“Throwing Off Their Masks”: Reading a Catechist Rebellion in a French Jesuit Mission in South India

In the late seventeenth century, French Jesuits arrived in India and joined their Portuguese, Spanish and Italian brethren in an attempt to claim the subcontinent for Christ. In this they were assisted by Indian catechists – local Christians who were employed as interpreters and religious intermediaries. This paper examines in detail a catechist rebellion which took place in Madurai in 1700, when three Tamil catechists became apostates and brought about the arrest of the French Jesuit heading the Madurai mission. This account of the catechist rebellion, and an examination of its subsequent narration in Jesuit letters, makes possible a reflection on the complex relationship between the Jesuit missionaries and the native converts they employed. The catechist rebellion reveals the multi-layered and sometimes contradictory expectations held by missionaries and catechists. Although catechists are mentioned in the Jesuit letters only in passing, and then in mostly positive terms, I argue that this relationship should be understood as both central to the Jesuit experience in India, and as one in which the missionaries exhibited a muted anger, even violence, toward the catechists. Therefore, the catechist rebellion in Madurai should not be understood as a rupture, but rather as an extreme instantiation of the tensions and conflicts common to Jesuit-catechist relations.