Chapter 9 Excerpts from Fr. Bouchet’s India: An Eighteenth- Century Jesuit’s Encounter with Hinduism
1 Excerpt 1 – Introduction: The Versatile Fr. Bouchet1
Jean Venance Bouchet (1655–1732) was a Jesuit missionary in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka for over forty years, most of the first half of the eighteenth century. He was born on April 10, 1655 in Fontenay-le-Comte, France, and entered the Society of Jesus in 1670. In 1687, he went to Siam as part of a Jesuit mission, but after a 1688 revolution, the fourteen Jesuits were ejected from the kingdom. Bouchet was one of just three2 who, upon reaching Pondi- cherry in 1689, stayed on to join the French mission. By 1702, and by his own admission, he had baptized twenty thousand adults and heard one hundred thousand confessions.3 Bouchet was a friend and spiritual advisor to St. João de Britto (1647–93), and was the last Jesuit to see Britto alive before his martyr- dom.4 He built a large church at Avur,5 which remained the center of the Mad- urai mission until 1773. He also worked for some time in Thakkolam (Tarcolam)
1 This chapter has been reprinted with permission. See bibliography for full information. 2 Along with Frs. Abraham le Royer (1646–1715) and Charles François Dolu (1655–1740), himself also a respected scholar of Buddhism (see Alison Gopnik, “Could David Hume Have Known about Buddhism? Charles François Dolu, the Royal College of La Flèche, and the Global Je- suit Intellectual Network,” Hume Studies 35, nos. 1–2 [2009]: 5–28, here 9–10); see Joe Sebas- tian, The Jesuit Carnatic Mission: The Foundation of the Andhra Church (Secunderabad: Jesuit Province Society, Hyderabad, 2004), 3–4. 3 Fr. Peter Martin, in a January 30, 1699 letter to Fr. Louis de Villette, reports Bouchet’s assess- ment of his converts: “They have hardly any of those obstacles which are found among other people because they have no communication with Europeans, some of whom, by their riot- ous excesses, have corrupted almost all the Christians in India” (from the Letters of Fr. Peter Martin, Madurai Mission, 1699–1713, typescript in the de Nobili Research Centre, Loyola Col- lege, Chennai, India, 6). 4 Augustine Saulière, Red Sand: A Life of St. John de Britto, S.J.: Martyr of the Madura Mission (Madurai: De Nobili Press, 1947), 403, 418. 5 See Léon Besse, La mission du Maduré: Historique de ses Pangous (Trichinopoly [Tiruchirap- palli]: Mission Catholique, 1914), 95: “A few years later, toward 1695, Fr. Venance Bouchet, who had come in 1689, founded there a residence. In 1697, he built there a very beautiful church in honor of the holy Virgin. A great gathering of people convened there to receive the sacra- ments. Thirty villages depended on Father Bouchet, about thirty thousand Christians. During his twelve years in that residence, he baptized twenty thousand catechumens and heard one hundred thousand confessions.”
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We needed a man of [Bouchet’s] experience and ability to start the new Carnatic Mission on the lines suited to our designs and lay solid founda- tions to enable us to begin at once to work usefully for the salvation of souls […]. Fr. Bouchet was appointed Superior of the New Mission, and it would have been difficult to make a better choice, as the end will show.6
As a Jesuit, counselor, and superior, Bouchet had status, simply as a spiritual person and wise friend. He seems to have lived as a prominent example of the group of Jesuits known as “paṇṭārasāmis,” who, in Savarimuthu Rajamanickam’s words,
were sufficiently respected and at the same time could deal with all the castes, even with the Brahmins though they could not be their teachers. They did not need to be Sanskrit scholars nor strict vegetarians nor were they obliged to fast every day. They could look after the low castes more easily.7
He took an indigenous “renunciant” name, Periya Sañjīvinātha (perhaps, “Re- vered Master of Spiritual Healing”). From his own comments, particularly in letter 9 (see below), written to a young French Jesuit interested in joining the mission, we learn that he lived an ascetic life, eating and drinking with an aus- terity due to both a paucity of resources and a determination to live as an as- cetic. He wore the cumbersome wooden sandals ascetics were accustomed to wear, and learned with difficulty to sit cross-legged on the ground for long hours. Such details of adaptation seem to have been taken for granted by Bouchet’s time, and he does not feel it necessary to explain or defend them. Bouchet’s insistence on tracing Indian religious practices and ideas back to the biblical and Greek pagan worlds may be thought of as an intellectual com- panion to his practice of adaptation. His effort in letters 4 and 78 to trace Indian
6 Sebastian, Jesuit Carnatic Mission, 12–13. 7 Savarimuthu Rajamanickam, S.J., The First Oriental Scholar (Tirunelveli: De Nobili Research Institute, 1972), 49. 8 See my enumeration of the letters, below.