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THE EMPIRE OF APOSTLES
 THE EMPIRE OF APOSTLES
Religion, Accommodatio, and the Imagination of Empire in Early Modern
Brazil and India

ANANYA CHAKRAVARTI
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries.
Published in India by
Oxford University Press
2/11 Ground Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110 002, India
© Oxford University Press 2018
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
First Edition published in 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
ISBN-13 (print edition): 978-0-19-948508-6
ISBN-10 (print edition): 0-19-948508-9
ISBN-13 (eBook): 978-0-19-909360-1
ISBN-10 (eBook): 0-19-909360-1
Typeset in ScalaPro 10/13
by Tranistics Data Technologies, Kolkata 700 091
Printed in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd
 To
Professor Dain Borges
and
Professor Muzaffar Alam
 CONTENTS

List of Figures
Acknowledgements

Introduction
1. From Contact to ‘Conquest’

PART I IN SEARCH OF THE INDIES

2. Other Indies
3. The Living Books

PART II ACCOMMODATIO AND THE POETICS OF LOCATION

4. José de Anchieta and the Poetics of Warfare
5. Christ in the Brahmapuri: Thomas Stephens in Salcete

PART III RELIGION, ACCOMMODATIO, AND THE IMAGINATION OF EMPIRE

6. Theatres of Empire: António Vieira and Baltasar da Costa in Brazil and India
7. The Empire of Apostles

Epilogue
Glossary of Key Terms
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
 FIGURES

1.1 The Malabar Coast in 1498

1.2 Coastal Brazil, Mid-Sixteenth Century
1.3 South and Central India, Mid-Sixteenth Century

2.1 Xavier’s Travels in the Indian Ocean

4.1 Manuscript of Poem Describing Six Savages Dancing, Os Machatins

5.1 Page from the Earliest Known Manuscript of Discurso sobre a vinda de Jesu Christo
5.2 Marsden Manuscript of Stephens’s Krisṭapurāṇa

6.1 Dutch Assaults on the Portuguese Empire, Seventeenth Century

6.2 António Vieira (1608–1697)
6.3 Baltasar da Costa’s Sketch of Roberto Nobili as a Sannyāsi
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Gratitude—is not the mention

Of a Tenderness,
But its still appreciation
Out of Plumb of Speech.
—Emily Dickinson

This book was researched and written across five continents and seven years. Along the way, I
incurred deep debts for which profound gratitude is meagre payment indeed. I was fortunate to
receive generous financial support for my archival research from various institutions, including
the University of Chicago, USA, the Social Science Research Council’s International
Dissertation Research Fellowship Program, USA, and the American University in Cairo, Egypt.
I am also grateful to the Max Weber Programme for Postdoctoral Studies, European University
Institute, Italy, and Antonella Romano in particular, for allowing me the luxury to write in an
office nestled in a Tuscan garden. My stay in Lisbon was facilitated by the institutional
hospitality of the Fundação Oriente, the Centro de História de Além-Mar, Universidade Nova de
Lisboa, Portugal, and the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal.
Eduardo Kol Carvalho, Pedro Cardim, and Ricardo Roque deserve special mention for their help
in facilitating my stay.
The materials for this book were drawn from a large number of archives including the
Arquivo Nacional and Biblioteca Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; the Archives and Special
Collections, SOAS Library, SOAS, University of London, and the Stonyhurst College Archives
in the UK; the Goa State Historical Archives, the Thomas Stephens Konknni Kendr, and the
Krishnadas Shama Goa State Central Library in Goa, India; the Jesuit Archives of Madurai
Province in Shembaganur, India; St Aloysius College, Mangalore, India; the Archivum
Romanum Societatis Iesu, the Archivio Storico di Propaganda Fide, and the Biblioteca
Nazionale in Rome, Italy; and the Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo, the Biblioteca Nacional,
the Biblioteca da Ajuda, the Academia das Ciências, and the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino in
Lisbon, Portugal. At these institutions, Fr Edward Jeganathan and Fr Irudiyaraj, Blossom Xavier
Souza, George Rodrigues, Jan Graffius, and Winifred Assan were especially helpful. Among the
many friends I made during my research, I wish to thank in particular Paolo Aranha, Joanna
Elrick, Manuel João Magalhães, and Ricardo Ventura, not just for their friendship but for their
intellectual companionship.
This book was conceived and nurtured at the University of Chicago, where my teachers,
interlocutors, and friends were invaluable critics and ardent supporters of this wildly ambitious
project. Mauricio Tenorio was an early champion of my ambition to bring together the two
‘Indies’, and his historical vision and love of poetry were constantly inspiring. I am also
profoundly grateful for the rigorous and careful feedback I received from Jorge Flores and his
generous support over the years. At the University of Chicago, I benefited from two intellectual
homes. I thank the members of the Latin American History workshop and the community of
scholars of South Asia, as well as the staff of the Department of History, the Center for Latin
American Studies, and Committee for Southern Asian Studies during my time there. I thank
especially Alicia Czaplewski, who is sorely missed. Romina Robles Ruvalcaba exists in a
category by herself—soul sister. If, as Rulfo tells us, time is heavier than the heaviest burden
man can bear, she has lightened my load, as a historian and as a person, every day. I also thank
Sonam Kachru, not just for sharing his brilliant mind, formidable erudition, and many, many
cigarettes over the years, but for his patience, his kindness, and his unflagging loyalty and
support.
I have benefited enormously over the years from the feedback and help of various
colleagues. Thanks are due to members of the Early Modern History Workshop at the University
of Chicago and Elisa Joy Jones, as well as my colleagues at the European University Institute,
particularly Jennifer Hillman. Ines G. Županov provided me with a platform to share my work at
its earliest stages, and I am most grateful to her and the participants of various workshops hosted
at the Centre d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud, Paris, France, especially Joan-Pau Rubiés,
for their feedback. Thanks are due to Ricardo Roque and the members of the collective working
on colonial mimesis at Instituto de Ciências Sociais, and to Tom Cohen and the attendees of my
workshop at Catholic University of America, Washington D.C., USA, especially Sanjay
Subrahmanyam and Fr John O’Malley. Perhaps the single most important forum for shaping this
final manuscript was the book workshop held by my colleagues at Georgetown University,
Washington D.C., USA. Many thanks to John McNeill, Bryan McCann, Dagomar Degroot,
Toshihiro Higuchi, Kate de Luna, Mubbashir Rizvi, and Suze Zijlstra for their generosity, time,
and advice. I am particularly grateful to John Tutino, without whose careful editorial eye this
book would not be what it is. Thank you for helping me see the forest past the trees.
I thank the anonymous reviewers; Trishula Patel and Jakob Burnham; William Nelson; and
the editorial team at Oxford University Press, New Delhi, for their help in preparing and
improving the manuscript. Many thanks to Fr Leon Hooper and the Woodstock Theological
Library, Georgetown University Library, and the Jesuit Maryland Province, USA, for
permission for the gorgeous cover image of this book. I also thank the directors of the Archivum
Romanum Societatis Iesu, Rome, Italy; Archives and Special Collections, SOAS Library;
Academia das Ciências, Lisbon, Portugal; the British Library’s Endangered Archives
Programme, UK; and the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, USA, for permission to
reproduce the images in this book.
I thank my ever-patient, supportive, and loving family. The love of peregrination that my
parents, Rupa and Sarvajit Chakravarti, inculcated in me is reflected in this work. I am grateful
for the curiosity and open-mindedness I learned from them. Thanks to my sister Aparupa for
making sure I ate, slept, and stayed human through gruelling months of writing. Thanks, too, to
my aunt Choi Chatterjee, in whose footsteps I follow and whose endless founts of creativity
inspire me. Though they are not here to see this work, the imprint of my grandparents, Deb
Kumar and Nonda Chatterjee, is apparent in every page.
Last but by no means least, I wish to thank the two people who have most deeply shaped my
scholarship over the years. Professor Borges’s erudition and generosity continue to sustain me,
many years after I had the pleasure of whiling away an afternoon in his office, learning how to
read and think with both breadth and depth. Professor Alam provided me with the finest
apprenticeship I could have hoped for in the art of historical scholarship. I thank my two
mentors for providing a model for the kind of scholar I aspire to be: curious, humble, generous,
rigorous. I dedicate this book to them.
 INTRODUCTION

We must now consider the process by which this [Christian] history of past centuries was transmitted to new
worlds … It was only a question of time before Europe would expand toward America and in part toward
Asia, continents that were lacking in great cultural protagonists. Still later, Europe would begin to make
further incursions into these two continents, Africa and Asia … which it would seek to transform into
European franchises, into colonies.1

This is how Pope Benedict XVI explained the ‘universalization of European culture’ to the
Italian Senate on 12 May 2004. His address on the state of Europe focused on the need to return
to its roots to address the challenges of the present.2 For him, the ‘cultural and historical
concept’ embedded in ‘Europe’ received concrete form with the advent of Islam. The new faith
disrupted the unity of the Mediterranean world, creating the tripartite division between Europe,
Africa, and Asia familiar today.3 (It is unlikely that a citizen of al-Andalus, who could travel
seamlessly from the depths of Iberia to the Maghreb and the Mediterranean shores of the Levant,
would have experienced such a disruption—but his ilk are not the subjects of this history.)
‘Amid this process of shifting borders,’ Benedict XVI argued, ‘a theology of history was
constructed … rooted in the Book of Daniel’, in which the formation of the Sacrum Imperium
Romanum laid the foundations of Europe.4 Then, inevitably, invincibly, Europe marched
outwards: America and parts of Asia and Africa, lacking a ‘protagonist’ of the stature of
Christianity or Islam, lay fallow until Europe, fulfilling its destiny, expanded to sow its seed in
these cultural wastelands.
Although Benedict XVI’s disquisition is better read in the spirit of theology rather than
history, the mythology of the ‘age of discoveries’ is remarkably resilient—and not merely in the
popular imagination.5 The same sense of momentousness and inevitability that infuses Benedict
XVI’s essay informs many accounts of the early modern European expansion—even those that
are highly critical of Europe’s history of imperialism. Like Benedict XVI, these accounts are
based on a teleology that culminates in the re-making of the globe into a series of ‘European
franchises, into colonies’.
Nevertheless, while the mythological aura surrounding Europe’s expansion has not faded
away, most writers today would balk at the explicitly Christian interpretation of the history
Benedict XVI offered. Scholarly analyses of Europe’s expansion are often studiously secular,
with religion often reduced to a footnote. For Benedict XVI, this historiographical lacuna is
another symptom of the graver illness that has beset Europe. The march of divine history was
slowed, in his eyes, not through the agency of Asians, Africans, and Amerindians, but through
developments in Europe’s own intellectual history. The Enlightenment ushered in ‘the victory of
the post-European techno-secular world’. Europe increasingly abandoned the spiritual
foundations of its identity, replacing its Christian roots with a multicultural secularism. Benedict
XVI lamented that ‘the time has apparently arrived to affirm the value systems of other worlds,
such as pre-Colombian America, Islam or Asian mysticism’.6 The alarm he rang resounds today.
As Europe confronts the bodies piling up on its shores, drifting on the deadly waves of conflicts
in its erstwhile colonies; as it contemplates Turkey’s entry into its union; as it looks askance at
the non-white residents of Molenbeek or the cités of La Courneuve, Benedict XVI is hardly
alone in his anxiety regarding Europe’s ‘crisis of identity’ in a multicultural, secular world.
In another address given in Aparecida, Brazil, Benedict XVI countered the orthodoxies of
multicultural relativism with a reading of Latin America history. He portrayed the pre-contact
populations of Latin America and the Caribbean as ‘knowing and welcoming Christ, the
unknown God whom their ancestors were seeking, without realizing it, in their rich religious
traditions’. Their cultures were made ‘fruitful’ by Christ, so that ‘the proclamation of Jesus and
of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbian cultures, nor was it
the imposition of a foreign culture’.7 The encounter of Christian Europeans and indigenous
peoples of Latin America, therefore, was not one of colonial violence. It was the beginning of a
process of cultural synthesis, since ‘authentic cultures are not closed in upon themselves … but
they are open, or better still, they are seeking an encounter with other cultures, hoping to reach
universality through encounter and dialogue with other ways of life’.8
Benedict XVI’s views on the spread of Christianity have a venerable genealogy, both
theologically and in the development of the missionary church.9 The mechanism by which the
Church has remained and continues to remain open is that of conversion. Conversion, in this
view, allows the possibility of surmounting the incommensurability inherent in cross-cultural
encounter, so that converts may one day achieve a ‘new synthesis’.10 Yet, in light of his earlier
pronouncements, it is hard to escape the conclusion that for Benedict XVI, ‘authentic cultures’
are really only those that are willing to capitulate to a specifically European tradition of
Catholicism.11
Naturally, the speech provoked scathing criticism in Latin America for its blatant evasion of
the violence and destruction—cosmological, material, demographic, and cultural—that attended
the continent’s evangelization. Humberto Cholango, president of the confederation of the
Kichwa peoples of Ecuador, even while affirming the vitality of Catholicism in contemporary
indigenous culture, took exception to the Pope’s claim that ‘the utopia of going back to breathe
life into the pre-Columbian religions … would be a step back.’12 Cholango reminded Benedict
XVI that the sword of empire had been one of the most effective weapons in the Church’s
arsenal in Latin America. There are good historical reasons why the contours of the global
Church today are still largely indistinguishable from the erstwhile boundaries of Europe’s
empires.
This book places the relationship between Church and empire at its centre, in the hopes of
decolonizing our understanding of both. The intention is not to reduce the Church to a
handmaiden of European imperial expansion, a functionalist view of the role of religion that
does disservice not least to the complex history of the indigenous adoption of Christianity.13
Indigenous peoples were not yoked to Christianity through European imperial coercion alone
and often embraced the faith for their own reasons.14 Moreover, the universal ambitions of the
Church were distinct from, though related to, the expansionist drive of Europe’s kingdoms.
While the synergy between Europe’s empires and the Church expanded the boundaries of both,
the Church’s drive towards universal conversion could and often did run counter to the demands
of temporal dominion. Furthermore, with the rise of an increasingly independent papacy, Rome
could function almost as a rival metropolitan node in the imperial networks of the Catholic
empires. As this book demonstrates, when the Dutch and other imperial rivals threatened
Portuguese dominion, the Church was content to seek other political partners in its evangelical
pursuits.
Still, imperialism itself in the early modern era was not innocent of religion. European
expansion occurred during a period in which religious culture still pervaded every aspect of
life.15 Thus, insistently secular histories of empire of this period are vulnerable to a (wishful)
presentism, if not outright anachronism. Standing at the opening to the waters that carried the
Portuguese around the world, Benedict XVI, ever mindful of the ‘theology of history,’ referred
precisely to this amnesia. He reminded his listeners of ‘the powerful cultural tradition of the
Portuguese people, deeply marked by the millenary influence of Christianity and by a sense of
global responsibility’. It was the ‘Christian ideal of universality and fraternity’, he claimed,
which had inspired ‘the adventure of the Discoveries and … the missionary zeal which shared
the gift of faith with other peoples … an “ideal” to be realized by Portugal, which has always
sought to establish relations with the rest of the world’.16
Just as in Aparecida, Benedict XVI’s deliberately anodyne words softened the crucial role of
imperial domination in the history of missionary work—a history of which he is painfully aware
in today’s decolonized world. Yet, his Eurocentric vision of the ‘universal’ Church; his
insistence on the place of the Church at the heart of a European identity; and his
uncompromising, almost millenarian belief in the divine destiny of both are living remnants of a
particular imaginaire, which this book hopes to historicize and, ultimately, dismantle.
This book explores how missionaries of the Society of Jesus working in the non-European
world—specifically, Francis Xavier (1506–1552), Thomas Stephens (c. 1549–1619), and
Baltasar da Costa (1610–1673) in India and Manuel da Nóbrega (1517–1570), José de Anchieta
(1534–1597), and António Vieira (1608–1697) in Brazil—sought to fashion an apostolic empire
that both coincided with and exceeded the temporal boundaries of early modern Portuguese
dominion. Their mandates were neither straightforward, nor singular. Rather, they struggled to
balance the exigencies of three primary commitments: the first, to a notion of the
meaningfulness and specificity of their particular local missionary space; the second, to the
universal enterprise of Catholic evangelism; and the third, to the global ambitions of Portuguese
temporal domain.
The careers of these Jesuits, spanning the mid sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries,
frame two key moments of crisis in the Catholic notion of universal Christian empire: the
dissolution of the unity of the Church and the end of Iberian domination of the enterprise of
European empire. Their lives thus run parallel to and reflect the arc of the first phase of
European imperialism.17 Over the course of this arc, these missionaries weighed and prioritized
these three commitments differently. Moreover, the relative importance of these competing
mandates was contingent upon their particular location. Through their attempts to inscribe and
understand their actions within these three scales of meaning—local, global, and universal—a
religious imaginaire of empire emerged.
In retaining the French usage here I draw attention to the cosmological nature of the term: as
Steven Collins puts it, the word ‘imaginaire’ refers to ‘objects of the imagination, the ensemble
of what is imagined, without implying falsity; it can also refer to specific imagined worlds, and
so can be used in this sense in the plural’.18 This book traces not only the discursive contours of
this imaginaire of empire, but also its relationship with the world that it represented. It
investigates the ways in which this imaginaire developed and spread, in reaction to and
sometimes in resistance to a changing world and how it facilitated action within the world for
these missionaries.
In doing so, I keep in view a chasm that is often blurred in histories of empire: the difference
between the messy realities of power in colonial spaces and the grandiose discursive productions
of empire that attended these activities. The subjects of this book were thwarted at every turn by
indigenous interlocutors, by their masters in Rome, and by the inadequate power and dubious
political will of the Portuguese imperial apparatus. Yet, in their writings, they bequeathed a
blueprint of imperial thinking, whose traces are still with us today: modes of classifying the
peoples of the world in hierarchical schemas, in which the European sits at the apex; conceptual
cartographies, in which the far-flung corners of the world serve as colonial outposts to a
European centre; and a sacralizing vision of empire, in which the realities and naked violence of
imperial power are eventually erased. In part due to Jesuit epistolary conventions, this
triumphalist vision found widespread circulation, while the ambiguities and disappointments of
colonial experience were relegated to private conversations and internal archives. The sense of
inevitability that attends even contemporary understandings of Europe’s dominion is an echo of
their millenarian assertion of the divine destiny of the Church travelling on the back of empire.
In imbuing their local missions with meaning, missionaries saw in them manifestations of
the universal Church, just as the universal claims of the Church found concrete expression in
their particular mission. The dependence, however uneven and contingent, of the evangelical
project upon the temporal dominion of the Portuguese meant that local missions also became
theatres within which global geopolitics played out. By the same token, in their eyes, the
abstract universalism of the Church could be given form in the globe-encompassing ambitions
of Portuguese rule. The religious imaginaire that they elaborated, therefore, provided a means to
suture the local, the global, and the universal into a holistic vision of empire.

Local, Global, Universal: Accommodatio and the Evolution of an

Imperial Imaginaire
In tracing the entangled history of early modern Portuguese imperialism and the evangelical
Church, the Society of Jesus is a particularly attractive focus of study. The order gained
influence early on with both the papacy and the Catholic nobility of Europe and took the lead in
missionary activity abroad. The Jesuits were thus highly influential in both the imperial and the
missionary enterprise.19 Furthermore, their institutional structure allowed them to develop a
global vision. The tightly knit, diasporic order placed heavy emphasis on written communication
between its members and headquarters. The knowledge generated in specific mission-fields,
including practical strategies for engaging indigenous peoples, was circulated amongst its
members throughout the world.20 The sophistication of Jesuit governance and administration
allowed the society to maintain a globally dispersed membership, without sacrificing the
coherence accorded by a centralized structure.21 As such, the Jesuits were ideally placed to
imagine and situate their activity within a broader context. Even as they struggled to find
appropriate means of conversion within their local contexts, Jesuit missionaries were always
aware of the wider implications of their activity from the point of view of the Portuguese
Crown, the Catholic Church, and their own order. In their understanding of the dialogic process
of the creation of Christian subjects of the universal Church in local missions, the Jesuits
provide an ideal group to investigate how local conditions shaped the development of a trans-
local imperial imaginaire.
 What then was the mechanism by which a series of particular mission spaces was
transformed in the imagination of these missionaries into an imperial landscape? When the
future saint Francis Xavier set sail for the Indies, he envisioned only the rich harvest of pagan
souls that he would reap in those faraway lands. Yet, very quickly he had to contend not only
with the variety and specificity of the various cultures of these ‘pagans’, but also with the
significant challenge their cosmologies could present to the Christian message. It was a lesson
future missionaries to the Indies would learn well and for which the missionaries fashioned a
solution based on a principle enshrined in Jesuit praxis from the very beginning: accommodatio.
Accommodatio enjoined the spiritual preceptor to adapt the Christian lesson to the capacity
and dispositions of his audience.22 Its theological roots lay in the Judaeo-Christian exegetical
principle that ‘the Scriptures speak a human language’. This opened the metaphorical and
allegorical language of scripture to hermeneutic interpretation that was sensitive to the time and
place of its elaboration.23 The concept intertwined rhetoric and theology: Augustine, in
explicating why Jewish customs were now condemned by the Christian God, had drawn upon
Cicero’s notion of appropriateness in De Oratore. Thus, ‘the rhetorical notion of the appropriate,
the fitting, allowed Augustine to sustain simultaneously the ideas of divine immutability and of
historical change’.24 Augustine’s crucial temporalization of Cicero’s rhetorical concept
eventually paved the way for Jesuit missionaries to add to it a spatial dimension: the principle of
accommodatio allowed missionaries to transcend the contingencies not only of time but also of
space, in spreading the Christian message. Accommodatio thus involved negotiating the tension
between the universal and eternal law of the Christian God and the necessarily contingent,
limited nature of the humans who received that law. In concrete terms, it involved the
willingness of the missionary to adapt to or even adopt those cultural practices of his flock that
he deemed free of the taint of idolatry.
By its very nature, the practice of accommodatio demanded from the missionary a
disciplined sensitivity to the local realities of the mission space and its peoples. No wonder then
that its practitioners have left us some of the richest proto-ethnographic accounts of the peoples
among whom they laboured: testaments to the lifetimes that were devoted to the study and
evangelism of their alien flock. Yet, the years spent in these missions and the understanding and
even respect for indigenous cultures that it engendered did not blind Jesuit missionaries to the
broader structures within which they laboured. In other words, the deep devotion to a particular
mission space did not preclude the missionaries from attending to the universal aspirations of the
Church or the global ambitions of their imperial patrons. Moreover, the practice of
accommodatio was not innocent of the exercise of power: it was adapted as a weapon of the
relatively weak precisely in those territories where the simple confluence of imperial arms and
missionary authority was not enough to compel conversion.
One of the central arguments of this book is that it was precisely through the practice of
accommodatio that Jesuits came to place the myriad locales of their acquaintance into the much
broader conceptual geographies of the Portuguese empire and the universal church. The
knowledge that they gleaned from these local mission spaces would eventually be shaped into
the logic of empire. Knowledge of other peoples was ordered into hierarchical ethnological
schema, in which European civilization was not only placed at the apex but was divinely
ordained to rule all other peoples. Moreover, their knowledge of local spaces, which were
initially imbued with meaning in relation to a universal Church, led eventually to a Eurocentric
conceptual cartography of empire.
 Writing from the Margins
The dialectic between the local and the global inscribed in accommodatio (and which is also
characteristic of the dynamic of empires) necessitates a methodology that allows analysis at a
variety of spatial scales.25 This is a challenge that this book addresses through the use of
historical biography. The process by which the disparate corners of the world (Brazil, India,
‘Europe’) went from being just that to becoming hierarchically organized nodes of an empire
requires the writing of the coterminous histories of these three regions.26 Biography provides a
manageable way to trace vast historical trends while resisting the schematic macro-historical
tendencies of much of ‘world history’. As David Nasaw puts it, biography ‘offers a way of
transcending the theoretical divide between empiricist social history and linguistic-turn cultural
history without sacrificing the methodological or epistemological gains of either’.27
There is, however, another more profound reason for choosing this methodology above
others. Biography favours the exploration of the ways in which an individual moulds himself,
and is himself moulded in terms of external presentation and internal self-cultivation. This
methodology is, therefore, particularly appropriate to this study, centrally concerned as it is with
the practice of Jesuit accommodatio.28 Missionaries self-consciously, though heteronomously,
shaped their encounter with their non-European others through the practice of accommodatio.
Moreover, it was through the unintended effects of this process of self-development, effects that
were determined by their specific non-European context, that these missionaries came to view
themselves as imperial actors and to develop a peculiarly imperial imaginaire.
Of all the missionary groups labouring outside Europe, the Jesuits most consciously
theorized and performed the cultivation of the self. The towering figure of Ignatius at the centre
of the order provided a model of the Jesuit self. The exemplum offered implicitly by Ignatius’s
life and the guidance given explicitly through his writings amounted to a comprehensive
programme through which to fashion oneself as a Jesuit, both at the spiritual and interior level,
and its more worldly and exterior manifestation.29 Thus, Jesuits who set off for India and Brazil
left with a similar model of self-cultivation, moderated by the effects of individual personality.
While it was always expected that a member of the order followed the peculiarly Jesuit modo
de proceder, this did not amount to a slavish attachment to an image or example of the ideal
Jesuit.30 It was Ignatius himself who prescribed accommodatio as the heart of Jesuit pastoral
practice. The particular demands of the pastoral or missionary field dictated how missionaries
translated their inner commitments into practical action and self-presentation.31 This pastoral
activity, which demanded careful management of their external selves to be successful, was also
intimately related to their sense of interior self-cultivation. The process of self-cultivation and
discipline necessitated by accommodatio ultimately bore fruit within the Jesuit himself, in
ensuring his own salvation and consolation, as much as that of his neighbour.
Despite the conscious ways in which these missionaries fashioned themselves in the
colonies, this is not a model in which the pristine agency of the European drives the motor of
history. While Europeans came to missions abroad with a set of tools through which to present
and cultivate themselves, the context itself imposed unexpected and unintended consequences.
In adapting to these imperial locations, however strategically, the European changed, becoming
something else entirely, becoming an ‘imperial’ man with very different perceptions and
motivations to the earlier self who first sailed from the shores of Europe to the ‘Indies’. Acting
in the imperial theatre, the European undoubtedly adopted masks; but these masks were
internalized, becoming integral parts of the European imperial self, sometimes despite
precautions against cultural contamination. This is not, it must be emphasized, a history of the
Janus-faced, strategic European.
The practice of accommodatio depended crucially on the cultural encounter in the non-
European world, which is at the heart of this genealogy of an imaginaire of European empire. In
other words, this is not an intellectual history of imperial ideas projected from the metropole
onto the peripheries; it is instead a history of empire written from the margins.
Methodologically, this requires a double reading of encounter, which considers the ‘implicit
ethnography’—the unstated assumptions regarding the nature of personhood, self and other,
identity and alterity, which underpins perceptions of social reality—of both interlocutors.32
Thus, for each encounter our missionary protagonists report—with a brahmin priest or an
Amerindian shaman, with untouchable village headmen in Tamil Nadu or indigenous children in
the Bahian backlands—this book will reconstruct the encounter from the perspective of these
interlocutors too, through an eclectic mix of textual sources in European and non-European
languages and scholarly advances in anthropology. Moreover, it will situate these interlocutors,
and hence these encounters, in the full complexity of the hierarchies and tensions of their own
societies. Even if the conclusions offered are speculative, the value of such an exercise is in
making empire strange again. The goal is to displace the Eurocentric modes of thought that are
empire’s legacy, and to which, as scholars working in imperial archives and European traditions
of history-making, we are still vulnerable.
The historiography of cultural encounters with Europeans in both America and India is vast,
rich, and complex. Nonetheless, these fields may be schematized according to three dominant
approaches. The first denies to some extent the very possibility of genuine encounter in the
chasm of cultural incommensurability.33 The European, in this model, is caught perpetually in
‘a hall of distorting mirrors in which each individual sees himself, as he thinks, truly reflected,
while those about him are disquietingly altered into grotesques, as familiar gestures and
expressions are exaggerated, parodied, even inverted’.34 The other, often demonic, is a construct
against which to articulate a sense of identity.35 At work here is a more or less unconscious
emphasis on the problems of human communication.36 Even where the European succeeds in
reading the signs of native culture for the instrumental purposes of colonial activity, the
possibility of genuine exchange is precluded.37 This historiographical strand assumes the
colonial actor’s cultural embeddedness, which remains, sometimes despite his own best efforts,
ultimately insurmountable in the encounter with the other.
The second approach to the history of colonial encounter has centrally employed the trope of
the gaze. Strongly influenced by the theoretical apparatus bequeathed by Michel Foucault,
Edward Said’s Orientalism is the cornerstone of this field of research for its polemical call to
demystify the relationship between European representation and rule of others. Here, the eye
itself is not innocent, but deeply implicated in a politics of domination. As one might imagine,
this historiography has focused heavily on domains of ritualized observation: travel and
ethnography.38 Understandably, much of this literature has been centrally concerned with a
political project to decolonize knowledge.39 This historiography has evolved from
understanding contact as a one-way relationship between the seeing eye and the observed, to a
model of dialogic, if unequal, interaction between the colonizer and the colonized.40
Nonetheless, this literature, despite allowing for the possibility for genuine mutual recognition,
does not escape from the metaphor of the mirror: the self and the other stand beholding each
other, as if each were gazing into a looking glass, in a ‘mirror dance’.41
The third approach to cultural encounter pivots from an emphasis on sight, observation, and
representation to a focus on action. This agent-centred approach focuses on colonial actors who
move back and forth between separate but at least partially porous cultural spheres.42 For the
case of Brazil, this approach has been employed particularly in the history of Bandeirantes and
Mamelucos, whose familiarity with indigenous and Portuguese culture allowed them to play a
crucial role in the making of colonial Brazil.43 Frontiersmen were not the only agents capable of
traversing cultural boundaries between indigenous and European society and acting as
transactional go-betweens.44 Histories of merchants, soldiers, and mercenaries, as well as of
indigenous agents in the employ of the imperial bureaucracy, often cast these actors in similar
terms.45 Despite the wide range of peoples studied, this historiographic strand is characterized
by a certain tendency towards instrumental interpretations, where cultural fluidity is primarily a
comparative advantage in the imperial transactional economy, an explanatory variable rather
than a locus of explicit investigation. Moreover, this approach typically takes as its point of
departure the existence of persons capable of traversing cultural spheres; the process by which
this capacity is generated, including the extent to which it is the direct result of conscious self-
fashioning rather than biological or circumstantial accident, has been relatively understudied.
This is particularly true of those individuals who altogether jumped cultural ship, that is those
infamous Europeans who went unapologetically native, or those indigenous people whose
cultural fluency in the linguistic and religious practices of Europeans drew both scorn and
approbation.46
Like all heuristics, this attempt to schematize an enormous body of scholarship is at best a
gross generalization and at worst unfair caricature. It points, however, to a deeper current in
historiography to underestimate the capacity of historical actors to understand the terms of
cultural encounter. The approach to the analysis of interaction across cultural barriers adopted in
this book is different. First, I reject any notion of insurmountable cultural incommensurability or
the absolute inability of interlocutors to communicate or understand each other across cultural
barriers. This is not to say that some measure of opacity and misunderstanding did not play a
crucial role in structuring these encounters, particularly in the very beginning. Second, I take
seriously the possibility that the historical actors in this exchange could gain fluency over time
with the cultural vocabulary of the other and use this mastery to fashion themselves in suitable
ways. Thus, the ability to traverse cultural boundaries is not taken as a given but is rather
considered an acquired skill, central to both the missionary practice of accommodatio and the
indigenous adoption of Christianity.
Last, I do not assume an immediate imbalance of power in favour of the Europeans in
understanding encounter. As this history of accommodatio clearly shows, cross-cultural fluency
was not made incumbent solely on the indigenous to survive in the disciplinary structures of the
colony. The imbalance of power between European would-be colonizers and indigenous
societies implied by this assumption simply did not exist in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.47 To the extent that the European imperial enterprise in this period had to rely on
negotiation as well as coercion, on persuasion as much as power, European actors had to learn
the dynamics and symbolic structures of local cultures and self-consciously play roles suited to
them.48 Indeed, when other forms of authority proved sufficient, accommodatio as a strategy
could be and was abandoned.
Nonetheless, accommodatio, forged as a practice in the crucible of cultural encounter in the
non-European world, was crucial to the development of the imperial imaginaire at the heart of
this book. It required the individual missionary to fashion a self suited to the local mission
context, without losing sight of either his role as representative of the universal Church or the
vagaries of global politics to which Portuguese rule was always vulnerable. It is also the
unifying thread of the various biographical studies that make up this book.

The Old World and the New

Since this book investigates the development of an imperial imaginaire that encompasses the
local and the global, it resists a national or regional delimitation of scope. In focusing on the
Portuguese empire in particular, the historian is also afforded a rare opportunity to bring
together into a single frame the history of European imperial engagement in the old world and
the new.49 Specifically, this book intertwines the histories of South Asia and Latin America, two
fields that have rarely been brought into historiographical conversation.
The interpenetration of South Asian and Latin American historiography remains in its
infancy. Empirically grounded historical studies that consider these regions simultaneously are
conspicuous largely by their absence.50 The limited engagement between the two fields has
been confined to the search for common methodologies and the realm of theory.51 Moreover,
many scholars of Latin American history, not without reason, have been cautious about a form
of engagement which they see as homogenizing disparate (post)colonial experiences.52
The rise of comparative studies of settler colonialism seems only to confirm this
fundamental historical difference between Latin America and South Asia. The experience of
British colonialism in India was paradigmatic of a mode of colonialism characterized by the
material domination of a numerically greater indigenous population by a foreign minority,
acting in the name of an explicitly articulated ideology of racial and cultural superiority.53
Canonical thinkers of decolonization and their intellectual inheritors have largely hailed from
such (post)colonies in which the indigenous population could ultimately become the inheritors
of their own earth. The Cabo Verdean and Guinea-Bissauan nationalist leader, Amílcar Lopes da
Costa Cabral, expressed this view most succinctly in his 1970 lecture at Syracuse University. In
his analysis of what he termed ‘foreign domination’, Cabral dismissed outright the choice of
genocide as a practicable solution to indigenous cultural resistance, on the grounds that it would
create ‘a void which empties foreign domination of its content and its object: the dominated
people’. Instead, unable to ‘harmonize economic and political domination of these people with
their cultural personality … imperialist colonial domination has tried to create theories which, in
fact, are only gross formulations of racism’.54
Latin America, by contrast, is a world ‘made by conquest’; the settler colonial state relied on
a (juridically) marked distinction ‘between conquerors and conquered, settlers and natives’,
which in turn formed ‘the basis of other distinctions that tend to buttress the conquerors and
isolate the conquered, politically’.55 As Patrick Wolfe puts it, ‘settler colonies were (are)
premised on the elimination of native societies … The colonizers come to stay—invasion is a
structure not an event. In contrast, for all the hollow formality of decolonization, at least the
legislators generally change colour’.56 These definitions of settler colonialism, by a scholar of
southern Africa and Australia respectively, also capture starkly the catastrophic demographic
collapse, however unintended, of indigenous populations in Latin America following contact
and its subsequent trajectory. It only seems to affirm the gulf between the historical experience
of a non-settler (post)colony like South Asia, and the settler colonial societies of Latin America.
Yet, this gulf depends on two fallacies. The first is a selective reading of South Asian
history, in which the long history of European presence in the subcontinent is reduced to the
British Raj. It is not incidental that the vast majority of the essays published in the volumes of
Subaltern Studies focus on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; postcolonial scholarship
has also generally fallen within this narrow temporal focus. The early modern era, during which
the Portuguese pioneered European imperialism in the subcontinent, is still largely overlooked.
Taking into account this early history of European imperial intervention in South Asia avoids
altogether the uncomfortable projection of the theoretical insights from nineteenth-century
British India onto the history of the early modern Iberian empires in Latin America, and vice
versa.
The second fallacy—and this is more subtle but equally pernicious—is the notion that
European imperialism in the old world and the new followed separate and disconnected
trajectories, leading inexorably to the ideal types of non-settler and settler colonialism in these
regions. Rather, as this book will demonstrate, the epistemic structures of what Aníbal Quijano
calls the coloniality of power was a result of circulation and comparison of European
experiences in both regions.
In Quijano’s view, the Eurocentric structure of global power, which allows resources to
accrue to a small minority of Europeans and their descendants even after the end of formal rule,
depends crucially on regimes of social discrimination. These, in turn, evolved from a project of
knowledge originating in the colonial period. These regimes evolved from the complex ways in
which Europeans came to know and hierarchically classify others, even as they appropriated and
delegitimized indigenous forms of knowledge, thus producing what Partha Chatterjee calls the
rule of colonial difference.57 Whereas Quijano suggests that this was the singular product of the
Latin American encounter with Europe, this book instead demonstrates that this process played
out on both sides of the globe.58 European observers in these lands drew on a great variety of
conceptual tools to grapple with their ‘discoveries’ in both the old and new worlds.59 Moreover,
unlike the secular view of this history advanced by Quijano, the contention here is that in the
development of the ideology of European superiority, which eventually underpinned empire,
religion played a crucial part.
This book, therefore, considers the foundational moment of early modern European
engagement in both South Asia and Latin America in a comparative and connected manner.
This is not to suggest that these regions in the sixteenth century were somehow essentially
similar or equivalent, thus leading inexorably to their absorption within the matrix of empire.
Though these regions could occupy the same plane within the symbolic structure of the ‘Indies’
for European observers, in reality they could hardly present a greater contrast as imperial
theatres. If pre-colonial Brazil was characterized by stateless societies, centred on shamanic
cosmologies, where indigenous societies suffered dramatic mortality rates after contact, South
Asia was bristling with indigenous polities and empires, with many competing forms of religion,
in a similar disease ecology as Europe. Far from suggesting any essential similarity between
Brazil and South Asia, this book hopes to investigate why their manifest disparities as political
and cultural terrain could eventually be subsumed by the logic of empire.
The protagonists of this history follow precisely this arc: when Francis Xavier and Manuel
da Nóbrega arrived in India and Brazil in the 1540s, they encountered a series of local contexts
to which they had to tailor their missionary strategies. In the localized nature of their
geographical imagination, they were no different from the men of their time. Caught between
the past and the future in its debt to Ptolemaic classical cosmography and in its anticipation of
new knowledge and the still-germinating imperial projects of conquest in the ‘age of
discoveries’, as Frank Lestringant has shown, cosmography was equally contradictory in its
spatial dimensions. The field, with its ‘aesthetics of varietas’ and its obsessive detailing of the
singular, was nonetheless committed to the notion of totality implied by the very term
‘cosmography’. As Lestringant puts it,
to plunge into the minute diversity of the world, to recognize its fundamental and inexhaustible
heterogeneity, paradoxically joined up with the project of accounting for its totality … Even if he might lose
himself among the [field of singular things], this encyclopaedist of the disparate … managed to recover in his
project the ‘delectable,’ shimmering unity of the Creation.60

What is important to note for our purpose here is this brief moment to which Lestringant
repeatedly draws attention, a moment in which the world was a concatenation of singularities
bound mostly by the notion of a unitary Creation—and not by the later heuristic of empire.
A century later, by contrast, Baltasar da Costa and António Vieira as imperial missionaries
inhabited very different roles from their pioneering forbears. They instead visualized these far-
flung and completely different mission-fields in one frame, simultaneously and in a relationship
of subordination to Europe—in other words, as an empire, albeit one in peril. In Costa’s case,
though his mission was located in the lands of indigenous kings, he nonetheless understood his
activities as the work of a Portuguese vassal in imperial space. From specific and strikingly
disparate mission-fields, India and Brazil had come to signify colonial outposts, interchangeable
in as far as they bore a relationship of possession with Portugal, which thus emerges as the
centre to the imperial periphery.

Chapter Outline
The following chapter sketches the world that the Portuguese ‘discovered’ upon their arrival in
South Asia and Brazil from the viewpoint of the indigenous peoples they encountered. It thus
serves as an introduction to the methodology adopted in this book in approaching the history of
cultural encounter. It also tracks Portuguese efforts to establish a foothold in these arenas, and
the political situation by the 1540s, when the first Jesuits arrived on the scene.
The book is then divided into three parts, tracing roughly three different stages in the
development of this religious imaginaire of empire. The first section explores the foundation of
the Jesuit enterprise in India and Brazil by the pioneers, Francis Xavier and Manuel da Nóbrega.
Tracing the different trajectories in the east and west of these missionaries in relation to the
geography of Portuguese power, I show the conceptual boundaries of Jesuit missionary space in
the Indies that they would bequeath.
The next chapter compares the ethnological frameworks Xavier and Nóbrega developed to
understand the peoples they encountered. Through his troubling encounter with brahmins,
Xavier came to elaborate a hierarchical ethnological schema, in which peoples were classified
according to a ladder of civility. Adopting an Augustinian framework, Nóbrega instead insisted
that the Tupí be viewed not as the bottom rung of an ethnological ladder, but rather as inherently
equal to all other peoples in their capacity to become Christians.
For all their differences, Nóbrega and Xavier were most alike in their ambivalence towards
the value of a humanistic approach to learning about the other for evangelism. Their successors,
however, devoted themselves to the particular form of accommodatio for which the Jesuit
missions came to be known. The next section of the book is devoted to the literary corpus of two
non-Portuguese missionaries: the Spaniard José de Anchieta in Brazil and the Englishman
Thomas Stephens in India, which married the skills, sensitivity, and intellectual proclivities of
the European humanist to the imperatives of imperial political calculation and indigenous
conversion.
The fourth chapter explores the effects of Anchieta’s early experience in the Tupí village of
Piratininga as well as the turbulence caused by the French–Tamoio alliance on his poetic corpus.
A significant portion of this corpus was in the standardized form Anchieta gave the lingua geral,
the coastal indigenous lingua franca.61 His poetic works also encompassed various European
vernaculars and even Latin. This corpus used the very terms of Tupí orality to mount a powerful
assault on the fait social total of Tupí culture, namely warfare. It replicated and reinforced the
emerging social project of Jesuit custodial control of the Amerindians in the aldeias instituted as
part of the pacification campaign of Mem de Sá.
The first English Jesuit in India, Thomas Stephens, rejected the forcible conversion
strategies of the Portuguese in Salcete in favour of humanistic accommodatio. Yet, like
Anchieta, Stephens’s corpus in Marāṭhī and Kōṅkaṇī, which adapted admirably the generic
conventions of local literature, was ultimately directed at creating a Christianized (if
brahminical) convert community. Accommodatio was less an index of cultural convergence or
tolerance than a strategy adopted in the face of the manifest failure of coercion.
The emphasis on the specificities of the local missionary context by these non-Portuguese
missionaries must be read in light of the changing circumstances of Portugal, which lost its
autonomy to Spain in 1580. As a result, the Portuguese empire was increasingly exposed to the
imperial ambitions of Spain’s greatest antagonists of the period: the Dutch and later the English.
As relative outsiders within the Portuguese empire, Anchieta and Stephens’s desire to set aside
the increasingly fractious ethnic and imperial rivalries that had begun to plague the empire and
the Jesuit order to focus instead on local conversion is understandable. Yet, a few years after
Stephens’s death in 1619, the crisis of the Portuguese empire became undeniable. The particular
combination of temporal dominion and religious jurisdiction, enshrined in the Padroado, which
undergirded the Jesuit missions in Portuguese Brazil and India, began to falter.62
It was in response to this crisis that a genuinely imperial imaginaire developed among
Portuguese Jesuits of the day. The final section focuses on the careers of António Vieira and
Baltasar da Costa. I first explore how millenarian visions of the Portuguese empire developed in
the Portuguese conquests, to make comprehensible in local terms the vicissitudes of global
politics originating in Europe and to imbue these events with meaning. For Vieira, in particular,
serving as a colonial missionary and a metropolitan political agent, the need to render the colony
as politically and religiously meaningful in itself was acutely felt. Costa, equally committed to
the local mission to which he had been assigned, adopted in the course of his career in Madurai
an extreme mimetic practice in the name of acommodatio. His many ‘faces’, however, were a
pragmatic result of his attempt to find a unity of purpose in the contradictory demands of his
particular location in Madurai, his adherence to a notion of the universal Church, and his sense
of his responsibilities and aspirations as a vassal of the Portuguese empire.
The last chapter considers the discursive parameters of this imaginaire of empire. Through
various genres, particularly historical prophecy, this vision circulated amongst Portuguese
Jesuits, affirming the divine destiny of the Portuguese empire in the teeth of its obvious
disintegration. This imaginaire underpinned the eventually unsuccessful attempts by Vieira and
Costa, among others, to found a company to save the Estado da Índia. As travel became safer,
unlike their forbears, Baltasar da Costa and António Vieira could circulate freely between the
metropole and the imperial outposts. This very mobility allowed them to inhabit a multitude of
roles, negotiating both the colonial mission context and the complex political landscape of the
metropole. What is remarkable here, however, is the extent to which, even in the metropole, they
remained ‘imperial’ men, their commitment to the conquests a marker of identity. In turn, this
allowed them to view the world they inhabited within the framework of empire, understanding
their travels and negotiations as structured by the relationship of imperial colonies and
metropolitan kingdom. In the story of these two men, the various strands of this book—the
Jesuit struggle to find appropriate means of conversion in local mission through strategies of
self-cultivation and presentation, their intimate implication in Portuguese imperialism, and their
attempts to safeguard universal Catholicism—come full circle.

1 Ratzinger, ‘The Spiritual Roots of Europe’, 64.

2 Ratzinger, ‘The Spiritual Roots of Europe, 64.
3 Ratzinger, ‘The Spiritual Roots of Europe, 51–2.
4 Ratzinger, ‘The Spiritual Roots of Europe, 5–4.
5 In the case of the Portuguese empire, Gilberto Freyre’s thesis of lusotropicalismo held sway till the late
1990s, when, beginning with Cláudia Castelo’s seminal work (1998), Portuguese scholars began to dismantle the
mythology of the benign nature of Portuguese imperialism.
6 Ratzinger, ‘The Spiritual Roots of Europe’, 66.
7 Benedict XVI, ‘Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI’, Aparecida, Brazil, 13 May 2007.
8 Benedict XVI, ‘Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI’, Aparecida, Brazil, 13 May 2007.
9 The theological locus classicus is Paul (particularly, Galatians 3:28), which has nourished a long tradition of
thought on universalism, and whose echoes are apparent in Pope Benedict XVI’s speech.
10 On incommensurability in cross-cultural encounter, see Pagden, European Encounters, 238.
11 On Benedict XVI’s ‘nearly absolute’ rejection of ‘every possible interpretation of inter-religious dialogue
in a syncretic sense’, see Aranha, ‘Roberto Nobili e il dialogo interreligioso?’ 146–7.
12 Cholango, ‘Respuesta indígena al Papa Benedicto XVI’, available at
http://www.voltairenet.org/article148222.html.
13 Vilaça argues that Wari adoption of Christianity solved an aporia central to their cosmology (Vilaça,
‘Cristãos sem fé’; Vilaça, ‘Conversão, predação e perspectiva’). Wilde, in Religión y poder en las misiones de
Guaraníes, contends that active support of educated indigenous elites was crucial to the Jesuit Guaraní missions.
14 Examples include the case of King Alfonso I of Congo and the case of the Parava in India in their struggle
against rival Muslim groups, discussed later.
15 See Somerville, The Secularization of Early Modern England; Taylor, A Secular Age.
16 Benedict XVI, ‘Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI’, Cultural Center of Belém, Lisbon, Portugal, 12
May 2010.
17 The periodization is from Pagden, Lords of All the World.
18 Collins, Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities, 73.
19 On Ignatius’s correspondence with the leading Catholics, see deNicólas, Powers of Imagining, 301.
20 Juan Polanco presented a list of twenty reasons for the importance of epistolary exchange for the Society,
including: (a) to keep the Company united and strong in the face of distance; (b) to keep members motivated and
to provide them with practical and spiritual guidance; (c) to grow the order and its reputation; and (d) to aid
centralized decision-making. See Juan Alfonso de Polanco to the Society, 27 July 1547, Sancti Ignatii, I: 536–41.
21 Friedrich, ‘Government and Information-Management’. On epistolary production in the missions, see
Županov, Disputed Mission.
22 The eighteenth annotation of Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises enjoins the giver of the exercises to
adapt them to the dispositions of the persons who wish to receive them.
23 Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 202–89.
24 Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes, 110–12.
25 On varying scales of analysis, see Revel, Jeux d’échelles.
26 My approach here is indebted to Subrahmanyam’s notion of connected history: Subrahmanyam,
Explorations in Connected History; Subrahmanyam, ‘On World Historians in the Sixteenth Century’.
27 Nasaw, ‘Introduction’, 576. See also the introduction to Eaton, A Social History.
28 Since the postmodern critique of subjectivity, scholarship has tended to ignore the former aspect in favour
of a performative understanding of the self. See, for example, Margadent, ‘Introduction’, 7. My approach is closer
to Barbara Taylor’s view that ‘[w]e need a biographical lens that looks inward as well as outward, to focus on the
constitutive elements of human subjectivity as well as its external determinants’ (Taylor, ‘Separations of Soul’,
651).
29 The key text here, foundational to the Jesuit identity is the Spiritual Exercises.
30 On critiques of slavish imitation in the period, see Pigman, ‘Versions of Imitation’. Herdt argues that the
mimesis of Christ is predicated on the perfection and inexhaustibility of the pattern he provides. Exemplary
characters such as saints point beyond themselves to Jesus as the original exemplar, thus securing their ability to
serve as models of character. See Herdt, Putting on virtue, 67, 112.
31 As O’Malley notes, accommodatio was ‘one of the principles characteristic of Jesuit ministry … In
practice, of course, it might be separated by only a hair’s breadth, or less, from opportunism’. This latter trait may
explain in part the vitriol directed to the most radical examples of Jesuit accomodatio (O’Malley, The First
Jesuits, 81).
32 See the introduction to Schwarz, Implicit Understandings.
33 Pagden, European Encounters, 238.
34 A classic formulation of this metaphor of colony as European mirror is Elliot, The Old World and the New.
35 See, for example, Mello e Souza’s application of Michel de Certeau’s notion of heterology in discursive
constructions of colonial Brazil in Inferno Atlântico.
36 Clendinnen speaks of the metaphor of ‘the confusion of tongues’ in the characterization of colonial
situations (Ambivalent Conquests, 127).
37 Todorov, The Conquest of America. As Clendinnen notes, Todorov’s semiotic analysis remains part of a
broad colonial historiographical tradition based on ‘proving’, in whatever domain, the superiority of European
culture in explaining its colonial mastery Clendinnen, ‘Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty’, 66.
38 The classic text in this vein is Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, which relies heavily on a particular, almost Saidian,
interpretation of the great Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz’s notion of transculturation for its theoretical
framework.
39 Pompa, in Religão como tradução, reflects on the persistence in current scholarship of the terms Europeans
originally elaborated to understand Tupí culture, while Tupí efforts to ‘translate’ Europeans has been largely
forgotten.
40 Pratt, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, 33–40.
41 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 137.
42 The term ‘agent’ captures both the flavour of individual actors and their role as cultural double-agents,
evoking the stigma of inauthenticity or disloyalty such movement across cultural boundaries can inspire, both in
history and in historiography. See, for example, Vainfas’s study of the Mameluco Jesuit-turned-apostate, Manoel
de Moraes, in Traição.
43 The classic statement of this thread in Brazilian historiography is Vianna Moog’s Bandeirantes e pioneiros.
On their role in the creation of a slave society as well of frontier expansion in Brazil, see, for example, Metcalf,
‘The Entradas of Bahia’.
44 The term is from Metcalf, Go-betweens.
45 Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge.
46 On the European side, this lacuna is a reflection of the limitations of archives. Such figures as Gonzalo
Guerrero, Diogo Álvares, and João Ramalho left little in the way of primary testimony. Perhaps the most poignant
example of the indio ladino, an indigenous person with European cultural and linguistic fluency, is Felipe
Guamán Poma de Ayala, whose indictment of the Spanish colonial system lay forgotten in the Danish royal
library till 1908. See Adorno, Guaman Poma.
47 On the tendency of historians to overstate the capacity of past imperial states to acquire and sustain
dominance, see Hopkins, ‘Back to the Future’. See also Pagden, Lords of All the World.
48 Subrahmanyam notes that an accommodationist attitude towards local context was exhibited by a variety of
colonial actors as late as the early nineteenth century in southern India (Subrahmanyam, ‘Profiles in Transition’).
49 In the field of Portuguese imperial history, studies generally focus on one region of the far-flung empire.
See Coates, ‘The Early Modern Portuguese Empire’, 83–90.
50 New attempts to connect Latin American and Asian history include Seijas, Asian Slaves. Scholars of Jesuits
have also been pioneers in this regard: see Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions; Clossey, Salvation and
Globalization; Hosne, The Jesuit Missions.
51 See the pioneering efforts of Gilbert Joseph and Floencia Mallon to found a Latin American school of
Subaltern Studies: Joseph, ‘On the Trail’; Mallon, ‘The Promise and Dilemma’. The beginning of the postcolonial
turn in Latin American scholarship was heralded by the 1993 special issue of Latin American Research Review
(vol. 28, no. 3). South Asianist engagement with Latin American history has been negligible.
52 See, for example, Klor de Alva, ‘Colonialism and Postcolonialism’; Moya, ‘A Continent of Immigrants’,
24.
53 This seminal definition of colonialism derives from Balandier, ‘La situation colonial’.
54 Cabral, ‘National Liberation and Culture’.
55 Mamdani, When Does a Settler Become a Native?
56 Wolfe, Settler Colonialism, 2.
57 Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 19, 33.
58 Quijano, ‘Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad’.
59 Randles, ‘“Peuples sauvages”’.
60 Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World, 35.
61 Though published only in 1595, the second published text on the indigenous languages of the Americas,
Anchieta’s Arte de Gramática da lingua mais usada na costa do Brasil (Art of the Language Most Used on the
Coast of Brazil) was composed between 1555 and 1556. On language ecology in colonial Brazil, see Lee,
‘Conversing in Colony’.
62 The Padroado, literally meaning patronage, was the arrangement between the papacy and the Portuguese
Crown that ceded to the latter the right to administer various aspects of the church in its domains.
 From each According to their ability
To each according to their need
1013

FROM CONTACT TO ‘CONQUEST’

Dispatches from the Pepper-Land

It was in the year 904 AH the Portuguese made their first appearance in Malabar … On this occasion, they
did not engage themselves in any trade. The main purpose of their trip to Malabar, according to their own
accounts, was to seek information about the pepper-land and to establish trade in that commodity, for at that
time they were buying pepper from other traders who export pepper from Malabar.1

This is how Sheikh Zainuddīn Ma‘abari II described the arrival of the Portuguese on the shores
of his homeland in present-day Kerala. The banal, almost matter-of-fact tone is suggestive of the
kind of reception these newcomers may have received upon their arrival in the busy ports of
Malabar, where strangers seeking to make their fortune in pepper were hardly unusual. If this
was the beginning of the age of discoveries, the thrill appears to have been sensed only by the
Portuguese (see Figure 1.1).
When Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope, he stumbled into a world webbed by
various networks predicated on certain cultural attitudes towards the Indian Ocean. Very
quickly, the Portuguese, who brought with them wholly new legal and cultural attitudes towards
the sea, disrupted these networks. Unlike other merchants drawn to Malabar by the seductive
warmth of pepper, as early as their second expedition, the Portuguese displayed a penchant for
violence. If their initial arrival was met largely with indifference, their later intrusions quickly
elicited a vigorous tradition of anti-Portuguese polemics from indigenous observers, alarmed at
the new mode of political action these strangers had brought with them.
Figure 1.1 The Malabar Coast in 1498
Source: The author (drawn by William Nelson).

The first of these polemicists was the noted scholar Sheikh Zainuddīn Ma‘abari I (1467–
1521). The son of a Yemeni migrant to Kochi (Cochin), and nephew to a celebrated scholar and
judge of that city, he moved with his uncle to Ponnani after he was orphaned. He was educated
in Kozhikode (Calicut), before leaving Malabar to study with prominent Egyptian scholars and
various Sufi masters. Following his studies and pilgrimage to Mecca, he returned to Ponnani and
built a great mosque there, which became a major centre of religious learning. His descendants
served as scholars and religious leaders of the Muslim community from the pearl coast of Tamil
Nadu to Mangalore in Karnataka.
Among his extensive Arabic corpus was the poem Tahrīd Ahlilmān ala Jihādi Abdati Sulbān
(An Exhortation to Believers to Fight against the Cross-worshippers). Written within two
decades of the arrival of Vasco da Gama, the poem described the conditions the Portuguese had
brought to Malabar through vivid images of captivity:
[The Portuguese] tyrannized [us] in Malabar …
Taking people captives …
Enslaving the believers …
And putting them into narrow quarters
Like sheds for senseless sheep.2

His grandson, Zainuddīn Ma‘abari II, deepened his analysis of the Portuguese intrusion and
continued this polemic tradition. Educated at his family’s famous madrasa in Ponnani, the
sheikh also studied in Mecca and Medina with important jurists and Sufi scholars. Upon his
return to Malabar, he taught at Ponnani and kept up his scholarly connections in the Arab world.
Aside from his academic life, the sheikh was a statesmen of import, cultivating relationships
with the rulers of Bijāpur and serving as the envoy of the Samūtiri of Kozhikode on diplomatic
missions to Egypt and Turkey, in part to garner military support against the Portuguese. Among
his extensive writings is an Arabic text entitled Tuḥfat al-Mujāhidīn fī ba’ḍ al-akhbār al-
Burtughāliyyīn (Gift of the Holy Warriors in Matters Regarding the Portuguese). Composed in
Malabar in the 1570s, the book was dedicated to ‘Ali ’Ādil Shāh, the ruler of the Deccan
sultanate of Bijāpur, to mobilize a Muslim military response to the Portuguese.
In his explication of jihād (holy war), the sheikh mentions two sorts of obligations towards
two sets of unbelievers. The first is the group that dwells permanently in the land of Muslims,
the second those who invade Muslim territories. The latter is what the sheikh claims Malabar is
experiencing. This is intriguing in that he essentially classifies the territory of Hindu rulers as
Muslim land. As he explains:
It is well known that the Muslims of Malabar do not have a leader … All of them are subjects of the rulers
who are non-believers. Notwithstanding, [these rulers] kept on fighting their foreign enemies who were
trying to dominate [the Malabari Muslims]. They have already spent their wealth to the extent of their means
in the cause of this struggle, with the generous help from the Muslim-friendly [Samūtiri].3

In Sheikh Ma‘abari II’s analysis, the category of the other is a complex enmeshing of the
separate categories of foreigners (to Malabar) and unbelievers (to Islam). The Portuguese, as
foreign unbelievers, are unquestionably the other, the interloper, and the antagonist of this text.
But the non-Muslim rulers of Malabar, and particularly his patron, the Samūtiri of Kozhikode,
known to the Portuguese as the Zamorim of Calicut, are contrasted favourably with foreign
believers, the sultans and emirs of the Muslim world who had ignored the plight of Malabar’s
Muslims.
The cross-cutting ways in which belonging to the diasporic world of the ummah (the
community of Muslims) and to the locality of Malabar mark Sheikh Ma‘abari II’s own
relationship to Malabar is evident in his description of the peoples of the land. He describes his
Hindu neighbours, among whom his family had lived for generations, with the ethnographic
detachment of a foreigner, not unlike the tone of sixteenth-century Portuguese chroniclers like
Duarte Barbosa. In the chapter devoted to the ‘very strange and unique customs … prevalent
among the Hindus in Malabar, such as not seen anywhere else in the world’, he noted that the
local matrilineal custom
of denying inheritance to male children [had] crept into the families of the Muslim community in Kannur
(known as Cannanore to the Portuguese) and the neighboring places. They read the Qu’ran; they learn it by
heart; they recite it beautifully; they acquire religious learning; they perform prayers and other forms of
worship; yet it is extremely strange and surprising that this custom prevails among them.4

Belonging in the Indian Ocean world was thus inherently multilinear, interlacing diasporic
and local relationships to space and people. Yet, before the Portuguese the open structure of
Indian Ocean port cities allowed such modes of being to flourish, without a sense of internal
contradiction. The sheikh’s history of Malabar prior to the arrival of the Portuguese is
instructive in this regard:
A party of Jews and Christians with their families arrived in a big ship in Kodungallur, the port city of
Malabar … They secured from the king grants of lands, plantations and houses and thus they settled there.
Some years later, there arrived at Kodungallur a party of Muslims, who were poor, with a sheikh … on their
way to visit the footprint of our father Adam in Ceylon. When the king heard about their arrival, he sent for
them … [T]he sheikh informed the king about Prophet Muhammad and the religion of Islam … [T]he king
asked the sheikh and his companions to call on him on their return journey [so] he might go with them.5

He then recounts how the king went to Shāhar al-Mukalla and perished there, after instructing
his Muslim emissaries to bring back a letter in Malayalam outlining his testamentary desires.
This included provisions for land grants to his emissaries, who built mosques in Kollam,
Ezhimala, Barkur, Mangalore, and other places.
The event was remembered by both Hindus and Muslims in Malabar, in garbled mythic
forms, both of which the sheikh dismisses. These myths, however, reflected a process of
fragmentation that gave the Malabar coast its particular political landscape. The first Malayalam
chronicle, Kēraḷōlpatti, reflective of a Nambūtiri brahmin perspective, identifies this legendary
king as Cēramān Perumāḷ, the last of the line of Cēra kings. His disappearance precipitated the
supersession of Cēra rule, lasting roughly between the ninth and twelfth centuries, by a host of
competing successor states, including that of the Samūtiri of Kozhikode; the Porḷātiri and the
Kurumbiatiri, whose lands lay on the outskirts of the dominion of the Samūtiri; the Kōlatiri of
Kannur, and the chiefs of Kochi and Valluvanad.6 The Kēraḷōlpatti reports a striking injunction
given by Cēramān Perumāḷ to Manavikraman, the governor of Eranad and future Samūtiri, to
‘conquer by courting and conferring death’. Symbolically, the chronicle reflected an
understanding that the dissolution of the Cēra state ushered in a process of political
fragmentation and competition among its erstwhile feudatories.
The Sheikh’s account too reflected this process: he recounted that the Samūtiri, who arrived
late to the meeting in which the partition of Malabar was effected, was only bequeathed a sword
by Cēramān Perumāḷ, along with the instruction to ‘grab power fighting with this’.7 He noted
that the rulers ranged from chieftains ruling over territories as small as three and a half square
miles with troops as meagre as a hundred soldiers, to those who commanded extensive lands and
armies numbering a hundred thousand or more. Coalition rule was not uncommon. The principal
players, according to the sheikh, were the Tiruvadi, the ruler of the territories between Kollam
and Kanyakumari (whom the Portuguese identified as the king of Quilão); the Kōlattiri, ruler of
Kannur, and the Samūtiri. The sheikh, ever loyal, contended that the last was the greatest of the
Malabari rulers, in part because of his treatment of Muslims, especially foreign Muslims.8 He
also described the rules of political contest in Malabar, where the subjugation of weaker rulers
would traditionally cause the vanquished to accept a tributary relationship with the conqueror or,
occasionally, forfeit his kingdom entirely. Nonetheless, the sheikh noted, ‘If the subdued king
does not give, he would not be forced to do so though a long time may lapse in waiting.’9
The sheikh’s history and description of pre-contact Malabar is instructive for our purposes
for two reasons. First, the internal world of Malabar was characterized by a continual contest for
sovereignty through territorial control and tributary recognition, mainly between the
principalities of Kochi and Kozhikode. Moreover, as the founding mythology of the post-Cēra
world suggests, this continual struggle was never marked by an ambition for total and final
conquest—in other words, of imperial dominion in a European key.
By contrast, the coastal world of Malabar was remarkably peaceful, its cosmopolitanism
maintained through mercantile and pilgrimage networks. Port cities in the early modern Indian
Ocean often escaped the normal rules of state sovereignty internal to South Asia.10 The
economic reasons for this are clear: as the sheikh noted, the governments of Malabar exacted
one-tenth of profits from trade as tax and did not tax land. Maintaining the open structure of
these port cities, in part through religious tolerance, was thus crucial to the economic survival of
these polities.
The Portuguese newcomers did not respect this formula. The sheikh made this clear when he
described their second advent into Malabar, in stark contrast to the ways in which Islam arrived
there. He noted that they approached the Samūtiri’s officers ‘with a request to stop the Muslims
from their trade and trade voyages to Arabia, promising to pay double the loss’ that would be
incurred. When the Samūtiri responded with an order to capture and kill ‘the Portuguese
invaders’, they moved to his rival’s port in Kochi and built their first fort. They also ‘demolished
a mosque … and built a church in its place’.11
Despite their ostensible mandate to enter the spice trade, the second Portuguese convoy, led
by Pedro Álvares Cabral, clearly harboured religious ambitions. As the sheikh explained, with
each successive wave of Portuguese arrivals, they increased not only their volume of trade but
also their political influence, exploiting the rivalries of Malabar’s polities to their advantage and
engaging in violence to assert their will. Over time, as their own trade grew, from their base in
the feitoria (fortified trading-post), the Portuguese instituted a system of licences for sea travel,
thus cementing the opposition of the Samūtiri and his supporters.
Sheikh Ma‘abari II’s text, though couched in the language of religious jihād, is actually a
call to defence of the older form of sovereignty and openness that characterized the Indian
Ocean port cities before Portuguese arrival.12 He speaks on behalf of his non-Muslim rulers, as
well as his Hindu, Jewish, and Christian neighbours, in calling Muslim foreigners to come to the
defence of Malabar’s imperiled coastal world. As Eng Seng Ho puts it,
 From the European perspective, what was strange about this rich world of the Indian Ocean and its
international economy was that no one state controlled it, or even had the idea of doing so. The Portuguese
… were the first to think of this ocean as a unity and to thereby dream up a systematic strategy to
monopolize the means of violence within it … The marriage of cannon to trading ship was the crucial, iconic
innovation.13

Yet, for all their novelty, for much of the subcontinent, far from being the harbingers of a
new Euro-centric world order, these interlopers were minor characters in the dramatis personae
of political life. The Kēraḷōlpatti’s description of the early battles of the Portuguese with
Kozhikode focuses not on these foreigners, but on the origin of the adoption of
Vettakkorumakan as the lineage deity of the Kurumbiatiri and subsequent struggles over temple
lands and ritual offices.14 From the viewpoint of the brahmin authors of the chronicle, such
internal politics were of far greater consequence than the (mis)deeds of the foreigners. Beyond
those communities such as the Muslims and, later, the Syrian Christians, whose religious lives
depended upon access to the Indian Ocean, as Veluthat notes, ‘Portuguese pretensions of an
overseas empire did not have any effect on the people of Kerala.’15

Waving from the Beach

Affonso Lopez … captured two well-built natives who were in a canoe … One of them caught sight of the
captain’s collar, and began to signal with his hand towards the land and then to the collar, as though telling
us there was gold in the land … Then food was given them; bread and cooked fish, comfits, cakes, honey,
and dried figs. They almost would not eat anything, and if they tried some things they threw them out … One
of them saw some white rosary beads; he signalled that they should give them to him … He made a sign
towards the land and then to the beads and to the collar of the captain, as if saying they would give gold for
that. We interpreted it so, because we wanted to. But if he meant that he would take the beads and the collar
too, we did not wish to understand because we did not intend to give it to him.16

This is how Pero Vaz de Caminha, secretary to Pedro Álvares Cabral, described the first
meeting with the indigenous inhabitants of what Caminha called the island of Vera Cruz in his
iconic letter of 1 May 1500 to D. Manuel. Following in the wake of Vasco da Gama, Cabral had
made landfall on the coast of Brazil on his diplomatically disastrous expedition to Malabar,
where a riotous mob would later kill Caminha. The letter would bequeath a series of powerful
tropes that came to structure European beliefs about Brazil: from the mirage of the land as an El
Dorado, to the idea that the gentiles of Brazil were denizens of a nearly Edenic nature. Fittingly,
from his perspective, these gentiles were innocent of the trappings of known civilization such as
clothing, organized religion, a state capable of monumentalizing itself, or even significant
internal social differentiation. The image was of lasting appeal precisely for the reason Caminha
himself suggested: ‘[a]ny stamp we wish may be easily imprinted upon them’, such that the
indigenous inhabitants of Brazil were not so much people, as clay to be moulded in the image of
the Christian European.
Caminha also bequeathed perhaps the most lasting idea of the method by which to begin this
process of ‘imprinting’, of ‘taming’ these peoples: their purported love of European things.
From the white rosary beads to the ‘other trifles of little value’ exchanged most cunningly for
gorgeous indigenous artifacts like the feather capes that Cabral sent to D. Manuel, Caminha
noted time and again the indigenous fascination and desire for European things. This was
especially marked for the iron tools they observed the Portuguese carpenters using, for, ‘they
have nothing of iron’. This belief in the indigenous love for European things as crucial to
contact and its inevitable corollary, ‘pacification’, has persisted into the present day, with
missionaries, state functionaries, and even anthropologists continuing to treat this as an article of
faith.17
Yet, as Caminha himself acknowledged when he revealed that they chose to interpret their
interlocutors’ actions as they wished, the letter is a testament to European wishfulness and a
projection of their own predilections. That Caminha chose to read every interaction as an index
of the indigenous amenability to barter or conversion reveals much about the Portuguese
understanding of contact, but not much about how their interlocutors themselves experienced it.
Caminha reacted with contempt when the enticements of European things failed to produce the
desired effect upon their indigenous guests: ‘The other two, whom the captain had had on the
ships and to whom he had given those things already mentioned, did not appear here again—
from which I gather them to be bestial people, of little knowledge and thus timid.’
Lacking indigenous textual evidence, the rich body of contemporary ethnographic work
from Brazil provides us with interpretive clues. It might elucidate the seeming contradiction
between Caminha’s belief in the irresistible allure of European things and the apparent
indigenous indifference to it. As Fernando Santos-Granero argues in his survey of contemporary
Amazonian sociality, beyond the two poles of convivial consanguinity and the common practice
of turning enemies into affines, one of the modes in which indigenous peoples seek out
relationships with potentially predatory strangers is through trading partnerships. Inter-tribal
trade in the ecology of lowland South America, however, cannot be reduced to product
differentiation, economic self-interest, or even political alliances, since trading partnerships
rarely culminate in marriage exchanges. Given the fact that even headmen were not
distinguished from other villagers by economic privileges, the logic of profit through trade was
irrelevant. Therefore, the exchange of goods to maintain trading partnerships was less important
for the goods acquired than for the formalized friendships they helped facilitate, a reversal of the
value system Caminha exemplifies.18 This might explain why, once indigenous needs for iron
tools were satisfied for subsistence and cultural needs, Portuguese attempts to barter labour for
such material enticements failed. As Stuart Schwarz brilliantly observes, indigenous peoples
steadfastly refused to respond to the ‘market’ conditions the Portuguese attempted to create.19
Moreover, far from encountering these strangers with the guileless receptivity of innocent
children, the indigenous peoples of Brazil approached contact with a judicious mix of curiosity
and caution. Perhaps the most telling sign of this caution was the reaction to strange food.
Commensality is both fraught with danger and rich with significance—and not just in Brazil, as
any student of caste in South Asia can attest. In the particular case of Amazonia, ‘[f]ood
consumption appears less as an activity directed towards the production of a generic physical
body, and more as a device for producing related bodies’.20 In other words, the act of eating
together is often constitutive of kinship. Moreover, ethnographic studies of indigenous lowland
traditions across Brazil attest to a particular view of the body as constantly open to
transformation.21 In this context, eating the food of foreigners carried the risk of the physical
transformation of oneself.22 The refusal of Portuguese food indicated that the indigenous men
Cabral and his crew ‘captured’ were far from uncritically receptive to the foreigners. The same
caution was apparent in their refusal to allow the Portuguese to spend the night at the longhouses
in their villages, a space of domesticity and kinship.
In maintaining their boundaries, the indigenous actors in this encounter nonetheless proved
to be curious and open-minded. Nowhere was this more apparent than in their reaction to the
performance of the mass. On Friday, as the friars and priests led a procession, singing and
chanting ahead of those who carried the cross, a group of over two hundred indigenous people
gathered to observe the ritual. Many of them copied the liturgical gestures performed by the
Portuguese, kneeling in silence with hands lifted in a manner that Caminha found exemplary.
After communion, however,
[o]ne of them, a man of fifty or fifty-five years … gathered those who had remained and even called others.
And walking among them, he talked to them, signaling with his finger to the altar, and afterwards he pointed
his finger towards the Sky, as though he were telling them something good; and we took it thus.

For Caminha, their pious behaviour during the mass and their acceptance of little tin crucifixes
were proof that ‘these people lack nothing to become fully Christian except to understand us, for
whatever they saw us do, they did too, thereby appearing to us all that they have no idolatry, nor
worship’. The trope was remarkably resilient: as we shall see, Manuel da Nóbrega repeated this
notion, verbatim, over half a century later. More importantly, Caminha missed the significance
of the shaman’s oral performance to his people: an attempt, it seems, to come to terms with the
discovery of a new source of cosmological knowledge.
In his seminal 1627 history of Brazil, Frei Vicente do Salvador characterized this encounter
as the indigenous recognition of white men ‘as divine, and more than men, and thus called them
Carahibbas, that is to say in their language something divine’.23 The classic colonial trope of the
indigenous misidentification of white men as gods is hardly unique to the history of encounter in
the New World.24 Frei Vicente do Salvador was correct in his assessment that the indigenous
interest in these strangers was in part centred on their status as strangers conveying new
cosmological knowledge—not as gods, but as karaíba or travelling shaman-prophets. Even the
manner of procession to the mass, led by a singing priest, lent itself to this indigenous
interpretation, akin to how karaíba would enter enemy territory.
Missionaries would later emulate precisely these indigenous religious figures, adopting their
practices to better accommodate the Christian message to indigenous tastes. Yet, this indigenous
openness to others rarely translated into uncritical and unwavering faith, as they continued to
test the efficacy of the Portuguese shamans and their strange gods.25 Still, Caminha’s belief in
the simplicity and malleability of indigenous belief systems persisted. Blinkered by their
expectations of what ‘religion’ looks like, European observers failed to appreciate the thickness
and resilience of indigenous cosmologies, to their enduring frustration.
If Caminha failed to observe the intricacies of indigenous cosmology, he had even less
access to the demographic complexity of coastal Brazil. Far from being an ‘island’ peopled by
undifferentiated gentiles, the Brazil Caminha and his compatriots had wandered into was a
deeply politically fragmented world (see Figure 1.2). By one recent estimate, the peoples of
Brazil, coastal and inland, comprised some 2,000 distinct groups, representing 40 or more
language families broadly categorized into Tupí, Macro-Gê, and Arawak languages.26
Moreover, though most of the coastal societies shared broadly similar cultural attributes,
including a common language known as the língua geral da costa, the peoples who came to be
known as the Tupí did not exhibit any formal, stratified political unity above the village level.
They were as likely to consider inimical competing segments of Tupí society as non-Tupí,
usually Gê-speaking groups, who came generically to be known as the Tapuía.27 While multi-
family village units might temporarily agglomerate, the networks of alliance and kinship that
bound several villages were inherently contingent and mutable and did not imply the
development of larger political units.28
Neither diversity nor political fragmentation was unique to the New World. What was new,
however, was a particular attitude towards territorial sovereignty, different again from the
regime the Portuguese had encountered and disrupted on the coast of Malabar. Advances in
archaeology and anthropology from the 1960s onwards have uncovered fascinating patterns of
Amerindian occupation of land and dispelled the long-standing trope, originating with Caminha
himself, that the peoples of Brazil, lacking monumental states and settled agriculture, left no
mark on the untouched nature of the land.29 Indeed, in their own dichotomous classification of
the peoples of the coast as Tupí or Tapuía, the Portuguese noted among the former greater
degrees of sedentary settlement, including horticultural activity, as one of their distinguishing
features.30 Even the Tupí, however, showed a relationship to land use predicated first and
foremost upon mobility, undergirded by cosmological imperatives.31 In short, sovereignty was
not tied to continuous occupation of land.
Figure 1.2 Coastal Brazil, Mid-Sixteenth Century
Source: The author (drawn by William Nelson).

If indigenous use of land did not conform to European notions of territorial kingdoms,
indigenous headmen were not local equivalents of kings. The status conferred no particular
economic privilege. Leading largely by consent, their responsibilities included mobilizing
warriors against enemy villages, and organizing social and material life, including the
contracting of strategic marriages and deciding when and where to resettle a village community.
Headmen operated at the level of the multi-family unit, or maloca, the village and occasionally
pan-village alliances, cobbled together usually for the purposes of war. Authority subtended
from their prowess and reputation as warriors, but equally from their charisma and ability as
orators. These rhetorical skills were used as much to galvanize warriors, as to impart knowledge
of the history and traditions of the community in organizing daily life.32
The other figures of authority within the village, to whom even headmen acquiesced, were
shamans or pajés. Following long apprenticeships with experienced shamans, pajés were
considered gifted healers. Their ability to transcend their own species perspective allowed them
to mediate between the world of men, spirits, and animals. The pajés, unlike the wandering
prophets or karaíbas, were resident in their communities.
The karaíbas, able to traverse enemy territory, used their rhetorical skills to exhort villagers
to seek the land without evil, whose spatial coordinates were new lands of spiritual and material
revival, and whose temporal axes were both the abode of dead ancestors and the future destiny
of warriors who had killed and eaten human flesh.33 In other words, their function was to
maintain an enemy-centric cosmology, in which the attainment of personhood depended upon
one’s status as a warrior and the successful accomplishment of anthropophagic and sacrificial
rituals. They also lubricated the constant mobility that shaped spiritual, material, and political
life. In this world, European notions of territorialized sovereignty were absurd.
The trope of a people without faith, law, or king that crystallized around the indigenous
inhabitants of Brazil reflected the European inability to imagine other kinds of cosmology and
sovereignty.34 Viewing them in this light, untouched by the corruptions of either power or
idolatry, Caminha saw only boundless opportunity. He urged the king to send priests to baptize
the peoples of this new ‘island’, who would by then be better prepared by the two convicts
remaining behind to receive the faith. He closed his letter to D. Manuel by indicating that in
Brazil the greatest opportunity afforded was religious; even if it remained only ‘a rest-stop for
this voyage to Calicut’, the conversion of the indigenous people would suffice as sufficient
reason to invest in this new land.
In light of the zeal Caminha demonstrated upon the shores of Brazil, perhaps it is
unsurprising that by the time they made landfall in Calicut, he and his compatriots were willing
to risk violent conflict to pursue their exclusionary religious aims. Still, for the first three
decades, the Portuguese impact on indigenous society was mostly negligible. An early extractive
trade in brazilwood was successful, in so far as it did not unduly stress Tupí social structures and
norms.35 Beyond occasional exploratory missions and this trade, indigenous society had little
interaction with Europeans.

Girding the Earth, Binding the Ocean

Upon his return to Portugal, Pedro Álvares Cabral presented the first accurate assessment of
Portuguese prospects in India. His travails had raised doubts among several notable figures in
the court regarding the usefulness of ‘a conquest so remote and of such dangers’.36 Thus, before
dispatching a second fleet under the command of Vasco da Gama, D. Manuel convened several
councils. The chronicler João de Barros informs us that the discussions centred on whether or
not to undertake commerce in India with arms or to focus on trade with Guinea and Ethiopia,
where the natives had proved themselves to be peaceful. Dispelling Vasco da Gama’s
misconception of the Christian faith of the Samūtiri, Cabral impressed upon the king and his
counsellors that, between Goa and Kochi alone ‘there were more Moors than all those facing us
on the coast of Africa between Ceuta and Alexandria’.37 Downplaying his own misbehaviour,
Cabral emphasized the implacable hostility of these Moors. Fearing the loss of their trade, they
stood as the chief obstacle to the conversion of and commerce with gentiles. Referring to his
experience, Cabral claimed that not only did the Portuguese not ‘have the hand of the gentiles of
the land, but had to rely on their large number of ships and many soldiers, more than any other
commodity’ to further their purpose.38 Cabral’s belligerence carried the day, aided by D.
Manuel’s desire to fulfil the destiny of his lineage in expanding his kingdom. When Vasco da
Gama returned to Malabar, he came as an aggressor.
While the Portuguese experiences in the north Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa were
an early experiment in colonization, this was not the blueprint of the experiment in the Indian
Ocean.39 From the beginning, this new enterprise was marked by a deep, though often
productive, tension. Despite the Crown’s desire to monopolize the seaways, noblemen and
captains—foremost among them Vasco da Gama and his family—viewed this oceanic space as a
playground for private profiteering and raiding.
The sporadic skirmishes with Moorish ships and indigenous kings did not crystallize into a
systematic project of power until the governorship of Francisco de Almeida. Appointed in 1505,
he was instructed to secure and fortify several east African ports, including Kilwa and
Mombasa, strategic points in the Arabian Gulf, as well as Ceylon and Melaka, to provide a
series of safe harbours for Portuguese ships traversing the Cape route across the Indian Ocean.
This early plan would come to fruition a few years later when the governor Afonso de
Albuquerque conquered key chokepoints of the Indian Ocean trade (Goa, Melaka, and Hurmuz),
between 1510 and 1514. Holding these fortified ports, the Portuguese were able to tax and
control the Asian trade through the mechanism of the cartaz (sea licence or pass).40 (It was
precisely this system of licensing and control that had drawn the ire of Sheikh Ma‘abari I, who
accused the Portuguese of penning his people in like ‘senseless sheep’.)
These developments went neither unnoticed nor unanswered: potentates across the Indian
Ocean were galvanized to resist the Portuguese assault on the status quo of their trading world.
Yet, the complexities of diplomatic relations among indigenous powers made it difficult to
coordinate efforts to dislodge the Portuguese.41 In 1509, when the joint forces of the Samūtiri,
the Mamlūks of Egypt, and the Sultan of Gujarat, supported by both the Ottomans and Venice,
were defeated at Diu, the Portuguese had established their naval dominance in this new arena
decisively.
The following year, Albuquerque established what would become the spoke in the wheel of
the Estado da Índia: the imperial city of Goa. Given the precarity, however unintentional, of the
hospitality of their ally in Kochi, the need for a permanent and sovereign foothold was
increasingly apparent. Goa, a lightly defended port of the sultanate of Bijāpur, whose military
strength was largely directed towards the Deccan interior, was an attractive prize, not least
because of its importance as a trading entrepôt for war horses from the Arabian Gulf. Following
the death of Yūsuf ‘Ādil Shāh, while his successor was occupied with fending off challenges in
the interior, Albuquerque seized the town, aided by the Hindu merchant Timayya (known in
Portuguese sources as Timoja). For the next two years, Albuquerque vigorously defended Goa
from Bijāpur’s attempts to retake their territory, in which enterprise the ‘Ādil Shāh was nearly
successful. From these dubious beginnings, Goa became the centre of the vast networks of the
Estado da Índia, with the capital moving officially from Kochi to Goa in 1530.42
The coastal region of Goa, prior to the arrival of the Portuguese, had not been the seat of a
major polity itself. As an area that had existed at the edges of the great kingdoms and empires of
the interior, local life was left mostly untouched by ruling regimes. Villages were dominated by
gāunkārs or the male patrilineal descendants of those considered the original inhabitants of a
village. Gāunkār lineages, hailing from upper castes, held land in common. Labour, organized
along caste lines, was divided such that lower castes served subservient ritual and productive
functions to the gāunkārs. Gāunkārs administered the villages, including standing surety for tax
payments due to the ruling regime. They also reserved for themselves ritual privileges at most
village festivals and in the general functioning of the temple. Lower castes received at best
subsistence plots or, more usually, shares in harvests; temple lands, by contrast, reserved for the
maintenance of the village cult and those who performed ritual functions, were often the most
fertile. While larger temple cults may have been dedicated to a pantheon of brahminical gods
familiar across broader swathes of South Asia, lineage and village deities bound to each locality
were of prime importance. These deities protected an agricultural society, in which the careful
maintenance of village lands and boundaries was of prime material and symbolic import.43
This basic structure, it seems, had persisted through different regimes, although there is
evidence that the Bijāpuri regime had begun a more interventionist policy, focused on displacing
the local gāunkārs with their own military functionaries.44 This may explain, perhaps, why the
Portuguese found willing allies among the local population when they seized Goa. Accordingly,
the 1526 Foral, Portuguese Goa’s foundational fiscal charter, was at pains to document the
nature of village administration and the gāunkār system and to maintain it largely untouched,
while extracting as much revenue as possible.45 It was not till 1649 that the state would deem
itself the direct owner of all communal lands, thus rendering the gāunkārs tenants.46
Figure 1.3 South and Central India, Mid-Sixteenth Century
Source: The author (drawn by William Nelson).

In these lands, formerly marginal to the great polities of central India, Goa rose as a
Portuguese imperial city, marked by a closed structure quite unlike earlier Indian Ocean ports. In
addition to the militarization of trade shipping, the institution of heavy fortifications, and the
licensing of seaways, in Goa a systematic attempt to impose a religious monopoly was effected,
including through judicial discrimination against non-Catholic resident. Harsh rules of escheat
allowed the Crown to seize the property of Hindus who died without male heirs and public
celebrations of non-Catholic rituals were increasingly curtailed.47 Over time, particularly after
the 1540s, the push towards evangelization became more militant; inducements were replaced
by more coercive measures, including a systematic campaign to destroy the temples of the
region.
There were costs to this policy of religious exclusion in Portuguese port cities. The later
history of Melaka is instructive here. While the Portuguese initially tried to retain the original
social structure of the city, over time, they increasingly fortified it and imposed religious
restrictions, first and foremost by increasing tax rates for non-Christian traders exorbitantly. The
exodus of various ethnic and religious mercantile communities not only led to the decreased
profitability of their own trade, but it also nourished the rival sultanates of Johor and Aceh, who
welcomed these immigrants. These sultanates then increasingly posed credible military threats
to the Portuguese.48
Nor was this imperial model embraced universally by the Portuguese—casados or private
traders not only resisted the centralizing impulses of the Crown and its representatives, but
themselves emigrated, living in bandéis as part of the ethnic mosaic of various Indian Ocean
port cities.49 These settlements, far from being formal extensions of the Estado, were considered
explicitly illegal and were often at direct odds with the empire—though scholars have contended
that their actions too furthered the Portuguese imperial project.50
Nonetheless, at this early stage, the establishment of Goa was the culmination of a
remarkably rapid rise to power for the Portuguese in the theatre of the Indian Ocean and the
beginnings of an explicitly imperial project. While the Venetians scrambled to find alternative
routes, the Portuguese monopoly of the spice trade in Europe proved very lucrative, and their
naval dominance stood unparalleled.
By the mid-1520s, significant threats began to emerge in the maritime sphere as other
powers sought to break this monopoly.51 Combined with chaotic internal power struggles, such
was the condition of the Estado by 1529 that D. Jaime, the Duke of Bragança, was advocating
the abandonment of Portuguese holdings in Asia in order to consolidate their limited strengths in
North Africa.52
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the 1530s saw efforts to extend the fledgling imperial project in new
directions. Attention again swerved towards the new world, in part because of the worrying
presence of French corsairs along the Brazilian coast, threatening the monopoly of the oceanic
route to India. The Spanish discovery of silver in Potosí also reignited the desire to find another
El Dorado in Brazil.53 In December 1530, Martim Afonso de Sousa embarked from Lisbon for
an exploratory expedition to Brazil. Erecting padrões (large stone crosses erected by Portuguese
explorers as a claim of Portuguese sovereignty) along the coast and capturing French ships laden
with brazilwood, the expedition signalled the Crown’s newfound intent to assert its sole
sovereignty over the land. After founding the key southern coastal settlement near Piratininga,
the expedition returned to assure D. João III of the favourability of the conditions in Brazil for
colonization.54
Over the next few years, the Crown established donatory captaincies across Brazil to
stimulate the colonization and development of the region. In a pattern perfected in the Atlantic
islands, these captaincies were constituted by the carta da doação, a quintessentially medieval
mechanism for the devolution of political sovereignty, which allowed the captain to govern
beyond the jurisdiction of royal officials. He could found towns and appoint local officials,
exercise extensive jurisdiction in criminal and even civil cases, and make individual land grants
or sesmarias at his discretion. Monopolies in salt, grain, and sugar pertained to the captain. He
received a portion of revenues collected for the Crown, could enslave a certain number of
indigenous people and was exempt from personal taxes. This was, in effect, a blueprint for the
notions of individual autonomy and sovereignty that came to define the colonial planter class.
The captaincy was also governed by a foral, which set out the rights of settlers and the
Crown’s prerogatives. The Crown retained monopolies in brazilwood and spices, and the royal
fifth for any precious metals or gems that might be mined. Treasury officials sent to each
captaincy safeguarded the Crown’s interests. The foral also provided incentives to stimulate
colonization, including immunity for settlers from crimes committed before coming to Brazil;
the right to trade with the indigenous population; the right to receive sesmarias and obtain titles
after five years of cultivation, and exemption from various taxes.
Despite these inducements, the Crown’s push towards colonization was stymied, partly due
to the difficulty of governing a group of settlers freed from the strictures of metropolitan law. Of
the twelve donataries, only São Vicente and Pernambuco truly prospered, and the lives of the
remaining band of settlers remained precarious. They were vulnerable both to the depredations
of the French and to indigenous enemies, provoked to understandable hostility by Portuguese
attempts to enslave them. Nonetheless, Martim Afonso de Sousa had laid the groundwork for the
nascent colony of Brazil before leaving for India.
In the search for profit, the Portuguese attempted to compel indigenous labour for the
colonial project. Increasingly, this required forcible enslavement, because of ‘the divergent
outlooks of Portuguese and Indians toward the nature of labor and production’.55 Though
enslavement of the indigenous population did not solve the problem of unreliable labour, even
after the large-scale importation of African slaves after the establishment of the sugar industry in
the 1580s, the practice continued. As the coast was denuded of indigenous peoples through a
combination of devastating epidemics and flight, regular expeditions into the interior, often
facilitated by mixed-race Mamelucos, ‘descended’ indigenous slaves from the backlands of the
sertão to coastal plantations. As Alida Metcalf puts it, this sixteenth-century trade was ‘the first
manifestation of a phenomenon that would repeat itself in later centuries in São Paulo, Minas
Gerais, Goiás, and Amazonia’. Though the dramatic influx of African slaves added yet another
element to this evolving society based on frontiers and plantations, this bandeirismo or informal
expansionist movement in the backlands ‘would make Indian slavery an integral part of the
colonial Brazilian economy and society’.’56
Even as efforts were made to penetrate the interior of Brazil, the 1530s was a period of
territorial consolidation around Goa, including the establishment of the província do Norte
centred on Chaul, Bassein, and Bombay. Under the leadership of Martim Afonso de Sousa, who
had overseen a similar process in Brazil, the Estado da Índia took what Sanjay Subrahmanyam
characterizes as a limited terrestrial turn, with the piecemeal establishment of a system of
aforamentos or land grants. The shift was timely, for renegados (renegades) had begun to accept
land grants from rival Asian states, and soldiers and noblemen voiced their fatigue at constantly
having ‘one foot in the water’.57
Nonetheless, large-scale territorial ambitions at the expense of continental states in the east
were rightly seen as beyond the realm of possibility. The Portuguese instead functioned as a
regional player in an indigenous theatre of power.58 By the early 1540s, they were observing
carefully the changing balance of power in the Deccan heralded by the death of Achyuta Deva
Raya, the emperor of Vijayanagara. The Portuguese were unable to capitalize upon this
opportunity, however. The resultant political turmoil culminated in the battle of Talikota in
1565, when the Vijayanagara empire was crushed by the combined force of the Deccan
sultanates. The ensuing transformation of the Vijayanagara Nāyakas from imperial functionaries
to petty kings in their own right further complicated the power dynamics of the region.59
Not only was the Deccan and its southern Indian neighbourhood the site of intense and
complicated political competition, but the region also witnessed a remarkable flowering of the
rituals and symbolism of power and state building, drawing on local religious traditions and
ideologies.60 Further north, the upheavals of Humayun’s reign would give way in the next
decade to the rise of the Mughal empire under Akbar. In this environment, the Portuguese were
at best minor players, embroiled in but unable to set the terms of local politics. The crisis of the
mid-sixteenth century—when the Portuguese recognized their inability to enforce a spice
monopoly in Europe to counteract the mounting costs of their Asian possessions—led to a
strategy focused on exploiting Asian trade networks, further cementing their status as regional
players.61 Not only did they find themselves in an environment that boasted many models of
power, statehood, and empire, the Portuguese were often directly dependent upon the goodwill
of indigenous polities in the Indian Ocean system.
By contrast, in Brazil, after the intermittent French and Dutch attempts to establish colonies
in the region and the later extraordinary kingdoms of Palmares, there was no sustained rival to
the Portuguese mode of state building. This is not to say that the colonial state was omnipotent
—far from it. As in the Estado da Índia, the Portuguese were internally divided and the
mounting private authority of the planter class could and did pose a serious obstacle to the
Crown. This dynamic in part explains a mode of settlement that Richard Morse described as
occurring in ‘an archipelago pattern’, such that the frontiers of the colony should be read ‘more
as interpenetration than as advance’.62
By the 1540s, therefore, when the first Jesuits arrived on the scene, the Portuguese Crown
had limited capacity to exert its will in both Brazil and South Asia, albeit for very different
reasons. Moreover, despite the responsibilities towards the spread of the Catholic faith made
incumbent upon the king by the Padroado with the final papal confirmation of the arrangement
in 1514, the institutional infrastructure of the Church in these locations remained scanty: as late
as 1700, the vast territory of Brazil would be the seat of only three bishoprics.
In this context, the arrival of newly minted missionaries of the Society of Jesus, full of
activist zeal, would have profound effects for the Portuguese project of temporal and spiritual
dominion. They came to terrains marked by a dual difference. In South Asia, they faced a
landscape of complex indigenous polities and a disease ecology that rendered contact benign to
the indigenous population. Brazil, by contrast, was a land of stateless indigenous societies facing
demographic collapse through contact. In these vastly different environments, Francis Xavier
and Manuel da Nóbrega sought to forge a lasting Christian community.
 1 Ma‘abari II, Tuhfat al-Mujāhidīn, 49. The hereditary judges of Ponnani are often referred to with the
honorific Makhdūm, meaning master or one worthy of service.
2 Ma‘abari I, Ahlil Iman, 92–3.
3 Ma‘abari II, Tuhfat al-Mujāhidīn, 15.
4 Ma‘abari II, Tuhfat al-Mujāhidīn, 40.
5 Ma‘abari II, Tuhfat al-Mujāhidīn, 29.
6 Gundert, Keralolpatti. On the Kēraḷōlpatti as early indigenous ‘history’, see Veluthat, The Early Medieval in
South India, 129–46.
7 Ma‘abari II, Tuhfat al-Mujāhidīn, 34.
8 The symbiotic relationship between Muslim courtiers and the Samūtiri had old roots: Veluthat notes that the
hereditary Muslim nobleman in charge of the port city had first advised and assisted the Samūtiri to acquire the
right to preside over the major festival at the temple of Tirunāvāya, increasing the legitimacy of the ascendant
ruler (Veluthat, The Early Medieval in South India, 261).
9 Ma‘abari II, Tuhfat al-Mujāhidīn, 35.
10 Pearson, Merchants and Rulers.
11 Ma‘abari II, Tuhfat al-Mujāhidīn, 49–50.
12 Europeans were aware of the cosmopolitan nature of these cities. See, for example, the description of
Calicut and other Indian ports in the Syrian Christian Priest Joseph’s account, widely circulated in Europe (The
Voyage of Pedro Álvares Cabral, 109).
13 Ho, ‘Empire through Diasporic Eyes’, 218.
14 Gundert, Keralolpatti, 85–7.
15 Veluthat, The Early Medieval in South India, 267–8.
16 Caminha, ‘A Carta’.
17 On the belief in progress propelled by limitless desires among missionaries and state officials in
contemporary Amazonia, see Hugh-Jones, ‘Yesterday’s Luxuries, Tomorrow’s Necessities’.
18 Santos-Granero, ‘Of Fear and Friendship’, 3.
19 Schwarz, ‘Indian Labor and New World Plantations’.
20 Fausto, ‘Feasting on People’, 500.
21 Vilaça, ‘Chronically Unstable Bodies’; Viveiros de Castro, ‘Cosmological Deixis’.
22 For a striking account of how the consumption of foreign foods renders one physically foreign, such that
one is unrecognizable to one’s kin, see Oakdale, ‘The Commensality of “Contact”’.
23 Salvador, História do Brasil, 5.
24 The classic debate between Gananath Obeyesekere and Marshall Sahlins on this issue was based on the
Pacific encounter. Obeyesekere views this trope as self-aggrandizing European myth-making, while Sahlins
challenges his defence of indigenous ‘rationality’ as based upon a mistaken and problematic universalization of
Eurocentric standards of thought. See Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook; Sahlins, How ‘Natives’
Think.
25 Lévi-Strauss, in his work on indigenous mythology and the encounter between Amerindians and whites,
noted this openness to alterity, as opposed to the European emphasis on identity. Other anthropologists, most
notably Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, have continued to document the other-centric cosmology of Brazil’s
indigenous peoples (Lévi-Strauss, The Story of Lynx).
26 Langfur, ‘Recovering Brazil’s Indigenous Pasts’, 9.
27 Monteiro, ‘The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies’, 973–4.
 28 Monteiro, ‘The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies’, 982–3.
29 On the archaeological evidence of a rich and thriving pre-contact civilization, see Roosevelt, ‘The Rise and
Fall of the Amazon Chiefdoms’.
30 Monteiro, ‘The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies’, 975.
31 Monteiro notes the frequent references to taperas or abandoned settlements in the colonial archive as
evidence of the temporary nature of indigenous settlements. See Monteiro, ‘The Crises and Transformations of
Invaded Societies’, 983. On land use, mobility, and cosmology, see Chakravarti, ‘Invisible Cities’.
32 Monteiro, ‘The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies’, 983–5.
33 Fausto, ‘Fragmentos de história e cultura Tupinambá’, 381–96.
34 The locus classicus of this trope was Pero de Magalhães Gândavo, who claimed that the Tupí lacked the
letters ‘f’, ‘l’, and ‘r’ in their language, ‘a thing worthy of awe for thus they have neither fé (faith), nor lei (law),
nor rei (king), and thus live in a disorderly manner without justice’ (Magalhães Gândavo, Tratado da Terra do
Brasil, chapter 7).
35 Schwartz, ‘Indian Labor and New World plantations’, 43–79.
36 Barros, Décadas, 2.
37 Barros, Décadas, 5.
38 Barros, Décadas, 3.
39 Fernández-Armesto, The Canary Islands. For a seminal interpretation of the impulses to expansion in the
mid-fifteenth century, see Thomaz, De Ceuta a Timor, 1–41.
40 Bulhão Pato, Cartas de Affonso de Albuquerque, I, 1, 269–71; 370–1; II, 311; III, 206, 268–76.
41 On the diplomatic high-wire act of the Sultan of Gujarat, caught between the Mughals, the Ottomans, and
the Portuguese, see Alam and Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World, 34–89.
42 For a seminal analysis of this process, see Madeira-Santos, Goa é a Chave.
43 Kosambi, Myth and Reality, 156–71.
44 Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, 333.
45 Cunha Rivara, Archivo Portuguez Oriental, 118–33.
46 See ‘Assento do Conselho da Fazenda declarando o Estado senhorio directo das terras aldeanas e
prohibindo doação dellas, July 5, 1649’, 236–7.
47 Derrett, Essays, 131–65.
48 Sousa Pinto, ‘Purse and Sword’.
49 Bandéis (plural of bandel, a Portuguese corruption of the Persian bandar, meaning port or harbor) could
refer to any ethnic settlement in a locality (bandel dos guzerates, bandel dos portugueses).
50 Thomaz, ‘Portuguese Control on the Arabian Sea’; Subrahmanyam, ‘The Tail Wags the Dog’; Bernardes de
Carvalho, ‘A “Snapshot” of a Portuguese Community in Southeast Asia’.
51 See, for example, Casale, ‘The Ottoman Administration of the Spice Trade’.
52 Subrahmanyam, ‘Making India Gama’.
53 On these complex motivations, see the classic work by Buarque de Holanda, Visão de paraíso.
54 For an account of the expedition, see Sousa, Diario de Navegação.
55 Schwartz, ‘Indian Labor and New World Plantations’, 47.
56 Metcalf, ‘The Entradas of Bahia’, 375.
57 Subrahmanyam, ‘Holding the World in Balance’.
58 Subrahmanyam, ‘Holding the World in Balance’, 1372.
 59 Here, Burton Stein and Noboru Karashima’s otherwise very different interpretations coincide: both see the
growing power of the Nāyakas as local feudal lords as crucial to this final period in Vijayanagara history (Stein,
Vijayanagara; Karashima, A Concordance of Nayakas).
60 See Stein’s Vijayanagara on the use of architecture in representing power in the empire. On the indigenous
evolution of rituals of power and strategies of state building amongst the Nāyakas, see Rao, Shulman, and
Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance. On the relationship of religion and power in indigenous state building in
the Deccan, see Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur.
61 Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia.
62 Morse, The Bandeirantes, 30–1.
 I
IN SEARCH OF THE INDIES
Another random document with
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novelty, and I do not see why Catholics should not keep to it and
leave the outline of history alone. I do not say that it is a line of
apologetics that would convince me altogether, but it is one that
would need far more arduous discussion and merit, far more respect
than Mr. Belloc’s a priori exploits, his limping lizards and flying pigs.
But it is not my business to remind Catholics of their own
neglected philosophers, and clearly the publication of Mr. Belloc’s
articles by the Universe, the Catholic Bulletin, and the Southern
Cross shows that the Catholic world of to-day is stoutly resolved to
treat the fall of man and his unalterable nature as matters of fact,
even if they are rather cloudy matters of fact, and to fight the realities
of modern biology and anthropology to the last ditch.
So the Catholics are pinned to this dogma of the fixity of man
and thereby to a denial of progress. This vale of tears, they maintain,
is as a whole a stagnant lake of tears, and there is no meaning to it
beyond the spiritual adventures of its individual lives. Go back in time
or forward, so long as man has been or will be, it is all the same. You
will find a world generally damned, with a select few, like Mr. Belloc,
on their way to eternal beatitude. That is all there is to the spectacle.
There is, in fact, no outline of history; there is just a flow of individual
lives; there is only birth and salvation or birth and damnation. That, I
extract from Mr. Belloc and other contemporary writers, is the
Catholic’s vision of life.

The Idea of Fixed Humanity

And it is not only the Catholic vision of life. It is a vision far more
widely accepted. I would say that, if we leave out the ideas of
damning or beatitude, it is the “common-sense” vision of the world.
The individual life is, to common-sense, all that matters, the entire
drama. There is from this popular and natural point of view no large,
comprehensive drama in which the individual life is a subordinate
part. Just as to the untutored mind the world is flat, just as to Mr.
Belloc during his biological research work in Sussex the species of
pig remained a “fixed type,” so to the common intelligence life is
nothing more or less than “Me,” an unquestioned and unanalysed
Me, against the universe.
The universe may indeed be imagined as ruled over and
pervaded by God, and this world may be supposed to have
extensions of hell and heaven; all sorts of pre-natal dooms and debts
may affect the career of the Me, but nevertheless the Me remains in
the popular mind, nobbily integral, one and indivisible, and either it
ends and the drama ends with it, or it makes its distinct and special
way to the Pit, or, with Belloc and the Catholic community, to the
beatitude he anticipates.
The individual self is primary to this natural, primitive, and
prevalent mode of thinking. But it is not the only way of thinking
about life. The gist of the Outline of History is to contradict this self-
centred conception of life and show that this absolute individualism
of our thought and destinies is largely illusory. We do not live in
ourselves, as we so readily imagine we do; we are contributory parts
in the progress of a greater being which is life, and which becomes
now conscious of itself through human thought.

The Fundamental Issue

Now here I think we get down, beneath all the frothings and
bespatterings of controversy, to the fundamental difference between
Mr. Belloc and myself. It is this which gives our present controversy
whatever claim it can have to attention. Neither Mr. Belloc nor myself
is a very profound or exhaustive philosopher. In ourselves we are
very unimportant indeed. But we have this in common, that we can
claim to be very honestly expressive of the mental attitudes of clearly
defined types of mind, and that we are sharply antithetical types.
By nature and training and circumstances Mr. Belloc stands for
the stout sensible fellow who believes what he sees; who considers
that his sort always has been and always will be; who stands by
accepted morals and time-honoured ways of eating and drinking and
amusement; who loves—and grips as much as he can of—the good
earth that gives us food for our toil; who begets children honestly by
one beloved wife until she dies and then repeats the same
wholesome process with the next; who believes in immortality lest he
should be sorry to grow old and die; who trusts in the Church and its
teaching because visibly the Church is a great and impressive fact,
close at hand and extremely reassuring; who is a nationalist against
all strangers because, confound it! there are nations, and for
Christendom against all pagans; who finds even Chinamen and
Indians remote and queer and funny. I do not think that is an unfair
picture of the ideals of Mr. Belloc and of his close friend and ally, Mr.
Chesterton, as they have spread them out for us; and I admit they
are warm and rosy ideals. But they are ideals and not realities. The
real human being upon this swift-spinning planet is not that stalwart,
entirely limited, fixed type resolved to keep so, stamping about the
flat world under God’s benevolent sky, eating, drinking, disputing,
and singing lustily, until he passes on to an eternal individual
beatitude with God and all the other blessed ones. He is less like
that every day, and more and more conscious of the discrepancy.
I have read and admired and sympathised with the work of Mr.
Belloc and Mr. Chesterton since its very beginnings, but I find
throughout it all a curious defensive note. It may be I attribute
distresses to them that they do not feel. But it seems to me they are
never quite sure in their minds about this “fixed” human being of
theirs—the same yesterday, now, and for ever. Mr. Belloc must be
puzzled not a little by that vast parade of Evolution through the
immeasurable ages which he admits has occurred—a parade made
by the Creative Force for no conceivable reason, since a “fixed type”
might just as well have been created straight away. He must realise
that if man is the beginning and end of life, then his Creator has
worked within fantastically disproportionate margins both of space
and time. And in his chapters upon animal and human origins Mr.
Belloc’s almost obstinate ignorance of biological facts, his fantastic
“logic,” his pathetic and indubitably honest belief in his non-existent
“European authorities,” his fumbling and evasion about Palæolithic
man, and above all his petty slights and provocations to those whose
views jar upon him, have nothing of the serenity of a man assured of
his convictions, and all the irritability and snatching at any straw of
advantage of a man terribly alarmed for his dearest convictions.
When Mr. Belloc gets to his beatitude he will feel like a fish out of
water. I believe Mr. Belloc and his friend Mr. Chesterton are far too
intelligent not to be subconsciously alive to the immense and
increasing difficulties of their positions, and that they are fighting
most desperately against any conscious realisation of the true state
of affairs.

The Idea of Progressive Humanity

It happens that my circumstances, and perhaps my mental
temperament, have brought my mind into almost dramatic opposition
to that of Mr. Belloc. While his training was mainly in written history,
the core of mine was the analytical exercises of comparative
anatomy and palæontology. I was brought up upon the spectacle of
life in the universe as a steadily changing system. My education was
a modern one, upon material and questionings impossible a hundred
years ago. Things that are fundamental and commonplaces to me
have come, therefore, as belated, hostile, and extremely distressing
challenges to the satisfactions and acceptances of Mr. Belloc.
Now, this picture of a fixed and unprogressive humanity working
out an enormous multitude of individual lives from birth to either
eternal beatitude or to something not beatitude, hell or destruction or
whatever else it may be that Mr. Belloc fails to make clear is the
alternative to beatitude—this picture, which seems to be necessary
to the Catholic and probably to every form of Christian faith, and
which is certainly necessary to the comfort of Mr. Belloc, has no
validity whatever for my mind. It is no more possible in my thought as
a picture of reality than that ancient cosmogony which made the
round earth rest upon an elephant, which stood upon a tortoise,
which stood upon God-knows-what.
 I do not know how the universe originated, or what it is
fundamentally; I do not know how material substance is related to
consciousness and will; I doubt if any creature of my calibre is
capable of knowing such things; but at least I know enough to judge
the elephant story and the fixed humanity story absurd. I do not
know any convincing proof that Progress must go on; I find no
invincible imperative to progressive change in my universe; but I
remark that progressive change does go on, and that it is the form
into which life falls more and more manifestly as our analysis
penetrates and our knowledge increases. I set about collecting what
is known of life and the world in time and space, and I find the broad
outline falls steadily and persistently into a story of life appearing and
increasing in range, power, and co-operative unity of activity. I see
knowledge increasing and human power increasing, I see ever-
increasing possibilities before life, and I see no limits set to it all.
Existence impresses me as a perpetual dawn. Our lives, as I
apprehend them, swim in expectation. This is not an outline I have
thrust upon the facts; it is the outline that came naturally as the facts
were put in order.
And it seems to me that we are waking up to the realisation that
the individual life does not stand alone, as people in the past have
seemed to imagine it did, but that it is far truer to regard it as an
episode in a greater life, which progresses and which need not die.
The episode begins and ends, but life goes on.
Mr. Belloc is so far removed from me mentally that he is unable
to believe that this, clearly and honestly, is how I see things; he is
moved to explain it away by saying that I am trying to “get rid of a
God,” that I am a rotten Protestant, that this is what comes of being
born near London, that if I knew French and respected the Gentry all
this would be different, and so on, as the attentive student of his
great apology for Catholicism has been able to observe. But all the
while he is uncomfortably on the verge of being aware that I am a
mere reporter of a vast mass of gathered knowledge and lengthened
perspectives that towers up behind and above his neat and jolly
marionette show of the unchanging man and his sins and
repentances and mercies, his astonishing punishments, and his
preposterous eternal reward among the small eternities of the
mediæval imagination. I strut to no such personal beatitude. I have
no such eternity of individuation. The life to which I belong uses me
and will pass on beyond me, and I am content.

The New Thought and the Old

Mr. Belloc is completely justified in devoting much more than half
his commentary to these fundamental issues and dealing with my
account of the appearance of Christianity and the story of the Church
much more compactly. It is this difference at the very roots of our
minds which matters to us, and it is the vital question we have to put
before the world. The rest is detail. I do believe and assert that a
new attitude to life, a new and different vision of the world, a new
moral atmosphere and a different spirit of conduct, is coming into
human affairs, as a result of the scientific analysis of the past
hundred years. It is only now reaching such a clearness of definition
that it can be recognised for what it is and pointed out.
The essential distinction of the newer thought in the world is in
its denial of the permanence of the self and in its realisation of the
self’s comparative unimportance. Even in our individual lives we are
increasingly interested in common and generalised things. The older
commoner life, the religious life just as much as the most worldly life,
seems to us excessively self-conscious. The religious life, its
perpetual self-examination for sin and sinful motives, its straining
search after personal perfection, appears in the new light as being
scarcely less egotistical than a dandy’s. And this new way of living
and thinking is directly linked on to the idea of progress, which
makes life in general far more interesting than any individual life can
be, just as the self-centred life, whether it be religious and austere or
vain or self-indulgent, is directly connected with the old delusions of
permanence which rob life in general of any sustained interest.
When one is really persuaded that there is nothing new under the
sun, then there is nothing worth living for whatever outside the
personal adventure, the dance between permanent individual
beatitude or permanent individual damnation.
As this modern conception of life as a process of progressive
change in which individuality of our order can be sometimes
excessively exaggerated as it has been in the past and sometimes
minimised as is happening now—as this conception establishes
itself, it changes the spirit of living and the values of our general
ideas about living profoundly. Lit only by a very bright light held low,
an ordinary road becomes a tangle of vivid surfaces and black
shadows, and you cannot tell a puddle or a gutter from a ditch or a
precipice. But in diffused daylight you can see the proportions of
every irregularity. So too with changing illumination our world alters
its aspects, and things that once seemed monstrous and final are
seen to be mere undulations in a practicable progress. We can
realise now, as no one in the past was ever able to realise it, that
man is a creature changing very rapidly from the life of a rare and
solitary great ape to the life of a social and economic animal. He has
traversed most of this tremendous change of phase in something in
the nature of a million years. His whole being, mind and body alike,
betrays the transition. We can trace the mitigations of his egotism
through the development of religious and customary restraints. The
recent work of the psycho-analyst enables us to understand
something of the intricate system of suppressions and inhibitions that
this adaptation to a more and more complex social life has involved.
We begin to realise how man has symbolised and personified his
difficulties, and to comprehend the mechanisms of his uncongenial
but necessary self-restraint.

Old Wine in New Bottles

The disposition of those who apprehend this outline of history
that modern science has made plain to us, and who see all life as a
system of progressive change, is by no means antagonistic to
religion. They realise the immense importance and the profound
necessity of religion in this last great chapter of the story, the
evolution of human society. But they see religion within the frame of
fact; they do not, like Mr. Belloc, look through religion at fact. Man
has accommodated his originally fierce and narrow egotism to the
needs of an ever wider and more co-operative social life, very largely
through the complex self-subjugations that religion has made
possible. Within the shell and cover of religion the new less self-
centred habits of mind have been able to develop. An immense
mass of imaginative work, of mythology, of theology, that now seems
tortuous, mystical, and fantastic, was necessary for the casting of the
new moral being of socialised man. We seem to be entering upon a
phase in which moral and intellectual education may be able to free
themselves from the last vestiges of the mythology in which that new
moral being was moulded; but it is ungracious and false to the true
outline of history to deny the necessary part that the priest, the
sacrifice, the magic ceremonial for tribal welfare, the early tribal
religions, have played in this transfiguration of the sub-human into
the modern human mind, upon which all our community rests to-day.
It is because of our sense of this continuity of our present
dispositions with the religions upon which they are founded that so
many of us are loth to part with all the forms and phrases of the old
creeds and all the disciplines of time-honoured cults. Perhaps some
of us (the present writer in the crowd among others) have been over-
eager to read new significances into established phrases, and clothe
new ideas in the languages of the old scheme of salvation. It may be
we have been pouring new wine into old bottles. It may be better to
admit frankly that if man is not fixed Christianity is, and that mankind
is now growing out of Christianity; that indeed mankind is growing
out of the idea of Deity. This does not mean an end to religion, but it
means a fresh orientation of the religious life. It means a final
severance with those anthropomorphic conceptions of destiny, that
interpretation of all things in terms of personality and will with which
religion began. For many of us that still means a wrench and an
effort. But the emphatic assertions of Mr. Belloc, the stand that
Catholicism, as he expounds it, makes against any progressive
adaptation to the new spirit in human life, may render that effort
easier.
 In this examination of Mr. Belloc’s opening and more
fundamental attacks upon the Outline of History I have shown
sufficiently that Mr. Belloc is incapable of evidence or discussion,
that he imagines his authorities, that he is careless and ignorant as
to his facts and slovenly and tricky in his logic. I have dealt kindly but
adequately with his atrocious bad manners and his insolence and
impudence. I do not think it is worth while to go on through the
second half of his outpourings with any particularity. It is exactly the
same kind of thing, but upon more familiar ground and less
fundamental issues. Mr. Belloc quibbles. He falsifies. For example,
he imagines traditions to reinforce the Gospel account of Christ’s
teaching and to show that the founder of Christianity was aware of
his godhead and taught the doctrine of the Trinity; he declares—just
out of his head—that I do not know it was the bull and not Mithra
who was sacrificed in the system of Mithraism, though I state that
quite plainly in a passage he has ventured to ignore. And so on. The
wonderful methods of the Palæolithic bow story repeat themselves
with variations, time after time. Why should I trouble to repeat the
exposure in every case? I have done enough to demonstrate the
quality of this effort to bluff and bawl away accepted knowledge and
manifest fact, and that is all that I set out to do.
And this apparently is the present state of Catholic teaching.
This stuff I have examined is the current utterance of organised
Christianity, so far as there is any utterance, upon the doctrines of
the Creation and the Fall—doctrines upon which rest the whole
scheme of Christian salvation and the entire fabric of a Christian’s
faith.
 Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made
consistent when a predominant preference was found in the
original book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced
quotation marks were remedied when the change was
obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced. Several apparent
misspellings may be intentional, and have not been changed.
Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between
paragraphs and outside quotations.
Page 69: Page 69: “Mr. Belloc will get if he says” probably
is missing an “it” after “get”.
Page 95: Part of the last paragraph was misprinted.
Transcriber has attempted to correct that error. The original
text was:

And this apparently is the present state of

Catholic teaching. This stuff I have examined is
ance of organised Christianity, so far as there is
representative stuff. This is the current utter-
ance of organised Christianity, so far as there is
any utterance, upon the doctrines of the Creation
and the Fall—doctrines upon which rest the whole
scheme of Christian salvation and the entire fabric
of a Christian’s faith.
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MR. BELLOC
OBJECTS TO "THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY" ***

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