16th century European contacts with Hinduism

[Steve Farmer]

Jogesh Panda wrote:
>
> >Steve Farmer <saf at SAFARMER.COM> wrote:
> >....Vasco da Gama landed in Calcutta.
>
> Correction- Calicut [Calicutt, Kalikat on the Malabar coast], not Calcutta.

Thanks! That was a slip-of-pen that I couldn't fix myself
due to the Indology two-posts-a-day rule. (We're now in a new
official day.)

Here are three early responses from my Renaissance colleagues on 16th
century knowledge of India - in response to Valerie Roebuck's inquiry:

Response #1:

> For 1498 and later, the standard work on the subject is comprised of the
> relevant volumes of Donald Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, Univ. of
> Chicago Press, 1964 and on in 9 or so volumes, various reprints, including
> ones in paperback. Note that the discussion there is divided up between the
> 16th century and the 17th century (volumes). More than enough there to keep
> anyone interested busy for decades. A truly amazing work of scholarship. Too
> bad Lach and his later collaborator stopped with the 17th century.

Also see Lach's later monographs, e.g., _Asia in the Eyes of Europe_ (1991).

Response #2:

> From the arrival of Francis Xavier in Goa (1542) to the end of the 16th
> century the Jesuits saw the Indians as dark skinned idolaters and did not
> pay any attention to their philosophical traditions.  Intellectual
> exchanges began much later, in the first decade of the 17th century with
> the Jesuit missionary Roberto de'Nobili (1577-1656). He seems to have
> been the first Westerner to have understood India's complex caste system
> and to learn Sanskrit in order to debate with and convert Brahmins.
>
> Thus mutual first-hand knowledge of Indian intellectual culture is
> really a Baroque rather than a Renaissance phenomenon. See:
>
> Zupanov, Ines G.  Disputed mission : Jesuit experiments and Brahmanical
> knowledge in seventeenth-century India / New Delhi ; Oxford : Oxford
> University Press, 1999.

Zupanov should have copious updated bibliography. The book isn't yet
available at the research libraries that I frequent.

Response #3:

This one comes from a well-known French scholar. It doesn't
contain much useful data, but suggests that the question
about Indian/European contacts is _terra incognita_ for most
16th-century European historians:

> > > Does anyone know what Hindu religious and philosophical ideas would have
> > > been accessible in Europe by about 1585?
>
>     Well... hmmm... a tough one indeed. I've just had a look at an anthology in
> French of the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses de Chine par des missionnaires
> jésuites 1702-1776 eds Isabelle and Jean-Louis Vissière (Paris:
> Garnier-Flammarion, 1979), but they only refer to the 18th century. I would
> recommend your colleagues to try and look for some evidence about the
> "gymnosophistes" so often referred to by Voltaire as typical of Brahmanism. I
> assume they were the yogis, but I can't tell much more. There may be some
> earlier references to this term in geographies, chorographies or dictionaries
> somewhere. It may be one of the possible terms through which evidence can be
> reached.
>     Sorry to be so vague, but the right term to look for is difficult to
> imagine at a distance of 3 or 4 centuries.

No Renaissance
scholar whom I've polled has yet claimed to know anything of the
Indian texts mentioned by Ferroli, referred to in Valerie Roebuck's
note, that were supposedly sent to Rome c. 1559. Knowing something
about ecclesiastical archives in this counter-Reformation period, it
wouldn't surprise me if these texts never made it out of Jesuit
headquarters. That was common in the case of many missionary reports
sent to Europe in this era from Mesoamerica. It is not impossible that
these records may be accessible today, however. Possibly some
bibliographical guidance might be found in Giorgio Levi Della Vida,
_Richerche sulla formazione del più antico fondo dei manoscritti
orientali della Biblioteca Vaticana_. Vatican City, 1939, or more
recent works by this same author. I've found them useful in the past,
but I can't recall whether they cover Hindu as well as Islamic
manuscripts.

So far, it appears that the earliest known discussions of Indian
thought in the Renaissance took place in the interviews that Pico
della Mirandola held with his Indian informant in Florence in 1494,
mentioned in my earlier post.

Steve Farmer