Part 3 of 3
Notes:Author’s note: In preparing this article, I benefitted greatly from discussions with Christophe Vielle, Joan-Pau Rubiés, David Lorenzen, and Linda Zampol D’Ortia. I am grateful to all of them; responsibility for any errors that remain is mine.
1. Duarte Barbosa, O livro de Duarte Barbosa: Edição crı́tica e anotada. Vol.2: Prefácio, texto crítico e apêndice, ed. Maria Augusta da Veiga e Sousa (Lisbon: Instituto de Investigação Cientıf́ca Tropical, 2000), 163. Barbosa, a writer at Cochin and Cannanore in the first decade of the sixteenth century, was renowned for his knowledge of Malayalam but he records no attempt to read any Indian works.
2. António da Silva Rego, ed., Documentação para a história das missões do Padroado Português do Oriente: Índia, vol. 1 (1499–1522) (Lisbon: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1947), 452.
3. Joseph Wicki, ed., Documenta Indica, vol. I (1540–1549) (Rome: Institutum historicum Societatis Iesu, 1948), 760–71 (henceforth DI).
4. Francis Xavier, Epistolae S. Francisci Xaverii aliaque eius scripta, ed. Georg Schurhammer and Joseph Wicki, vol. I. (1535–1548) (Rome: Monumenta Historica Soc. Iesu, 1944). Xavier’s letter, written in Spanish, was translated into Latin and published in French (Copie d’une lettre missive envoiée des Indes par monsieur maistre François Xavier [Paris, 1545]). In a later French translation of 1660, Xavier’s brief account of texts containing the commandments is elaborated so that the Brahmins are said to have “une espece de Bible, où ils tiennent que les Loix divines sont contenües” (Lettres de S. Francois Xavier [Paris, 1660], 68).
5. Albuquerque to João III, November 28, 1548 in DI, I: 326–29.
6. Almeida, December 26, 1558 in DI, IV: 199–215.
7. The purāṇa is ascribed to Nāmdev, the name of a well-known thirteenth/fourteenth-century Marathi sant. Although in the following year the Jesuits were to acquire works by Nāmdev’s contemporary and friend Jñāndev, references in Almeida’s letter to village deities mentioned in the purāṇa suggest that this work was composed in Goa and had Nāmdev’s name attached to it (Panduronga Pissurlencar, “A propósito dos primeiros livros maratas impressos em Goa,” Boletim do Instituto Vasco da Gama 73 [1956]: 55–79).
8. DI, IV: 203. Two summaries of the Anādipurāṇa are extant. The first (ARSI, Goa 46, 348–65) is described by Joseph Wicki (“Old Portuguese Translations of Marathi Literature in Goa: c.1558–1560,” Indica 12 [1975]: 22–26). Another version of this text, with a few variations in spelling, is extant in the Bibliotheca Pública de Évora (Cod. CXV/2–7, no. 3) and has been transcribed as an appendix to Ricardo Nuno de Jesus Ventura, “Conversão e conversabilidade: Discursos da missão e do gentio na documentação do Padroado Português do Oriente (séculos XVI e XVII)” (Ph.D. diss., Universidade de Lisboa, 2011), vol. II, Anexos, 10–15. It is clearly a summary, rather than a translation, of the purāṇa, as is suggested by the title of the codex: “Seguesse a lei dos Jentios e substancias do que elles cren e en que tem que esta toda sua saluação.”
9. This is stated in the last line of the text (ARSI Goa 46, 352r), where “R.” stands for Reitor, i.e., rector of the College of Saint Paul.
10. Luís Fróis, November 14, 1559 in DI, IV: 335.
11. Ibid., 339.
12. Wicki (“Old Portuguese Translations”) summarizes the Portuguese translations in Rome (ARSI, Goa 46, 354–94). There are also three codices in the Braga Public Library (771, 772, 773), which are described in L. A. Rodrigues, “Glimpses of the Konkani Language at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century XIII: Ramayana and Mahabharata,” Boletim do Instituto Menezes Bragança 163 (1990): 43–72, and Pissurlencar, “Livros maratas impressos em Goa.” The first two codices contain rough and fair copies of stories from the epics, all in Konkani. The third codex contains Marathi works, by Goan authors. One of these may be a version of, or a commentary on, Jñāneśvara’s Marathi version of the Bhagavad-Gītā.
13. Nelson Falcao, Kristapurāṇa: A Christian-Hindu Encounter. A Study of Inculturation in the Kristapurāṇa of Thomas Stephens, S.J. (1549–1619) (Anand: Gujarat Sahitya Prakash, 2003), 12–13.
14. L. A. Rodrigues, “Glimpses of the Konkani Language at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century VI: Pre-Portuguese Konkani Literature,” Boletim do Instituto Menezes Bragança 131 (1982): 3–23, at 18, 22.
15. See Alessandro Valignano, Historia del principio y progresso de la Compañıá de Jesús en las Indias orientales (1542–64), ed. Josef Wicki (Roma: Institutum historicum Societatis Iesu, 1944), II: 30–34, and Sebastião Gonçalves, Primeira parte da História dos Religiosos da Companhia de Jesus, ed. Josef Wicki (1614; Coimbra: Atlântida, 1957–62), III: 34–45, 62–65. Giovanni Pietro Maffei, who used Valignano’s history, mentions the name Parabrammam, identified in the Anādipurāṇa as the sole god (Historiarum Indicarum libri xvi. [Florence, 1588], 27).
16. Georg Schurhammer, Francis Xavier: His Life, His Times, vol. 2: India 1541–1545 (Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1980), 614–16. Two versions of Azevedo’s “Estado da Índia e aonde tem o seu principio,” from manuscripts in the British Library and the Bibliotheca Nacional de Madrid, are printed in António da Silva Rego and Luıś de Albuquerque, eds., Documentação ultramarina portuguesa (Lisboa: Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1960–63), I: 197–263 and II: 40–147. I cite from the first version, except where noted. Schurhammer (Xavier, 2: 616–20) notes that there are close parallels in three sections of these texts with parts of the fifth of Diogo do Couto’s Décadas da Asiá. In the case of the first two—which relate to the history of Hormuz (210–12) and of Ceylon (235– 54)—Azevedo mentions that Couto had asked him to provide information (205, 235). Couto, who elsewhere does mention his sources, nowhere acknowledges Azevedo. There are also close parallels in the section on Indian religion in Azevedo and Couto and also with that which appears in João de Lucena in his life of Xavier. Lucena’s work was published in 1600, Schurhammer dates the final version of Azevedo’s text to 1603 (Xavier, 2: 616), and Couto’s work did not appear until 1612. Nevertheless
it appears that Lucena used the manuscript of Couto’s fifth decade, a version of which was sent to Lisbon as early as 1597 (Marcus de Jong, ed., Década quinta da “Asia”: Texte inédit, publ. d’après un manuscrit de la Bibliothèque de l’Univ. de Leyde [Coimbra: Biblioteca da Universidade, 1937], 47).
In a letter sent from Goa in November 1603, Couto complained bitterly about Lucena’s use of information which he claimed to have acquired at great effort and expense from the schools of the Brahmins in the kingdom of Vijayanagara (Schurhammer, Xavier, 2: 620). Despite Couto’s claim here that “in all my Decades I have given to each his due,” it seems likely that he had again used without acknowledgment material provided to him by Azevedo. The account of Indian religion was likely prepared by Azevedo during his second period in India between 1586 and 1589, and later incorporated into his Relação do Estado da Índia, completed in Lisbon by 1603.
The text which has served for the following translation comprises the Suktas of the Rig-Veda and the commentary of Sayana Acharya, printed, by Dr. Muller, from a collation of manuscripts, of which he has given an account in his Introduction.
Sayana Acharya was the brother of Madhava Acharya, the prime minister of Vira Bukka Raya, Raja of Vijayanagara in the fourteenth century, a munificent patron of Hindu literature. Both the brothers are celebrated as scholars; and many important works are attributed to them, — not only scholia on the Sanhitas and Brahmanas of the Vedas, but original works on grammar and law; the fact, no doubt, being, that
they availed themselves of those means which their situation and influence secured them, and employed the most learned Brahmans they could attract to Vijayanagara upon the works which bear their name, and to which they, also, contributed their own labour and learning. Their works were, therefore, compiled under peculiar advantages, and are deservedly held in the highest estimation.-- RigVeda Sanhita. A Collection of Ancient Hindu Hymns, Constituting the First Ashtaka, or Book of the Rig-Veda: The Oldest Authority for the Religious and Social Institutions of the Hindus. Translated from the Original Sanskrita by H.H. Wilson
With regard to the twelve MSS. of the Commentary to the first Ashtaka of the Riv-veda, I have only succeeded in reducing them to three independent classes.
It is not very likely that MSS. should still be found in India contemporaneous with Sayana, though, if we could trust native authorities, copies of Sayana's works have been buried in the ground near Vidyanagara [Vijayanagara]. Excluding these MSS. the existence of which is extremely problematical, I am convinced that there are no Mss. at present which have any claim to be considered as exhibiting the Commentary exactly such as it came from the hands of Sayana....It would have been equally wrong, however, to consider Sayana's commentary as an infallible authority with regard to the interpretation of the Veda.
Sayana gives the traditional, but not the original, sense of the Vaidik hymns. These hymns -- originally popular songs, short prayers and thanksgivings, sometimes true, genuine, and even sublime, but frequently childish, vulgar, and obscure -- were invested by the Brahmans with the character of an inspired revelation, and made the basis of a complete system of dogmatic theology. If therefore we wish to know how the Brahmans, from the time of the composition of the first Brahmana to the present day, understood and interpreted the hymns of their ancient Rishis, we ought to translate them in strict accordance with Sayana's gloss. This is the object which
Professor Wilson has always kept in view in his translation of the Veda; and for the history of religion, which in India, as elsewhere, represents the gradual corruption of simple truth into hierarchical dogmatism and philosophical hallucination, his work will always remain the most trustworthy guide.
Nor could it be said, that the tradition of the Brahmans, which Sayana embodied in his work, after the lapse of at least three thousand years, had changed the character of the whole of the Rig-veda. By far the greater part of these hymns is so simple and straightforward, that there can be no doubt that their original meaning was exactly the same as their traditional interpretation. But no religion, no poetry, no law, no language, can resist the wear and tear of thirty centuries; and
in the Veda, as in other works, handed down to us from a very remote antiquity, the sharp edges of primitive thought, the delicate features of a young language, the fresh hue of unconscious poetry, have been washed away by the successive waves of what we call tradition, whether we look upon it as a principle of growth or decay.
To restore the primitive outlines of the Vaidik period of thought will be a work of great difficulty....PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITIONThe princely and truly patriotic liberality of His Highness the Maharajah of Vijayanagara has enabled me to take up once more in the evening of my life that work which has occupied me during my youth and during my advancing years....
I received a letter from His Highness the Maharajah of Vijayanagara, offering to defray the whole expense of a new edition, if I were still willing to undertake the labour of revising the text. -- Rig-Veda-Sanhita: The Sacred Hymns of the Brahmans, Together with the Commentary of Sayanacharya, edited by Dr. Max Muller
17. Azevedo, “Estado da Índia,” 211.
18. Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250– 1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 279; Azevedo, “Estado da Índia,” 242.
19. Azevedo, “Estado da Índia,” 249.
20. Although he says nothing about this, Azevedo’s access to these texts is more likely to have been akin to his access to the royal chronicles of Ceylon—that is, simultaneous translation of a recited text—than to his direct reading of the histories of Hormuz.
21. The names of the texts in Rego’s transcription are “Ferum Mandramole e Trivaxigao” (Azevedo, “Estado da Índia,” 251) or “Tonem, Mandramolé e Trivaxigao” (Silva Rego, Documentação ultramarina portuguesa, II: 134).
In the 1612 editio princeps of Couto these appear as “Terúm, Mandramole, Etrivaxigão.” From Couto’s work, Willem Caland was confident in identifying the latter as Tiruvācakam, less so the first as Tirumantiram (De ontdekkingsgeschiedenis van den Veda [Amsterdam: Johannes Müller, 1918], 273). Although neither Tirumantiram nor Tiruvācakam uses carvēsparaṉ, or the more common carvēccuraṉ (Sanskrit, sarveśvara), to refer to God, there can be no doubt that Tiruvācakam is meant here, and good reason to think that Tirumantiram could also have been intended.22. Azevedo, “Estado da Índia,” 255.
In both Rego’s transcriptions, and Couto, the title of the work is given as Tivarum. Although Caland (Veda, 318) suggests Tēvāram, Azevedo’s description of the content leaves little doubt that it is rather Tivākaram, an important early Tamil lexicon that begins with a list of the divine names, which is meant.23. Azevedo, “Estado da Índia,” 257.
24. Ibid., 260–61.
25. Da Asia de Diogo de Couto, Decada Quinta, Parte Segunda (Lisbon, 1788), 24.
26. Ioam de Lucena, Historia da vida do padre Francisco de Xavier (Lisbon, 1600), 95.
27. Abraham Rogerius, De Open-Deure tot het Verborgen Heydendom, ed. Willem Caland (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1915), 21.
28. A. C. Burnell, “On Some Early References to the Vedas by European Writers,” Indian Antiquary 8 (1879): 98–100, at 99.
29. As well as Azevedo’s account of the Vedas, Baldaeus included also the brief account of Jacome Fenicio (Albert Johannes de Jong, ed., Afgoderye der Oost-Indische Heydenen door Philippus Baldaeus [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1917], 176). Baldaeus was also translated into German in 1672.
30. Olfert Dapper, Asia, of naukeurige Beschryving van het Rijk des Grooten Mogols, en een groot gedeelte van Indiën (Amsterdam, 1672), 137.
31. John Ogilby, Asia. The first part being an accurate description of Persia . . . the vast empire of the Great Mogol, and other parts of India (London, 1673), 143. Ogilby used Dapper.
32. An adaptation of Rogerius’s work by Antoine Augustin Bruzen de La Martinière appeared first as “Dissertation sur les Moeurs et sur la Religion des Bramines” in Jean-Frédéric Bernard and Bernard Picart, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses des peuples idolâtres . . . Second partie du tome premier . . . les pratiques religieuses des Indiens Orientaux (Amsterdam, 1723). Each text was separately paginated. Azevedo’s account of the Vedas is on p. 27. A translation from this version appeared also in John Lockman’s translation, The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of the Several Nations of the Known World, vol. III: Idolatrous Nations (London, 1731), 318.
33. The essence of Azevedo’s account appeared also in Vicenzo Maria di Santa Caterina da Siena, Il viaggio al l’Indie Orientali (Venice, 1678), 282. Caland (Veda, 271) noted the similarity between the accounts of Couto, Lucena, Rogerius, Baldaeus, and Vicenzo Maria. Theodor Zachariae, in his review of Caland, considered the possibility that Couto and Lucena might depend on a common, older source, but dismissed it as improbable (Göttingsche Gelehrte Anzeigen 183 [1921]: 148–65, at 151). Zachariae’s review was translated and published with a few additional comments, mostly relating to the Jesuit Ezour-Vedam, by Henry Hosten (“The Discovery of the Veda,” Journal of Indian History 2, 2 [1923]: 127–57).
34. See Marco della Tomba, Gli scritti del Padre Marco della Tomba, missionario nelle Indie Orientali, ed. Angelo De Gubernatis (Florence, 1878), 100–101.
35. Two other early seventeenth-century sources—both likely independent of Azevedo—mention the idea that the Brahmins have four sacred texts. The first is Edward Terry, whose account first appeared in Samvel Pvrchas, Haklvytvs posthumus, or, Pvrchas his Pilgrimes (London, 1625), 2: 1478. When Terry published his own, much revised version, of his Voyage to East-India (London, 1655), he mentioned not four books, but two, one of which he names as śāstra (349). Four unnamed sacred books are mentioned in a report on Gujarat prepared in the 1620s by a factor of the Dutch East India Company (Willem Caland, ed., De Remonstrantie van W. Geleynssen de Jongh [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1929], 85). Although not published until Caland’s edition, the work was used by Johan van Twist, in his Generale Beschrijvinghe van Indien (Batavia, 1638), 35.
36. Frédéric Tinguely, ed., Un libertin dans l’Inde moghole: Les voyages de François Bernier (1656–1669) (Paris: Chandeigne, 2008), 332. Roth had studied Sanskrit and brought the Vedāntasāra of Sadānanda (c. 1490) and the Pañca-tattva-prakāśa of Veṇīdatta (1644) to Europe in 1662 (Richard Hauschild, “Notes on the Content of the Three Manuscripts of Heinrich Roth,” in The Sanskrit Grammar and Manuscripts of Father Heinrich Roth S.J. 1610–1668: Facsimile Edition of Biblioteca Nazionale Rome Mss. or. 171 and 172, ed. Jean-Claude Muller and Arnulf Camps [Leiden: Brill, 1988], 17–18). Roth’s letters from India are lost, but in what has survived the descriptions he gives of Indian religion are based on purāṇic sources. See his account of the avātaras of Viṣṇu, Decem fabulosae Incarnationes Dei, quas credunt Gentiles Indiani extra et intra Gangem, published by Kircher in his China illustrata (Amsterdam, 1667), 156–62, and a shorter account of the nine principal Indian gods in Heinrich Roth, Relatio rerum notabilium Regni Mogor in Asia (Aschaffenburg, 1665), 4–5.
37. Following his return from India in 1669, Bernier published the four volumes that have come to be called his Voyages in 1670 and 1671. His “Lettre à Monsieur Chapelain,” dated 1667, which includes the acknowledgement of Rogerius, Kircher, and also Henry Lord’s 1630 account of Vaiṣṇavas in Surat, appeared in the first volume of his Suite des Mémoires du Sieur Bernier sur l’empire du Grand Mogol in 1671. Although Chapelain dispatched books to Bernier in India, it seems more likely that he first read Lord and Rogerius in the French translations that had recently appeared (in 1667 and 1670, respectively), especially as Kircher’s China illustrata was only published in 1667.
38. Kavīndrācārya Sarasvatī was retained by Bernier’s own patron, Danishmand Khān (P. K. Gode, “Kavīndrācārya Sarasvat̄ı at the Mughal Court,” in Studies in Indian Literary History, vol. 2 [Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1954], 364–79).
39. Bernier, Voyages, 332.
40. Rogerius, Open-Deure, 21–22.
41. It is from the Gautama Dharmasūtra (12.4), but more often cited from Śaṅkara’s Brahmasūtrabhāṣya (I.3.38).
42. Patrick Olivelle, Manu’s Code of Law: A Critical Edition and Translation of the Mānava-Dharmaśāstra (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005), 60, 17.
43. Jarl Charpentier, “Preliminary Report on the ‘Livro da Seita dos Indios Orientais’ (Brit. Mus. Ms. Sloane 1820),” Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 2, 4 (1923): 731–54, at 745.
44. Eugene F. Irschick, “Conversations in Tarangambadi: Caring for the Self in Early Eighteenth Century South India,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 23, 1–2 (2003): 254–70, at 263–64.
45. Jarl Charpentier, ed., The Livro da seita dos Indios orientais (Brit. mus. MS. Sloane 1820) of Father Jacobo Fenicio, S.J. (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1933), 150. Fenicio also mentions the recovery by Viṣṇu as Matsyāvatāra of “the Law” stolen from the gods by Hiraṇyākṣa (p. 57).
46. Nobili to Laerzio Dec 24, 1608, in Joseph Bertrand, La mission du Maduré d’après les documents inédits (Paris: Poussièlegue-Rusand, 1847–1854), 2: 20. Rogerius also reported this idea (Open-Deure, 21).
47. S. Rajamanickam, ed., Roberto de Nobili on Indian Customs (Palayamkottai: De Nobili Research Institute, 1972), 55.
48. On Nobili’s relation to Śivadharma see Iñes G. Županov, Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century India (New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), and Margherita Trento, “Śivadharma or Bonifacio? Behind the Scenes of the Madurai Mission Controversy (1608–1619),” in The Rites Controversies in the Early Modern World, ed. Iñes G. Županov and Pierre-Antoine Fabre (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 91–120.
49. Willem Caland, “Roberto de’ Nobili and the Sanskrit Language and Literature,” Acta Orientalia 3 (1924): 38–51, at 50–51.
50. Fernandes’s treatise was edited by Josef Wicki under the somewhat misleading title Tratado do Pe. Gonçalo Fernandes Trancoso sobre o Hinduísmo (Madure 1616) (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1973). The title of Wicki’s earlier German summary of the text gives a more accurate indication of the content: Die Schrift des P. Gonçalo Fernandes S.J. über die Brahmanen und Dharma-Sastra (Madura 1616) (Münster: Aschendorff, 1957).
51. George Gispert-Sauch, “The Bhṛgu-Vallī of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad: An Early XVII Century European Translation,” Indica 5, 2 (1968): 139–44.
52. Wicki, ed., Tratado, 7, 218–19. On Śivadharma and Buccerio, see further Trento, “Śivadharma,” 106–7.
53. Rajamanickam, Indian Customs, 43–44.
54. Ibid, 42.
55. S. Rajamanickam, ed., Roberto de Nobili on Adaptation (Palayamkottai: De Nobili Research Institute, 1971), 138/139.
56. Rajamanickam, Indian Customs, 47.
57. Baldaeus, Afgoderye, 176. Manuel de Faria e Sousa, Asia Portuguesa, vol. 2 (Lisbon, 1675), 2: 682; John Stevens, The Portugues Asia, 3 vols. (London, 1695), 2: 390. Faria e Sousa used an abridged text prepared by another Jesuit, Manoel Barradas; Baldaeus had access to a different and fuller version. See Charpentier, Livro da seita, lxxvii–lxxxv.
58. Will Sweetman and R. Ilakkuvan, Bibliotheca Malabarica: Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg’s Tamil Library (Paris: IFP/EFEO, 2012), 43–44.
59. There are several printed versions of this letter, the original of which is not extant. The most detailed is in Herrn Bartholomäi Ziegenbalgs und Herrn Heinrich Plütscho, Kön. Dänischer Missionariorum, Brieffe . . . von neuem heraus gegeben von Christian Gustav Bergen (Pirna, 1708), 18–26.
60. Willem Caland, ed., Ziegenbalg’s Malabarisches Heidenthum (Amsterdam: Uitgave van Koninklijke Akademie, 1926), 14.
61. Joachim Lange, ed., Merckwürdige Nachricht aus Ost-Jndien . . . Die andere Auflage (Leipzig, 1708), 11.
62. Bergen, Brieffe, 19. In another letter written later in the same month to August Hermann Francke, Ziegenbalg confirms both that the texts are being copied and that this was possible only because of the “great love” the Tamils had for him (Arno Lehmann, Alte Briefe aus Indien: Unveröffentlichte Briefe von Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg 1706–1719 [Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1957], 40).
63. The conversation was first published in the so-called Hallesche Berichte (8: 567), a series of letters and reports published at irregular intervals from Halle and edited initially by August Hermann Francke. References to the Hallesche Berichte (henceforth HB) are given to the installment and page number. An earlier similar conversation is recorded in HB 8: 546. In 1724 Benjamin Schultze, one of Ziegenbalg’s successors, expressed similar doubts (HB 20: 504–5).
64. HB 7: 374.
65. Charles le Gobien, ed., Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, écrit des missions étrangères par quelques missionaires de la Compagnie de Jésus (Paris, 1702–1776), 9: 38–39.
66. Bourzes to Souciet, 23 March 1719, Archives de la Province de France de la Compagnie de Jésus, Paris, Fonds Brotier, 86, ff. 42r–43v.
67. Bourzes calls this “Ekiam” (Tamil ekkiyam, Sanskrit yajña).
68. Joan-Pau Rubiés, “From Antiquarianism to Philosophical History: India, China and the World History of Religion in European Thought (1600–1770),” in Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Early Modern Europe and China, 1500–1800, ed. Peter N. Miller and François Louis (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2012), 313–67.
69. Dorothy M. Figueira, “The Authority of an Absent Text: The Veda, Upavedas, Upangas, and Upnekhata in European Thought,” in Authority, Anxiety, and Canon: Essays in Vedic Interpretation, ed. Laurie L. Patton (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1994), 201–33.
70. Georges Minois, The Atheist’s Bible: The Most Dangerous Book that Never Existed, tr. Lys Ann Weiss (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2012), 1.
71. Ibid., 39, 61, 55.
72. Caland does not explain why he thinks De tribus impostoribus was already published in 1538. The date is associated with Thomas Campanella, who, in the manuscript preface to his Atheismus Triumphatus (1636), denied that he was the author of De tribus impostoribus—which he claimed to have read—on the grounds that it had been published thirty years before his birth in 1568.
73. He suggested that this might owe something to Arabic sources, given that Averroës was one of the putative authors of De tribus impostoribus (Caland, Veda, 263–64).
74. De imposturis religionum (De tribus impostoribus). Von den Betrügereyen der Religionen: Dokumente, ed. Winfried Schröder (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1999). Müller’s source was most likely Baldaeus. Müller mentions the theft of three Vedas by “a son of the gods” (p. 115). This is perhaps a combination of the two accounts in Fenicio of the loss of one Veda and the theft of “the Law” by Hiraṇyākṣa (see n. 45). Rogerius had identified the stolen law as the four Vedas (Open-Deure, 94), but in his version of Fenicio’s account of the first avatāra of Viṣṇu, Baldaeus combines this with Rogerius’s account of the loss of one of the Vedas, which perhaps accounts for Müller’s idea that the three remaining Vedas were stolen. De tribus impostoribus is to be distinguished from a French text, the Traité des trois imposteurs, which emerged in the same milieu, but does not mention the Vedas.
75. Mathurin Veyssière de Lacroze, Histoire du christianisme des Indes (La Haye, 1724), 427, 454, 473.
76. Institutiones historiae ecclesiasticae Novi Testamenti (Frankfurt, 1726), 56.
77. Doubts about the existence of the Vedas persisted into the late eighteenth century. Around 1774, the Capuchin missionary Marco della Tomba thought it probably they had “never existed, at least as real books” (David N. Lorenzen, “Marco Della Tomba and the Brahmin from Banaras: Missionaries, Orientalists, and Indian Scholars,” Journal of Asian Studies 65, 1 [2006]: 115–43, at 116). Pierre Sonnerat, reporting the Brahmins’ belief that the fourth Veda was lost, wondered if the other three also no longer existed (Voyage aux Indes orientales et à la Chine [Paris, 1782], 2: 32).
78. See, e.g., Tomba, Gli scritti, 99.
79. Jack A. Clarke, “Abbé Jean-Paul Bignon ‘Moderator of the Academies’ and Royal Librarian,” French Historical Studies 8, 2 (1973): 213–35, at 227.
80. Henri Auguste Omont, Missions archéologiques françaises en Orient aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1902), 809.
81. Nicholas Dew, Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), 20–21.
82. See, for example, Dew’s account of his efforts to establish a reliable supply of native French speakers of Arabic, Turkish, and Persian (ibid., 24–25).
83. Jean Filliozat, Bibliothèque nationale, Département des manuscrits: Catalogue du fonds sanscrit. Fascicule I, nos 1 à 165 (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1941), i.
84. Ibid., ii.
85. Gérard Colas and Usha Colas-Chauhan, Manuscrits telugu: Catalogue raisonné (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1995), 7.
86. Le Gac to Souciet, 10 Oct 1727, Fonds Brotier 88, f. 115.
87. Fonds Brotier 82.
88. Gargam to Souciet, 15 Sept 1726, Fonds Brotier 82, f. 72r.
89. Le Gac to Souciet, 10 Oct 1727, Fonds Brotier 88, f. 115v.
90. Bibliothèque nationale de France, naf 6556, f.152r, printed in Omont, Missions archéologiques françaises, 838.
91. Calmette to Souciet, 26 Aug 1730, Fonds Brotier 89, f. 25v; Calmette to Souciet, 25 Aug 1732, Fonds Brotier 89, f. 35r. Further references to these two letters will be given in the text by year and folio. The works were sent to Europe in the early 1730s and remain in the BNF: Ṛgveda (Sanscrit 214); Sāmaveda (Sanscrit 310–12); Yajurveda (Sanscrit 313, 424); Artharvaveda (Sanscrit 177–79, but see below). For details of the contents of the manuscripts see Filliozat, Catalogue du fonds sanscrit, I & II.
92. Filliozat, Catalogue du fonds sanscrit, I, 25.
93. One of these may have been Calmette’s convert Maṅgalagiri Ānanda, who later composed a summary of the Gospels in Telugu verse entitled Vedānta Rasayanam (Léon Besse, “Liste Alphabétique des Missionaires du Carnatic de la Compagnie de Jésus au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue Historique de l’Inde Française 2 [1917/18]: s.v. Calmette; see also C. P. Brown, “Notices of some Roman Catholic Books, existing in the Telugu Language,” The Madras Journal of Literature and Science [July 1840], 54–58).
94. Calmette’s successive stations saw him push further and further to the northwest of Pondicherry. In 1727 and 1728 he wrote from stations in Arcot; by 1730 he was in Ballabaram (now Chikkaballapura, some 60 kilometres north of Bangalore); and his final letter is from Darmavaram, still further north.
95. Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, 21: 457–58.
96. Colas and Colas-Chauhan, Manuscrits telugu.
97. It seems likely that the same method was used by John Marshall in 1674–77 to produce an English version of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and of another text that he identified as the Sāma Veda. Marshall, an English East India Company factor in Bengal from 1668 until his death in 1688, had been educated at Cambridge and was close to Henry More, one of the Cambridge Platonists. A Bengali Brahmin, Madhusudana, translated orally into Bengali from a Sanskrit original, on the basis of which Marshall produced a written English text (Anna Winterbottom, Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016], 95–96). Marshall described the latter text as “the Epittomie or the Sum of the four Beads,” an indication that this is likely not the Sāma Veda.
98. Le Gac to Souciet, 28 September 1732, Fonds Brotier, 89, f. 35r.
99. Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, 26: 233.
100. Caland, Veda, 281.
101. Tēmpāvaṇi uses the conventions of classical Tamil poetry, but Beschi also wrote other works in Tamil in popular genres, such as ammāṉai.
102. On Stephens’s close adherence to the purāṇic model see Ananya Chakravarti, “Between Bhakti and Pietà: Untangling Emotion in Marāṭhī Christian Poetry,” History of Religions 56, 4 (2017): 365–87, at 372–73. Although Étienne de la Croix mentions the four Vedas, like Stephens he composed his Discursos sobre a vida do Apostolo Sam Pedro (1629) in the vernacular and divided it into three “purāṇas.” The Vedas are mentioned in his second purāṇa, and particularly in the canto 31 of book 5.
103. Ziegenbalg’s translation of the Gospels and Acts into Tamil was published in 1714 as Añcu vēta poṣtakkam and his 1717 translation of Johann Freylinghausen’s Grundlegung der Theologie (1703) as Vētacāṣtiram.
104. Although Sanskrit translations of some of these texts were prepared, it appears that the Ezour-Vedam itself was to have been translated into Telugu (Ludo Rocher, Ezourvedam: A French Veda of the Eighteenth Century [Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1984], 71).
105. Rocher, Ezourvedam, 57–60.
106. Ziegenbalg does at one place express a desire to be able to translate Sanskrit mantras into German, but notes that no one was able to explain them to him, as only a few learned Brahmins were able to understand them (Malabarisches Heidenthum, 108).
107. Sweetman and Ilakkuvan, Bibliotheca Malabarica, 21.
108. They cite also other European scholars, including Mosheim and Thomas Hyde.
109. HB 39: 418.
110. They cite also Bernier and the Jesuit Lettres édifiantes et curieuses.
111. Their letter is printed in HB 45: 1182–85. The translation of the text appeared in the next installment (HB 46: 1251–94).
112. Although they do not here mention the Lettres édifiantes, they had cited an earlier reference in them to the Vedas in their 1734 diary.
113. Albrecht Weber, “Ein angebliche Bearbeitung des Yajurveda,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 7 (1853): 235–48, at 236.
114. Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum Bibliothecae regiae. Paris 1739. Étienne Fourmont was likely responsible for the entries in the section “Codices Indici.”
115. A fragment of the Vedas—a single hymn from the first maṇḍala of the Ṛg Veda (I, 89)—was collected in Surat by James Fraser in Khambayat in the 1730s (Bodleian Library, MSS. Fraser Sansk. 30). Fraser aspired to translate the Vedas but was aware he had only a fragment of them. He notes that the “Pourans and Shasters are glosses and comments on the Vedh” and of the Gītā he says “This book the Brahmins call The Marrow of the Vedh. It gives a Light into the most mysterious part of their religion, and explains the substance of the Vedh” (A Catalogue of Manuscripts in the Persic, Arabic, and Sanskerrit Languages [London, 1742], 37–39). On Fraser and his collections see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India: Words, Peoples, Empires, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), 144–210.
116. Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomaeo, Examen Historico-criticum Codicum Indicorum Bibliothecae Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide (Rome, 1792), 5.
117. Julien Bach, “Notice sur la première découverte des Vedas,” Annales de philosophie chrétienne 18e année, 3e série, vol. 16 (1847): 434–43, at 434.
118. Daniel S. Hawley, “L’Inde de Voltaire,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 120 (1974): 139–78.
119. Sonnerat, Voyage aux Indes orientales, cited in Rocher, Ezourvedam, 13.
120. Anquetil Duperron, Voyage en Inde: 1754–1762: Relation de voyage en préliminaire à la traduction du “Zend-Avesta,” ed. Jean Deloche, Manonmani Filliozat, and Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat (Paris: École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1997), 378–81.
121. Ângela Barreto Xavier and Iñes G. Županov, Catholic Orientalism: Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge (16th–18th Centuries) (New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015), 302–3.
122. On Polier, see Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India, 239–68.
123. G. N. Bahura, “Glimpses of Historical Information from Manuscripts in the Pothikhana of Jaipur,” in Cultural Heritage of Jaipur, ed. J. N. Asopa (Jodhpur: United Book Traders, 1982), 107. See also G. N. Bahura, ed., Catalogue of Manuscripts in the Maharaja of Jaipur Museum (Jaipur: Maharaja of Jaipur Museum, 1971).
124. Constantin Regamey, “Un pionnier vaudois des études indiennes: Antoine-Louis de Polier,” in Mélanges offerts à Monsieur Georges Bonnard, professeur honoraire de l’Université de Lausanne, à l’occasion de son quatrevingtième anniversaire (Geneva: Droz, 1966), 202.
125. The Vedas that Bernier had seen in Banaras were likely also connected with Jai Singh. Although Bernier does not say this, it is likely that he saw them when he and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier visited the college in Banaras established by Jai Singh (William Crooke, ed., Travels in India by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Baron of Aubonne. 2nd ed. 2 vols. [London: Humphrey Milford, 1925], 2: 183).
126. Ludo Rocher and Rosane Rocher, The Making of Western Indology: Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the East India Company (London: Routledge, 2012), 41. It was from the texts obtained by Polier and Colebrooke that Friedrich August Rosen produced his pioneering edition of the Ṛg Veda Saṃhitās (Rigveda-sanhita, Liber primus, Sanskritè et Latinè [London, 1838]).
127. Thomas Edward Colebrooke, “Notices of the Life of Henry Thomas Colebrooke, Esq., by His Son,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 5, 1 (1839): 1–60, at 29.
128. Sarvasammata-Śikṣā, 36, cited in Madhav M. Deshpande, “From Orality to Writing: Transmission and Interpretation of Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī,” in Proceedings of the International Symposium “The Book. Romania. Europa” 20–24 September 2010, ed. Jan E. M. Houben and Julieta Rotaru (Bucharest: Metropolitan Library of Bucharest, 2011), 64.
129. Cezary Galewicz, “Let Śiva’s Favour Be Alike with Scribes and with Reciters: Motifs for Copying and Not Copying the Veda,” in Houben and Rotaru, Proceedings, 116.
130. Johannes Bronkhorst, “Illiteracy as a Socio-Cultural Marker,” in Houben and Rotaru, Proceedings, 47.
131. For a survey of scholarly views on the question of writing in pre-modern India, see Harry Falk, Schrift im alten Indien (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1993), esp. chs. 9–10. On Indian manuscript culture and the transmission of texts, see also Gérard Colas and Gerdi Gerschheimer, ed., Écrire et transmettre en Inde classique (Paris: EFEO, 2009), and Saraju Rath, ed., Aspects of Manuscript Culture in South India (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
132. It is nevertheless worth recalling Calmette’s comments that his interactions with Brahmins were easier the further he was from coastal areas where European influence was greatest.
133. A brief account of their trip was first published in the new edition of the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses published in 1781–83 (vol. 15, 336–7).
134. This was one reason why the missionaries among them thought other texts more important to obtain.
135.
Caland concluded his 1918 essay by noting the limits of most Brahmins’ knowledge of the Vedas, adding that while it was not that there were no Brahmins who could have given Europeans a better and fuller account of the Vedas “do Couto, Rogerius and all the others knocked on the wrong door” (Veda, 303). Ludo Rocher expressed similar “reservations concerning the weight that has been given to the secrecy argument” (“Orality and Textuality in the Indian Context,” Sino-Platonic Papers, 49 [1994]: 5). Rocher was “convinced that there was, far more often, a second reason why Westerners were denied a knowledge of the Vedas; their Indian contacts, who were supposed to provide them with information on the Vedas, did not possess it themselves, and, therefore, were unable to communicate it” (“Max Müller and the Veda,” in Mélanges d’islamologie: Volume dédié à la mémoire de Armand Abel par ses collègues, ses élèves et ses amis, ed. Armand Abel and Pierre Salmon, vol. 2 [Leiden: Brill, 1974], 223).