Evangelism in India Županov has suggested that Portuguese missionaries felt that there was an intrinsic geographical character to India that resisted
evangelism and led to
paganism. This resistance also contaminated European Christians and caused the meanings of the
gospels to be inverted. She showed that 16th century
Jesuit missions in India adopted a calibrated approach to the
conversion of Indians to
Christianity. Instead of a complete conversion to "European" Christianity, they first translated, with Indian interpreters, key texts into local languages. They abandoned an insistence on proselytising and sermonising in
Portuguese, instead encouraging the administration of
sacraments in Tamil. This established a society of Indian believers who were then able to organise and fund religious charities and practices, thereby indigenising the faith. Ironically, the translation of Christian works into Tamil by the
Jesuits and their interpreters included the rejection of colonial policies. The Jesuits' efforts caused a gradual revolt against the
Portuguese language and, eventually, against Portuguese Christian domination. One of the "accommodative" Jesuit missions was that of
Roberto de Nobili, whose evangelism extended deep into the Tamil country. Among his efforts was the attempt to remove the stigmatic name
Parangi given by the Tamilians to the Europeans and their converts, a word that originated from
farangi (meaning "foreign") but also given to low-caste people for their habit of drinking alcohol. While the Jesuits strove to evangelise on the basis of "kinship, friendship, and locality", they did so by hiding
Hindu signs within Christian ones; Nobili went further by pretending that
Hindu rites were secular and thus not a religious threat to a converted Christian. However, this caused consternation in the
Catholic church's hierarchy in Europe, which feared that the Indian
Catholicism was becoming contaminated. Initially, such accommodative practices were approved by the Church, but were outlawed on the basis of
sacrilege in 1703.
Tamil linguistics Jesuit missionaries began to make close investigations of south Indian languages in the sixteenth century. They determined that Tamil fitted sufficiently into the Latin and Greek linguistic model such that they were able to analyse and teach it using their standard methodology. The
Cartilha, published in 1554, compared the syntactic structures of Portuguese and Tamil. The authors found that Tamil was distant enough from the Classical languages that, according to Županov, the Portuguese consigned it and Tamil culture to a "barbarian" (or uncivilised) state, with an impoverished vocabulary. This view has been countered by others, suggesting that "outlandish" or "exotic" might be a better interpretation, as even dialectical differences from the standard were often called "barbarous". By 1717, however, the
Protestant evangelist and linguist
Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg was to claim Tamil was
peculiar, in the sense of
distinctive, because its grammatical conjugation and declension was regular, and in terms of vocabulary, on par with
Latin. This corresponds to Županov's assessment of another
Jesuit,
Henrique Henriques, who had compiled a Tamil grammar
Arte da Lingua Malabar in 1549. ==Books==