Paper short abstract:

A study of the attempt to refute Hindu religion in the "Christian-Hindu Dialogue" of the Capuchin padre, Giuseppe Maria da Gargnano, written in Hindustani in 1751 with the purpose of aiding the conversion of Hindus to Christianity

Paper long abstract:

Giuseppe Maria da Gargnano (born as Bernardino Bernini, 1709-1761) was a Capuchin padre who joined the Tibet Mission sponsored by Propaganda Fide. He arrived in Bengal in 1739 and died at Bettiah in northern Bihar, India, in 1761. He was in Lhasa from 1742 to 1745 and spent most of following years in Bettiah where he established a small community of Christian converts, one that still exists. In 1751 he wrote--with the help of his fellow Capuchin and biographer, Cassiano da Macerata--a fictional dialogue between a Christian and a Hindu in the Hindustani language, a text intended to aid in the conversion of Hindus to Christianity. The dialogue shows that Giuseppe Maria did make a serious effort to understand Hindu religion. The Hindu conceptions and ideas he attacks in the dialogue include the transmigration of souls, the large Hindu pantheon of Hindu gods organized as a celestial government, the idea that God writes out a person's destiny at birth, the implausibility of the descriptions of gods and demons in Hindu scriptures, and the Hindu idea that all religions are given by God and that everyone can be saved by following his own religion. The paper will discuss these arguments and the possible influence in their formulation of the writings of early Christian thinkers against Roman and Greek religions and of the disputes in eighteenth-century Europe between Protestants and Catholics.