Ines G. Županov

She showed that 16th century Jesuit missions in India adopted a calibrated approach to the conversion of Indians to Christianity. Instead of a complete conversion to "European" Christianity, they first translated, with Indian interpreters, key texts into local languages. They abandoned an insistence on proselytising and sermonising in Portuguese, instead encouraging the administration of sacraments in Tamil. This established a society of Indian believers who were then able to organise and fund religious charities and practices, thereby indigenising the faith. Ironically, the translation of Christian works into Tamil by the Jesuits and their interpreters included the rejection of colonial policies. The Jesuits' efforts caused a gradual revolt against the Portuguese language and, eventually, against Portuguese Christian domination.

Ines G. Županov (born 1955) is a Croatian historian and Indologist. She is a director of the Centre d’études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud and senior research fellow at the CNRS, Paris.

Ines G. Županov was born in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, in 1955. She graduated from the University of Zagreb with a degree in comparative literature and Indology in 1979. Her master's (1986) and doctoral degrees (1991) were from the University of California, Berkeley. She is based in Paris, but she has lived successively in Zagreb, Mumbai, Berkeley, Dakar, London, Pondicherry, Berlin, Bochum and currently resides in New Delhi.

By 1717, however, the Protestant evangelist and linguist Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg was to claim Tamil was peculiar, in the sense of distinctive, because its grammatical conjugation and declension was regular, and in terms of vocabulary, on par with Latin. This corresponds to Županov's assessment of another Jesuit, Henrique Henriques, who had compiled a Tamil grammar Arte da Lingua Malabar in 1549.

One of the "accommodative" Jesuit missions was that of Roberto de Nobili, whose evangelism extended deep into the Tamil country. Among his efforts was the attempt to remove the stigmatic name Parangi given by the Tamilians to the Europeans and their converts, a word that originated from farangi (meaning "foreign") but also given to low-caste people for their habit of drinking alcohol. While the Jesuits strove to evangelise on the basis of "kinship, friendship, and locality", they did so by hiding Hindu signs within Christian ones; Nobili went further by pretending that Hindu rites were secular and thus not a religious threat to a converted Christian. However, this caused consternation in the Catholic church's hierarchy in Europe, which feared that the Indian Catholicism was becoming contaminated. Initially, such accommodative practices were approved by the Church, but were outlawed on the basis of sacrilege in 1703.

Jesuit missionaries began to make close investigations of south Indian languages in the sixteenth century. They determined that Tamil fitted sufficiently into the Latin and Greek linguistic model such that they were able to analyse and teach it using their standard methodology. The Cartilha, published in 1554, compared the syntactic structures of Portuguese and Tamil. The authors found that Tamil was distant enough from the Classical languages that, according to Županov, the Portuguese consigned it and Tamil culture to a "barbarian" (or uncivilised) state, with an impoverished vocabulary. This view has been countered by others, suggesting that "outlandish" or "exotic" might be a better interpretation, as even dialectical differences from the standard were often called "barbarous".