The Absent Vedas.

• Author: Sweetman, Will

By the early eighteenth century, a strange dichotomy was apparent in European views of the Vedas. In Europe, on the one hand, the best-informed scholars believed the Vedas to be the most ancient and authoritative of Indian religious texts and to preserve a monotheistic but secret doctrine, quite at odds with the popular worship of multiple deities. The Brahmins kept the Vedas, and kept them from those outside their caste, especially foreigners. One or more of the Vedas was said to be lost--perhaps precisely the one that contained the most sublime ideas of divinity. By the 1720s scholars in Europe had begun calling for the Vedas to be translated so that this secret doctrine could be revealed, and from the royal library in Paris a search for the texts of the Vedas was launched.

In India, on the other hand, the missionaries, who--overwhelmingly--were responsible for the best information on Indian religious literature that had reached Europe, took a quite different view. Many doubted whether the Vedas still existed; some that they had ever existed. All realized the much greater significance for daily religious life in India of other texts, mostly texts in vernacular languages. The missionaries reported that most Brahmins knew little of the Vedas and often did not well understand even the little that they did know. The only European to have read parts of the Vedas before the 1720s--the Jesuit Roberto Nobili--knew the Vedas described sacrifices to multiple deities. He called these deities idols and thought Vedic ideas superstitious rather than sublime. It was another Jesuit, Etienne Le Gac, who responded to the call from Paris in the 1720s for copies of the Vedas. In his first response he wrote that the whole venture was useless. Five years later, even as he dispatched copies of the Vedas to Paris, he predicted--accurately--that the books would serve only as a spectacle in Europe, and he repeated that he thought acquiring them a waste of money.

What accounts for this dichotomy in European views of the Vedas? Here I argue that it is ultimately the absence of the Vedas, in Europe but also in India, that explains both views. Until well into the eighteenth century the view from Europe was shaped primarily by just one early report of the Vedas. This was contained in an account of "the opinions, rites and ceremonies of the Gentiles of India," written by a Portuguese friar, Agostinho de Azevedo, most likely in the late 1580s. His brief statement on the Vedas was recycled in every major European language throughout the seventeenth century and even late in the eighteenth century, half a century after the first manuscripts of the Vedas had arrived in Europe. But Azevedo, like almost all missionaries writing on Hinduism prior to the 1720s, in fact relied on vernacular--in his case, Tamil--texts for his own account of Indian religious belief. References to these sources were, however, excised by those who repeatedly plagiarized his account.

The view from India was shaped by the absence of the Vedas in most Indian religious practice. The best seventeenth- and eighteenth-century accounts of Indian religion, penned mostly by missionaries in the south of India, were primarily based on other literature--Vedic only in the broadest sense. Their works were mostly not published until long after missionary Orientalism was superseded by Company Orientalism and the Vedas proper were finally studied by British Orientalists in north India in the last years of the eighteenth century. In the meantime, Europe's obsession with the Vedas had elevated a pseudo-Veda--the Ezour-Vedam, a work produced among the same group of Jesuits who first acquired the actual Vedas as a kind of preparatio evangelica--to the status of an important source for European discussions of Hinduism.

This article begins by examining European engagement with Hindu texts in the sixteenth century, demonstrating that despite Azevedo's early report on the Vedas and contrary to what is sometimes stated, it was vernacular texts that Europeans--including Azevedo--obtained, read, and translated. It will then be shown how the repeated copying of Azevedo's report in published European works on Indian religion in the seventeenth century established the reputation of the Vedas in Europe. By this time Jesuits had gained access to the Vedas and discovered they were far from monotheistic, but their works remained unpublished in the seventeenth century. The Protestant mission in India began in the early eighteenth century and at first followed the Catholic pattern of using vernacular texts. By the second quarter of the eighteenth century both Catholics and Protestants had to respond to demands from Europe that the Vedas be found and translated. The Vedas were obtained, but missionaries continued to emphasize the importance of other texts, and the texts sent to Europe remained unread. The article concludes by examining the relative ease with which collectors and scholars associated with the English East India Company obtained copies of the Vedas in the 1780s and 1790s and questions the view that it was primarily the prohibition on transmission of the Vedas to non-Brahmins that accounts for the gap of two centuries between the first European report of the Vedas and the first published scholarly studies of them.

THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY: THE PORTUGUESE IN INDIA

One of the earliest Portuguese writers on India, Duarte Barbosa, describes the Brahmins in Malabar as "learned in their idolatry," adding that they possessed many books and were held in great esteem by the rulers of the land. (1) In this respect they were quite different from the other idolatrous "Indians" the Spanish were encountering in the New World. In time, the literacy of Asian civilizations would force recognition of the need for quite different strategies of evangelization there, but in the 1520s the first episcopal visitor to Goa, Duarte Nunes, proposed that the Portuguese should proceed in the same way as the conquistadores in the Americas: destroying the temples of the idolaters and expelling from Goa any who would not convert. (2) It was not, in fact, until the early 1540s that orders were given for the destruction of temples in areas under Portuguese control and the diversion of their revenues to newly built Christian institutions. (3) It was in this context that Francis Xavier arrived in Goa in May 1542. At the end of 1543 Xavier was to add some critical details to Barbosa's image of the literate Brahmin idolater. Xavier encountered a Brahmin who revealed to him their secret monotheism: there was only a single God, creator of heaven and earth, and they worshipped this God and not the idols, which were demons. This doctrine was taught in their schools, but the Brahmins were obliged not to reveal it. Xavier added that they had books [scripturas], written in a learned tongue, which contained the commandments. (4) Already by the 1540s, then, Europeans had begun to establish an image of the Brahmins as literate and in possession of texts that taught a secret monotheism. It was these elements that would lead to calls for the Vedas to be obtained and translated. Only the idea of the antiquity of these texts, and their designation as Veda, were lacking at this point.

As soon as missionaries managed to obtain Hindu religious texts, however, a quite different image emerged. These were acquired by confiscation, in the context of competition and conflict between the Portuguese colonial and clerical establishments and their prominent clients and converts in Goa. In 1548 the Bishop of Goa, the Franciscan Juan de Albuquerque, described the seizure of some "gentile books" from the house of a prominent Hindu on the island of Divar, an area where many temples had been destroyed. The books were taken to Antonio Gomes, recently installed as the head of the Jesuit College of Saint Paul, founded in 1541 with the revenues from the destroyed temples of Goa. Before Gomes could find someone to read the texts, the Governor, Garcia de Sa, ordered that they be returned. (5)

Further texts were seized in the same way a decade later, during the period when the so-called "rigor of mercy," or forcible conversion of Goa, reached its height. In 1558 a Jesuit brother, Pedro d'Almeida, described the imprisonment, impoverishment, and even enslavement of those found in possession of images or other Hindu artefacts during raids that took place at the time of festivals such as Ganesh Chaturthi and Divali. (6) It was during Divali that a copy of a text called Anadipurana, in two volumes of more than a hundred folios, was seized in the house of a prominent Gentile. (7) This work is likely lost, but Almeida writes that a translation of the text had already begun, and copies were sent to Europe. (8) This was probably prepared for the new rector of the Jesuit college, Francisco Rodrigues, who took possession of this and other texts seized the following year. (9)

These latter texts represent the first targeted acquisition by the Jesuits of Hindu religious works. The texts were stolen by a young Brahmin, who had recently converted and taken the name Manuel d'Oliveira. The Jesuits reported more than three thousand conversions in Goa in 1559, but d'Oliveira's had been eagerly anticipated as he was reputed to be one of the most intelligent and learned of the Brahmins in Goa. With the Governor's permission, d'Oliveira led an expedition to steal books belonging to a Brahmin living outside the area under Portuguese control. This Brahmin had spent eight years assembling and translating from different ancient authors the works of "their principal prophet, who they call Veaco [Vyasa], who wrote the eighteen books of their law." (10) Having brought the books to the college, d'Oliveira began translating them, and Rodrigues quickly put them to use in preaching to Brahmins who were obliged by order of the Governor to assemble in the college on Sunday afternoons. Copies...