Book Review

Asia

This book is as much about literary devices, languages, and semiotics as it is about the realities of the Jesuits and Jesuit missions in India in the seventeenth century. What saves it from being a barren abstract analysis of "text" is that the author does provide an account of the context and, among other things, is concerned with the external conditions and developments that influenced the Jesuits and Jesuit writing. Indeed, one of the main values of the work is that Ines G. upanov pays very careful attention to European as well as to Indian history and, as a result, is able to show how the European heritage (including the conventions of Jesuit writing) affected their accounts of Indian religion, mission, and society.	1
The author selects four basic "tropological and narrative frameworks" that become the basic sections of the book. These are the "Dialogic/Polemical Mode," which was the framework in which Roberto de Nobili and the Jesuits debated the issue of the Malabar rites; the "Geo-ethnographic Mode," which contrasts "Aristocratic Analogies" with "Demotic Descriptions"; the "Theatrical Mode," where the author discusses conversion scenarios, miracles, and other encounters; and the "Self-expressive Mode," in which Nobili in particular communicated his dreams of Utopia and aspirations to saintliness in the context of the Madurai mission.	2
One of the clear implications of this work is that literary techniques and conventions shaping and conditioning texts in one period can lead to misunderstandings when read by scholars immersed in quite different worlds of literary convention in another. Furthermore, by grappling with the meaning of the text, upanov does succeed in raising anew further questions about the Jesuits and the nature and impact of the Madurai mission.	3
Admittedly much of what upanov has to say about the role of politics in the controversy over the Malabar rites, the impact of national prejudice, and the strength of individual agendas is not especially new—except perhaps for some of the detail. What is more significant is the author's emphasis on conflicting European ways of viewing and describing the world outside of Europe. upanov contrasts Nobili's view with that of his arch rival, the somewhat pedestrian Jesuit, Gonçalo Fernandes, who was already entrenched at Madurai when Nobili arrived in 1606. While Fernandes focused on externals and saw difference, Nobili went further, through interpretation, finding parallels in the thinking and theology behind different rites and practices. Furthermore, Nobili's universalistic outlook, reflected in his use of similes in language, was reinforced by his belief that the Brahmans were descended from a lost Jewish tribe and that Hindu theological texts were "defective Catholicism" (p. 115).	. . .