Aristocratic Analogies and Demotic Descriptions in the Seventeenth-Century Madurai Mission

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Two JESUIT MISSIONARIES confronted each other in 1610 through letters and treatises, following what appeared to have been an intense, though brief, cohabitation in a distant mission at the heart of Tamil country. Roberto Nobili, a Roman aristocrat, schooled in the Collegio romano and a relative of the Cardinal Bellarmino, in his early thirties with about five years of experience in the Indian apostolic field, came under fire from an older colleague. His adversary was Goncalo Fernandes, a semi-literate Portuguese ex-soldier who for fifteen years had cultivated his Madurai Mission of Paravas, a low caste of fishermen converted by St. Francis Xavier.' The controversy started over the correct method of conversion, but it issued in two distinct proto-ethnographic accounts. The differences at stake can be understood at various levels: personal animosity, age difference, apostolic experience, status in an institutional hierarchy, national feeling, and social class. In the heat of the argument the two Jesuits came to perceive each other as other. In European seventeenth-century terminology, they suspected each other of falling victim to demonic influences. The translation of the smallest personal, political, or theological conflict into daemonomachia was a standard Jesuit (and not only Jesuit) strategy of both containment and annihilation. And it was precisely the discovery of this otherness within the European colonial, or in this case proselytizing, enterprise that fueled their opposing cultural descriptions of Tamil alterity. The gravity of demonic charges and counter-charges, although relatively subtle and prudent in the case of the controversy between Nobili and Fernandes, produced, to the historian's delight, a plethora of written documents bearing witness to the intellectual labor that brought them into being as well as their contingent, improvisational, and contesting origins. Nobili and Fernandes forced each other to assume in detail, as if on a distant horizon, the divisions and epistemological rifts that tore the European social and cultural fabric from within. While Nobili drew upon an aristocratic and humanist theological univer-