HINDREP · Early modern Catholic representations of Hinduism

This two-year project is a contribution to the current post-colonial debates on orientalism and, more specifically, on the extent to which Hinduism was also a European construction. The aim is to analyze the representations that Catholic missionaries developed between the Seventeenth and the early Eighteenth centuries to interpret Hinduism. The period considered follows the end of the Portuguese monopoly on the sea route to India and precedes the emergence of secular indology. From the early seventeenth century, Jesuit missionaries as Giacomo Fenicio, Roberto Nobili and Gonçalo Fernandes composed detailed descriptions of Indian “heathenism” that were circulated in manuscript form and plagiarized extensively. Elementary notions of Hinduism were found in printed versions of Jesuit letters and in works published by members of other religious orders. Using archival material, printed works and visual sources, I will analyse how theology, antiquarianism and classical learning were deployed in order to understand a religion that the missionaries wanted to replace with Catholicism. By basing myself at the Warburg Institute, London, I will be trained in the study of the classical tradition and early modern scholarship; moreover, I will benefit substantially from the Institute’s world-renowned tradition of using visual sources as evidence of anthropological representations. My project will test the hypothesis of a specifically Catholic early modern representation of Hinduism by examining the tensions between a common Catholic framework and differences in national backgrounds and religious orders, as well as investigating the circulation of indological knowledge in Europe between Catholics and Protestants. The goal is a book that will contribute to a comprehensive history of the relations between Europe and India. Europe needs to be aware of these complex processes, as a multipolar world takes shape and India becomes a major economic, political and cultural actor.