Paper short abstract:

It is common to optimistically point out the high place accorded to mathematics and "science" in early-modern Jesuit missionary strategies in the East. Here we present a case where such kind of knowledge (astronomy) is deployed by a Jesuit in order to discredit South Indian brahmins in the early 17th century.

Paper long abstract:

The long process of inventing "Hinduism" to early-modern European audiences (which was to be completed only in the eighteenth-century British Orientalist movement) was informed, from the start, by travel narratives, historical chronicles of the exploits of Westerners in several parts of India, and, evidently, by missionary literature in various genres (letters, relations, grammars, treatises, maps etc.). Seventeenth-century sources of these kinds abound in expositions of customs, rituals, "mythologies" and denunciations of idolatry (especially when it comes to missionaries' writings), and they even give some useful information on local natural-historical knowledge, but they are scant in representing local cosmological traditions. In this regard, the Jesuit Jacobo Fenicio's treatise "Livro da Seita dos Indios Orientais", written aroud 1610 (but only published, partly, in the 1930s, although having circulated in manuscript quite widely until the eighteenth century), is a notable exception. The book already starts with the presentation of cosmological conceptions of Malabari brahmins (whom the author calls "natural philosophers and theologians"), and proceeds to their refutation on the basis of contemporary European astronomy, which is taken as self-evidently correct. Natural knowledge is thus clearly identified as a key cultural trait and, concomitantly, as a cultural weapon to be deployed in the representation of the other. Here we examine the details of Fenicio's exposition and the place he accords to European and Indian cosmologies in wider Jesuit policies and ways of proceeding, reflecting also on the uses of science to reinforce cultural and religious identities and divides in early-modern contact zones.