When Jesuit priests met devils ancl monsters in India

In early modern India, certain Hindu practices sparked a massive appetite for news of foreign lands among European travellers

- Manu S. Pillai

While the chief antagonists ofthe Jesuits in w the Mughal court were its Muslim scholars, [..] three fathers had observed some Hindu practice too. To begin with, they were annoyed that their escort spent a long time resting in the port of Surat, waiting for the stars to realign auspiciously before resuming the journey-a delay made less infuriating only by the sight of people arriving to look at their images of Mary and Jesus and according these the same honour Akbar would. In Mandu, they were puzzled to see *a fragment of a huge iron gun, being worshipped, while the festival of Holi, witnessed in Narwar, scandalized them: Where men and women celebrated the advent of spring, splashing each other with water and colours-a tradition still alive-the fathers saw *savage and degraded, public conduct. Thereafter in Gwalior, **thirteen rude statues," provoked their ire, though this may be because they suspected these monumental Jain sculptures as representing Christ and his apostles. Muslim sites too were decried, of course.. All in all, in their view, there was nothing to report on the way to Akbar but idolatry and fraud. India was a pagan land governed by only marginally better Islamic power.

Of course, everything the Jesuits conveyed passed through specific lenses of cultural difference and missionary exaggeration-a pattern built over several years. This was partly to loosen the purse strings of wealthy patrons at home, reminding them ofthe *barbaric, conditions in which the fathers toiled but partly also to entertain with tales ofthe unusual and exotic. After all, as the founder ofthe Society of Jesus wrote, there was a massive appetite in Europe for news of foreign lands. And such information-*sauce for the taste ofa certain curiosity,-was to be generously supplied..