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- Convenors:
-
Heinz Werner Wessler
(University of Uppsala, Dept for Linguistics and Philology)
Paolo Aranha (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
- Location:
- Room 113
- Start time:
- 28 July, 2016 at
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
- Session slots:
- 4
Short Abstract:
The panel invites researchers working on the early modern lexicographical and grammatical traditions and on the historical context of the encounter between India and Europe before William Jones and the emergence of European academic Indology.
Long Abstract:
From the sixteenth century onwards, Europeans began to study South Asian languages and compose grammars and dictionaries, starting with the first draft of a Tamil grammar for European learners, sketched by the Jesuit Fr. Henrique Henriques around 1549.
These European endeavors took place in a cultural environment where grammatical and lexicographical studies had been practiced for centuries with a great sophistication, leading to masterpieces like the Aṣṭādhyāyī and the Tolkāppiyam, respectively for Sanskrit and Tamil.
This panel wants to promote a conversation on the lexicographical and grammatical endeavours that occurred in the context of the early modern encounter between India and Europe, before William Jones and the emergence of European academic Indology in the early 19th century.
We are particularly interested in studying the development of a European linguistic knowledge of India and South Asia at large, from the sixteenth until the first half of the eighteenth century, encompassing figures like the Jesuits Thomas Stephens and Jerome Xavier, respectively working in the Salsete peninsula (Goa) and at the court of Akbar the Great, as well as the Capuchin Francois-Marie de Tours' dictionary and grammar of the "lingua Mogolana".
This panel is promoted by a scholars working on de Tours' linguistic opus on Hindustānī and aims to contextualize that early eighteenth century endeavour in the relation to the other European encounters with South Asian languages in the early modern time.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Report on a project on François-Marie de Tours' "Thesaurus Linguae Indianae", i.e. "lingua mogolana" or "Hindustānī " in context and its unique position in early missionary linguistics.
Paper long abstract:
François -Marie de Tours' dictionary of 1703, the "Thesaurus Linguae Indianae", consists of 490+424 pages and is organized in four columns: Latin key word, Hindī word in Devanāgarī, French rendering, and a phonological transcription with a self-styled set of diacritics. The orthography of Devanāgarī and the phonological transcription are, thanks to its systematic and conscious recording of the sounds, especially important tools for the reconstruction of the pronunciation of Hindī around 1700. Altogether, the language that the author describes is astonishingly close to Modern Standard Hindī. The grammar as well as the dictionary show a remarkable insight into the language the author describes, as well as a profound scholarly erudition. This becomes particularly clear in the comparison with Joan Josua Ketelaar's "oldest grammar of Hindī" (Bhatia/Machida) and word list, which was also produced in Surat some years earlier.
Several notes for the printer in the manuscript confirm that it was meant to be handed over to the printing press for publication. The title page of the grammar describes the language as "the language of the Mughals", later on in the introduction the language it is explained as being spoken in the whole Mughal empire and "along the coasts" (as expressed by François-Marie), i.e. beyond the Mughal empire in the last years of the reign of Aurangzeb. The dictionary is an early and rather unique effort to understand and explain the thesaurus of Hindustānī and to communicate it to Latin Christians.
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to contextualize François-Marie de Tours' grammar and dictionary of the "Lingua Mogolana" within the linguistic and intellectual efforts of the early modern French Capuchin missionaries scattered between Syria and South India.
Paper long abstract:
Recently it has become accepted by all historians that it was not with William Jones, but already in the sixteenth century that emerged a body of European orientalist knowledge of India. A category of "Catholic orientalism" has been proposed to characterize the intellectual endeavors promoted in India by missionaries depending from the Portuguese Padroado, the Pontifical Congregation de Propaganda Fide or sent by the French Crown. However, the "anglocentrism" of previous (anglophone) historians has often been replaced or complemented by a "Jesuitocentrism", namely the equation of the early modern Catholic missions to India with the very important Jesuit ones, and the assumption that only the Jesuits were able to develop a sophisticated understanding of the Indian languages, cultures and religions. On the contrary, the recent acknowledgement of François-Marie de Tours' central contribution to Hindustānī linguistics has demonstrated the fundamental intellectual relevance of the French Capuchin missionaries. This paper will show how Fr. François-Marie's accomplishments were based on a tradition of linguistic and orientalist studies undertaken since the early seventeenth century by his Capuchin confrères, particularly from the Province of Touraine along an axis stretching from Syria up to the Coromandel Coast. Particular attention will be paid to the intellectual context of the Capuchin mission in Surat, the very one where François-Marie's Hindustānī studies emerged. I will present unpublished manuscript texts composed by the French Capuchins, fragments of an intellectual tradition largely forgotten, primarily due to the dispersal of religious archives at the time of the French Revolution.
Paper short abstract:
The paper seeks to provide a comparative study of the conjugational patterns, i.e. the nominal and verbal paradigms used by Ketelaar and de Tours in their Grammars and examine the use of the negative particles.
Paper long abstract:
Though Joan Josua Ketelaar and François-Marie de Tours both reached India in the same decade of the 17th century and wrote their Hindī Grammars in less than six years gap, they have documented Hindī grammatical features differently. Their approach to documenting the Hindī language can be broadly considered as grounded in a culture-based language use. Ketelaar's Grammar has been broadly examined by scholars but de Tours' Grammar has hardly found any attention either in India or in the West. The paper intends to provide a comparative study of the conjugational patterns, i.e. nominal and verbal paradigms used by Ketelaar and de Tours and examine the use of the negative particles by them. Apart from that, the paper also seeks to discuss the purpose of Ketelaar's and de Tours' Grammars and their emphasis on the communicative competence of Hindustānī / Hindī. The question whether both of them are using the same lingua franca or bāzār Hindī in their documentation or not, will also be discussed.
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents the salient lexicographical and grammatical properties and the cross-cultural issues pertaining to the oldest grammar of Hindustānī written by Joan Josua Ketelaar, based on Bhatia and Machida's (2008 and 2014) analysis of the Dutch manuscript copy of the grammar.
Paper long abstract:
The paper has five objectives: One, to underscore the most recent discoveries in the area of the pioneering heritage of the Hindī grammatical tradition; Two, to identify the most neglected aspect of the Hindī grammatical tradition, namely the grammatical tradition, whose foundation was laid long before the onset of the British tradition; Three, to account for the salient lexicographical and grammatical properties together with the cross-cultural and language acquisition issues pertaining to the oldest grammar of Hindustānī written by Joan Josua Ketelaar, based on Bhatia and Machida's (2008) analysis of the Dutch manuscript copy of the grammar found in the National Archives, The Hague (MS: C-76). Four, to identify the salient features of the three succeeding grammars written by François-Marie de Tours, Benjamin Schultze and Cassino Belligatti; and Five, to attempt to present the model that went into the making of the grammars. The key focus will be the grammar by Ketelaar and its recently discovered variants (e.g. the Utrecht Manuscript among others).
Reference
Bhatia, Tej K & Kazuhiko Machida, 2008. The Oldest Grammar of Hindustānī: Contact, Communication and Colonial Legacy. Vol. 1-3, Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.
Paper short abstract:
This paper detects the process of 'cultural translation' applied by Roberto Nobili SJ (1577-1656) in the Ñāṉa Upadēsam, his magnum opus, in order to transfer Catholic concepts into the Tamil language.
Paper long abstract:
During his fifty years of missionary life (1605-1656), Nobili elaborated a method to translate and teach Catholic doctrine to the Madurai Tamil community. This effort led to the Ñāṉa Upadēsam, Nobili's last work: here the author introduced a Christian Tamil lexicon, coined technical religious vocabularies and accurately selected and accommodated religious concepts by intertwining the Biblical canon with the Sanskrit and Tamil literatures. In the encounter between Jesuits and Tamil Nāyakas, the process of translation consisted in a transfer of concepts, practices, habits, customs and social characters for a 'foreign' audience; an act of bringing a cultural message from a source-context into a target-context. The translation of textual narratives, on the linguistic as well as on the morphological aspects, is a complex negotiation of both linguistic and cultural differences. The missionary-translator challenged the boundaries of the sayable, where the 'ineffable' semantical relations require an effort to establish a communication of ideas, doctrines and meanings. The Ñāṉa Upadēsam is not a literal translation, as Nobili did not translate Catholic prayers, the Decalogue, the definitions of the Sacraments, but rather he transferred the Biblical cosmogony, the Christian parables and narrations, the Catholic social precepts as well as special word-categories (such as God, Heaven, Resurrection) into a Tamil-target. My analysis will focus on the connection, in terms of resemblances and\or distances, between Nobili's Ñāṉa Upadēsam and previous Jesuit works such as Henrique Henriques and Thomas Stephens' texts.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on Paulinus' Sanskrit grammars — "Sidharùbam seu grammatica Samscrdamica" (Roma 1790) and "Vyàcarana seu locupletissima Samscrdamicae linguae institutio" (Roma 1804) —, their relationship with Hanxleden's "Grammatica Grandonica", and the reference texts used by these missionaries.
Paper long abstract:
In our times, the basic pedagogical manuals of Sanskrit grammar throughout India are the Sanskrit dictionary Amarakoṣa, and the grammatical work known as Siddhāntakaumudī, composed by the Marathi grammarian Bhaṭṭojidīkṣita in the 17th century. In addition, students from Kerala used to memorize a catalogue of simple inflected Sanskrit forms, which is called Siddharūpa. This paper casts light upon the traditional pedagogy of Sanskrit grammar in South-India through the works of European missionaries, who worked in Malabar during the 17th and 18th centuries and composed the first Western grammars of the Sanskrit language. These works bear evidence of the wide circulation throughout South India of a Pāṇinian grammar, which is no longer actively studied, even though it was arranged long before Siddhāntakaumudī. The present paper focuses on the decline of this local grammatical tradition, considering also that, on the other hand, Siddhāntakaumudī was the direct reference of the Englishmen of the Asiatic Society and had been attentively studied by William Jones himself.
Paper short abstract:
The paper aims at surveying the characteristics of lexicographical work undertaken by European missionaries in India. The paper first seeks to offer some approximate quantitative figures and will then concisely present three lexicographical samples.
Paper long abstract:
The paper aims at surveying the characteristics of lexicographical work undertaken by European missionaries in India, in a larger geographical sense. Largely relying on valuable work done in the field of missionary linguistics and making use of the database "Diachro-Babel" that is currently built at the University of Leuven, the paper first seeks to offer some approximate quantitative figures, which are lacking in most of today's analyses. Which Indian languages have been given greater lexicographical attention? And which ones did not attract equal consideration among lexicographers? What was the ratio between published and unpublished work? Did the background of the authors (Catholic priests, laymen and Protestant ministers working in the framework of the Dutch and English East Indian Company, Protestant ministers of the Danish-German Tranquebar mission) affect the ways in which dictionaries were composed? The second part of the paper will concisely present three lexicographical samples testifying to the range of dictionaries and word lists composed between the sixteenth and eighteenth century.
Paper short abstract:
Adopting the outer form of Marāṭhī words with Hindu signification but altering the concepts they signify, Thomas Stephens SJ (1549-1619) constructs a language system, whose outer form is almost identical with the Hindu religious language on which it is based, but fit for expressing Christian ideas.
Paper long abstract:
Christian missionaries in early modern Goa faced the question of how to express their Christian message in new languages (Kōṅkaṇī and Marāṭhī) whose religious vocabularies were deeply infested with Hindu concepts, but that lacked a specifically Christian theological vocabulary. The most prominent sample of Marāṭhī literature conveying a Christian message using words with Hindu connotations is the biblical epic known as Kristapurāṇa, written by the English Jesuit Thomas Stephens (1549-1619) in the early years of the seventeenth century. What Stephens does can be understood within a Saussurean-structuralistic framework as keeping the visual/audial form of the Hindu religious words but altering the concepts they are used to signify. Altering the meaning of important and interrelated religious words leads to a reshaping of the entire language into a system where seemingly Hindu words express concepts that are in some way analogous to these Hindu concepts, but which fit in Stephens' Christian worldview. Without explicitly criticizing Hindu ideas (except occasionally), Stephens manages to form a language system which on the surface looks almost identical to that used by the Hindu authors he imitates, but which is used to build a distinctly Christian conceptual construction. Depending on bias, this can be described as an effort to enable Marāṭhī speakers to think new thoughts in their old language, or as a strategy for gaining upper hand in the Marāṭhī religious discourse by manipulating what is possible and natural to think in that language.
Paper short abstract:
The Dutch East India Company (VOC) was instrumental in opening up the linguistic horizons of European scholars in the 17th-18th centuries. This paper explores the scope and nature of VOC patronage by examining specific language documents from India, and tracing the fates of those documents.
Paper long abstract:
The United Dutch East India Company (VOC), constantly searching new trading grounds in South Asia, played an instrumental role in opening up the access to new linguistic material for the European scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its merchants, as well as religious and administrative personnel, were often the first ones to document new "exotic" languages by compiling language manuals, grammars and vocabularies which were eagerly awaited in Europe. However, the scope and nature of VOC's patronage varied according to place and time, and of course the spread of linguistic knowledge was far from the Company's top priority.
This paper will present the historical circumstances of creation, and consequent itineraries, of four manuscripts from India and Sri Lanka, concerning Sinhala, Tamil, Hindustani and Persian, where different geopolitical contexts led them to very different fates. Some of these documents were sent to the Netherlands and published, some remained in manuscript form only, and some never reached Europe. Their cases will be compared and contrasted with the fates of other linguistic materials created under the auspices of the VOC in South Asia.
Paper short abstract:
From a Christian viewpoint 'sacrifice' denotes gentilidade, idolatry, and ritual killing. New questions arise if one tries to investigate the local religious environment that takes voice in the Christian fight against sacrifice. I will focus on the entangled receptions of the terms karman and yajña.
Paper long abstract:
In an effort to qualify the Indian 'heathenism' or 'paganism' ('gentilidade' in Portuguese), the Jesuit Giacomo Fenicio quoted a passage from 1 Corinthians in order to condemn certain Malabar ritual practices. The Greek term employed by Paul of Tarsus to indicate the ritual killing is thousia, but in the Latin language employed by the Christian theologians, this word became 'sacrifice'. Sacrifice as a concept was then used in Jesuit treatises to visualize efficiently the pagan 'side' of the local practices. In the words of Fenicio, 'gentilidade' serves as a synonym of idolatry, namely worship performed through offering and ritual killing in honour of the idols. Such practice was in contrast with monotheism and the fight against sacrifice meant a fight against idolatry. Such assumptions suggest that it is clear what sacrifice was from the Christian perspective; however, new questions arise if one tries to investigate the local religious environment that takes voice in the Christian fight against sacrifice or in the 'accomodation' attempts to rationalize certain customs.
I will examine how missionaries employed and translated the ritual Sanskrit terminology borrowed from the authoritative texts. I will focus on the entangled receptions of the terms karman and yajña in order to discuss the doctrinal disputes among local religious groups. I will suggest that the equivalence between sacrifice, karman and yajña does not merely provides a response to the Christian debate against idolatry, but also translates and reflects the social, political, and religious emergence of new audiences of the Vedic tradition.
Paper short abstract:
The presentation explores a manuscript on the art of statecraft composed by a Spanish Jesuit at the Mughal court, and ways in which it renews shared Perso-Hellenic political ideas to advance a socio-religious objective.
Paper long abstract:
The Jesuit missions to the Mughal court are typically conceived of in terms of their religious character, and the theological, if collaborative, works they produced. Yet scholarship has failed to account for the final and least studied of these Mughal-Jesuit literary collaborations, which appears to be of a different, non-religious nature: a Persian manuscript on the art of statecraft (Adab us-Saltanat, 1018AH/1609AD).
Presented as the work of the head of the mission, Jerome Xavier, this mirror for princes, dedicated to emperor Jahangir, deploys knowledge systems that at many points overwhelm patent dualities of Islamo-Christian ideological opposition by appealing, perhaps inadvertently, to pre-islamic political ideas of a shared Perso-Hellenic world -- ideas that in varying forms had been accumulated, appropriated, and shared across the Eurasian space for over over two millennia.
Among other subjects, the text directly addresses the importance of translation for the advancement of useful knowledge. This paper explores to what extent this unique work from the Mughal court relies on non-religious knowledge systems to advance a socio-religious objective. As a precolonial instance of cross-cultural literary collaboration, its manuscripts, long left to languish in European libraries, throw new light on the complexity of non-religious knowledge in cross-cultural encounters, and of early-modern South Asia in global-historical context.