Librarian's Notes on Will Sweetman and R. Ilakkuvan's -- Bibliotheca Malabarica, Institut Francais de Pondichery, 2012
[Comments are being continually added]
Will Sweetman has failed to identify Ziegenbalg as the likely source of the Vedas discovered by Calmette, Polier and Colebrooke.
Relying on specious justifications, Sweetman deliberately ignores whole categories of evidence relevant to consideration of the reasonableness of Ziegenbalg as a source of Calmette's Vedas, as well as of various other matters. Sweetman's categorizations are broad and he is the sole judge of the importance of documents, as well as the diviner of the intentions of those who created them hundreds of years ago.
Among the unsupported value judgments made by Sweetman, some notable ones are these:
That the only documents of importance are those with a Hindu or Jain provenance. To the contrary, the most important documents for comprehending both Ziegenbalg's purpose, and that of the Jesuits, would be the documents they themselves created.
That truly important documents were "meant" to be sent to Europe for publication. Sweetman has no citation for this assertion, that he uses to conveniently elide troublesome conclusions.
That the Christian dialogue documents, and other Christian creations, are of no interest to anyone. Again, a bald assertion that runs contrary to reason, that suggests these may be the most illuminating documents.
That any Christian documents created for the primary purpose of being used to convert Indians, are of no importance. Sweetman clearly has no use for such documents, that would reveal and underline the propaganda agenda of the Jesuits and Ziegenbalg.
Sweetman does not admit the value of the various missionary manuscripts and books to other missionaries and Europeans for the long-term. The first thing every missionary, and every European person of standing, including, of course, every Asiatic society member would do when they got to India was look for books. Especially the Vedas, the secret repository of ancient monotheistic wisdom. The idea that nobody cared for Ziegenbalg's library is absurd. Urs App describes Ziegenbalg's sudden acquisition of the Jesuit Library as "a stroke of luck." Even though Ziegenbalg hated Catholics, he was very glad to get their library. He took ten of their manuscripts, revised them, and sent them out as his own Protestant product. As soon as Ziegenbalg died, Calmette and his friends were also there looking for books. And the history of missionary writing is full of plagiarizing other missionaries' works. Urs App says:
Already in Ricci's and de Nobili's time, around the beginning of the seventeenth century, the claim surfaced that the Vedas of India were the repository of ancient Indian monotheism. Of course, the approach of Nobili and his successors in the Jesuit Madurai mission was anchored in the idea that India had once been a land reigned by pure monotheism; but the locus classicus for the monotheism of the Vedas is the description in Diogo do Couto's Decada Quinta da Asia of 1612 (124Vff.). Schurhammer (1977:614-18) has shown that Couto plagiarized the report by the Augustinian missionary Agostinho de Azevedo, but it was through Couto that this view of the Vedas as a monotheistic scripture, hidden by the Brahmans from the people to whom they preached polytheism, became popular... Couto's description was a central source for Holwell...
Philip BALDAEUS (1632-72), the Dutch missionary and author of a description of South India and Ceylon (1672), is reprimanded for having "based his dissertations [Memoires] about the island of Ceylon on the manuscripts of Portuguese missionaries who disfigured the Indian pronunciation to accommodate their way of writing and in various respects were not exactly well enough informed about the facts" (pp. 444-45). Vincenzo MARIA (d. 1680), the Carmelite author of Il viaggio all'Indie orientali (1678) "also described at length the religion of the Indians in Malabar and even gave some extracts from some of their books"; but he "ignored the language of the land and frankly admitted to have done no more than copy the Portuguese dissertations communicated to him by Don Francis Garzia, the Jesuit archbishop of Cranganor" (p. 445)....
Ziegenbalg had studied Baldaeus (1672) before arriving in India as a young man of twenty-four years, and in his first letter (September 2, 1706); he described "the content of the four books of law [Vedas] according to his opinion" (Ziegenbalg 1926:14). But he soon realized that Baldaeus "got most [of his information] from the Portuguese fathers who were forced to leave it when they were chased out of Ceylon by the Dutch..."
Mainly because of his opposition to Ricci-style missionary strategy, Joao Rodrigues's writings were suppressed. Some of them got buried in archives and may still lie there; others were plagiarized by ideological opponents (for instance, Rodrigues's writings on Asian history and geography by Martino Martini)...
Apart from a series of dictionaries that never came to fruition, Fourmont was also working on a Chinese grammar. He announced its completion in 1728, eight years before the arrival of de Guignes. The first part of this Grammatica sinica with Fourmont's presentation of the 214 "keys" and elements of pronunciation appeared in 1737. The second part, prepared for publication while de Guignes sat at his teacher's feet, contained the grammar proper as well as Fourmont's catalog of Chinese works in the Bibliotheque Royale and was published in 1742. When Fourmont presented the result to the king of France, he had de Guignes accompany him, and the king was so impressed by the twenty-one-year-old linguistic prodigy that he endowed him on the spot with a pension (Michaud 1857:18.126).
But de Guignes's teacher Fourmont had a dirty little secret. He had focused on learning and accumulating data about single Chinese characters, but his knowledge of the Chinese classical and vernacular language was simply not adequate for writing a grammar. By consequence, the man who had let the world know that a genius residing in Europe could master Chinese just as well as the China missionaries decided to plagiarize -- what else? -- the work of a missionary. No one found out about this until Jean-Pierre Abel-Remusat in 1825 carefully compared the manuscript of the Arte de La lengua mandarina by the Spanish Franciscan Francisco Varo with Fourmont's Latin translation and found to his astonishment that Fourmont's ground-breaking Grammatica sinica was a translation of Varo's work (Abel-Remusat 1829:2.298). In an "act of puerile vanity," Abel-Remusat sadly concluded, Fourmont had appropriated Varo's entire text "almost without any change" while claiming that he had never seen it (1826:2.109)....
Holwell boasted that he had "studiously perused all that has been written of the empire of Indostan, both as to its ancient, as well as more modern state" but added that what he had read was "all very defective, fallacious, and unsatisfactory to an inquisitive searcher after truth" (Holwell 1765:1.5). However, in the meantime we may have learned not to take every word of Holwell as gospel. He occasionally cited Ramsay's Travels of Cyrus, which contained an interesting passage about Indian religion that could not fail to inspire him. Ramsay reported that the Veda statesthat souls are eternal emanations from the divine Essence, or at least that they were produced long before the formation of the world; that they were originally in a state of purity, but having sinned, were thrown down into the bodies of men, or of beasts, according to their respective demerits; so that the body, where the soul resides, is a sort of dungeon or prison. (Ramsay 1814:382)
Ramsay attributed this passage to Abraham Roger's De Open-Deure tot het verborgen Heydendom (The Open Door to the Hidden Paganism), whose French translation (1670) he had consulted. In the preface to that edition, translator Thomas La Grue particularly emphasized "what was also clearly a motif with Roger himself: that the Indians did indeed possess a pristine and natural knowledge of God, but that it had decayed almost completely into superstition as a result of moral lapses" (Halbfass 1990:46-47). But Holwell, a good reader of Dutch, could consult Roger's original edition of 1651.20 There Roger called the Indian Dewetaes (Skt. devatas; Indian guardian spirits or protective divinities) "Engelen" or angels (Roger 1915:108). But here we are primarily interested in Roger's description of the Vedam, which for him is the Indian's book of laws containing "everything that they must believe as well as all the ceremonies they must perform" (p. 20).This Vedam consists of four parts; the first part is called Roggowedam; the second Issourewedam; the third Samawedam; and the fourth Adderawanawedam. The first part deals with the first cause, the materia prima [eerste materiel, the angels, the souls, the recompense of good and punishment of evil, the generation of creatures and their corruption, the nature of sin, how it can be absolved, how this can be achieved, and to what end. (p. 21)
After a brief explanation of the content of the second to fourth Vedas, Roger states that conflicts of Vedic interpretation generated a literature of commentaries called Iastra (Skt. sastra), "that is, the explanations about the Vedam" (p. 22). As Willem Caland has shown in detail (1918),21 Roger's source for such information was Diogo do Couto's Decada Quinta da Asia of 1612. Couto's account of the content of the Vedas was in turn, as Schurhammer (1977:2.612-20) proved, plagiarized from an account by the Augustinian brother Agostinho de Azevedo's Estado da India e aonde tem o seu principio of 1603, a report prepared in the 1580s for King Philip III of Portugal, which "includes an original summary of Hindu religion, from Shaiva Sanskrit and Tamil texts" (Rubies 2000:315). The question as to what exactly Azevedo's sources were still awaits clarification in spite of Caland's speculations (1918:309-10)....
For people in search of the world's oldest books, India's mysterious Vedas had a particular attraction, even though -- or perhaps because -- information about them often consisted of little more than the names of its four parts and the assertion of great antiquity. Agostinho de Azevedo's report about the Vedas and Shastras of India found its way into Johannes Lucena's Historia da Vida do Padre Francisco de Xavier (1600) and Diogo do Couto's Decada Quinta da Asia (1612), and from there into other works including Holwell's (see Chapter 6). The report in the Livro da Seita dos Indios Orientals by the Jesuit Giacomo Fenicio from the early seventeenth century was plagiarized by Baldaeus (1672) and also got some publicity. However, both Fenicio's and Azevedo's data were based not on the Vedas but on other texts....
Fifth, the manuscripts of the Pondicherry Vedas (and possibly additional notes and related study materials) were from 1770 onward used and plagiarized by several persons and ended up directly and indirectly influencing the nineteenth-century image of Indian religion....
The dossier contains a fragment of one more letter from Pondicherry, and the content of both letters indicates that there must have been a total of three letters written by a French-speaking missionary in Pondicherry. The first letter cites La Croze and was thus written after 1724. The third letter cites Engelbert Kaempfer and was thus written after 1729. The writer could read Chinese (he cites Ma Duanlin and various Chinese texts) and was familiar with Indian terminology. He also knew southern Indian literature and criticized a text dating by the Danish missionaries. And, of course, the writer of the letters resided in Pondicherry in the early 1730s, just around the time when Calmette wrote the Ezour-vedam. Given these data, the only author I can think of is Claude de Visdelou, who died in Pondicherry in 1737. The letters were thus probably sent to Paris between 1730 and 1737. The addressee is unknown, but there is little doubt that the precise references to Chinese texts were meant for Fourmont and that someone had copied parts or all of these letters. The copied first letter and part of the third letter somehow ended up in Fourmont's files at the Bibliotheque Nationale, and later someone decided that they are from de Guignes, which is why they ended up in his dossier.
However, a handwriting comparison shows that the copyist of these letters from Pondicherry was Deshauterayes and not de Guignes. Deshauterayes' quotations from de Visdelou's letters in his missive to Anquetil-Duperron show, as does his note in de Mailla's history, that he was just as good as his rival de Guignes and their teacher Fourmont at plagiarizing the writings of missionaries. Having copied these Pondicherry letters, Deshaurerayes used parts of them in his letter to Anquetil-Duperron as if these were his own findings, adding "I believe" and "I concluded," etc., to de Visdelou's text!...
The question why Coeurdoux advertised Mozac's Veda is intriguing, and it is linked to another mysterious manuscript that Hans Rothschild, the owner of the Amsterdam bookshop Antiqua, sold in 1954 to the India Office Library in London. The manuscript is now in the Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections of the British Library (APAC: Mss Eur D 22). In her fascinating two-volume study and edition of this 1987 manuscript, Sylvia Murr proved that its content stems from Father Coeurdoux and that a similar manuscript must have been plagiarized by Abbe Dubois for his famous book Description of the Character, Manners, and Customs of the People of India (1817). In the nineteenth century, Dubois's book became a classic about Indian religions and dominated the public image in the West for many decades, and Murr's discovery showed how information gathered by missionaries in the eighteenth century was still very much in use in the nineteenth. Here we are only interested in a small part of her fascinating story. The manuscript is in the handwriting of a French artillery officer named Desvaulx. The young man, accused of having traveled without permission and neglected his duties in India, had to return to Paris in 1777 to explain his case and justify his actions. When he showed up before the authorities, he produced this manuscript and claimed that he had not been idly traveling but had spent much of his time doing research on Indian customs and religion. Whatever the plan was, it seems to have gone awry and the manuscript, which was written in Pondicherry around 1775-76, left no trace until it resurfaced through unknown avenues in Amsterdam and was bought by the India Office half a century ago.
Since this manuscript contains entire parts that are virtually identical with texts that Coeurdoux had included in letters to Anquetil-Duperron, there is no doubt that Desvaulx's manuscript, though written in the officer's hand, consists of material authored by Coeurdoux that was modified and shortened by the officer.... Murr (1987:2.50) thinks that Desvaulx could not have used Coeurdoux's work without the missionary's approval. But did Coeurdoux want Desvaulx to copy and publish his original manuscript? Or did he "consent to let him abbreviate and modify it" (p. 50) in view of a goal that both agreed upon, namely, the defense of Christianity? Murr thinks it more likely that Coeurdoux and Desvaulx worked as author and secretary and that abbreviations and modifications were made with Coeurdoux's blessing (p. 51). Still, the question remains: did Coeurdoux also agree to modifications clearly designed to erase traces of authorship that were incompatible with Desvaulx's stay in India -- for example, the elimination of earlier dates and of events in towns that Desvaulx had never visited? This would mean that Coeurdoux consented to publication of his writings under Desvaulx's name -- in other words, a leak of his work for a good cause without implicating his name.
And this possibility is exactly what made me first think that Coeurdoux could have leaked not just this manuscript but also another one: the Ezourvedam. Both texts were slipped into Europe to be published by someone not associated with the Pondicherry Jesuits; both were relatively carefully edited to erase traces of original authorship and purpose; and both were directed at Europeans who undermine Christianity-deists like Voltaire, for example....
When Coeurdoux wrote his advertisement for Mozac's Veda -- which implied the genuineness of the texts in spite of their younger age and praised them as "great treasures" -- he probably was not yet aware of Voltaire's perversion of the Ezour-vedam. But Desvaulx, whom Murr describes as an ardent defender of Christianity and the Bible, must have informed Coeurdoux and Mozac after his arrival in the fall of 1772 about the latest brouhaha in France: Baron d'Holbach's System of Nature, rampant skepticism and atheism in the salons of Paris, and, of course, Voltaire's "Indian campaign," which must have confounded the missionaries. Both Coeurdoux and Mozac knew perfectly that the Pondicherry Vedas were authored by Jesuit missionaries; after all, the handwriting of these texts was, according to Henry Hosten, certifiably that of Mozac. According to my hypothesis, what happened was the following: Coeurdoux, for reasons described above, in the early 1750s, either leaked the Ezour-vedam himself or authorized it in order to confound European doubters with a "proof" of ancient Indian monotheism and possibly also to support or justify Jesuit mission methods. He thought it would be a kind of vaccine against skepticism and atheism. But in 1772 he learned that the vaccine not only did not prevent the disease but actually helped spread it. Indomania with its inflated world ages and idealization of Indian Ur-religion was infectious, and it rapidly appeared as a threat to biblical authority. Coeurdoux, of course, could not imagine that less than twenty years later Langles would openly declare that the Pentateuch was plagiarized from the Vedas; but he might have seen such horror scenarios in his nightmares. The main threat was that the biblical narrative, and in particular the story of the flood,28 would be undermined by alternative scenarios that would show the Old Testament to be a record of local events and -- even worse -- show God as a local divinity propped up by a local myth. The Ezour-vedam, from that perspective, had indeed a certain nocuous potential because, due to its origin as a non-Prangui missionary tool, it tried to keep things Indian and did not feature any link to the biblical line of patriarchs. Even Adimo, the Adam of the Ezour-vedam, was Indian, as Voltaire remarked with much glee before accusing the Jews of having plagiarized their creation Story from Indian sources.
Buy unmasking the Ezour-vedam was out of the question. The last thing the Jesuits needed in their dire straits29 was an indictment for forgery of ancient Indian texts. So Coeurdoux decided to encode the truth in those two paragraphs that have caused reactions ranging from consternation to outrage. I will now cite them once more and try to decode them. First of all, the Pondicherry Veda's real author, Calmette, needed to be protected, and this was best done by citing him (and not Pons or someone else) as the one who told the truth about the true Vedas:I will add here what I have heard Father Calmette -- who knew the samscroutam [Sanskrit] and had much studied the books of Indian science -- utter more than once: that the true Vedam [le vrai Vedam] is of such an ancient samscrouram that it is almost unintelligible, and that what one cites is of the Vedantam, that is, of introductions and commentaries that were made of the Vedam. In effect, in a famous prayer named gai'tri, one understands only the word savitourou, the sun.
The next paragraph on the same page contains the tricky part and is dissected in Table 16 where the left column contains Coeurdoux's statement and the right my interpretation of it....
Having skillfully encoded the truth and proclaimed both the genuine and the Jesuit Vedas "true," Coeurdoux turned to the crux of the problem that was partly responsible for the mess: the need to establish a solid link between Noah's ark and ancient India, thus filling in some of the dotted lines in the Eusebius-related graph above (Fig. 18). This was one of those friendly takeover attempts that the famous forger ANNIUS of Viterbo (c. 1432-1502) had brought into fashion in Europe. Thanks to Annius, the invented founder of France, "Francus," got a pedigree that linked him to Japhet (Asher 1993), and a "Tuisco" with a long beard became Germany's mythical founder....
The link to the biblical transmission line was thus the appropriate antidote, and it was administered to Europe in two doses: first via Anquetil-Duperron and via the Academy to Abbe Mignot and the learned society of Paris, and second to a larger public through Desvaulx's book. The first dose reached its target and strengthened Anquetil-Duperron's (and Sainte-Croix's) belief that the Ezour-vedam is a genuine Indian text that was possibly a bit mangled in the translation and copying process. The second dose, however, was for some reason a dud; Desvaulx might have guessed that such a publication would raise questions that he could never answer; or his distracted superior said, "I shall have a look at it" and forgot to put it even into the administration files; or someone from Desvaulx's family sold the manuscript -- who knows? At any rate, it ended up in Amsterdam, and its neat handwriting can now be admired at the British Library. But a larger dose of the antidote remained in Pondicherry: Coeurdoux's complete manuscript. It was first extensively used by Paulinus a Saneto Bartholomaeo and then plagiarized in its entirety by Abbe Dubois. Dubois, the very man who had introduced smallpox vaccination in southern India, was an ideal host who succeeded not only in introducing Coeurdoux's antidote to readers of English and French but in inoculating an entire generation through insertion into the textbooks and university classrooms of nineteenth-century Europe.
Father Coeurdoux's dose for Anquetil-Duperron consisted, apart from that bit of encoded truth, in a small treatise that also is contained "except for six words and some commas" in Chapter 46 of the Desvaulx manuscript and in Dubois (Murr 1987:2.30). It is a convincing proof that Coeurdoux was the author of the Desvaulx manuscript. The theme of Coeurdoux's treatise is exactly that missing link berween Noah's ark and the earliest Indians. He makes them migrate from the plains of Shinar via the mountains in the north to India and lets the Indians descend from Noah's son Japher. This is said to have happened at the beginning of the fourth yuga, which was within the chronological safety margin of the Septuagint's flood, and the patriarchs chosen for transmission of Noah's religion are "seven penitents" who are India's seven rishis:The epoch of the beginning of this new age is exactly the end of the deluge, very distinctly marked in all Indian books. It destroyed all men except the seven famous penitents of India with their wives. Some [sources] add Manouvou, of whom I have already spoken and who appears to be Noah himself. They escaped the universal ruin by means of a ship whose builder was Vishnu himself. I do not believe that one finds the universal deluge more clearly arrested to in the diverse authors of antiquity from almost all nations who have mentioned this great event, nor in a more similar manner to the recital of Moses.
This is the antidote designed for the Ezour-vedam's soft spot that Voltaire had exploited, and by extension for the entire indomaniac vision of India as the cradle of civilization. Coeurdoux's Indian history confirms biblical history, and his portrayal of Indian religion exposes those of Voltaire and Holwell as completely baseless. The seven rishis of India are the country's ancient legislators and, as descendants of Noah's son Japhet, they guarantee that Ur-monotheism reached India long before the reigning polytheistic cults developed. This treatise thus reinforces the vision of a monotheistic pre-Vedic religion that forms the core of the Ezour-vedam and of Chumontou's teaching. Far from rejecting the Ezour-vedam, Coeurdoux sees its author Calmette as an excellent philosopher and as a fighter in true postdiluvian tradition against polytheism. But Coeurdoux was directing his attack not only at Voltaire. He was possibly even more concerned about Holwell, whose work, as we have seen, he also received courtesy of Anquetil-Duperron. Holwell had built his edifice almost entirely on an Indian basis and presented fragments of an Indian Old Testament that seemed designed to replace the Pentateuch....
While Fourmont cobbled together hypotheses and conjectures, the Bible always formed the backdrop for his speculations about ancient history. A telling example is his critique of the Chinese historian OUYANG Xiu (1007-72), who argued that from the remote past, humans had always enjoyed roughly similar life spans. Lambasting this view as that of a "skeptic," Fourmont furnished the following argument as "proof" of the reliability of ancient Chinese histories:We who possess the sacred writ: must we not on the contrary admire the Chinese annals when they, just in the time period of Arphaxad, Saleh, Heber, Phaleg, Rea, Sarug, Nachor, Abraham, etc., present us with men who lived precisely the same number of years? Now if someone told us that Seth at the age of 550 years married one of his grand-grand-nieces in the fourteenth generation: who of us would express the slightest astonishment? ... It is thus clear that all such objections are frivolous, and furthermore, that attacks against the Chinese annals on account of a circumstance [i.e., excessive longevity] which distinguishes them from all other books will actually tie them even more to Scripture and will be a sure means to increase their authority. (Fourmont 1740:514)
No comment is needed here. Immediately after Fourmont's death in 1745, the twenty-four-year-old Joseph de Guignes replaced his master as secretary interpreter of oriental languages at the Royal Library. It was the beginning of an illustrious career: royal censor and attache to the journal des Scavans in 1752, member of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1753, chair of Syriac at the College Royal from 1757 to 1773, garde des antiques at the Louvre in 1769, editor of the Journal des Savants, and other honors (Michaud 1857:18.(27). De Guignes had, like his master Fourmont, a little problem. The pioneer Sinologists in Paris were simply unable to hold a candle to the China missionaries. Since 1727 Fourmont had been corresponding with the figurist China missionary Joseph Henry PREMARE(1666-1736), who, unlike Fourmont, was an accomplished Sinologist (see Chaprer 5). Premare was very liberal with his advice and sent, apart from numerous letters, his Notitia Linguae sinicae to Fourmont in 1728. This was, in the words of Abel-Remusat,neither a simple grammar, as the author too modestly calls it, nor a rhetoric, as Fourmont intimated; it is an almost complete treatise of literature in which Father Premare not only included everything that he had collected about the usage of particles and grammatical rules of the Chinese but also a great number of observations about the style, particular expressions in ancient and common idiom, proverbs, most frequent patterns -- and everything supported by a mass of examples cited from texts, translated and commented when necessary. (Abel-Remusat 1829:2.269)
Premare thus sent Fourmont his "most remarkable and important work," which was "without any doubt the best of all those that Europeans have hirherto composed on these matters" (p. 269).
But instead of publishing this vastly superior work and making the life of European students of Chinese considerably easier, Fourmont compared it unfavorably to his own (partly plagiarized) product and had Premare's masterpiece buried in the Royal Library, where it slept until Abel-Remusat rediscovered it in the nineteenth century (pp. 269-73)....
But there is a third, extremely competent Jesuit Sinologist who remained in the shadows though his knowledge of Chinese far surpassed that of de Guignes and all other Europe-based early Sinologists (and, one might add, even many modern ones). His works suffered a fate resembling that of the man who was in many ways his predecessor, Joao Rodrigues (see Chapter 1) in that they were used but rarely credited. The man in question was Claude de VISDELOU (1656-1737), who spent twenty-four years in China (1685-1709) and twenty-eight years in India (1709-37). One can say without exaggeration that the famous Professor de Guignes owed this little-known missionary a substantial part of his fame -- and this was his dirty little secret....
De Visdelou's four-volume work on Tartary and the inserted manuscript with his annotated translation of the Nestorian stele somehow ended up in The Hague where Jean Neaulme, the well-known publisher of Voltaire and Rousseau, purchased them for 400 Dutch florins and communicated them to the bibliophile Prosper Marchand (c. 1675-1756) and others (Herbelot et al. 1779:4.iii)....Abel-Remusat and others had long suspected that de Guignes had used de Visdelou's Tartar manuscript; but only in the summer of 2008 did I find the conclusive proof of this among the papers of Fourmont at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. The Fourmont dossier contains dozens of pages in de Guignes's hand, copied word for word from de Visdelou's Tartar manuscript. The notes contain references indicating that these copies from de Visdelou's manuscript were very voluminous.
-- The Birth of Orientalism, by Urs App
Because of the incredibly convoluted needs to plagiarize, there was the need to obtain source material from other missionaries' libraries. Ziegenbalg himself seems to plagiarize the work of Balthasar da Costa SJ when he writes a Tamil grammar in Latin. He compiled all the books known to him in his list, but does not mention what acquisitions he made from Father Martin's library. It seems quite likely that the bulk of his acquisitions were from the Jesuits, Father Martin in particular.
Sweetman conceals the meaning of undesired information he is compelled to reveal only for purposes of explaining it away by diverting the reader's attention to insignificant, tending-to-the-contrary-understanding bits of information.
For example, in Bergen's version of Ziegenbalg's 9/7/1706 letter, Sweetman diverts us from the fact that Ziegenbalg had his schoolteacher write out three of the four vedas (the fourth being lost), by hypothesizing that Bergen probably got that "detail" from Baldaeus, thus suggesting without any basis that Bergen's rendering of Ziegenbalg's letter interpolated a false statement. To divert further, he states that Ziegenbalg's collection probably BEGAN by collecting books that formed the core of the curriculum of Tamil Village schools! Far more likely is that the first books he collected were undoubtedly Father Martin's Jesuit library. Although school books are listed in the Bibliotheca Malabarica, probably as part of his effort to learn the language from his schoolteacher, this was certainly not his main interest.
Ziegenbalg's main interest was in finding the Vedas, converting the heathen through composing books of Dialogue, and translating the New Testament. When he tried to buy books from a particular list made by one of his scribes from prominent Hindu and Muslim visitors, he informed them he "wanted only the best." He was not seeking for mundane instructional texts. He bought books from the poor wives of dead Brahmans at the cheapest price possible. He was interested in turning the locals' books against them, and when the people figured that out, they no longer provided him with books. Then, to divert further from the problem of the vedas, Sweetman goes off on an excited journey into the Matam literary culture. Diverting even further, he tells us that Ziegenbalg was not interested in Sanskrit works and that the four vedas were not allowed to be seen, and he had no access to anything but the puranas.
Sweetman continually reconciles the opposites, resulting in zero. He says that Ziegenbalg's canon is "complete", then goes on to say "it's not representative."
He tells us that La Croze preferred Ziegenbalg's sources and methods to the Catholic authors, when they were the same.
He tells us that documents he deems "important" are those "meant" to be sent to Europe for publication, then demeans whatever was sent to Europe as meant just for the curiosity cabinet.
He tells us that after he died in 1719, Ziegenbalg's library disappeared, because nobody cared about Tamil literature. Then he blows in the opposite direction, telling us that a year later, the French Jesuits of the 1720s engaged in a large-scale acquisition of manuscripts at the behest of the royal librarian in Paris.
He tell us Ziegenbalg had no access or interest in gaining access to the Vedas, without explaining why, then, as soon as he got to India, he had his old schoolmaster copy three of the four vedas. (The fourth, as Ziegenbalg noted, being lost due to Siva cutting off one of Brahma's four heads!). His first letter (September 2, 1706) described "the content of the four books of law [Vedas] according to his opinion." Sweetman seems to have conveniently forgotten that the Vedas were believed to be the repository of ancient monotheism, the origin of Natural Religion, a popular Enlightenment conception. Every missionary's first interest was in finding proof of this theory. Which provided proof of another fond notion, that India was the oldest inhabited country on the planet after the Flood, and its inhabitants were descendants of Noah.
Additionally, to this point, according to Urs App, Ziegenbalg oftentimes described the vedas, but in words Urs App says indicate he had never "seen" them, and did not know their contents. But the context of Ziegenbalg's statement he refers to is speaking about books that were commonly available to the people, not books that were available to him (because he created them himself).
But while "the four law books and the six Sastirangol [castirankal] get into the hands of few persons and are only found with some priests who show such books to nobody," he wrote, "the eighteen Paranen [puranas] and other history books are ubiquitous, and parts of them can also be found with the common people" (p. 36).
If they had been written in Sanskrit, as he indicates they were, he wouldn't have been able to read them, and that could be the reason why he depended on his sources to inform him of their contents. But that doesn't mean he never "saw" them, or did not gain possession of them. He could have had possession of them newly written in Sanskrit or some other language, but not known how to read them.
He tells us that the work most important to Ziegenbalg is unknown to the scholarship of Tamil literature. This book is the Tirikala cakkaram, "the basis of all other Malabarian books," which is a "mathematical description of the 7 underworlds, 7 worlds above, and 14 seas beneath the 14 worlds." Since Tamil literary scholarship is "in a sorry state," according to Sweetman, one is left to wonder why it is then significant that the book is unknown to the scholarship of Tamil literature.
Sweetman engages in the type of misrepresentation of myth for history that has been the bane of Indology, implying that the Bibliotheca Malabarica is a work of ethnographic content, after saying that the puranas were the most important sources for Ziegenbalg, who glosses the Periya puranam as "the greatest of their eighteen history-books." Puranas, epics, tales, the Mahabharata, Ramayana ... these books are not books of ethnography, or history, but myth.
Sweetman emphasizes understanding Ziegenbalg's sources, and identifies three: Ziegenbalg's elderly tutor, his son Kanapati, and Kaliyapillai, who may have been Kanapati's father-in-law. Urs App makes Aleppa/Alakappan the "elderly schoolmaster", the most important source of Ziegenbalg's texts, describing him as "exceeding in importance even the Japanese Anjiro to Francis Zavier, and Ziegenbalg's most highly paid employee, exceeding even that of Europeans in the area. Sweetman gives the "elderly tutor" no name and identifies him as another person, 70 years old, with a son named Kanapati.
Sweetman seems bent on minimizing Alakappan's role. Although he admits Alakappan had been a translator to the Danish East-India Company who knew Portuguese, Tamil, Danish, German and Dutch, and was hired because the "old schoolteacher" didn't know these languages, and wrote most of the letters published in Europe (reluctantly, still wanting to maintain the possibility that there were other corresponders, which Urs App rules out), Sweetman nevertheless tries to limit Alakappan's contribution to doing some reading for him, and will not admit that Alakappan was a source for books and manuscripts. He is not one of Ziegenbalg's "key figures", even though as Urs App says, he is Ziegenbalg's most highly paid employee, and "the letter collection's preface refers to letter number 6, which is 'written by someone who read and copied many books of the Christian religion in his language' ... this man was, of course, Aleppa." Additionally, according to Daniel Jeyaraj, Aleppa lived with Ziegenbalg for two years and procured for him several Tamil palm leaf manuscripts. The idea that Ziegenbalg's most highly paid employee, who lives with him for two years does, not qualify him in Sweetman's eyes as automatically one of Ziegenbalg's "key figures," shows willful scholarly blindness. And clearly, Ziegenbalg was not persuading Indians to write down Indian beliefs for Westerners, but rather, formulating Christian religion for Indians. Which is how Ziegenbalg, who initially considered the Indians savages, was able to gain new respect for them after he had created and read "their" written texts himself! He was reading what he had himself created, attributing it to the Indians, and then admiring them for being in such harmony with Western Christian notions! It is a funny story being told here. Which is why the documents created by the missionaries themselves are the most important.
Ziegenbalg's Tamil treatises are a sort of correspondence course in the opposite direction. To explain how heathendom arose, for example, the missionary informed his Tamil readers that Ananam (Skt. ajnana, ignorance) came into this world through the cunning of Picacu (Skt. pisaca, ghost, goblin) and man's offense. Ziegenbalg pointed out that ajnana (which for him signified idolatrous heathendom) is present when, instead of the true God, only his creatures are worshipped. Only the manusa-avataram (Skt. manusavatara, human manifestation) of Christ could bring true motcam (Skt. moksa, liberation) and conclusively exterminate ajnana (Jieyaraj 2003:311-12).
-- The Birth of Orientalism, by Urs App
Sweetman refuses Alakappan the status of "source," except as he might pass on by "reading," because he does not wish to consider him as the source of Ziegenbalg's three vedas. Urs App implies that Aleppa was 100% cooperative in procuring texts, even those that were forbidden to foreigners, including, perhaps, the 3 out of 4 vedas. Because Sweetman wants to elide these facts, he describes Ziegenbalg as not having access to, having no knowledge of, and not interested in Sanskrit works, and asserts that the old schoolmaster referred to in Ziegenbalg's September 2, 1706 letter, refused to give Ziegenbalg the vedas because "it was against their law."
Sweetman and Urs App identify different people as Ziegenbalg's primary source. Sweetman tells us that Ziegenbalg's "elderly schoolmaster" (no name) was the most important person to him. He was 70 years old. He spoke only Tamil. He knew no Portuguese. He taught Ziegenbalg and Plutschau the Tamil script. He dictated books to his six Tamil scribes. When Ziegenbalg speaks of reading works in the presence of "an old poet," Sweetman assumes this is the same person as the "elderly schoolmaster," even though footnote 137 describes the old schoolmaster's son as "a good poet". Similarly, he (tentatively) identifies Kanapati's father-in-law with Kaliyapillai, merely because he was also said to provide books, then speculates further that he might have had connections with the city of Nakappatinam in order to tie him with Kanapati, who lived in Nakappatinam after he reverted back to Saiva practice in 1727. The schoolmaster had a son named Kanapati Vattiyar who also provided him with books, a boy who "exceeded his father in scholarship." He converted to Catholicism in 1709, and caused a rupture between the father and Ziegenbalg. Kanapati's father-in-law was a revenue officer/headman, who also provided Ziegenbalg with books, including one from his own father.
Urs App tells a quite different tale. Ziegenbalg's Tamil teacher did not know Portuguese, so they hired Aleppa/Alakappan, who was a headman of the Tamil community and spoke good Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, and German. He was born around 1660 (making him 48 years old at the time he met Ziegenbalg) into a family that had long worked for Europeans. In 1700 he was head translator of the Danish trading company and top representative of the Tamil inhabitants of the city. He was banished from town for some crime, but brought back by the missionaries who paid him a very high salary. He was twice more banished, and similarly brought back. He describes Aleppa as "the old schoolmaster who often discussed with me all day long," and makes Aleppa a Shaivite, which is why Ziegenbalg devoted himself so much to that branch of Hinduism. He was paid money by Ziegenbalg and his associate Grundler to write letters to be published in Europe. He was 100% cooperative with providing even forbidden books to Ziegenbalg. He was banished by the king neighboring Tancavur for having "revealed all the secrets of their law and worship [Gesetzes und Gottesdienstes]" to the missionaries. This indicates the possibility that he provided Ziegenbalg with the vedas, as the September 2, 1706 letter indicates. The likely reason for all his other exiles, that Ziegenbalg left unexplained, was providing forbidden books to missionaries.
Sweetman's narrative diminishes the value of Ziegenbalg's acquisition of the Jesuit library, attributing the bulk of his acquisitions to Ziegenbalg's independent efforts. Sweetman finds no significance in the fact that Ziegenbalg's favorite text, the Civavakkiyam, that features the Gnanigols and monotheism, was also de Nobili's favorite text. Sweetman contends that the Jesuit missionaries were Ziegenbalg's rivals in having knowledge of Tamil literature, when in fact, they were his first teachers and sources. While conceding the presence of astrological texts in Ziegenbalg's list, books he would have no personal interest in acquiring, Sweetman fails to consider that the presence of all the astrological texts most likely proves that Ziegenbalg's library as recited in the "list" was the Jesuit library.
Sweetman makes no connection between the Gnanigols of Ziegenbalg and the Gnanigols of the Ezour Vedam. Wasn't Ziegenbalg constantly engaged in an "Ezour Vedam" type endeavour during his time in India? The most concession on this point that we can get out of Urs App is the following:
[T]he golden age/degeneration/regeneration mould that was very popular in Europe since the Middle Ages ... shaped the vision of many missionaries, for example, de Nobili and the Madurai Jesuits, Athanasius Kircher, and the Jesuit figurists in China. They saw themselves as restorers of a pure "golden-age" monotheism that had degenerated through the influence of Brahmans or an impostor such as Shaka (Buddha). In this respect they resemble Chumontou of the Ezour-vedam and Voltaire as well as Isaac Newton, who all were critical of established religion and dreamed of restoring pure original monotheism.
Sweetman makes one excuse for one category, and an opposite for another of the same category. For example, the reason why there are a large number of texts in Ziegenbalg's library dealing with ethics reflects his high estimate of them, and interest in using the ethical sense of the Tamils as a starting point for Christian apologetics. On the other hand, the large number of books on astrology are there only because they were so readily available, not because he was interested in astrology! First of all, NO BOOKS were readily available. But Sweetman's discomfort with this material being in Ziegenbalg's library is understandable, since it suggests a Jesuit origin for the collection. The Jesuits were interested in all things astronomical (astrological), as well as being sympathetic towards Indian ways, wanting to create a "New Christianity" that unified both religions.
Indeed, this one casually-elided fact, the presence of astrological texts in the collection, is probably the smoking gun that proves this was largely, if not entirely, Father Martin's Jesuit library, falsely attributed to Ziegenbalg.
All Indologists considering the period will concede that all these missionaries were stealing each other's works, putting their own names on translations and minor revisions.
Ziegenbalg was sent to India on a commission of the Danish king, Frederik IV. He received his pietist missionary orders directly from the King himself, which were (1) to establish that "natural monotheism" did in fact exist among the Indians, and (2) teach the Indians the God of the Christian Bible. He didn't tell him to go find the heathen fables that were the truth of Indian religion. So from the get-go, he was tasked with a lie. He sent his first reports from Tranquebar to Joachim Lange, who printed them in Berlin along with other Pietist literature, including his own. Ziegenbalg summarized Freylinghausen's "Foundation of Theology" into Tamil (palm leaf manuscript), and named it Vetacastiram, and did the same with Freylinghausen's "Order of Salvation", and distributed copies to the Tamil people. He coordinated with the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, a large organization that coordinated with many Christian societies in India, to produce the first translation of the Bible into Tamil, and corresponded with them about how the mission schools were the "fruitful seed plots of the church." This organization engaged other Halle missionaries as well as their agents in India, like William Tobias Ringeltaube. Ziegenbalg was a representative of the Danish missionaries in Tranquebar, engaging on their behalf in many fights with the Catholics, and was even imprisoned by Johann Hassius, the Danish commandant, for his interference and complaints. In 1714 he returned to Europe to discuss his mission's privileges with the king and the directors of the Danish company. He maintained six Tamil scribes in his household. He and his associate Grundler paid Aleppa money to write letters to be published in Europe in order to raise money and inform "their European readership." Who paid for all of these people to work for him? And like the Jesuit lettres edifiantes, his letters were full of appeals to Christians in Europe for financial support. Sweetman is at pains to emphasize the personal character of Ziegenbalg's collection. He describes it as a library of Tamil literature gathered from "his own personal initiative," "without any intention of sending it to Europe," and that when he did send something to Europe, it wasn't for the library but for the curiosity cabinet! Implying that he had no larger state, business or corporate agenda, when in fact, everything he did was on behalf of the Pietist corporate movement, and the general and widespread "Christian missionary society" movement as well.
Unlike the corporate effort of his Jesuit contemporaries and rivals, Ziegenbalg’s was a personal collection, undertaken at his own initiative, and without any intention of sending it to Europe. When he did send a Tamil palmleaf manuscript to Halle, it was not a Hindu text but an extract from the Gospels in Tamil, and it was sent not for the library but for the curiosity cabinet.
By contrast, Urs App compares what the European public was able to know about the Danish Malabar mission through the Malabar Correspondence to what La Croze himself had access to: "all the major manuscripts that Ziegenbalg had sent to Europe: his travel account, the Bibliotheca Malabarica, the translations from Tamil morality books, the Malabar Correspondence, the manuscript of the Malabar Heathendom, and of course also the manuscript of the second main work of Ziegenbalg, the Genealogy of Malabar Divinities." He writes that Ziegenbalg's "manuscripts were made available to the royal librarian of Prussia, the noted linguist Mathurin Veyssiere de La Croze, who recognized the novelty and extraordinary value of Ziegenbalg's work and intensively used his manuscripts for a groundbreaking treatise about Indian religions. Ziegenbalg and La Croze played important roles in the delimitation of the traditions that are now called "Hinduism" and "Buddhism"."
Sweetman devalues Ziegenbalg's library to make it plausible for it to be eaten by worms as he proposes. The last thing he seems to want is for Ziegenbalg's library to have survived. Especially since it is the most likely continuing source of the Ezour Vedam "mould," (having been started by de Nobili and added to by others, including Father Martin). Remember, that Maudave claimed his copy of the Ezour-Vedam discovered in 1758 was written by Father Martin. Which presents the possibility that Father Martin's fully-written Ezour-Vedam came into the hands of Ziegenbalg, who used it for his various Gnanigol manuscripts, and whose library then came into the hands of Maudave and/or his friends Barthelemy and Tessier de la Tour at the Council of Pondichery. But there is a real possibility that the Ezour-vedam was a product of Ziegenbalg himself. After all, he is the "Gnanigol" man.
Despite Ziegenbalg's official titles and duties, for Sweetman, it is the Jesuits who were corporate, and collected manuscripts as part of a state-sponsored programme at the behest of the royal librarian in Paris.
Another reason driving this argument of "no corporate effort" is the clear intention of both Sweetman and Urs App to destroy the idea that orientalism was a "corporate colonial" endeavor as stated by Edward Said. God forbid Edward Said should have been right that colonialism and racism drove the "orientalist" endeavor! They both want to present individual missionaries as important non-corporate actors in the orientalist enterprise, which never really works out for them, because missionaries, too, were working for The Establishment: various governments and religious corporate entities with significant political ties to the ruling classes. As if church and state are ever separate! And of course religion is a colonialist concern. Urs App constantly argues against the idea that Buddhism and Hinduism were created in the 19th century "for the first time, in a European philological workshop ... by British Colonialist Sahibs," his and Sweetman's thesis both being that "this 'discovery' play of the latter half of the eighteenth [and 19th] century had significant earlier acts," and "was not a Caesarean section performed by colonialist doctors at the beginning of the nineteenth century when Europe's imperialist powers began to dominate large swaths of Asia. Rather, it was the result of a long process that around the turn of the eighteenth century produced a paradigm change." Whatever the significance of any of that is. Always arguing in terms of absolute vs. murky beginnings. They, of course, being the discoverers of the murkiest of "beginnings" -- that is, the "discovery" of the delusional religions called "Buddhism" and "Hinduism." How tedious!
Take just one example: De Guignes' "Indian Religion." First of all, it was entirely Buddhist. Both Brahmins and Samaneens followed the doctrine of Buddha. They comprised two sects. The Buddha was an Egyptian priest from Memphis. He is Mercury. He taught "the ultimate stage of transmigration before union with the Supreme Being." Yes, the very Christian "One." The oldest surviving Buddhist text was the Forty-Two Sections Sutra, which was "a Christianity of the kind that the Christian heresiarchs of the first century taught after having mixed ideas from Pythagoras on metempsychosis with some other principles drawn from India ... With the exception of a few particular ideas, all the precepts that Fo conveys seem to be drawn from the gospel." It was a book of Valentinian gnostic Christianity. This book represented the "inner" teaching of Buddha, along with the Anbertkend (Pool of Nectar), a Hatha Yoga text which is a "complex synthesis of Indian, Islamic, gnostic, and Neoplatonic influences... widely disseminated among Sufis." Buddha was the author of the "Vedas." He was identical with Vyasa. He was Alexander Dow's "Beass-mouni" of his fraudulent Shaster Bedang. The Ezour-Vedam was also the same. They are all the Vedas. The 4th Veda that was considered lost was the Prajnaparamita Sutra that was sent to China. China was a modern colony of Egypt. The Chinese mixed up the Nestorian Christians with Buddhists. They gave Jesus Christ the name Fo (Buddha). Emperor Ming's dream about a saint from the West had been about Jesus Christ, and they mistakenly brought back heretical Christianity that they confused with the religion of Buddha. ---- Does this look like any religion but "Hash"? That's because both the reality and unreality was Hash. They were not, as some people claimed, "unusual cross-cultural encounters" that deviated from otherwise clear-cut dominant religions.
While they differ on particulars of Ziegenbalg's sources, Sweetman joins with Urs App in establishing a category of books that were meant "to be kept in the mission rather than sent to Europe for publication." Urs App thus seeks to blame Voltaire for having sent the forged/fraudulent Ezour Vedam out into the world, excusing the missionaries themselves for creating the infernal device. Sweetman does the same thing when he refers to another dangerously similar book of Ziegenbalg's, "a lengthy book on the doctrines of the 'heathen poets,' written by Kanapati Vattiyar." Is this yet another version of the Ezour Vedam? It's definitely a Gnanigol text. And what about the title of the first pamphlet from the brand-new Tamil mission press in Tranquebar: "The Veta-pramanam (Skt. vedapramana, Vedic norm) demonstrating that akkiyanam [ajnana] must be detested and how those in akkiyanam can be saved" (pp. 309-10)?" Sounds like yet another text pretending to be a Veda to me! And what is this "gnanigol" business but a play on "jnana," meaning "wisdom," meaning "veda"?
Veda is a Sanskrit word from the root, vid, meaning “to know." Thus, veda means "knowledge" or "wisdom."
-- Veda, by Yogapedia
