Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies Volume 13 Article 18 January 2000 Book Reviews Francis X. Clooney Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/jhcs Part of the Religion Commons Recommended Citation Clooney, Francis X. (2000) "Book Reviews," Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies: Vol. 13, Article 18. Available at: https://doi.org/10.7825/2164-6279.1238 The Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies is a publication of the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies. The digital version is made available by Digital Commons @ Butler University. For questions about the Journal or the Society, please contact [email protected]. For more information about Digital Commons @ Butler University, please contact [email protected]. Clooney: Book Reviews Book Reviews 47 Order of Vaishnava monks (Vijay Pinch); historical understanding: (ix). What should and comparisons between Vivekananda and be preserved from the past and what should other significant leaders and thinkers: be discarded from the world's religions? Brahmabandhab Upadhyay (Julius Lipner), These questions are as crucial today as they two sanatan dharma propagandists in the were a hundred years ago. Together with Punjab (Kenneth Jones) and Govind Rambachan's recent The Limits ofScripture: . Chandra Dev in East Bengal (Hiltrud Vivekananda's Reinterpretation ofthe Vedas Rustau). What the volume shows, says the (University of Hawaii Press, 1994), this editor, William Radice, is that for book would provide the basis for an Vivekananda modernization meant both excellent graduate/senior undergraduate physical and mental reform. "His central seminar on "Vivekananda and Hindu project - uniting his work in India and the Reform". West - was to work out what in the religious traditions not only of India but of all Harold Coward countries and civilizations was valid and University of Victoria acceptable to modem scientific and His Star in the East. Augustin Sauliere, SJ. Revised and Re-edited by S. Rajamanickam, SJ. Madras: De Nobili Research Institute, 1995. Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century India. Ines G. Zupanov. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America 1542-1773. Gauvin Bailey. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. The Call of the Orient: A Response by Jesuits in the Sixteenth Century~ Anthony D'Costa, SJ. Mumbai: Heras Institute of Indian History and Culture, 1999. ROBERTO DE NOBILl (1577-1656) Europeans to learn Tamil, and perhaps the was an Italian Jesuit priest who came to first to write theological treatises in that (or India in 1605, reaching the city of Madurai any) Indian language. He also read Sanskrit, in Tamil Nadu in November 1606. For most the classical language of Hindu India, and of the next 40 years he lived and worked was perhaps the first European to read there as a missionary. De Nobili is best extensively in that language. He used his remembered - and admired and criticized - learning to establish contacts within the for his· willingness to adapt to Indian Hindu community and to win over converts, customs of dress, food, and maimer of liv­ beginning in 1607. He hoped in this way to ing. In his first years in Madurai, de Nobili make his spiritual mission clear, win the put into practice the methods of adaptation attention of his desired audience, and for which he is famous. He simplified his remove the impressio~ that Christianity was dress, diet, and lifestyle and sought to follow merely a foreign, Western religion. He was the ascetic lifestyle of a Hindu renunciant. A determined to show that the Christian faith, talented linguist, he was one of first the one true religion, coUld flourish in India. Published by Digital Commons @ Butler University, 2000 1 Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, Vol. 13 [2000], Art. 18 48 Book Reviews He seems to have been rather successful too; health was in severe decline and he Sauliere cites de Nobili's contemporary gradually went blind; he died in 1656 near Balthasar da Costa to the effect that by 1661 the modem city of Chennai. Even today he 30,000 converts had been won over due to is known by his Tamil title, Tattuva de Nobili's methods. Podagar, ''Teacher of Truth". During de Nobili's lifetime, it was His Star in the East is by far the most primarily other missionaries who criticized detailed and substantial biography of de his accommodation of Indian culture, which Nobili yet written. Fr Sauliere made great they did not believe could be so smoothly use of the mission archives at the old Jesuit disconnected from what we might sum­ seminary in Shembaghanur, Tamil Nadu, marize as Hinduism, and which they termed and meticulously pulled together the superstition, heathenism, or idolatry. After documents on de Nobili (available in the 1612 the intra-Christian controversy about 1950s) for as full as possible an accoUnt of his methods heated up, and he had to defend his life. The book is therefore also a rich himself against vigorous Christian critics, resource for the study of one of the earliest beginning with his original Jesuit colleague Catholic missions in India and for under­ in Madurai, Gonyalo Fernandes (1541- standing the thinking and strategies of the 1619),· who believed that de Nobili was early Jesuits there. The manuscript was seriously misunderstanding or misrepresent­ already fmished in 1955 and the major ing Brahminism, and was far too tolerant in portion of it published in the Catholic what he expected of converts. For ten years periodical New Leader during 1956-1957, he was forbidden to accept converts into the but Sauliere himself never published it. He culturally-sensitive form of Christianity he was apparently deterred by the financial had devised. This controversy was not failure of his earlier book on St John de entirely without benefit, since it occasioned Britto (a missionary and Christian martyr) his articulation of the rationale for his and by his quarrel over scholarship and style missionary theory in three Latin treatises, with Vincent Cronin, whose A Pearl to India the Apology, the Narration, and Report on (1959) admittedly popularizes Sauliere's Certain Customs of the Indian Nation. As research. Rajamanickam, a student of Sau­ for the Hindu reaction, we do not know liere who in the 1960s and 1970s was him­ much about the local response to de Nobili, self the leading scholar on de Nobili, fmally since there seem to be no contemporary undertook in the 1990s to publish Sauliere's Hindu reports about him. He himself reports work under the current title, correcting and on extended theological arguments with· updating it in light of more recent research pandits, and there were learned Brahmins, (e.g. the discovery of de Nobili's Latin including those not interested in converting, treatises), and adding useful appendices. We who were willing to vouch for the validity of owe a great deal to Frs Sauliere and Rajama­ his understanding of their traditions. nickam, but much remains 'to be done. Sauliere reports various controversies and For most Indian Catholics, de Nobili altercations, but narrates them mainly in a represents a respected though rarefied ideal, rather hagiographical tone, i.e. as "the trials but some see his accommodation of caste as of the missionary". After the defmitive papal too tolerant of unjust structures. Sauliere approval of his methods in 1623, de Nobili never criticizes de Nobili and gives little built up the Madurai mission and was also sympathy to opponents, but insists, "Every able to travel to other parts of South India Christian heart in this ancient land is a and Sri Lanka to establish new mission shrine to the honoured memory of Tattuva centres. During this period he wrote in Podagar". (443) Fr Rajamanickam con­ Tamil his great Refutation of Calumnies, a cludes his epilogue even more fervently: thorough defence of the Christian teaching no one has a better claim to be called a and way of life, and a multi-volume saint than Robert de Nobili, the Tattuva Catechism. Toward the end of his life his Podagar, the ''Brahmin Sanyasi", "the https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/jhcs/vol13/iss1/18 DOI: 10.7825/2164-6279.1238 2 Clooney: Book Reviews Book Reviews 49 Wise and Holy man from the West,", hopes that it will inaugurate a new above all "His Star in the East", which generation of historical and cultural studies led thousands of Indians to Jesus, the of the Catholic missionaries in India. Saviour and "the expectation of the Two other books deserve brief mention. nations". (459) First, Gauvin Bailey's Art on the Jesuit Protestant writers, concerned about the Missions in Asia and Latin America (J 580- purity and power of the Christian Gospel, 1773) devotes a full chapter to the ambitious . have always been rather more inclined to see Jesuit mission to the Mughal Court, a story de Nobili;s strategy of adaptation as too fascinating in itself. His assessment of that much of a compromise with Hinduism. mission in light of parallel developments in Several recent Hindu writers have viewed de Japan, China, and Latin America vastly Nobili rather as a wolf in sheep's clothing - enriches our understanding of the common the missionary disguised as holy. man, the features of the Jesuit encounter with the author of a false Veda, and the inspiration cultures and religions of Asia and the for modem efforts to "conceal" Christian America. Second, Anthony D'Costa's The l evangelization in Hindu appearances. Call of the Orient: A Response by Jesuits in Both the hagiographical and negative the Sixteenth Century offers well-researched estimations of de Nobili are at least vignettes of 15 Jesuits contemporary to premature, since even scholarly familiarity Francis Xavier in the mid-sixteenth century with him has remained incomplete.