Paper short abstract:

This paper, which is based on the recovery of lost communities of knowledge embedded in the heart of the political and social archives of the Portuguese empire in South Asia in the early modern period, aims at connecting the early-modern «Catholic Orientalism» with the «Portuguese Orientalism» of the 19th century.

Paper long abstract:

This paper, which is based on the recovery of lost communities of knowledge embedded in the heart of the political and social archives of the Portuguese empire in South Asia in the early modern period, aims at connecting the early-modern «Catholic Orientalism» with the «Portuguese Orientalism» of the 19th century.

Our quest for the lost «Catholic Orientalism» begins where the current historiography ends. In pursuing connections between knowledge, science, and empire, indelibly marked by colonial and discursive power relations, emblematically called Orientalism, we focus both on material and on lost, or forgotten archives. It is our claim that by resurrecting the invisible documents we can glimpse different landscapes and tell a different history: more nuanced, with other geographies and chronologies, with new actors, and with different conclusions.

Widening the scope of Orientalism to include earlier practices of knowledge closely linked to Catholicism is a way to make visible the roots and inspiration of 19th century Orientalisms (namely the Portuguese one).

However, "Catholic" orientalism was not a monolithic ideological and discursive formation. It was a composite entity with Iberian monarchies, Italian republics, the Papacy and finally France competing, at different times and with varying success, to control, to know, and to possess territory, trade and people in South Asia. By the end of the 18th century, even if for a short period, it was probably Rome, and neither London nor Paris, the richest European center for studying Sanskrit philology.