The Absent Vedas
by Will Sweetman
University of Otago
Journal of the American Oriental Society 139.4 (2019) 781
2019
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I have a larger vision or fantasy of original Indian Buddhism as an ocean with many icebergs, each representing the local textual traditions...of the different parts of the Indian world. Those icebergs are mostly gone...We have the Pali canon...the partial Sanskrit canon...They had a common core but they had many different texts in and around that basic commonality... and... there's no hope of finding them mainly for a simple physical reason, the climate of...India proper is such that organic materials...never last for more than a few hundred years. There are really no really old manuscripts in India proper. You only get the ancient manuscripts from the borderlands of India, in this case Gandhara which has a more moderate climate.
-- One Buddha, 15 Buddhas, 1,000 Buddhas, by Richard Salomon
The climate of Theravada countries is not conducive to the survival of manuscripts. Apart from brief quotations in inscriptions and a two-page fragment from the eighth or ninth century found in Nepal, the oldest known manuscripts are from late in the fifteenth century, and there is not very much from before the eighteenth.
-- Tripitaka, by New world Encyclopedia
[Key Points]:
At the end of 1543 … Xavier encountered a Brahmin who revealed to him their secret monotheism: there was only a single God, creator of heaven and earth, and they worshipped this God and not the idols, which were demons. This doctrine was taught in their schools, but the Brahmins were obliged not to reveal it. Xavier added that they had books [scripturas], written in a learned tongue, which contained the commandments.…
It was only toward the end of the sixteenth century that the Vedas are first mentioned, by Agostinho de Azevedo, an Augustinian… The Brahmins, the “masters of their religion,” teach a unified doctrine of God, creation, and the corruption of creatures…
Azevedo’s brief account of the content of the four “origins” makes clear that he had no real access to the Vedas themselves. When he comes to elaborate on the content of the fourfold Veda, he in fact names a series of other texts—all in Tamil…They say that this first cause is God, and that he is a pure spirit, incorporeal, infinite, full of all power and knowledge and truth, and present everywhere, which they call Carvēsparaṉ [Xarves Zibarum] which means the creator of all…
Despite his claim, then, that the Vedas are the original scriptures that prescribe what the gentiles of India are to believe and what rites they are to perform, Azevedo’s actual sources are all much later Tamil sources…
Bernier … notes that having learned Sanskrit,they ordinarily put themselves to reading the puranas, which are an interpretation and abridgement of the Vedas, which are very large, at least if they are those which were shown to me in Benares. They are also very rare, so much so that my agha could never find them for sale, whatever diligence he used; for they keep them well hidden, fearing that the Mahometans should get hold of and burn them, as they have done several times…
[T]he Brahmins’ texts—and the teachings they contained—were kept secret….
[W]hen Jesuits first gained access to Vedic texts, in the early seventeenth century, this was through the personal mediation of converted Brahmins who may have known the texts—thus from memory rather than manuscripts...
The first Jesuit to name the Vedas is Jacome Fenicio, who had been in India since 1584… In 1603 Fenicio reports writing a manual of Hindu mythology, in which he mentions that he has copied three hundred verses critical of idolatry from a text in Malayalam ascribed to Pākkanār... Fenicio also mentions and names the four Vedas in connection with the mythology of Brahmā, but he does not otherwise show any knowledge of Vedic sources…
Nobili is the first European known to have read parts of the Vedas…he cites directly from the texts associated with the Black Yajur Veda….Nobili’s access to these texts was mediated by the Telugu Brahmin convert who taught him Sanskrit, Śivadharma or Bonifacio…Śivadharma who made the texts available to him, on the basis of Nobili’s orthography in his Responsio…Śivadharma, who had fallen out with Nobili, assisted Fernandes with scriptural quotations in his 1616 treatise attacking Nobili…as Fernandes did not know Sanskrit, the texts were translated into Tamil by Śivadharma and only thence into Portuguese…This kind of mediated access to Sanskrit texts, likely the same method used by Azevedo and Rogerius, would be repeated in the following century by other missionaries.
Having at last obtained access to the texts hinted at by Xavier half a century earlier, Nobili discovered that while some parts of them did indeed refer to “God in the true and absolute sense” (Brahma)—and even contained “an adumbration of the recondite mystery of the most Holy Trinity”—other parts described superstitious rites directed to false deities (Brahmā) so that “the sayings they record are in striking contradiction one with another.”… Significantly, Nobili also notes that the term Veda refers not only to the “law” of the Brahmin but also to knowledge (scientia) more broadly. It was for this reason that he used it in coining many terms to refer to aspects of Christian life and practice, and even to Christianity itself… This usage was followed by Protestants in the following century and beyond…
He concludes that … by metonymy all these works are identified with the Vedas…
[ I]n September 1706 Ziegenbalg reported that books were being copied out for him by the elderly schoolmaster he had engaged to teach him Tamil…
It is clear, both from the fact that the works were being copied in Tamil and from Ziegenbalg’s later catalogue of his library, that these were not the Vedas. As he began reading Tamil texts, Ziegenbalg’s interest in the Vedas receded, and he even came to doubt their very existence… Ziegenbalg says that he doubts the “lawbooks” exist because none of the many thousands of Tamils to whom he has spoken had seen them. They have only been told by the Brahmins that they exist, but none of the Brahmins Ziegenbalg had spoken to had access to them either… He adds that while the Brahmins make much of the four Vedas, they do not allow others even to see, much less to read, them…
In 1711 one of the Jesuits in this mission, Jean-Venant Bouchet, argued that Hindu religious texts were a diabolic imitation of the Christian scriptures. Although he had not been able to obtain copies of the Vedas, he had been able to learn enough of their contents from “certain teachers” to be able to pronounce it an imitation of the books of Moses…
Louis de Bourzes… [states] that to communicate the Veda to others was a crime punishable by many millions of years in hell… He corrects Bouchet (without mentioning his name) on the question of whether there were at first five Vedas, saying that he has been assured constantly that there are only four… he writes that the name Veda is applied by extension to a whole range of other texts that are not, strictly, Veda… The Vedas proper are never read and expounded to the people—they would not be capable of understanding them…
The reputation of the Vedas in Europe around the turn of the eighteenth century demonstrates what Dorothy Figueria has aptly called “the authority of an absent text.” An intriguing demonstration of this is a mention of the Vedas in a text that was as much sought after—and as much discussed in ignorance of its actual contents—as were the Vedas themselves: De tribus impostoribus. The idea of a blasphemous treatise that grouped Jesus Christ, Moses, and Muhammad as the three impostors who had fooled the world begins with an encyclical from Pope Gregory IX against the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in 1239. For the next four centuries, accusations of having authored such a treatise—or even just having possessed a copy of it—swirled around Europe, applied to anyone whose orthodoxy was in doubt—from Thomas Scoto (a Franciscan friar accused, arrested, and probably burned to death in Lisbon in 1335) to Michael Servetus and Giordano Bruno, burned alive in Geneva in 1553 and in Rome in 1600, respectively. The text itself, however, proved elusive. When a version of this notorious text was finally printed, in 1753, it bore a false date of 1598. Caland dated De tribus impostoribus sixty years earlier still, to 1538, and therefore suggested that that De tribus impostoribus was likely the first European text to mention the Vedas. In fact, the reference to the Vedas in De tribus impostoribus is one reason for dating it much later, most likely to a manuscript of 1688 by Johann Müller. ..
From Ziegenbalg, Lacroze learned that the Indians, despite their outward idolatry, preserved also a knowledge of the real nature of the supreme being. Rogerius, Baldaeus, and the Jesuits persuaded him that this could be proven, if only the Vedas could be found and translated… Mosheim acknowledged the reputation of Oriental philosophers for wisdom, but regretted that little more could be said until the “very ancient book of the Brachmans called Vedam” was translated into another language…
In 1726 Gargam told Souciet he had been offered a translation of the Vedas. Even though he had not yet read it, he thought it would be of “very great use to all the missionaries . . . in refuting the errors of the Gentiles.”…
Calmette refers to the Brahmins’ secrecy about the Vedas:Ever since India has been known, it does not appear that the Europeans have been able to unearth this book which the Brames scruple to communicate and which they transcribe superstitiously in the woods or in remote places where they cannot be seen by any who are not of their caste. (1730: 25v)
I have at last recovered the four Vedas, of which the first is called Rougvedam, the second Ejourvedam, the third Samavedam, the fourth Adarvanavedam. The fourth is that which, so long as there have been missionaries in India, has been said to have been thrown into the sea by the Brahmins. Thus, that which the Brahmins have until now kept hidden more than the Jews have the books of Moses, that which they have communicated to no other nation of the world, not even to Indians if they are not of their caste, finally falls into our hands and the sea itself has given up its prey. (1732: 35r).
Calmette described how he had confirmed the authenticity of the texts he had purchased by having young Brahmins who were learning the Vedas recite them to him (1732: 35v). In his letter he describes how both Gargam, his close colleague in the northern reaches of the Carnatic mission, and Jean-François Pons, a Jesuit collecting Sanskrit texts in Bengal, had been deceived into buying texts purporting to be Vedas… while Calmette did obtain the Rg, Yajur, and Sama Veda samhitas, his “Adarvana Vedam” is in fact an assortment of tantric and magical texts connected with goddess worship called Atharvanatantraraja and Atharvanamantraśāstra….
[Calmette] adds that it was remarkable how few Brahmins understood Vedic Sanskrit… Some of these works, like others sent by the Jesuits, were not so much copies of actual Indian texts as verbal abstracts of the texts recited by scholars and recorded, on paper not palm-leaves, by converts who adorned them with Christian symbols…
[T]he Jesuits had thus finally succeeded in obtaining for European libraries at least parts of the Vedas…
The growing reputation of the Vedas in Europe was not without effect in India, however. Among the Jesuits, Gargam and Calmette were convinced of the value of obtaining the Vedas, or at least of responding to the demand for them from Europe. This is perhaps reflected also in that the works of preparatio evangelica composed, probably in French, by the Carnatic Jesuits were labelled “Vedam”… Although Francis Whyte Ellis saw these texts in Pondicherry in 1816, only the Ezour-Vedam survives. While their author cannot be determined with certainty, Ludo Rocher has demonstrated that they were probably produced among the Jesuits of the Carnatic mission…
[T]he Tranquebar missionaries gave a brief account of the Vedas. They report that despite their efforts to see the Vedas, they have been told that they are not written, but that boys (who can only be Brahmins) learn sections of them from a priest by repeating it constantly. The language in which they are recorded, which they call Grantha, is so old that no one can understand it without referring to the sastra. Few learn the fourth part, because it consists of sorcery…
[ I]n 1737, four of these missionaries announced that they had obtained a translation of the Yajur Veda… the text that was published in the Hallesche Berichte had, according to Albrecht Weber, “not the slightest thing to do with the Yajurveda,” instead representing “an encyclopedic and systematically ordered representation of the modern Brahmanical world and life-view.”…
[T]he Vedas [Le Gac] dispatched to Europe… Although catalogued, on the basis of the Jesuits’ descriptions of the texts... remained unread throughout the eighteenth century… Paulinus saw them in late 1789, but … was not permitted enough time to examine them closely.For Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomaeo, the word "Veda" "does not signify exclusively a sacred book but implies in general as much as a sacred law, whether observed by Indians or other nations" (p. 65). Of course, Paulinus famously (and wrongly) argued that "the Vedas" do not exist as a specific set of ancient Indian scriptures and that the Indians call many texts, even non-Indian ones, "Vedas." But modern southern Indian usage agrees with Paulinus's view about the word, as the entries in the University of Madras Tamil Lexicon cited by Rocher(1984:65) show:
vetam: 1. The Vedas; 2. The Jaina scriptures; 3. The Bible; ...
veta-k-karan: Christian (the only meaning!)
veta-pustakam: 1. The Vedas; 2. The Bible.
veta-vakkiyam: 1. Vedic text; 2. Gospel truth.
veta-vakkiyanam: 1. Commentaries on the Vedas; 2. Expounding the bible.
-- The Birth of Orientalism, by Urs AppAnquetil did not limit himself to revealing to us, through his luminous dissertations, what had been the empire of the Achaemenids and the Sassanids, he also introduced us to India, which we did not know in the last century even more than Persia. Voltaire did not take the sanscrit, which was then called Sanscretan, for a book, and was he not duped by the forger who had composed Ezour-Vedam, and surprised the religion of Father Nobili? The Vedas themselves were so ignored that Father Paulinus of Saint-Barthélemy did not believe in their existence, and considered them mythical books. ['Voy. Hem. de l'Acad., t. L, p. 1 and following.]
We can say that the discoveries are in the air and that when they occur, alongside their authors, a crowd of researchers met who had approached them and who would have been called upon to make them, if the discoverer had not been taken from the world before reaching his goal. Thus, at the same time as Anquetil du Perron lifted the veil which hid ancient India from us, Abbé Étienne Mignot, a learned theologian that the Academy had enrolled among its members, shed light in five memoirs published successively by his Collection, the history of Hindu doctrines. [He should not be confused with Father Vincent Mignot, Voltaire's nephew.] An independent mind, who had shaken off the yoke of the Sorbonne, Mignot sometimes succeeded, in spite of very incomplete documents, in unraveling the speculations of these ancient Indian thinkers whose boldness he loved, and which took a century of study to be known and understood.
Anquetil had only been able to advance on the threshold of Hindu literature, with the help of Persian translations; but on the other hand he had collected a prodigious number of information on India and the East, which he put to use and which have earned us works which have remained indispensable to the study of Asia. [its Eastern Legislation and India in relation to Europe.] As his reputation spread, oriental manuscripts and documents from Hindustan and Persia flocked to him in greater numbers; he ended up becoming in Europe the true representative and the literary agent of these countries, which one did not know before with us only by the connections of Bernier, Tavernier, Chardin, merchants or tourist philosophers who had neither the ardor of the French orientalist, nor the taste for erudition. If Anquetil had been able to learn Sanskrit, the last century would already have enjoyed some of the discoveries which have been the exclusive patrimony of ours; but having at its disposal an incomplete vocabulary that had been communicated to him by Cardinal Antonelli, prefect of the Congregation of Propaganda, he tried in vain to translate the Vedas, and had to be content to let us know the Upanishads [We see from a letter from Father Cœurdoux to Anquetil du Perron, which was addressed to him from the Indes in 1771, that the translation of the Vedas was then regarded as an almost impossible undertaking: The true Vedam, writes this missionary, is, in the opinion of Father Calmette, of a Sanserutan (Sanskrit) so old that it is almost unintelligible, and that what is cited is from Vedantam, that is to say introductions and comments made there.]; one of his correspondents had transmitted the text to him in 1775. Thanks to these curious but obscure treatises, Anquetil gave the Academy an idea of the religious philosophy of the Hindus, and he later published a Latin version. [See Handwritten correspondence from Anquetil du Perron, kept at the Imperial Library.]
De Guignes, through another source of information, Chinese documents, sought to shed light on the darkness of the Hindu religion. For want of being able to understand the original books, we were, as we see, reduced to asking the knowledge of Brahmanism and its philosophy from the neighboring peoples of Hindustan, who had only had one idea - perfect; so all the schools and all the sects were confused; we did not even know how to distinguish the Vedic religion from Buddhism; for for a long time we had no idea of this latter religion. It was in 1753 that De Guignes read his memoir on the Samaanian philosophers at the Academy, where the first glimpses of knowledge of Buddhism appeared, the teachings of which he had rediscovered in China. However, he associated with the information provided to him by China some indications which he obtained directly from India. He had in his hands the translation of the Bhagavata-Pourana, made on a Tamil version, and due to an indigenous interpreter from Pondicherry, four years later, in 1776, De Gui named Méridas Poullé. He owed it to Minister Bertin, who had given it to him in 1769. De Guignes endeavored to bring out data for the Indian chronology and communicated them in 1772 to his colleagues. But, as was inevitable, this orientalist, who had at his disposal none of the elements suitable to enlighten his progress, without realizing it, a complete shipwreck. Four years later, in 1776, De Guignes named Méridas Poullé. He owed it to Minister Bertin, who had given it to him in 1769. [See, on the Upanichads, Max Muller, A history of ancient Sanskrit literature, 2nd ed., P. 316-319. These books, which are metaphysical commentaries on the Vedas intended for the teaching of young disciples of Brahmam science, belong to the class of writings called Aranyakas, and enjoy the greatest authority in India.] [Under the title of Oupnek'hat, 1802, in-10. See the analysis given by Lanjuinais in his oEuvres, t. 1V, p. 216.]
De Guignes was no happier in his Historical Researches, Indian religion, and on the fundamental books of this religion, published by the Academy. Indeed, without knowledge of Sanskrit, one could only have incomplete and confused notions about India. It was up to England to endow us at last with documents which placed India in its true light. But the dawn of that day was barely breaking when De Guignes was writing his memoirs, and the misfortune for the reputation of this orientalist was to have come too early.
It was only in the last years of the Academy, in 1785, that the works of Ch. Wilkins began to penetrate us. Parraud gave, in 1787, the French translation of the English version of the Indian poem entitled: Bhagavadgîte, that is to say, song of the blessed, epilogue of one of the great Sanskrit epics, the Mahâbhàrata, which A.W. de Schlegel was to make us better known in the following century. An eminent compatriot of Wilkins, William Jones, who had been in India to complete his acquaintance, gave in Calcutta, in 1789, the translation of the famous drama of Kâlidâsa, Sacountala, and published in 1793 the version of Laws of Manu.
-- Histoire de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (1865), by Louis Ferdinand Alfred Maury
In 1847 the Jesuit Julien Bach commented wryly: “No Indianist is tempted to make use of it, and it is from these books that we can say: Sacred they are, because no one touches them.”…It is to these books that Voltaire's mischief could rightly apply:"Sacred they are, because no one touches them."
-- The Father Calmette and the Indianist Missionaries, by Father Julien Bach
Voltaire received a manuscript in French entitled Ezour-Vedam in late 1760… Pierre Sonnerat correctly identified the Ezour-Vedam as “definitely not one of the four Vedams” but rather “a book of controversy, written by a missionary”… Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron, the leading French Orientalist of his time …defended the authenticity of the Ezour-Vedam as late as 1808… In Surat, Anquetil Duperron was offered, through a Parsi intermediary, manuscripts containing extracts of the four Vedas. He declined… because the Brahmin—and Jain—scholars whom he asked to certify the authenticity of the texts assured him they were incomplete…
While the Ezour Vedam was being discussed by Voltaire and others, the Vedas sent by Calmette languished unread in the Bibliotheque Imperiale. They were even excluded from the catalogue of Sanskrit manuscripts prepared by Alexander Hamilton and Louis-Mathieu Langlès in 1807, again because they were mostly not in Devanagari script...
In 1781–82 Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier, a Swiss Protestant who served in the English East India Company’s army until 1775, had had copies of the Vedas made for him at the court of Pratap Singh at Jaipur. Polier’s intermediary was a Portuguese physician, Don Pedro da Silva Leitão… Jai Singh had assembled a substantial collection of manuscripts from religious sites across India, and in the time of his successor Pratap Singh the library had contained the samhitas of all four Vedas in manuscripts dating from the last quarter of the seventeenth century…
Polier records that he had sought copies of the Veda without success in Bengal, Awadh, and on the Coromandel coast, as well as in Agra, Delhi, and Lucknow and had found that even at Banaras “nothing could be obtained but various Shasters, [which] are only Commentaries of the Baids”…
It is perhaps significant that it was in a royal library, rather than in a Brahmin pathasala, that Polier found manuscripts of the Vedas. But the same is not true of the manuscripts acquired in Banaras only fifteen years later by Henry Thomas Colebrooke, during the period (1795–97) when he was appointed as judge and magistrate at nearby Mirzapur…I cannot conceive how it came to be ever asserted that the Brahmins were ever averse to instruct strangers; several gentlemen who have studied the language find, as I do, the greatest readiness in them to give us access to all their sciences. They do not even conceal from us the most sacred texts of their Vedas.
The several gentlemen would likely have included General Claude Martin, Sir William Jones, and Sir Robert Chambers. These were all East India Company employees who obtained Vedic manuscripts (Jones from Polier) in the last decades of the eighteenth century.
Why was it so much easier for Polier, Colebrooke, and others to obtain what it had been so difficult for the Jesuits and impossible for the Pietists?...
Despite Calmette’s statement about no European having been able to unearth this text “since India has been known,” the evidence suggests rather that no European other than Nobili had seriously sought to obtain the Vedas. The “false” Vedas obtained by the Pietists two years after Calmette—and by Gargam and Pons six years before—are explicable by the flexibility of the term Veda; we do not need to postulate either duplicity or secrecy on the part of those who transmitted these texts.
The question of the availability of the texts in manuscript form touches on the hotly debated issue of the oral transmission of the Vedas. That there was a powerful presumption against writing down Hindu texts, and the Vedas in particular, is not controversial. “One who reads from a written text” (likhita-pathaka) is included among a list of the six worst types of those who recite the Vedas…. We do not have to fall into what Johannes Bronkhorst calls “the brahmanical trap” —imagining that the Vedas were never written down—in order to accept that the brahminical prejudice against writing down the Vedas would have meant that it was far less likely that European scholars would come across manuscripts of the Vedas than manuscripts of other texts…
Many Europeans—both Jesuits from Xavier to Bouchet and Calmette, and Protestants from Rogerius to Ziegenbalg and his Pietist successors, as well non-clerical authors like Bernier and Alexander Dow—mentioned restrictions on who could hear the Vedas. This alone would have made the Vedas harder to find; most Hindus would not have had access to them either. But we should not overlook that many of the same writers also stated that even among Brahmins the Vedas were not widely known. Thus, in addition to the reasons suggested above, it seems that one reason, other than religious scruple, for the difficulty Europeans experienced in attempting to obtain copies of the Vedas was a simple lack of knowledge of the Vedas, despite their acknowledged authority, on the part of many Indians. In this sense, the Veda was an “absent text” not only for Europeans, but for many Indians too.
-- The Absent Vedas, by Will Sweetman
The Vedas were first described by a European author in a text dating from the 1580s, which was subsequently copied by other authors and appeared in translation in most of the major European languages in the course of the seventeenth century. It was not, however, until the 1730s that copies of the Vedas were first obtained by Europeans, even though Jesuit missionaries had been collecting Indian religious texts since the 1540s. I argue that the delay owes as much to the relative absence of the Vedas in India—and hence to the greater practical significance for missionaries of other genres of religious literature—as to reluctance on the part of Brahmin scholars to transmit their texts to Europeans.
By the early eighteenth century, a strange dichotomy was apparent in European views of the Vedas. In Europe, on the one hand, the best-informed scholars believed the Vedas to be the most ancient and authoritative of Indian religious texts and to preserve a monotheistic but secret doctrine, quite at odds with the popular worship of multiple deities. The Brahmins kept the Vedas, and kept them from those outside their caste, especially foreigners. One or more of the Vedas was said to be lost—perhaps precisely the one that contained the most sublime ideas of divinity. By the 1720s scholars in Europe had begun calling for the Vedas to be translated so that this secret doctrine could be revealed, and from the royal library in Paris a search for the texts of the Vedas was launched.
In India, on the other hand, the missionaries, who—overwhelmingly—were responsible for the best information on Indian religious literature that had reached Europe, took a quite different view. Many doubted whether the Vedas still existed; some that they had ever existed. All realized the much greater significance for daily religious life in India of other texts, mostly texts in vernacular languages. The missionaries reported that most Brahmins knew little of the Vedas and often did not well understand even the little that they did know. The only European to have read parts of the Vedas before the 1720s—the Jesuit Roberto Nobili—knew the Vedas described sacrifices to multiple deities. He called these deities idols and thought Vedic ideas superstitious rather than sublime. It was another Jesuit, Étienne Le Gac, who responded to the call from Paris in the 1720s for copies of the Vedas. In his first response he wrote that the whole venture was useless. Five years later, even as he dispatched copies of the Vedas to Paris, he predicted—accurately—that the books would serve only as a spectacle in Europe, and he repeated that he thought acquiring them a waste of money.
What accounts for this dichotomy in European views of the Vedas? Here I argue that it is ultimately the absence of the Vedas, in Europe but also in India, that explains both views. Until well into the eighteenth century the view from Europe was shaped primarily by just one early report of the Vedas. This was contained in an account of “the opinions, rites and ceremonies of the Gentiles of India,” written by a Portuguese friar, Agostinho de Azevedo, most likely in the late 1580s. His brief statement on the Vedas was recycled in every major European language throughout the seventeenth century and even late in the eighteenth century, half a century after the first manuscripts of the Vedas had arrived in Europe. But Azevedo, like almost all missionaries writing on Hinduism prior to the 1720s, in fact relied on vernacular—in his case, Tamil—texts for his own account of Indian religious belief. References to these sources were, however, excised by those who repeatedly plagiarized his account.
The view from India was shaped by the absence of the Vedas in most Indian religious practice. The best seventeenth- and eighteenth-century accounts of Indian religion, penned mostly by missionaries in the south of India, were primarily based on other literature—Vedic only in the broadest sense. Their works were mostly not published until long after missionary Orientalism was superseded by Company Orientalism and the Vedas proper were finally studied by British Orientalists in north India in the last years of the eighteenth century. In the meantime, Europe’s obsession with the Vedas had elevated a pseudo-Veda—the Ezour-Vedam, a work produced among the same group of Jesuits who first acquired the actual Vedas as a kind of preparatio evangelica [preparation evangelica]—to the status of an important source for European discussions of Hinduism.
This article begins by examining European engagement with Hindu texts in the sixteenth century, demonstrating that despite Azevedo’s early report on the Vedas and contrary to what is sometimes stated, it was vernacular texts that Europeans—including Azevedo—obtained, read, and translated. It will then be shown how the repeated copying of Azevedo’s report in published European works on Indian religion in the seventeenth century established the reputation of the Vedas in Europe. By this time Jesuits had gained access to the Vedas and discovered they were far from monotheistic, but their works remained unpublished in the seventeenth century. The Protestant mission in India began in the early eighteenth century and at first followed the Catholic pattern of using vernacular texts. By the second quarter of the eighteenth century both Catholics and Protestants had to respond to demands from Europe that the Vedas be found and translated. The Vedas were obtained, but missionaries continued to emphasize the importance of other texts, and the texts sent to Europe remained unread. The article concludes by examining the relative ease with which collectors and scholars associated with the English East India Company obtained copies of the Vedas in the 1780s and 1790s and questions the view that it was primarily the prohibition on transmission of the Vedas to non-Brahmins that accounts for the gap of two centuries between the first European report of the Vedas and the first published scholarly studies of them.
The Sixteenth Century: The Portuguese in India
One of the earliest Portuguese writers on India, Duarte Barbosa, describes the Brahmins in Malabar as “learned in their idolatry,” adding that they possessed many books and were held in great esteem by the rulers of the land. 1 In this respect they were quite different from the other idolatrous “Indians” the Spanish were encountering in the New World. In time, the literacy of Asian civilizations would force recognition of the need for quite different strategies of evangelization there, but in the 1520s the first episcopal visitor to Goa, Duarte Nunes, proposed that the Portuguese should proceed in the same way as the conquistadores in the Americas: destroying the temples of the idolaters and expelling from Goa any who would not convert. 2 It was not, in fact, until the early 1540s that orders were given for the destruction of temples in areas under Portuguese control and the diversion of their revenues to newly built Christian institutions. 3 It was in this context that Francis Xavier arrived in Goa in May 1542. At the end of 1543 Xavier was to add some critical details to Barbosa’s image of the literate Brahmin idolater. Xavier encountered a Brahmin who revealed to him their secret monotheism: there was only a single God, creator of heaven and earth, and they worshipped this God and not the idols, which were demons. This doctrine was taught in their schools, but the Brahmins were obliged not to reveal it. Xavier added that they had books [scripturas], written in a learned tongue, which contained the commandments.4
Already by the 1540s, then, Europeans had begun to establish an image of the Brahmins as literate and in possession of texts that taught a secret monotheism. It was these elements that would lead to calls for the Vedas to be obtained and translated. Only the idea of the antiquity of these texts, and their designation as Veda, were lacking at this point.
As soon as missionaries managed to obtain Hindu religious texts, however, a quite different image emerged. These were acquired by confiscation, in the context of competition and conflict between the Portuguese colonial and clerical establishments and their prominent clients and converts in Goa. In 1548 the Bishop of Goa, the Franciscan Juan de Albuquerque, described the seizure of some “gentile books” from the house of a prominent Hindu on the island of Divar, an area where many temples had been destroyed. The books were taken to António Gomes, recently installed as the head of the Jesuit College of Saint Paul, founded in 1541 with the revenues from the destroyed temples of Goa. Before Gomes could find someone to read the texts, the Governor, Garcia de Sá, ordered that they be returned. 5
Further texts were seized in the same way a decade later, during the period when the so-called “rigor of mercy,” or forcible conversion of Goa, reached its height. In 1558 a Jesuit brother, Pedro d’Almeida, described the imprisonment, impoverishment, and even enslavement of those found in possession of images or other Hindu artefacts during raids that took place at the time of festivals such as Ganesh Chaturthi and Divali. 6 It was during Divali that a copy of a text called Anādipurāṇa, in two volumes of more than a hundred folios, was seized in the house of a prominent Gentile. 7 This work is likely lost, but Almeida writes that a translation of the text had already begun, and copies were sent to Europe. 8 This was probably prepared for the new rector of the Jesuit college, Francisco Rodrigues, who took possession of this and other texts seized the following year. 9
These latter texts represent the first targeted acquisition by the Jesuits of Hindu religious works. The texts were stolen by a young Brahmin, who had recently converted and taken the name Manuel d’Oliveira. The Jesuits reported more than three thousand conversions in Goa in 1559, but d’Oliveira’s had been eagerly anticipated as he was reputed to be one of the most intelligent and learned of the Brahmins in Goa. With the Governor’s permission, d’Oliveira led an expedition to steal books belonging to a Brahmin living outside the area under Portuguese control. This Brahmin had spent eight years assembling and translating from different ancient authors the works of “their principal prophet, who they call Veaço [Vyāsa], who wrote the eighteen books of their law.” 10 Having brought the books to the college, d’Oliveira began translating them, and Rodrigues quickly put them to use in preaching to Brahmins who were obliged by order of the Governor to assemble in the college on Sunday afternoons. Copies were also made and sent to Europe, but Fróis notes that these were done by young students in the college who made many errors, and that there had not been time to improve the translations or compare them to the original. 11 The copies extant in Europe include texts in both Marathi and Konkani, mostly episodes from the Mahābhārata and Rāmayāṇa, as well as translations into Portuguese. 12
These texts became important sources for the Jesuits in Goa. As well as being put to use in sermons against the Brahmins, Jesuits used these texts well into the seventeenth century. They served as models for Christian works in Marathi like Thomas Stephens’s Kristapurāṇa (1616) and Étienne de la Croix’s Discursos sobre a vida do Apostolo Sam Pedro (1629), 13 and as sources for vocabularies like those composed by Diogo Ribeiro (1626) and Miguel d’Almeida. 14 Together with the Anādipurāṇa, they informed the accounts of Indian religion in Jesuit histories by Alessandro Valignano (1584) and Sebastiam Gonçalves (1614). 15 It is important to note the character of these texts—including a local purāṇa and vernacular versions of the epics—as a hasty reading of the Jesuit letters has sometimes led to the conclusion that the Jesuits had acquired Sanskrit versions of the Bhagavad-Gītā, the Mahābhārata, or the Rāmayāṇa.
The First European Account of the Vedas
It was only toward the end of the sixteenth century that the Vedas are first mentioned, by Agostinho de Azevedo, an Augustinian. Azevedo’s biography has been reconstructed by Georg Schurhammer, who thinks it possible he first went to India as a soldier before joining the Augustinian order in Goa in the 1570s. Azevedo was sent back to Portugal to ordain and train, returning to India in 1586. From 1589 to 1600 he was in Hormuz, from where he returned overland to Portugal, where he completed a Relação do Estado da Índia. 16 Azevedo’s report provides an overview of Portuguese settlements in Asia from the Arabian Gulf to the spice islands, devoting particular attention to Hormuz and Ceylon. It is notable that in his accounts of both, Azevedo draws on local textual sources. For Hormuz, he claims that he read these sources himself, 17 but for Ceylon he relied on an interpreter’s simultaneous translation of Sinhalese chronicles recited for him when he met Sinhalese princes in Goa around 1587. 18 There is a similar emphasis on textual sources in his section on India, entitled “Of the opinions, rites, and ceremonies of all the gentiles of India between the river Indus and the Ganges and that which is contained in their original scriptures which their learned men teach in their schools.” 19 The Brahmins, the “masters of their religion,” teach a unified doctrine of God, creation, and the corruption of creatures. They have, writes Azevedo,
many books in their Latin, which they call Geredão [Grantha] which contain everything they are to believe, and all the ceremonies they are to perform. These books are divided into bodies, limbs, and joints, whose origins are some [books] which they call Veados, which are divided into four parts, and these further into fifty-two parts in the following manner: six are called Xastra, which are the bodies; eighteen are called Purana, which are the limbs; twenty-eight called Agamon which are the joints.
Azevedo’s brief account of the content of the four “origins” makes clear that he had no real access to the Vedas themselves. When he comes to elaborate on the content of the fourfold Veda, he in fact names a series of other texts—all in Tamil. 20 The first part of the Vedas, he writes, deals with the first cause
according to the books which they have called Tirumantiram and Tiruvācakam, which are summas of their theology which they read in the schools. They say that this first cause is God, and that he is a pure spirit, incorporeal, infinite, full of all power and knowledge and truth, and present everywhere, which they call Carvēsparaṉ [Xarves Zibarum] which means the creator of all. 21
For the second part of the Vedas, “dealing with the regents who have dominion over all things,” Azevedo again cites a Tamil text: “They say that this supreme [being] which they call God has infinite names, given in a particular book called Tivākaram.” 22 His account of the third part of the Vedas, on moral doctrine, singles out the author of Tirukkuṟaḷ as the great teacher of moral precepts. Like many later missionary authors, Azevedo suggests Tiruvaḷḷuvar had derived these from St Thomas. 23 Finally, Azevedo refers to a further book, Cātikaḷ Tōṭṭam, on castes. This text is difficult to identify, but its southern provenance is confirmed by the names of the four primary castes: kings, brahmins, chettis, and vellalas. 24
Despite his claim, then, that the Vedas are the original scriptures that prescribe what the gentiles of India are to believe and what rites they are to perform, Azevedo’s actual sources are all much later Tamil sources: Tirumantiram, Tiruvācakam, Tivākaram, Tirukkuṟaḷ, and the text on caste. This combination—identification of the Vedas as the oldest authoritative sources, together with a reliance on quite different texts for the actual details of the religious practices of those who so acknowledged the Vedas—would be repeated in the works of many of those who wrote from India. But the identification of the Vedas as the oldest and most authoritative works meant that it was only the Vedas that gained widespread recognition in Europe as the sacred texts of the Indians.
Azevedo In Other Authors
Although Azevedo’s work was not published until the twentieth century, it had an extraordinary impact on European understanding of the Vedas in the seventeenth century. Diogo do Couto, who had met Azevedo in Goa, used Azevedo’s work in his continuation of João de Barros’s chronicle of the Portuguese Asian empire, the Décadas da Ásia (see n. 16 above). The third and fourth chapters of the sixth book of Couto’s fifth decade, published at Lisbon in 1612, are taken almost verbatim from Azevedo. 25 Couto’s work, in turn, was used by João de Lucena in his life of Xavier. 26 The Dutch chaplain, Abraham Rogerius, followed one or the other of these works very closely in the account of the Vedas in his De Open-Deure tot het Verborgen Heydendom (1651), adding only the names of the Vedas, which he is the first to report in print in Europe. Through his primary informant, a Tamil Brahmin named Padmanābha, Rogerius was even able to give a paraphrase of part of a Sanskrit text (the Nītiand Vairāgya-śatakas of Bhartṛhari), although he again relies on other sources including some in Tamil. While Rogerius emphasizes that the Brahmins “must submit themselves to the Veda, and cannot contradict it in the least or object when a text from it is cited,” he adds that there are often strong disputes over the sense of the text: “one interprets a word thus, the other so,” so that to resolve such disputes reference is made to the “śāstra, which betokens so much as an explanation or exposition.” 27 This was perhaps suggested to him to explain why texts other than the Vedas were those to which he was referred, despite the Veda’s acknowledged ultimate authority. Burnell suggests that, rather than the Vedas, Rogerius’s work in fact reflects the Tamil Vaiṣṇava canonical collection, the Nālāyira Tiviyappirapantam.28 Rogerius’s work gives a great deal of detailed information on brahminical Hinduism, but it was his repetition of Azevedo’s summary content of the Vedas that was most important for their reputation in Europe.
Rogerius’s work was quickly translated into German (1663) and French (1670), plagiarized in Dutch by Philip Baldaeus (1672) 29 and Olfert Dapper (1672), 30 and extracted in English and French in the works of John Ogilby (1673) 31 and of Jean-Frédéric Bernard and Bernard Picart (1723, 1731). 32 Each of these included Azevedo’s summary of the Vedas, and in this way it was very widely disseminated in Europe. 33 Even late in the eighteenth century, Azevedo’s account of the Vedas was repeated almost verbatim in the work of the Italian Capuchin, Marco della Tomba. 34 Although Couto, who repeats almost the whole of Azevedo’s account, retained all the references to Tamil texts, none of these subsequent works (with the partial exception of Lucena, who retains only the reference to Tiruvaḷḷuvar) mention any of the Tamil sources, despite Azevedo’s claim that these are the “summas of their theology.” In this way the idea was firmly established in Europe that it was the Vedas, above all and almost to the exclusion of other texts, that were the sacred books of India.
Other Published Seventeenth-Century Accounts
The only other significant independent account of the Vedas published in the seventeenth century was that of François Bernier. 35 Bernier had met the Jesuit Heinrich Roth in Agra and noted his study of “the books of the gentiles.” 36 He also acknowledges having read Rogerius, but the major details in his account are independent of the Azevedo /Rogerius text, 37 and it was an Indian pandit, Kavīndrācārya Sarasvatī, who was his primary informant. 38 Although Bernier repeatedly makes the “Beths” the source of “the doctrine of the Indous or Gentiles of Hindoustan,” he notes that having learned Sanskrit,
they ordinarily put themselves to reading the purāṇas, which are an interpretation and abridgement of the Vedas, which are very large, at least if they are those which were shown to me in Benares. They are also very rare, so much so that my agha could never find them for sale, whatever diligence he used; for they keep them well hidden, fearing that the Mahometans should get hold of and burn them, as they have done several times. 39
Bernier was not the first to mention that the Vedas were kept hidden; Rogerius had given details on which of the varṇas were entitled to learn, teach, read, or hear the Vedas. 40 Bernier and Rogerius thus confirmed Xavier’s account that the Brahmins’ texts—and the teachings they contained—were kept secret.
It is certainly true that there were restrictions on who could hear the Vedas. One of the most notorious expressions of this is the verse stating that the ears of a Śūdra who hears the Veda are to be filled with lead. The verse is widely, but falsely, attributed to the Manusmṛti. 41 More relevant, perhaps, for Europeans in the early modern period and those who revealed the Vedas to them, was the fact that, while Manu’s code does forbid the recitation of the Vedas in the presence of Śūdras (4.99, 108), the penance for “misusing” the Veda, i.e., disclosing it to someone unauthorized to hear it, is fairly mild. It is found not among the grievous sins listed at the beginning of the chapter on sin and penance but rather in the “motley list of sins and infractions” at the end of the chapter, an excursus “which is clearly an interpolation.” 42 Moreover, given that Europeans first obtained Hindu texts by seizure or theft, Brahmin reluctance to transmit the Vedas would be irrelevant, if we can assume that the texts were indeed available in manuscript. However, when Jesuits first gained access to Vedic texts, in the early seventeenth century, this was through the personal mediation of converted Brahmins who may have known the texts—thus from memory rather than manuscripts.
Jesuits In The South: Fenicio And Nobili
The first Jesuit to name the Vedas is Jacome Fenicio, who had been in India since 1584, for the most part in Cochin and Calicut. In 1603 Fenicio reports writing a manual of Hindu mythology, in which he mentions that he has copied three hundred verses critical of idolatry from a text in Malayalam ascribed to Pākkanār. 43 Texts of this sort held an obvious appeal for missionaries —a century after Fenicio, the Protestant Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg was to seize on texts like Tirumantiram and Civavākkiyam because of their opposition to image worship. 44 Some of Pākkanār’s verses are included in Fenicio’s Livro da Seita dos Indios Orientais, probably completed in 1609. Here Fenicio also mentions and names the four Vedas in connection with the mythology of Brahmā, but he does not otherwise show any knowledge of Vedic sources. Fenicio writes that the four laws, “iréa, ueressa, samam, edaruna,” came from the four heads of Brahmā, but as Īśvara cut off one head, the Brahmins lack the fourth law, which is the one “pertaining to God.” 45 It may have thus have been from Fenicio that his more famous colleague, Roberto Nobili, first heard the idea that one of the Vedas was lost. Nobili, who spent three months recuperating in Cochin in early 1606, wrote in 1608 that, of the four Vedas, only three were extant, and the fourth—which was required for salvation—was lost. 46
Nobili is the first European known to have read parts of the Vedas. In a number of his works defending his strategy of tolerating aspects of Brahminical lifestyle among his converts, he cites directly from the texts associated with the Black Yajur Veda. Thus, for example, in his Informatio de quibusdam moribus nationis indicae (1613) he quotes from the account of the aśvamedha in Taittirīya Brāhmaṇa 3.8.5. 47 Nobili’s access to these texts was mediated by the Telugu Brahmin convert who taught him Sanskrit, Śivadharma or Bonifacio. 48 While it was Śivadharma who made the texts available to him, on the basis of Nobili’s orthography in his Responsio, Caland thought it probable that “Nobili himself had copied the passages [in Sanskrit] quoted by him, and that these passages had not been dictated to him by some Brahman . . . [and therefore] that Nobili has himself drawn his argumentative passages from the Sanskrit texts.” 49 Margherita Trento contrasts this with the method of Nobili’s opponent in the debate over accommodation, Gonçalo Fernandes. Śivadharma, who had fallen out with Nobili, assisted Fernandes with scriptural quotations in his 1616 treatise attacking Nobili. 50 The first part (O sumário das serimonias) describes the lifecycle rites of Brahmins from birth, through initiation and marriage, to entry into the state of a sannyāsīn, with a description of some of the daily and other rites performed by and for brahmin sannyāsīns. It includes a translation of the first six verses of the third chapter of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad. 51 The second, much shorter, section (O compendio de ditos de graves autores) describes penances (prāyaścitta) according to the dharmaśāstra of Parāśara. Śivadharma is again the source, but, as Fernandes did not know Sanskrit, the texts were translated into Tamil by Śivadharma and only thence into Portuguese by Fernandes with his assistant Andrea Buccerio. 52 This kind of mediated access to Sanskrit texts, likely the same method used by Azevedo and Rogerius, would be repeated in the following century by other missionaries.
Having at last obtained access to the texts hinted at by Xavier half a century earlier, Nobili discovered that while some parts of them did indeed refer to “God in the true and absolute sense” (Brahmă)—and even contained “an adumbration of the recondite mystery of the most Holy Trinity”—other parts described superstitious rites directed to false deities (Brahmā) so that “the sayings they record are in striking contradiction one with another.” 53 He was nonetheless able to name the four Vedas, including the Śukla, or White, recension of the Yajur Veda. 54 Significantly, Nobili also notes that the term Veda refers not only to the “law” of the Brahmin but also to knowledge (scientia) more broadly. 55 It was for this reason that he used it in coining many terms to refer to aspects of Christian life and practice, and even to Christianity itself (dēva vēdam, or ñāna vētam) and to the Bible (often simply vētam in Nobili’s works). This usage was followed by Protestants in the following century and beyond. Further evidence of the extent of Nobili’s knowledge of the Veda is to be found in Jesuit correspondence of the eighteenth century, discussed below.
Nobili was, however, also keenly aware of the importance of other texts. He associated the Vedas especially with Advaita Vedāntins, but he reported that the religious texts for the Śaivas were the Āgamas, for Vaiṣṇavas the Tiruvāymoḻi, and for the Dvaitins Madhva’s commentary on the Brahmasūtra. 56 He concludes that although by metonymy all these works are identified with the Vedas—more specifically with the Upaniṣads—there is a wide variety of sacred texts.
metonymy: the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant, for example suit for business executive, or the track for horse racing.
Thus, even though he is almost certainly the first European to have had direct access to the Vedas themselves, like other missionaries in India Nobili acknowledged the practical significance of other texts for contemporary Hindus, and thus also for his missionary task.
Nobili’s works were not published until long after his death, but Fenicio’s brief account of Brahmā’s revelation of the Vedas, and the loss of his head and with it one Veda, did reach print in Dutch, Spanish, and English in the second half of the seventeenth century in the works of Baldaeus (1672) and Manuel de Faria e Sousa (1675, 1695). 57