"We Prove It with the Words from Their Books and Because All These People Desire To Be Saved”: Missionary Accommodation in Early Modern South India

Religious conversion is a foundational event by its very definition, and it makes possible the apparition of places and landscapes unimaginable beforehand. In this paper, my aim is to critically examine and chronicle the experience of conversion as multiple acts of mediation in the early modern South India in the shadow of the Portuguese colonial engagements in the region. I will focus in particular on the socio-linguistic conversion in which Catholic missionaries and their Indian “translators” negotiated the shape of the language in which to express new spiritual and social identities. Accommodation, the famous Jesuit method of conversion applied in India between 16^th and 18^th century – was imagined as an in-between ground in which Christianity were to temporarily meet, and size up Indian religious practices and theologies before exfoliating what was considered “pagan” material. In India, implicit European colonial appetites and Catholic Christian universalism worked together to a point in dislodging and invading the public and the intimate space of the “converts”, but it was also often at loggerheads.

My paper will be in two parts.  I will show first how the European Jesuits, cast in the role of linguistic and cultural intermediaries adapted both their actions and narratives to sustain a double-bladed performance vis-à-vis the Christian communities and the superiors in Goa and Rome. Then I will turn to Goan Brahman Christians who reinterpreted and readapted the Jesuit missionary/intermediary role in their own 18^th century mission in Sri Lanka. Finally, by sifting through the missionary “archival” material I propose to unravel the filaments and the logic of cultural and religious mediation embedded in conversion, which is potentially contagious political, linguistic and spiritual act.