintliness were the ideal. Evidence that this ideal often was not met informed the anticlerical sentiments prior to the Reformation. That is to say, the theological claim that the Church of Rome provided an exclusive path to eternal beatitude provoked the creation of a negative mirror image long before the Reformation: a deep-rooted and cultural suspicion of the priest. Voices of dissent were expressed at grassroots levels by various spiritual movements that highlighted the sacerdotal ideal, that is, penance, and a frugal, inner spiritual life. Associated with the literature of this period is the exemplum. This literary genre served to illustrate such normative principles with short narratives or anecdotal stories that were remarkably constant in the popular imagination.Footnote 20
It was within this distinct literary and cultural context that the Brahmans made their reappearance, in this instance in the Collatio Alexandri cum Dindimo. This was a fictional exchange of instructing letters between Alexander and Dindimus, the leader of the Brahman ascetics, written between the fourth and the sixth centuries c.e.Footnote 21 The Brahman's righteousness was subsequently revealed when the French historian and famous preacher Jacques de Vitry (ca. 1160–1240) introduced passages from the Collatio correspondence into his history of the crusades, the Historia Orientalis. De Vitry recognized the edifying nature of his work and bears witness to the fact that medieval anticlericalism was no less ardent than that of the 1500s and 1600s during the Reformation.Footnote 22 He was associated with the Beguines, a lay sisterhood that advocated a strong spiritual component to the religious life and combined asceticism with charity and teaching. Within this edifying context, the French preacher recapitulates tales about a mythical nation referred to in French as “bien dignes d'admiration,” that is, well worthy of admiration. They are called “Brachmanes.”Footnote 23 He allows Dindimus to explain his religion, including his vision of God, in terms of the Christian Bible, and takes a significant step toward the support of the Brahman ascetic: he simply omits Alexander's apologetic and casts Dindimus' trenchant critique of Macedonian worldliness and pride in an explicitly Christian idiom.Footnote 24
This edifying image of the Brahmans appeared and reappeared prior to the age of exploration. For example, the Archbishop of Canterbury, John of Salisbury (ca. 1110–1180), was known for his Policraticus (The statesman; ca. 1159). This work of political theory was famous not only as an encyclopedia of learning but also for being a storehouse of edifying exemplars, including the Brahman exemplum.Footnote 25 Similarly, the Italian priest Godfrey von Viterbo (1125–1202) introduced the Brahman exemplum into his Pantheon (ca. 1185), a Latin chronology of the world and repository of edifying stories.Footnote 26 Later still, in the thirteenth century, the French Dominican monk Vincent de Beauvais (ca. 1190–1264) produced the most important encyclopedic work prior to the Renaissance, Speculum Maius (Mirror of the world; 1240–1260), a compendium of the available theological, natural, and historical knowledge. The work incorporates six sections on the discourse between Alexander and the leader of the Brahman ascetics, based on what was known from the Collatio correspondence, and indicates the constancy of the Brahman exemplum: Dindimus is made to introduce his Brahman subjects as divine ascetics, faithfully worshipping the biblical God.Footnote 27
The stereotyped image of the proto-Christian Brahman reached its height with the publication of the most famous, yet fictional travel report of the Middle Ages: the Voyages de Jehan de Mandeville Chevalier (The voyages of John Mandeville Knight; ca. 1357). As the author draws his travels to their conclusion, he reports about an island in the legendary kingdom of Prester John, “great and good and plenteous, where that be good folk and true, and of good living after their belief and of good faith.”Footnote 28 Though they are not certified Christians, they nevertheless know the biblical Ten Commandments. Whereas some call that island the “Land of Faith,” others call it “the Isle of Bragman.”Footnote 29 Mandeville's report soon became the most influential vehicle of the Brahman exemplum in the popular domain: the author expresses his appreciation of their near-perfection in allusions to shortcomings at home. The Brahmans are not given to theft, murder, or adultery, and they live “as that they were religious men.” Because they are teeming with good qualities, they never suffer tempests, famines, or any other tribulations, “as we be, many times, amongst us, for our sins.”Footnote 30 The significance of this travel report to the dissemination of the edifying Brahman motif is indicated by the rapid multiplication of manuscripts and translations. Moreover, Mandeville's work was not only popular in the sense of its wide distribution but also in its appeal to people from many walks of life: from the laymen in the middle classes, through the English, French, Italian, and Spanish courtiers, to the monks and religious men of Germany.Footnote 31
These instances are representative of a wider edifying genre, and illustrate how the Brahman was assimilated into the Christian fold as the proto-Christian embodiment of a sacerdotal and Christian ideal, to serve an internal theological and moral purpose. The fictional correspondence between Alexander and Dindimus was originally interpolated in a second Latin translation of the Alexander romance by Archbishop Leo of Naples (ca. 950 c.e.), better known as the Historia de Preliis (The book of battles; eleventh century). It continued to influence the image of India during the decades in which the Portuguese set out to discover a passage to the East. Quarto editions in Latin were printed in Köln circa 1472 and in Southern France in 1490, both including the Collatio correspondence.Footnote 32
To conclude, Pliny provided Europe with fantastic tales about the East, from those of dog-headed and one-legged peoples beyond the Ganges, to stories of the countries of griffons and mythical snakes. For fifteen centuries or more these were thought to present a reliable ethnographic portrait of the East.Footnote 33 For some eleven centuries the vision of a Brahman nation safeguarding Christian principles in the East was taken as a reliable spiritual portrait. The Brahman was domesticated in Christian thought and assimilated into the genre of the exemplum. Like the priest who safeguarded true religion at home—in word if not always in deed—the Brahman was believed to strive for the sacerdotal ideal in the East. Pliny's monopod and headless nations represented the exotic Other. Regarding the Brahmans, Europe simply saw no Other: they were transformed into an edifying and almost ideal representation of “the Christian self.”
II. FALSE RELIGION AND THE CRAFTY PRIEST
The rationale behind the early-modern descriptions of the Indian traditions, unrelated to the Alexander sources, stems from the widespread assurance that the world had known the biblical God. The Christian theologies were adamant that their religion could be traced back to Adam and Eve and suspected that its remnants survived in the most distant quarters of the world, which testified to the universal propagation of the truth prior to the devil's deceptions. While the “austere” Brahmans were represented as proto-Christians, they were thought to guard the central aspects of true religion: good morals, faith, and the belief in the biblical God. This legendary image of a Brahman nation had such an impact on the popular imagination that to single out the Brahmans as a unified, pan-Indian clerical estate appeared to be self-evident; they always had a fabled place in European learning and popular perceptions of the East. As we have seen, religion was the realm of the priest, leading Mandeville to categorize the Brahmans “as that they were religious men.”Footnote 34
The foreknowledge of this “asceticism” certainly shaped the idea that “Brahman” referred to someone who strived for the sacerdotal ideal—in word, but like the Catholic priest, perhaps not always in deed. Consequently, a second image soon arose on the ancient foundations of the first: the Brahmans were crafty friars and priests. Or to put this differently, the cognitive limits of what could be said about the Indian traditions were drawn as follows: they either reflected true religion (Christianity), or its perversion. The more Europe learned about contemporary Brahmans, the more they moved to the other end of the spiritual spectrum, representing a defective Christianity in the East. Much like the Catholic friars and priests, the Brahman embodied the sacerdotal ideal in word, but in the eyes of Renaissance Europe, not always in practice. As I will show, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century representations of Calicut provide a glimpse of the process whereby Europeans continued to transform the East to suit their own expectations.
Ludovico di Varthema (ca. 1468–1517), an Italian adventurer, wrote the Itinerario (Rome, 1510), an Italian account of his travels in the Middle East and India in which he included one of the first detailed reports of Calicut. Varthema made it clear that his narrative did not concern just one city on the Malabar Coast but also Vijayanagar, and Pulicat on the Coromandel Coast.Footnote 35 He mentions that the king of Calicut is an idolater, yet continues to believe in the Creator. His faith in the Christian God notwithstanding, the king only pays homage to the devil, which he calls “deumo.” Varthema saw a statue that was most likely an image of the man-lion avatar of Vishnu, Narasimha, popular amongst the South Indian Vaishnavites, and refers to the Malabar Brahmans as the priests of the idol. His report contains sufficient detail for the reader to evoke an image of a monstrous demon, explicitly described as Satan or the Christian devil. The coronal in the indigenous representations of Narasimha is associated with the Triple Crown or papal tiara. The Brahmans are said to be like the priests or bishops in Europe.Footnote 36 Furthermore, Varthema notes that the king does not eat before the Brahmans have sacrificed to the devil, nor does he eat meat without sacerdotal permission.Footnote 37 Outside the city stands a church similar in shape to St. John's Basilica in Rome. Every 25 December crowds gather at the temple to sacrifice to the idol after the priests anoint them with oil. The Italian traveler finally says that worshipping the devil in such a manner constitutes, according to the Indians, a penance for their sins.Footnote 38
Varthema's Itinerario, however rudimentary, set the tone for the representation of the Indian traditions in early-modern ethnography. Its success in the Italian-speaking world was immediate: the Italian original went through nine editions between 1510 and 1535, and it was translated into virtually every major European vernacular right into the seventeenth century. But its impact on the popular imagination was even stronger than the multiple editions and translations suggest. Varthema quickly found a keen audience in Europe, curious about the lands in the East. His account of the deumo stands out for the synthesis that he provides. Calicut was considered to be the chief economic and political center on the Malabar Coast.Footnote 39 It is thus not surprising that his sketch of the Malabar Brahmans and their imaginary religion was in Renaissance ethnography extrapolated to being the pan-Indian standard.
In less than twenty-five years, Varthema's work revised the imagery that had captivated intellectuals and the popular imagination for centuries. This is the conceptual moment of the second stereotyped image: the Brahman protagonist grew into a lucid manifestation of satanic priestcraft. Such an expeditious transformation admits no easy explanation but suggests a change of climate, ripe for conceptual change. While Varthema was putting his observations of India to writ, the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus was writing Stultitiæ Laus (In praise of folly; 1511). This staggering bestseller, a satire of the faults of the upper classes and the opulence of religious institutions, would become a catalyst of the Reformation. This was the cognitive milieu in which the Brahman exemplum was called upon to serve as an edifying tool, and in which Mandeville and Boemus upheld the Brahman as a proto-Christian example to follow. If the Brahman ascetic reprimanded Alexander's worldliness and greed, surely he must have shunned the lavishness and avarice associated with the episcopates and Roman Catholic Curia. That same intellectual milieu became radicalized. In short order, the Brahman protagonist entered the eye of the Protestant storm.
Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon in Germany, John Calvin in France, and Ulrich Zwingli in Switzerland were among the radical reformers who charged the Catholic Church with idolatry or devil worship. The Catholic priests had thus far claimed exclusive access to the Word of God. While interpreting the Bible, they made into religion what was not part of it, inventing rites and dogmas as they pleased. Instead of preserving the purity of Revelation, they had added new creeds, made new prescriptions, and promulgated new modes of worship. Finally, with the pope as the Vicar of Christ, the papacy had usurped the civil power. This confessional conflict, which would dominate the cultural history of Europe for centuries, has to be understood as a replay of the battle between early Christianity and pagan Rome, with the pope and his red hats playing ancient Rome and the Protestants taking up the role of unadulterated apologists of the primitive church. Just as the Greco-Roman cults and local practices were corrupted instances of God's original religion, so did the Roman Catholic priesthood corrupt the message of Christ into the worship of human saints, crucifixes, relics, and bones, and the pecuniary exploitation of the gullible masses.
It is a fascinating historical coincidence that this conflict started at the time the West and the East Indies were being explored. Originally cataloguing the similarities between Catholic practices and the pagan traditions of ancient Greece and Rome, Protestant antiquarianism soon turned its attention to India.Footnote 40 The early church fathers united pagan cult and philosophy in a common frame of reference. In the same vein, the Brahman protagonist was assimilated as the Oriental custodian of Christian beliefs and principles. Reformation Europe continued this theological exercise and also assimilated the local Indian traditions into this template, in order to make visible how Roman Catholic Christianity and devilish idolatry were each other's equals. It is in this interpretative context that a second image of the Brahman emerges: the Brahman as the cunning priest. One report lies at the heart of this polemical vocabulary: Varthema's Itinerario.
Calicut in Continental Controversies
Michael Herr, a Protestant physician from Strasbourg, produced the first German translation of the Itinerario in 1515. This edition was issued at Augsburg, five years before the Omnium Gentium Mores was published there. Augsburg was one of the first German cities to support the Reformation. Luther was summoned there in 1518 to face the church authorities and was greeted by large numbers of supporters. The Augsburg printers issued at least 530 of his writings during his lifetime, and the milieu in which the German translation of the Itinerario was released was such that none of them was willing to publish the papal bull of excommunication (1520).Footnote 41 Interestingly enough, the original Italian chapter on the multitudes who gather every 25 December outside Calicut is titled as follows: “Ca come uene gran numero de gente ad. xxv. de Dece[m]brioa p[a]sso a Calicut a pigliar il perdono” (Of the large number of people that gather at Calicut on 25 December to receive pardon).Footnote 42 The German reformer does not simply render “pigliar il perdone” into “receiving pardon,” but, significantly, adds the German term for indulgences, the chief point of contention when Martin Luther initiated the Reformation (1517): “Capitel von ainer walfart so die selben velcker thon umb gnad und ablas willen” (Chapter on a pilgrimage to the same place for the sake of pardon and indulgences).Footnote 43
Similar comparisons between Roman Catholic and Indian practices reappear in a large variety of theological and popular treatises. For instance, Varthema's report was included in the Novus orbis (The New World; 1532), the most authoritative compilation of voyages of the period, collected by Johan Huttich of Mainz and Sebastian Münster, and prefaced by Simon Grynaeus, the leader of the Reformed church in Basel. Another project successfully completed by Michael Herr was the translation of the Novus orbis into German (1534). A substantial part of the translator's dedication is devoted to Varthema's description of Calicut and paraphrases the account in ardent anticlerical terms. Herr dedicated the work to the Earl of Hanau, another German city central to the Reformation, and informed his readership that the king of Calicut is not allowed by his priests to eat before the devil has been honored.Footnote 44 The Protestant obsession with explaining traditional practices in terms of doctrinal content is displayed in the way in which a sixteenth-century physician understood vegetarianism as a diabolical belief imposed by priests. Through Varthema's narrative, Herr compares the king's ordeal with that which the Germans were to suffer: as the king of Calicut was apparently forbidden to consume what his priests would enjoy themselves, so were the Germans made to eat what those who imposed it would refuse to eat:
And though this is such a horrid and terrible thing, the aberration is that persistent that even this mighty king is not entitled to think differently, and suffers what we were subjected to for long, because some have also made us eat and drink the things they would not have themselves, like the priests of the king of Calicut do not permit him to eat anything that once has lived, and feed him only rice and bread, including herbs and vegetables, while they themselves will eat what they please. And still the king remains obedient to them, though he knows that this only serves the devil, and not his rewards in the life hereafter.Footnote 45
The comparison is arguably an implicit reference to the Catholic fast, another practice fervently disliked by the reformers. Just as the king was forbidden to eat what his priests would eat, in the same manner Germans were told to abstain from meat and obliged to eat fish during Lent and the Friday fasts. Suspicious members of the Catholic fold suspected that the priests did not follow this conscientiously: they made the laity eat what they would not. For the reformers, Indian vegetarianism was thus not simply vegetarianism, but a sacerdotal corruption of true religion.Footnote 46
To give another example, during the time that the Dutch campaign against the Spanish was beginning to succeed, the Burgomaster of Antwerp, Marnix of Thoulouse (1538–1598), wrote his cutting satires against the Church of Rome, Le Tableau des Différens de la Religion (The table of religious differences; 1599). Marnix studied theology under John Calvin at Geneva, after which he became involved in the politics of the Low Countries. Calicut features prominently when he questions the divine apostolic lineage that would make the pope the Vicar of Christ on earth. The pope in Rome is more easily connected with the deumo of Calicut than with the Apostle Peter of Galilee, the radix of the papal tradition. This reference to the deumo is made in passing, as if it were common knowledge in the Low Countries at the end of the sixteenth century. The cathedra or throne of the pope in Rome, the paraphernalia associated with the deities of antiquity, and the deumo of Calicut all coalesce into a single antiquarian frame of reference: “The same emblem, that she alone wears the Triple Crown, does not displease that great fool, the devil of Calicut, who also has come to wear the triple tiara. In a fit of insanity, he forgot that in the Olympic Pantheon there is only one Jupiter who holds a threefold lightning, that in the ocean, on the seat of Triton, sits only one Neptune with a triune, that in Pluto's underworld, there is but one three-headed Cerberus, and on earth, in the kingdom of the maniacs, one Pope with a triple crown.”Footnote 47
The attitudes towards Calicut were not simply framed by the Protestant polemics, but they were also apparent in the protests that constitute the local history of reform. Long before the Duke of Parma recaptured Bruges, Ghent, and finally Antwerp in 1584–1585, Luther and Calvin had found a sympathetic audience in Flemish cities. From the 1530s onward, Ghent was divided by religious discord. The iconoclastic fury (Beeldenstorm) of August 1566 had left no church or monastery undamaged. Writing from Ghent, the Catholic historian Marcus van Vaernewijck (1518–1569) documented the turbulence that rocked the city between 1566 and 1568. He observed the damage done to St. Jakob's and St. Michael's churches and other places of Catholic worship. His Dutch diary was dated between 1566–1568, and issued at Ghent between 1872–1881.
The Catholic historian narrates how the statues in St. Peter's Abbey remained relatively intact, with the exception of a life-sized statue of the Apostle Peter. The sturdy image would have survived the attacks were it not for the three crowns on St. Peter's head that had been cast to the ground. Even in war-torn Ghent, the devil of Calicut made an appearance: Marcus quotes the iconoclasts saying that they had seen a golden statue of the devil of Calicut with three crowns on its head, a vision that led the rioting mobs to mock the papal crown or tiara.Footnote 48 That a Calvinist reading of Varthema's report, or of a graven image that was actually offloaded in the harbor of Antwerp, was manifest in the local history of the Reformation in the Low Countries further indicates the propagandistic frames through which ethnographic information was structured and understood.
Similar comparisons between Calicut and Catholic Rome can be found in the French polemics of another disciple of Calvin, Pierre Viret (1511–1571), the most important preacher at Lyon in the 1560s. Viret authored one of the earliest works to catalogue the corruptions supposed to have crept into the Christian fold via the Greco-Roman milieu in which Christianity matriculated. When Viret observes that the Monarch of Hell knows of ingenious ways to have the Children of God worship him, a reference to Calicut follows suit.Footnote 49 Calicut was featured not only in print but also in the visual propaganda of the Reformation. It appears prominently on the Mappe-Monde Nouvelle Papistique (The new papal world map; Geneva, 1566). This satirical broadsheet and allegorical map depicts ceremonial and ecclesiastic components of the Catholic universe submerged inside the devil's mouth, surrounded by accompanying letterpress attributed to the French Calvinist, Théodore de Bèze (1519–1605), or at times to Pierre Viret. From outside the walls of the papal kingdom traders bring in not only barrels of commodities from the New World, the Middle East, Africa, and Calicut, but also heathen festivals, ceremonies, idols, and relics, visually representing the spiritual corruption of the papal universe.Footnote 50
On one hand, we have Varthema's narrative, released in 1510. On the other, we have the Calicut motif extracted from his narrative, which carries at its heart a novel imagery of the Brahman and his religion. The deep theological nature of this imagery is suggested by its popularity in the reformed sources—where it originated—and by its compliance with the taste of their authors and intended audiences. It was constructed not only from an amalgam of misunderstanding and religious imagination, but its origins can and should also be located in the sixteenth-century anti-Catholic polemics. The composition of the Brahman protagonist as the custodian of defective Christianity in the East was not only a continental affair; in England, too, the “devil of Calicut” became a rallying cry for the reformers in their war against the church.
Calicut in English Controversies
The imaginary religion of Calicut quickly became a feature of Tudor learning. One of the first geographical works in English after the great discoveries was the Geographia (1540) by Roger Barlow (d. 1553), an associate of Thomas Cromwell and a friend of the Reformation. Much of it was translated from Encisco's work on the New World, the Summa de Geografía (Seville, 1519). Yet one of Barlow's original contributions was an extensive section on Calicut, reproduced ad verbatim from the Itinerario.Footnote 51 The cultural milieu through which this work percolated was characterized by the socio-religious processes through which the Church of England broke away from the authority of the Catholic Church. When Henry VIII divorced Rome in 1534, England not only opened its gates to the Reformation but also to ethnographic imagery that came with it. For instance, the bishop of Exeter, Miles Coverdale (1488–1565/68), a radical advocate of reform and friend of Cromwell, translated an anonymous work from the High Dutch that is essentially a list of Roman Catholic sects and orders. After describing the Carthusian Order and its monastic practices and austerities, the monks of Calicut are evoked to heap scorn on such outward display of Catholic spirituality.Footnote 52
This motif surfaces in popular English literature of the period and, much like on the Continent, also appears in the project of translation. The famous translator Richard (Rycharde) Eden (ca. 1520–1576) was commissioned to translate European travelogues to warm his countrymen to the prospect of overseas expeditions, which gained him a prominent treasury position during the Catholic reign of Mary Tudor (1553–1558). By the end of 1555, however, he had come under suspicion of heresy and was forced to resign from office.Footnote 53 That his loyalty to the Catholic queen became suspect is no surprise; already in 1553 Eden had translated parts of Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia (Basel, 1544), the German original of which included Varthema's paragraphs on the South Indian deumo. The translator betrays his religious affiliations in the margins, next to a picturesque description of the idol's crown. His annotation to the left of the printed text reads: “The bishop of Rome's vicar at Calicut.”Footnote 54 It is one thing to note similarities between the idol's coronal and the papal tiara, but quite another to describe the satanic idol of Calicut as an Indian substitute for or an agent of the Catholic pope.
The last work Eden translated was the entire text of the Itinerario (1577). This was during the Protestant reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603), and Eden could now freely express his anti-Catholic ethos in marginal annotations. Where Varthema observes that the devil of Calicut wears a triple crown with four horns, Eden reads the “Difference betweene the Popes crowne and the devylles.”Footnote 55 The Malabar Brahman is praised as “A goodly priest the devylles Chaplen.”Footnote 56 Eden must have seen the similarities with the Catholic priests shining forth from Varthema's pages: where the traveler writes that the Brahmans apply oil on the heads of the pilgrims, Eden adds, “Holy oyle in the steade of holy water,” yet another Roman Catholic custom that Protestant reformers saw to be a priestly fraud.Footnote 57 Where Varthema observes a funeral cortège in Tangasseri (Quilon), and notes “a great noyse with Trumpettes, Pipes, Drummes, Tambarells,” Eden is reminded of the “Canonisyng of saintes,” another institution fervently disliked by the reformers.Footnote 58
This process of cultural translation into the framework of Protestant polemics is multiplied in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and not only in scholarship that deals specifically with India. In 1572, for example, John Bossewell (d. 1580) issued his Workes of Armorie, a collection of armorial bearings. Though the author draws heavily from Gerard Legh's The Accedens of Armory (1568), one of his original contributions is worth mentioning. Bossewell illustrates the text with woodcuts to clarify the technicalities of heraldry. One of the coats of armor is a triple-crowned goat. At variance with the papal emblem, this heraldic crown also bears four horns. For his readers the imagery must have rung a bell. Indeed, Bossewell writes that the goat is “adorned Diademate modo Romanorum Pontificum” (with the diadem of the Roman Catholic pontificate). The shield might thus belong to some “Romishe bishoppe” fraudulently aspiring a higher status.Footnote 59 Bossewell comments in an anti-Catholic spirit that describing the image any further would be redundant to any reader who abhors “the tyranny of that Romishe sea.”Footnote 60 But one final observation must have truly fascinated his Protestant audience: a summary narrative of Varthema's relation of the deumo of Calicut and its priesthood, taken from Münster's Cosmographia.Footnote 61
It must be remembered that this anticlericalism or anti-Brahmanism is not evident in Varthema's original report; the early-modern image of the Brahman protagonist was constructed at the focal points of intellectual life in the libraries of northern Europe. On the Continent, the Calicut motif appears in the local history of the Reformation. In England, too, the vision that Roman Catholicism was tantamount to Indian heathenism was used to excite the masses at crucial public events. On 3 June 1571, the bishop of Oxford, John Bridges (1535–1618), delivered an acerbic denunciation of popery, at St. Paul's Cross next to the St. Paul's Cathedral. The sermon was printed with a dedication to Sir William Cecil, the principal secretary of Elizabeth I. Bridges notes the many requests he received to publish his discourse, for sensational it surely was: the good bishop went so far as to argue that the Catholics did not believe in Christ, for they worshipped other creatures besides Him, that is, the Catholic saints.Footnote 62 Bridges takes apart the Catholic distinction between veneration (dulia) and worship (latria). He is not prepared to simply accept the claim that they believe in Christ, and compares the Catholic worship of saints with “the fayth at Calecute,” where the Christian devil was “inthronized and crowned like the Pope.”Footnote 63 It seems likely (proof is lacking) that this remark about the devil, enthroned at Calicut like the pope in Rome dethroned Christ, featured also in the spoken sermon. The anecdotal nature of “the fayth at Calecute” fitted a homily intended to incite the crowds in St Paul's Churchyard. The controversies that surrounded the speech testify to its extensive readership, suggesting that many copies were sold in the bookstalls at St Paul's. Another sermon that incorporated this imagery was delivered on 24 March 1613, at the tenth anniversary of the accession of James I. The historical nature of this event suggests that many people must have gathered at St. Paul's Cross, then the most famous pulpit of England. The orator was the bishop of Norwich, Joseph Hall (1574–1656). While prompting his audience to fear and serve the Lord, Hall hit hard at the Catholic worship of saints: “Every worldling is a Papist in this, that he gives service, to the creature, which is the lowest respect that can bee … Yea, I would it were uncharitable to say, that many besides the savages of Calecut, place Satan in the throne, and God on the footestoole. For as Witches and Sorcerers converse with evill spirits in plausible and familiar formes, which in ugly shapes they would abhorre; so many a man serves Satan under the formes of gold and silver, under the images of Saints and lightsome Angels; under glittering clotes, or glorious titles, or beauteous faces, whom they would defie as himselfe.”Footnote 64
The comparison between the Indian deumo occupying the throne of the King of Heaven and the Catholic worship of saints resonated with the anti-Catholic sentiments of his audience. That diverse English preachers and theologians recapitulated the Calicut motif in the religious discourses of late Tudor and early Stuart England further indicates the deep theological nature of this second mode of representation.Footnote 65 The savants wrote about Calicut as the principal city and marketplace of India. Henceforth, this coastal entrepôt was built anew in the libraries of northern Europe: it became the Oriental sister city of the papal metropolis, from where the devil's religion spread in concentric circles of sacerdotal corruption. The pope—usurping the position of Christ in Rome—found his equivalent in Calicut, where the deumo occupied the throne. In the Protestant's war for souls, Varthema's already colored passages were thus not simply a matter of ethnography—they became the heavy artillery. As part of a distinctly Protestant formulation, these sources exploited the motif of the heathen priests and practices to explore internal Christian divisions. The second mode of representation thus has to be understood as a Protestant footnote to the apologetic works of the fathers of the church: as the pagan cults of Greece and Rome had been assimilated as corrupted instances of a monotheistic core, the Indian traditions became part of this shared polemical vocabulary directed against Catholic Christianity. For as long as the theological conflict between the Catholics and Protestants continued, the same line of argument was repeated, with the comparative method used to discredit theological opponents and perpetuate a deep theological vision of the Indian reality.
III. THE SPIRITUAL HISTORY OF INDIA
The German scholars are generally considered to be the first among northern European intellectuals to take a direct interest in Portuguese activities in the East, even though scholars like Boemus initially continued to provide accounts of India disconnected from the recent discoveries.Footnote 66 When European learning decided to grant India the privilege of historical progress, it turned first to the Itinerario. In consequence, the difference between India's spiritual past and present was portrayed as an unfortunate development: the noble nation of Brachmanes had turned into a circle of crafty priests. In 1534, the same year in which Herr's dedication to the German edition of the Novus orbus was issued at Augsburg, and fourteen years after the Omnium Gentium Mores appeared in that turbulent city, Boemus' Brachmanes met Varthema's Brahmans in close textual proximity. This meeting took place at a time when Boemus' collection of customs was still being reprinted in various European cities. In other words, the stereotyped image of the noble Brahman retained its popularity, but it coexisted with the distribution of a second composite image: the Brahman as cunning Indian priest.
One of Boemus' readers was the reformer Sebastian Franck (1499–1542). In his early chronicle of Turkey (Augsburg, 1530), prefaced by Martin Luther, Franck wanted to uplift the Europeans by holding up to them the mirror of the exemplary Turk. The implication was that true religion was possible at all times and places, even outside the geographical realm of Christ. But Franck went beyond the pre-Renaissance vision, and even rejected the possibility of capturing the Word of God in the written word of the Bible. Though he shared in the critique against the Church of Rome, Franck thereby argued at the margins of the Reformation. He advanced a religion of the spirit, implanted by God in the hearts of all men and women, which led him to dismiss the visible church and set aside the particularity of Scripture in favor of a timeless and unarticulated Inner Word of God. For this reason, Sebastian Franck is called a sixteenth-century spiritualist.Footnote 67
Much like Boemus, Franck bears witness to the stability of the analytical format with which the Christian theologies made sense of themselves and other traditions. Like Boemus, he saw his most important work, Weltbuch, Spiegel und Bildtnisz des Gantzen Erdtbodens (Book of the world, mirror and image of the entire globe; 1534), not merely as a scholarly project but also as the edifying embodiment of his theological outlook. Inspired by 2 Romans, 14–15, in which the Apostle Paul argues that the gentiles or heathens by nature adhere to the commandments of God, Franck concludes that contemporary heathens are descendants of the tribes that came down from the Patriarch Abraham. An annotation in the margin says, “Gott hat sein volck allenthalb” (God has his people everywhere).Footnote 68 Franck moves beyond the ahistorical method of his predecessor, and also incorporates ethnographic reports brought back from the newly discovered worlds. With reference to India, the data come from a single source: the Itinerario. It is here that the noble Brahmans meet their satanic counterparts. Franck first introduces Boemus' account of the Brahmans verbatim in the vernacular, with a particular emphasis on their simple way of life and adherence to the law of nature.Footnote 69 Boemus' enthusiasm led Franck to write those annotations that grace the margins in the books of old: in the margin left from where Boemus writes that the Brahmans are not given to idolatry is printed, “Der Bracmannorum Gotsdienst” (The Brahman religion). Next to where the section starts is printed, “Bracman[n]i ein Christen volck” (The Brahmans, a Christian nation).Footnote 70
When these Christian “Bracmanni” meet Varthema's “Bramini,” the latter were also assimilated: though clearly misguided, they similarly testified to the human search for the Christian God. Franck recapitulates Varthema's report of the religion of Calicut, and repeats the theme of indulgences in the German title of his chapter on the Indian pilgrimage.Footnote 71 He further observes that the devil's industry had not been confined to the Malabar regions: everything that can be said about the customs of Calicut is also applicable to “Cauul, Dabuli, Bathacala, Onor, Mangalor, Cannonor, Cucinco, Narsinga, Caicolon, Colon, etcetera.”Footnote 72 The “Bramini” failed to elicit the praise previously directed at the “Bracmanni.” The spiritualist reformer stays remarkably quiet about what had happened to the Indian religion in the absence of scriptural revelation.
One year later, a reformed printer at Frankfurt, Christian Egenolf (1502–1555), again arbitrarily juxtaposes both images in his cosmography.Footnote 73 Another German cosmography in which the pre-Renaissance and early-modern modes of representation came to coexist early on is the Cosmographia Universalis (1544) by the reformed Hebrew scholar Sebastian Münster (1489–1552). This work in the vernacular immediately became popular and remained so for more than a century, in up to forty-six editions in six different languages.Footnote 74 In his preface Münster presents exactly the same outline of religious decay as does the Omnium Gentium Mores. He also recapitulates the pre-Renaissance vision of the noble Brahmans. A marginal annotation describes them as a righteous nation: “Bragma[n]ni ein gerecht volck.”Footnote 75 Once again, Varthema's narrative about the Brahmans is printed in close textual proximity. Münster welcomes the opportunity to talk about “India in our times” (India zü unsern zeite[n]), and draws from Varthema's Calicut report to describe it.Footnote 76
This method of combining both theoretical images of the Brahman protagonist within a unified historical format resonated with French cosmographies of the period, and the Calicut account spread rapidly. The French editor Pierre Boaistuau (1500–1566) started his collection of curiosities (1560) with a spectacular illustration of the satanic deumo, followed by a heavily embellished reproduction of Varthema's report.Footnote 77 The second Brahman image found an avid audience amongst the Catholic scholars, not surprising given that Roman Catholic Christianity had a long history of assimilating the Greco-Roman traditions and vilifying their protagonists as the sacerdotal agents of religious corruption. Such anticlerical sentiments were not new, but they became radicalized in Protestant Europe and translated into anti-Brahmanism. Under siege by the Protestants of northern Europe, the Catholic savants advanced an ethno-theological method through which both images of the Brahman protagonist were constructed.Footnote 78
It is of related interest to note that François de Belleforest (1530–1583), historian of Henry III of France, interpolated large chapters on contemporary India in the second French edition of Münster's Cosmographia (1575). He also wrote his own cosmography, L'Histoire Universelle du Monde (The universal history of the world; 1570). In it he first reproduces the India sections in Johannes Boemus' work, then continues with the “Bracmanes.” He summarizes the Collatio correspondence, and recapitulates the pre-Renaissance formulation: the Brahmans serve the biblical God in prayer and spiritual service.Footnote 79 As a marginal annotation explains, “Pure religion of the Brachmanes, if nurtured by the knowledge of Christ like it has been since.”Footnote 80 Belleforest testifies to the kind of generalizations the Europeans would strive for: he suggests a genealogical link between the present-day priests and the Brahmans of yesteryear, and further, propels the Indian Brahmans to the echelons of a pan-Indian priesthood. A marginal annotation explains: “Still today in the entire country of India are the priests called Bramines.”Footnote 81 Unfortunately, he says, those at Calicut have come to worship an idol that carries the papal tiara, and they bear witness to the manner in which the devil mocks Christianity. The author reproduces Varthema's account of the “images Sathaniques,” and explains that the ministers of Satan are the descendants of the proto-Christian Brahmans: “The priests retain the name of Brahmans from these ancient Bracmanes, who are more saintly and more religious than these soiled and cursed idolaters.”Footnote 82
As Belleforest explains it in the second French edition of Münster's Cosmographia (1575), now that Christianity has conquered the lands of Europe, the devil has relocated his abode to India.Footnote 83 One of his marginal annotations explains this spiritual battle as follows: “The Brahmans were once Christians.”Footnote 84 The temple of Calicut is therefore made into the epicenter of the inner circle of hell, from which its satanic religion spreads amidst the phosphorous fumes of priestly corruption. The Brahmans are the priests of not only Calicut but of all the regions documented—Gujarat, the entire Malabar littoral, and Vijayanagar. The people are diverse, as are their ceremonies, but the engine of priestcraft transcends this variety: they all enjoy the same priests, who are responsible for the defects of Christianity among them. All their idols are adaptations of the deumo of Calicut, “as in this respect they all are similar in their belief.”Footnote 85
IV. CONCLUSION: STRUCTURES OF REPRESENTATION
The pre-Renaissance representation of the Brahmans reflects the preoccupations of pre-Reformation Christianity. The vision of the early-modern Brahmans also echoes the preoccupations of early-modern Christianity. The emergence of a structural outline of the spiritual history of India has to be located in the Renaissance ethnographies, where both formulations met. Both theoretical entities are conjugated into a unified portrait of the spiritual history of India: the true Christianity that permeated the medieval archive is relegated to the past tense and superseded by defective Christianity. The decline is attributed to an ideated priesthood, the nodal point in this Renaissance composition.
It is a commonplace that the European expansion propelled the decisive shift from the classical anthropological canon to the development of modern anthropology, beyond what Pliny and Strabo had written.Footnote 86 The belief in the marvels and wondrous nations in the East might have died slowly. Yet at least in the case of the representation of India, the pre-Renaissance formulation was not discarded, but rather consigned to the chapters on ancient India, such that classical anthropology continued to thrive in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Footnote 87 In addition, both the classical and early-modern modes of representations reveal but two faces of the same theological coin, and further nuance the anthropological shift in relation to the European representation of religion.Footnote 88
Both modes of representation reveal a resilient analytical format that continued to shape future reports about India. The spiritual historiography of the Bible—accepted as an ethnographic premise by cosmographers and translators of the sixteenth-century travel reports and books on the discoveries in the East—drew all Semitic and non-Semitic traditions into the same frame of reference. The great company of future travelers, religious as well as secular, confirmed in the eyes of many readers that this was indeed their most appropriate place. Whereas ethnographic learning was framed to fit specific theological purposes, future travelers to India incorporated the Christian worldview and reproduced these theological assumptions as commonsense narratives.Footnote 89 An inherently pluralistic context that defied the European imagination—energetic, vibrant, and made up of a multitude of crosscutting traditions—was reduced to a binary mode of representation: true or false. In both, India enacted a normative idea. This concept propelled the cultural history of Europe: the true or false, asymptotic, and assumedly human quest for a specifically Christian mode of conduct and faith.
Of course, the various types of sources cannot be rigidly differentiated, and the attitudes they display towards India form much more of a continuum than I can convey in this outline. Nonetheless, descriptions of India continued to vacillate between the two modes of representation. For as long as Christianity aspired to universal significance, the outside world was drawn in to argue for the truth of the Christian faith. Throughout the conflict between Catholic and Protestant denominations, that between ancient paganism and primitive Christianity was replayed. Those seeking to neutralize theological opponents recapitulated the early-modern formulation.Footnote 90 Those who sought to show the universality of Christian principles carried on with the pre-Renaissance formulation.Footnote 91
The encyclopedic dictionaries characterize the period between the 1670s and 1750s. They constitute a vast body of literature in which the Christian vocabulary is gradually stripped away and the historical outline of Indian spirituality, manufactured in the sixteenth-century sources, is reformulated in a “scientific” lexicon.Footnote 92 As such, colonial scholarship did not develop in an intellectual vacuum. Four years prior to Holwell (1765), another East India Company servant, Luke Scrafton (1732–1770?), could appeal to anthropological consensus and effectively frame his account of the Brahmans and local Hindu (Gentoo) practices within both modes of representation outlined above.Footnote 93
Two points require comment: first, the international character of the codification of a unified, yet notional Indian religion; and second, the fact that this obviously was not a colonial enterprise. Surely, as a word, “Hinduism” was coined in the nineteenth century. It was derived from “Hindooism,” first employed in 1787 by the missionary and subsequently director of the East India Company Charles Grant (1746–1823).Footnote 94 But as a conceptual unit, it embraces the theoretical entities that were combined in the books of sixteenth-century Europe. The Orientalist notion of an unadulterated “philosophical Hinduism” in ancient manuscripts is manifest in the first composite image, and that of “popular Hinduism” in the second image. While the genealogy of colonial discourse I am dealing with here constitutes one thread in a complex history of representation, the mythical Brahman nation never lost its crucial position in these preexisting cognitive categories. As the nineteenth century unfolded, this Orientalist discourse was incorporated into the colonial discourse, and implicated in colonial state formation. But the constancy of representation cannot be explained in terms of colonial necessities or the demands of modernity. It cuts across the multiple power constellations that emerged in both Europe and India over four centuries or more. That constancy was possible because coherent theoretical formats continued to operate in the background of European discourse on India, the Christian theologies, both explicit and disguised.
