From Manu S Pillai’s new book: How the Portuguese responded to the complexities of Hinduism

Within decades of the establishment of Portuguese rule in India, missionaries who shadowed them realised – despite immense support and firepower from Goa – that this country was going to prove a challenge. Typically, when white men in robes set out for the East, it was with a degree of professional optimism. As Francis Xavier (1506–52) of the founding class of the Society of Jesus, wrote in 1540, two years before reaching India, the prevailing sense was that “native tribes are very well disposed to accept the religion of our Lord Jesus Christ”. All that was lacking was competent preaching, so that an ambition to “convert two or three kingdoms of idolaters” in a few years was not unreasonable.

When he actually arrived, however, he found the situation dire. To start with, most missionary activity was limited to the coast (where Portuguese ships offered protection) and its non-elite classes. In Tamil country, thus, there were thirty villages of Paravar converted a decade before via another man’s labours. But this was not because Jesus appealed to this low-ranking group of fishermen, and boat- and salt-makers. Facing competition from rivals in the pearl-fishing sector, the Paravar had sought Portuguese security and were claimed wholesale in a quid pro quo – a commercial rather than a spiritual transaction. When Xavier asked: “What more they believed now than when they were Infidels,” beyond the appellation of being Christian, they had not a clue. Journeying with a translator from village to village, the father launched a valiant effort to impart knowledge to his less-than-sterling flock, but apprehensions lingered. And far from converting whole kingdoms, even communicating to the interested minority was trying, given linguistic and other limitations.

It is not surprising, then, that shortcuts were employed. On the one hand, there was fear that converts might relapse into idolatry (bans on drinking and polygamy were disincentives against sustained faith), but equally, there was also a need to shore up numbers. In a 1545 letter, Xavier announced how in “the space of one month I made Christians of more than ten thousand”. His method was necessarily dubious. “As soon as I arrived in any heathen village where they had sent for me to give baptism, I gave orders for all, men, women, and children, to be collected in one place. Then, beginning with the first elements of the Christian faith, I taught them there is one God.”

This elementary lesson having been imparted, he would communicate the sign of the cross and recite a prayer in the local language (which he would have “learned…by heart”). Thereafter, he gave them “articles of the Creed and the Ten Commandments”. When it seemed like the mass of people were “sufficiently instructed to receive baptism”, he proceeded with the ceremony and wrote “each [convert’s new] name on a ticket”. After a round of destroying idols and bringing in the converts’ families, he bid them goodbye and set off for his next station. “In this way,” concluded Xavier, “I go all round the country”. Indeed, at times he was unable to use his hands or voice “from the fatigue of baptising”, for “in a single day I have baptised whole villages”. But shallow successes notwithstanding, the father encountered an obstacle: the hold of a “perverse and wicked set” of “embracing the religion of Jesus Christ”.

As it happened, Brahmins were a tantalising, incomprehensible entity for Europeans. One early Portuguese writer, despite all the cultural and racial differences between Hindus and them, had observed that this specific group among the former shared ideas in common with Christians.

For, as the Portuguese writer Duarte Barbosa added in 1516, at their core, Hindus offered prayers not to diverse gods (or devils) in idols but to one “God, whom they confess and adore as the true God, Creator and maker of all things”. This was not simple polytheism – if there was a variety of gods in shrines, these were all “under” a formless great being. Even van Linschoten, after talking of the usual “devilish superstitions”, added how Brahmins believed “their [sic] is a supreme God above, which ruleth all things”. This now created a quandary: The assumption that Hindus were a photocopy of Europe’s polytheists could not hold. Like former idol-worshippers in the West, brown people had a list of deities, yes; and yet they also acknowledged a single power.

Without irony, their paganism was tethered to a monotheism. Idolatry itself, in fact, was represented differently by Brahmins. There were no feared forces inside, the images only representing god (singular) in various manifestations (as gods, plural). Or as a text explains: “Even if the cow’s entire body were filled with milk, it could secrete it only through the teat”; images were that divine teat. Nobody important believed idols were gods; they only symbolised divine power. For missionaries, this more sophisticated glimpse of Hindu ideas generated a problem, for they could no longer simply traffic in stereotypes. They would, instead, have to apply themselves to gathering real knowledge before they could debunk the Hindu system. Land was easier to conquer; a conquest of souls warranted more meticulous efforts. And in the process, Brahmins would become key to missionary imagination – and the principal defendants for Hinduism.

While this class was met with even in areas under Portuguese control – so much so that the Goa government too relied on Brahmins for administrative support – it was in Hindu-ruled territories that Jesuits clashed with them on more equal terms. The fathers were welcome in coastal courts, which entertained them partly from curiosity but also out of fear of Portuguese terror.

Thus, in about 1600, a Jesuit called Giacomo Fenicio not only debated Brahmins in Calicut but also prepared a guidebook on Hindu mythology and its gods. His language, to be clear, was violent, given how the text was intended for European priests, but it is patent that the author spent much time cataloguing and digesting the Puranic tradition – something Xavier neglected, using vitriol to compensate for ignorance, until giving up on India three years into his stay. Fenicio and his peers, on the other hand, recognised that the age of blanket dismissal was over; attacking local gods as devils confirmed European biases but did not unsettle Hindus or bolster conversion. Knowledge, therefore, was imperative to spiritual dominance.

So, as Akbar’s ulema were baffled when Jesuits cited the Quran and used it to challenge them on their own turf, the father in Calicut combined missionary zeal with a command (even if at times garbled) of Hindu mythology. His objective was transparent. “I have,” Fenicio explained, “occupied myself with studying [the Hindus’] religion”, and not mere superficialities like deities with “six faces and twelve hands”. He had ventured deeper to identify material of more intellectual value, to help “in refuting these Hindus”. In other words, while the goal of winning converts and smashing idols remained, experience dictated that mapping the local position, on its own terms, was a critical first step.

Interestingly, as with Acquaviva and his friends at Akbar’s court, Fenicio also had the freedom to argue his case in Calicut. But as with the Mughals, its Hindu ruler too was not convinced. For instance, told about Christianity’s superiority, the rajah asked how Jesus could be divine when he was “gibbeted on a cross and killed by the Jews?” And if idolatry were bad, how come Christians adored images of the Virgin? Was that not idolatry? This being precisely one of the charges Protestants tossed at Catholics, the father “flung into a passion” and a “vehement peroration”. Lacking a direct answer, he attacked the deity Krishna instead, a god to whom even Akbar’s Jesuit friends took exception.

According to Puranic mythology, Krishna was full of mischief. Jesus suffered in his mortal aspect to atone for mankind’s sins, but what, asked Fenicio, did Krishna do? Flaunting his research, he dished out a caustic account of the deity’s exploits: He broke pots and pans, was thrashed by his mother “with a churn-staff”, hid the clothes of bathing women and acted in ways unbecoming of any god. The Hindus’ personalised deity – who could be loved and chided – was an undignified rogue in Jesuit eyes. Others like Ganapati defied logic: He had an elephant’s head, a prodigious belly, but somehow managed to commute on a rat. Even allowing for annoyance, one imagines the king and his court would have been impressed with Fenicio’s homework.

For the father in turn, while missionary success was slight, he was able to aid Portuguese strategic interests. He converted the rajah’s nephew, for instance, concealing the fact so the prince could spy on his uncle. And as an appalled authority wrote, Goa’s religious leadership, “instead of condemning” the Jesuits for “this scandalous dissimulation, actually confirmed it.”

This overlap between Portuguese political concerns and the missionaries was a continuation of a culture where there was no “distinction between religion, economics, and politics”. Thus, when the Dutch sailed into Calicut, it was Fenicio who represented Goa with the rajah, aiming to thwart Portugal’s rivals. With the Mughals, it was bluntly stated that Jesuit presence at court was a source of intelligence. This could even embarrass missionaries: In the 1540s, Goa contemplated an ambitious voyage to loot the Tirupati temple, which was under the protection of the Vijayanagara emperor. Though ships sailed out, inclement weather aborted the operation; so instead, they attacked a temple south of the Calicut rajah’s territories. This, ironically, was done even as Xavier received support from the province’s Hindu ruler. It did not end double-dealing: in 1615, there was another Jesuit encouraging the Portuguese in their programme of intimidation. In his blandly titled Historia do Malavar, Diogo Goncalves lists the locations of temples in southern Kerala, estimates of their treasure, resources of the surrounding countryside and offers ideas on how the Portuguese might attack these places – shrines (and the occasional mosque) by the beach were close enough to be blown up from ships, for example, while others would require disembarking. Happily, the father surveyed the terrain in advance and supplied ideal landing spots.

It really did look, then, as far as the Portuguese were concerned, as if god and the gun went hand in hand. And Hindu powers noticed this; while Nasrani churches were acceptable, European ones sometimes found themselves unde attack in Kerala. For they represented not merely faith but also white men’s imperial presumptions.

As Jesuits moved into the interior, however, further away from Portuguese arms, these overt connections with politics backfired. In 1598, a mission went to the new capital of Vijayanagara at Chandragiri. It was welcomed with an elephant parade and Venkata II, the reigning raya (emperor), gave permission to “build a Church, erect Crosses, and convert men”. Of course, he had his motives: A predecessor had tried and failed to hammer out a deal for the exclusive supply of warhorses with the Portuguese. Nor were the fathers innocent of worldly causes – scuttling overtures from the Dutch would soon become one of their mandates. So the court flattered the Jesuits, while the latter reciprocated: A European artist they introduced not only painted Hindu gods but also, apparently, an erotic picture of Venkata in a pool with women (for which he promptly got into trouble).

As with Akbar and the Calicut rajah, this potentate also listened to the Jesuits with an open mind: They could assert the falseness of idol worship without fear, angry Brahmins being silenced. That is, till Portuguese political excesses tested royal tolerance: Venkata’s warmth dissipated in 1606 when news arrived of a skirmish between the state’s authorities and white soldiers on the east coast. Though peace was restored, the Jesuits were dropped, and in 1610, the emperor transferred his favour to the Dutch, challenging the Portuguese monopoly of the seas. Shortly after, the fathers departed. By too openly mixing religion with politics, they had failed in their mission. Fresh lessons would need to be learnt – though old mistakes would in time recur under the British, with painful consequences again.

Excerpted with permission from Gods, Guns, and Missionaries: The Making Of The Modern Hindu Identity, Manu S Pillai, Penguin India.