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Journal of the American Oriental Society 139 .4 (2019) 781
The Absent Vedas
Will S weetman
University of Otago
The Vedas were first described by a European author in a text dating from the 1580s, which was subsequently copied by other authors and appeared in transla- tion in most of the major European languages in the course of the seventeenth century. It was not, however, until the 1730s that copies of the Vedas were first obtained by Europeans, even though Jesuit missionaries had been collecting Indi- an religious texts since the 1540s. I argue that the delay owes as much to the rela- tive absence of the Vedas in India—and hence to the greater practical significance for missionaries of other genres of religious literature—as to reluctance on the part of Brahmin scholars to transmit their texts to Europeans.
B y 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 responsi-
ble 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, Étienne 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 Aze-
vedo, most likely in the late 1580s. His brief statement on the Vedas was recycled in every
Author’s note: In preparing this article, I benefitted greatly from discussions with Christophe Vielle, Joan-Pau Rubiés, David Lorenzen, and Linda Zampol D’Ortia. I am grateful to all of them; responsibility for any errors that remain is mine.
782 Journal of the American Oriental Society 139.4 (2019)
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 mission-
ary 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 schol-
ars 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
- Duarte Barbosa, O livro de Duarte Barbosa: Edição crıt́ica e anotada. Vol.2: Prefácio, texto crítico e apên- dice , ed. Maria Augusta da Veiga e Sousa (Lisbon: Instituto de Investigação Cientıfí ca Tropical, 2000), 163. Bar- bosa, a writer at Cochin and Cannanore in the first decade of the sixteenth century, was renowned for his knowledge of Malayalam but he records no attempt to read any Indian works.
784 Journal of the American Oriental Society 139.4 (2019)
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 Veaço
[Vyāsa], 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 preach-
ing to Brahmins who were obliged by order of the Governor to assemble in the college on
Sunday afternoons. Copies were also made and sent to Europe, but Fróis notes that these
were done by young students in the college who made many errors, and that there had not
been time to improve the translations or compare them to the original. 11 The copies extant in
Europe include texts in both Marathi and Konkani, mostly episodes from the Mahābhārata
and Rāmayāṇa , as well as translations into Portuguese. 12
These texts became important sources for the Jesuits in Goa. As well as being put to use in
sermons against the Brahmins, Jesuits used these texts well into the seventeenth century. They
served as models for Christian works in Marathi like Thomas Stephens’s Kristapurāṇa (1616)
and Étienne de la Croix’s Discursos sobre a vida do Apostolo Sam Pedro (1629), 13 and as
sources for vocabularies like those composed by Diogo Ribeiro (1626) and Miguel d’Almeida. 14
Together with the Anādipurāṇa , they informed the accounts of Indian religion in Jesuit histo-
ries by Alessandro Valignano (1584) and Sebastiam Gonçalves (1614). 15 It is important to note
the character of these texts—including a local purāṇ a and vernacular versions of the epics—as
(Cod. CXV/2–7, no. 3) and has been transcribed as an appendix to Ricardo Nuno de Jesus Ventura, “Conversão e conversabilidade: Discursos da missão e do gentio na documentação do Padroado Português do Oriente (séculos XVI e XVII)” (Ph.D. diss., Universidade de Lisboa, 2011), vol. II, Anexos, 10–15. It is clearly a summary, rather than a translation, of the purāṇa, as is suggested by the title of the codex: “Seguesse a lei dos Jentios e substancias do que elles cren e en que tem que esta toda sua saluação.”
- This is stated in the last line of the text (ARSI Goa 46, 352r), where “R.” stands for Reitor , i.e., rector of the College of Saint Paul.
- Luís Fróis, November 14, 1559 in DI, IV: 335.
- Ibid., 339.
- Wicki (“Old Portuguese Translations”) summarizes the Portuguese translations in Rome (ARSI, Goa 46, 354–94). There are also three codices in the Braga Public Library (771, 772, 773), which are described in L. A. Rodrigues, “Glimpses of the Konkani Language at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century XIII: Ramayana and Maha- bharata,” Boletim do Instituto Menezes Bragança 163 (1990): 43–72, and Pissurlencar, “Livros maratas impres- sos em Goa.” The first two codices contain rough and fair copies of stories from the epics, all in Konkani. The third codex contains Marathi works, by Goan authors. One of these may be a version of, or a commentary on, Jñāneśvara’s Marathi version of the Bhagavad-Gītā.
- Nelson Falcao, Kristapurāṇa: A Christian-Hindu Encounter. A Study of Inculturation in the Kristapurāṇa of Thomas Stephens, S.J. (1549–1619) (Anand: Gujarat Sahitya Prakash, 2003), 12–13.
- L. A. Rodrigues, “Glimpses of the Konkani Language at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century VI: Pre-Portu- guese Konkani Literature,” Boletim do Instituto Menezes Bragança 131 (1982): 3–23, at 18, 22.
- See Alessandro Valignano, Historia del principio y progresso de la Compañıá de Jesús en las Indias ori- entales (1542–64) , ed. Josef Wicki (Roma: Institutum historicum Societatis Iesu, 1944), II: 30–34, and Sebastião Gonçalves, Primeira parte da História dos Religiosos da Companhia de Jesus , ed. Josef Wicki (1614; Coimbra: Atlântida, 1957–62), III: 34–45, 62–65. Giovanni Pietro Maffei, who used Valignano’s history, mentions the name Parabrammam, identified in the Anādipurāṇa as the sole god ( Historiarum Indicarum libri xvi. [Florence, 1588], 27).
S weetman : The Absent Vedas 785
a hasty reading of the Jesuit letters has sometimes led to the conclusion that the Jesuits had
acquired Sanskrit versions of the Bhagavad-Gītā , the Mahābhārata , or the Rāmayāṇa.
the firSt european account of the vedaS
It was only toward the end of the sixteenth century that the Vedas are first mentioned,
by Agostinho de Azevedo, an Augustinian. Azevedo’s biography has been reconstructed by
Georg Schurhammer, who thinks it possible he first went to India as a soldier before join-
ing the Augustinian order in Goa in the 1570s. Azevedo was sent back to Portugal to ordain
and train, returning to India in 1586. From 1589 to 1600 he was in Hormuz, from where he
returned overland to Portugal, where he completed a Relação do Estado da Índia. 16 Aze-
vedo’s report provides an overview of Portuguese settlements in Asia from the Arabian Gulf
to the spice islands, devoting particular attention to Hormuz and Ceylon. It is notable that in
his accounts of both, Azevedo draws on local textual sources. For Hormuz, he claims that he
read these sources himself, 17 but for Ceylon he relied on an interpreter’s simultaneous trans-
lation of Sinhalese chronicles recited for him when he met Sinhalese princes in Goa around
- 18 There is a similar emphasis on textual sources in his section on India, entitled “Of
the opinions, rites, and ceremonies of all the gentiles of India between the river Indus and the
Ganges and that which is contained in their original scriptures which their learned men teach
in their schools.” 19 The Brahmins, the “masters of their religion,” teach a unified doctrine of
God, creation, and the corruption of creatures. They have, writes Azevedo,
many books in their Latin, which they call Geredão [Grantha] which contain everything they
are to believe, and all the ceremonies they are to perform. These books are divided into bodies,
limbs, and joints, whose origins are some [books] which they call Veados , which are divided
into four parts, and these further into fifty-two parts in the following manner: six are called Xas-
tra , which are the bodies; eighteen are called Purana , which are the limbs; twenty-eight called
Agamon which are the joints.
- Georg Schurhammer, Francis Xavier: His Life, His Times , vol. 2: India 1541–1545 (Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1980), 614–16. Two versions of Azevedo’s “Estado da Í ndia e aonde tem o seu principio,” from manu - scripts in the British Library and the Bibliotheca Nacional de Madrid, are printed in António da Silva Rego and Luıś de Albuquerque, eds., Documentação ultramarina portuguesa (Lisboa: Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1960–63), I: 197–263 and II: 40–147. I cite from the first version, except where noted. Schurhammer ( Xavier , 2: 616–20) notes that there are close parallels in three sections of these texts with parts of the fifth of Diogo do Couto’s Dé cadas da Asiá. In the case of the first two—which relate to the history of Hormuz (210–12) and of Ceylon (235– 54)—Azevedo mentions that Couto had asked him to provide information (205, 235). Couto, who elsewhere does mention his sources, nowhere acknowledges Azevedo. There are also close parallels in the section on Indian religion in Azevedo and Couto and also with that which appears in João de Lucena in his life of Xavier. Lucena’s work was published in 1600, Schurhammer dates the final version of Azevedo’s text to 1603 ( Xavier , 2: 616), and Couto’s work did not appear until 1612. Nevertheless it appears that Lucena used the manuscript of Couto’s fifth decade, a version of which was sent to Lisbon as early as 1597 (Marcus de Jong, ed., Dé cada quinta da “Asia”: Texte iné dit, publ. d’après un manuscrit de la Bibliothèque de l’Univ. de Leyde [Coimbra: Biblioteca da Universidade, 1937], 47). In a letter sent from Goa in November 1603, Couto complained bitterly about Lucena’s use of information which he claimed to have acquired at great effort and expense from the schools of the Brahmins in the kingdom of Vijayanagara (Schurhammer, Xavier, 2: 620). Despite Couto’s claim here that “in all my Decades I have given to each his due,” it seems likely that he had again used without acknowledgment material provided to him by Azevedo. The account of Indian religion was likely prepared by Azevedo during his second period in India between 1586 and 1589, and later incorporated into his Relação do Estado da Índia, completed in Lisbon by 1603.
- Azevedo, “Estado da Índia,” 211.
- Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250– 1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 279; Azevedo, “Estado da Í ndia,” 242.
- Azevedo, “Estado da Í ndia,” 249.
S weetman : The Absent Vedas 787
The third and fourth chapters of the sixth book of Couto’s fifth decade, published at Lisbon
in 1612, are taken almost verbatim from Azevedo. 25 Couto’s work, in turn, was used by
João de Lucena in his life of Xavier. 26 The Dutch chaplain, Abraham Rogerius, followed one
or the other of these works very closely in the account of the Vedas in his De Open-Deure
tot het Verborgen Heydendom (1651), adding only the names of the Vedas, which he is the
first to report in print in Europe. Through his primary informant, a Tamil Brahmin named
Padmanābha, Rogerius was even able to give a paraphrase of part of a Sanskrit text (the Nī ti -
and Vairāgya- śatakas of Bhartṛhari), although he again relies on other sources including
some in Tamil. While Rogerius emphasizes that the Brahmins “must submit themselves to
the Veda, and cannot contradict it in the least or object when a text from it is cited,” he adds
that there are often strong disputes over the sense of the text: “one interprets a word thus, the
other so,” so that to resolve such disputes reference is made to the “ś āstra, which betokens
so much as an explanation or exposition.” 27 This was perhaps suggested to him to explain
why texts other than the Vedas were those to which he was referred, despite the Veda’s
acknowledged ultimate authority. Burnell suggests that, rather than the Vedas, Rogerius’s
work in fact reflects the Tamil Vaiṣṇ ava canonical collection, the Nālāyira Tiviyappirapan-
tam. 28 Rogerius’s work gives a great deal of detailed information on brahminical Hinduism,
but it was his repetition of Azevedo’s summary content of the Vedas that was most important
for their reputation in Europe.
Rogerius’s work was quickly translated into German (1663) and French (1670), plagia-
rized in Dutch by Philip Baldaeus (1672) 29 and Olfert Dapper (1672), 30 and extracted in
English and French in the works of John Ogilby (1673) 31 and of Jean-Frédéric Bernard and
Bernard Picart (1723, 1731). 32 Each of these included Azevedo’s summary of the Vedas,
and in this way it was very widely disseminated in Europe. 33 Even late in the eighteenth
century, Azevedo’s account of the Vedas was repeated almost verbatim in the work of the
- Da Asia de Diogo de Couto, Decada Quinta, Parte Segunda (Lisbon, 1788), 24.
- Ioam de Lucena, Historia da vida do padre Francisco de Xavier (Lisbon, 1600), 95.
- Abraham Rogerius, De Open-Deure tot het Verborgen Heydendom , ed. Willem Caland (The Hague: Mar- tinus Nijhoff, 1915), 21.
- A. C. Burnell, “On Some Early References to the Vedas by European Writers,” Indian Antiquary 8 (1879): 98–100, at 99.
- As well as Azevedo’s account of the Vedas, Baldaeus included also the brief account of Jacome Fenicio (Albert Johannes de Jong, ed., Afgoderye der Oost-Indische Heydenen door Philippus Baldaeus [The Hague: Mar- tinus Nijhoff, 1917], 176). Baldaeus was also translated into German in 1672.
- Olfert Dapper, Asia, of naukeurige Beschryving van het Rijk des Grooten Mogols, en een groot gedeelte van Indiën (Amsterdam, 1672), 137.
- John Ogilby, Asia. The first part being an accurate description of Persia... the vast empire of the Great Mogol, and other parts of India (London, 1673), 143. Ogilby used Dapper.
- An adaptation of Rogerius’s work by Antoine Augustin Bruzen de La Martinière appeared first as “Dis - sertation sur les Mœurs et sur la Religion des Bramines” in Jean-Frédéric Bernard and Bernard Picart, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses des peuples idolâtres... Second partie du tome premier... les pratiques religieuses des Indiens Orientaux (Amsterdam, 1723). Each text was separately paginated. Azevedo’s account of the Vedas is on p. 27. A translation from this version appeared also in John Lockman’s translation, The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of the Several Nations of the Known World , vol. III: Idolatrous Nations (London, 1731), 318.
- The essence of Azevedo’s account appeared also in Vicenzo Maria di Santa Caterina da Siena, Il viaggio al l’Indie Orientali (Venice, 1678), 282. Caland ( Veda , 271) noted the similarity between the accounts of Couto, Lucena, Rogerius, Baldaeus, and Vicenzo Maria. Theodor Zachariae, in his review of Caland, considered the possi- bility that Couto and Lucena might depend on a common, older source, but dismissed it as improbable ( Göttingsche Gelehrte Anzeigen 183 [1921]: 148–65, at 151). Zachariae’s review was translated and published with a few addi- tional comments, mostly relating to the Jesuit Ezour-Vedam , by Henry Hosten (“The Discovery of the Veda,” Jour- nal of Indian History 2, 2 [1923]: 127–57).
788 Journal of the American Oriental Society 139.4 (2019)
Italian Capuchin, Marco della Tomba. 34 Although Couto, who repeats almost the whole of
Azevedo’s account, retained all the references to Tamil texts, none of these subsequent works
(with the partial exception of Lucena, who retains only the reference to Tiruvaḷḷuvar) men-
tion any of the Tamil sources, despite Azevedo’s claim that these are the “ summa s of their
theology.” In this way the idea was firmly established in Europe that it was the Vedas, above
all and almost to the exclusion of other texts, that were the sacred books of India.
other publiShed Seventeenth - century accountS
The only other significant independent account of the Vedas published in the seventeenth
century was that of François Bernier. 35 Bernier had met the Jesuit Heinrich Roth in Agra and
noted his study of “the books of the gentiles.” 36 He also acknowledges having read Rogerius,
but the major details in his account are independent of the Azevedo /Rogerius text, 37 and it
was an Indian pandit, Kavīndrācārya Sarasvatī, who was his primary informant. 38 Although
Bernier repeatedly makes the “Beths” the source of “the doctrine of the Indous or Gentiles
of Hindoustan,” he notes that having learned Sanskrit,
they ordinarily put themselves to reading the purāṇ as, which are an interpretation and abridge-
ment of the Vedas, which are very large, at least if they are those which were shown to me in
Benares. They are also very rare, so much so that my agha could never find them for sale, what-
ever diligence he used; for they keep them well hidden, fearing that the Mahometans should get
hold of and burn them, as they have done several times. 39
- See Marco della Tomba, Gli scritti del Padre Marco della Tomba, missionario nelle Indie Orientali , ed. Angelo De Gubernatis (Florence, 1878), 100–101.
- Two other early seventeenth-century sources—both likely independent of Azevedo—mention the idea that the Brahmins have four sacred texts. The first is Edward Terry, whose account first appeared in Samvel Pvrchas, Haklvytvs posthumus, or, Pvrchas his Pilgrimes (London, 1625), 2: 1478. When Terry published his own, much revised version, of his Voyage to East-India (London, 1655), he mentioned not four books, but two, one of which he names as śāstra (349). Four unnamed sacred books are mentioned in a report on Gujarat prepared in the 1620s by a factor of the Dutch East India Company (Willem Caland, ed., De Remonstrantie van W. Geleynssen de Jongh [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1929], 85). Although not published until Caland’s edition, the work was used by Johan van Twist, in his Generale Beschrijvinghe van Indien (Batavia, 1638), 35.
- Frédéric Tinguely, ed., Un libertin dans l’Inde moghole: Les voyages de François Bernier (1656–1669) (Paris: Chandeigne, 2008), 332. Roth had studied Sanskrit and brought the Vedāntasāra of Sadānanda (c. 1490) and the Pañ ca-tattva-prakāś a of Veṇ īdatta (1644) to Europe in 1662 (Richard Hauschild, “Notes on the Content of the Three Manuscripts of Heinrich Roth,” in The Sanskrit Grammar and Manuscripts of Father Heinrich Roth S.J. 1610–1668: Facsimile Edition of Biblioteca Nazionale Rome Mss. or. 171 and 172 , ed. Jean-Claude Muller and Arnulf Camps [Leiden: Brill, 1988], 17–18). Roth’s letters from India are lost, but in what has survived the descriptions he gives of Indian religion are based on purāṇ ic sources. See his account of the avātaras of Viṣṇ u, Decem fabulosae Incarnationes Dei, quas credunt Gentiles Indiani extra et intra Gangem , published by Kircher in his China illustrata (Amsterdam, 1667), 156–62, and a shorter account of the nine principal Indian gods in Heinrich Roth, Relatio rerum notabilium Regni Mogor in Asia (Aschaffenburg, 1665), 4–5.
- Following his return from India in 1669, Bernier published the four volumes that have come to be called his Voyages in 1670 and 1671. His “Lettre à Monsieur Chapelain,” dated 1667, which includes the acknowledge- ment of Rogerius, Kircher, and also Henry Lord’s 1630 account of Vaiṣṇ avas in Surat, appeared in the first volume of his Suite des Mémoires du Sieur Bernier sur l’empire du Grand Mogol in 1671. Although Chapelain dispatched books to Bernier in India, it seems more likely that he first read Lord and Rogerius in the French translations that had recently appeared (in 1667 and 1670, respectively), especially as Kircher’s China illustrata was only published in 1667.
- Kavīndrācārya Sarasvatī was retained by Bernier’s own patron, Danishmand Khān (P. K. Gode, “Kavīndrācārya Sarasvatı̄ at the Mughal Court,” in Studies in Indian Literary History , vol. 2 [Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1954], 364–79).
- Bernier, Voyages , 332.
790 Journal of the American Oriental Society 139.4 (2019)
in 1608 that, of the four Vedas, only three were extant, and the fourth—which was required
for salvation—was lost. 46
Nobili is the first European known to have read parts of the Vedas. In a number of his works
defending his strategy of tolerating aspects of Brahminical lifestyle among his converts, he
cites directly from the texts associated with the Black Yajur Veda. Thus, for example, in his
Informatio de quibusdam moribus nationis indicae (1613) he quotes from the account of the
aś vamedha in Taittirī ya Brāhmaṇa 3.8.5. 47 Nobili’s access to these texts was mediated by
the Telugu Brahmin convert who taught him Sanskrit, Śivadharma or Bonifacio. 48 While it
was Śivadharma who made the texts available to him, on the basis of Nobili’s orthography
in his Responsio , Caland thought it probable that “Nobili himself had copied the passages
[in Sanskrit] quoted by him, and that these passages had not been dictated to him by some
Brahman... [and therefore] that Nobili has himself drawn his argumentative passages from
the Sanskrit texts.” 49 Margherita Trento contrasts this with the method of Nobili’s opponent
in the debate over accommodation, Gonçalo Fernandes. Śivadharma, who had fallen out with
Nobili, assisted Fernandes with scriptural quotations in his 1616 treatise attacking Nobili. 50
The first part ( O sumário das serimonias ) describes the lifecycle rites of Brahmins from
birth, through initiation and marriage, to entry into the state of a sannyāsīn, with a description
of some of the daily and other rites performed by and for brahmin sannyāsīns. It includes
a translation of the first six verses of the third chapter of the Taittirī ya Upaniṣ ad. 51 The
second, much shorter, section ( O compendio de ditos de graves autores ) describes penances
( prāyaś citta ) according to the dharmaś āstra of Parāś ara. Śivadharma is again the source, but,
as Fernandes did not know Sanskrit, the texts were translated into Tamil by Ś ivadharma and
only thence into Portuguese by Fernandes with his assistant Andrea Buccerio. 52 This kind of
mediated access to Sanskrit texts, likely the same method used by Azevedo and Rogerius,
would be repeated in the following century by other missionaries.
Having at last obtained access to the texts hinted at by Xavier half a century earlier,
Nobili discovered that while some parts of them did indeed refer to “God in the true and
absolute sense” ( Brahmă )—and even contained “an adumbration of the recondite mystery
of the most Holy Trinity”—other parts described superstitious rites directed to false deities
( Brahmā ) so that “the sayings they record are in striking contradiction one with another.” 53
He was nonetheless able to name the four Vedas, including the Śukla, or White, recension
- Nobili to Laerzio Dec 24, 1608, in Joseph Bertrand, La mission du Madure ́ d’après les documents inédits (Paris: Poussièlegue-Rusand, 1847–1854), 2: 20. Rogerius also reported this idea ( Open-Deure , 21).
- S. Rajamanickam, ed., Roberto de Nobili on Indian Customs (Palayamkottai: De Nobili Research Institute, 1972), 55.
- On Nobili’s relation to Ś ivadharma see Iñes G. Ž upanov, Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brah- manical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century India (New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), and Margherita Trento, “Śivadharma or Bonifacio? Behind the Scenes of the Madurai Mission Controversy (1608–1619),” in The Rites Controversies in the Early Modern World , ed. Iñes G. Ž upanov and Pierre-Antoine Fabre (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 91–120.
- Willem Caland, “Roberto de’ Nobili and the Sanskrit Language and Literature,” Acta Orientalia 3 (1924): 38–51, at 50–51.
- Fernandes’s treatise was edited by Josef Wicki under the somewhat misleading title Tratado do Pe. Gonçalo Fernandes Trancoso sobre o Hinduísmo (Madure 1616) (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1973). The title of Wicki’s earlier German summary of the text gives a more accurate indication of the content: Die Schrift des P. Gonçalo Fernandes S.J. über die Brahmanen und Dharma-Sastra (Madura 1616) (Münster: Aschendorff, 1957).
- George Gispert-Sauch, “The Bhṛgu-Vallī of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad: An Early XVII Century European Translation,” Indica 5, 2 (1968): 139–44.
- Wicki, ed., Tratado , 7, 218–19. On Śivadharma and Buccerio, see further Trento, “Śivadharma,” 106–7.
- Rajamanickam, Indian Customs , 43–44.
S weetman : The Absent Vedas 791
of the Yajur Veda. 54 Significantly, Nobili also notes that the term Veda refers not only to the
“law” of the Brahmin but also to knowledge ( scientia ) more broadly. 55 It was for this reason
that he used it in coining many terms to refer to aspects of Christian life and practice, and
even to Christianity itself ( dēva vēdam , or ñāna vētam ) and to the Bible (often simply vētam
in Nobili’s works). This usage was followed by Protestants in the following century and
beyond. Further evidence of the extent of Nobili’s knowledge of the Veda is to be found in
Jesuit correspondence of the eighteenth century, discussed below.
Nobili was, however, also keenly aware of the importance of other texts. He associated
the Vedas especially with Advaita Vedāntins, but he reported that the religious texts for the
Ś aivas were the Āgamas, for Vaiṣṇ avas the Tiruvāymo ḻi , and for the Dvaitins Madhva’s com-
mentary on the Brahmasū tra. 56 He concludes that although by metonymy all these works are
identified with the Vedas—more specifically with the Upaniṣads—there is a wide variety of
sacred texts. Thus, even though he is almost certainly the first European to have had direct
access to the Vedas themselves, like other missionaries in India Nobili acknowledged the
practical significance of other texts for contemporary Hindus, and thus also for his mission-
ary task.
Nobili’s works were not published until long after his death, but Fenicio’s brief account
of Brahmā’s revelation of the Vedas, and the loss of his head and with it one Veda, did reach
print in Dutch, Spanish, and English in the second half of the seventeenth century in the
works of Baldaeus (1672) and Manuel de Faria e Sousa (1675, 1695). 57
the eighteenth century : proteStant miSSion
Through Baldaeus, Azevedo’s and Fenicio’s accounts of the Vedas were briefly important
for the first Protestant missionary in India, Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg. Ziegenbalg arrived
in the Danish enclave of Tranquebar, in Tanjore, in July 1706. The only European work
on India that we know for sure Ziegenbalg had read by 1706 is the German translation of
Baldaeus, but this was enough to ensure that he very early set out to acquire the Vedas. 58
Already in September 1706 Ziegenbalg reported that books were being copied out for him
by the elderly schoolmaster he had engaged to teach him Tamil. Ziegenbalg’s letter includes
parts of both Fenicio’s account of Brahmā’s revelation of four books (one of which was lost)
and Azevedo’s brief summary of the contents of the Vedas. 59 Ziegenbalg later admitted he
had taken these details from Baldaeus, but then only to emphasize the contrast between Bal-
daeus’s “very false relations of these heathen” and what he had learned from his own exten-
sive reading of Tamil sources in the intervening five years. 60 While one published version
- Ibid, 42.
- S. Rajamanickam, ed., Roberto de Nobili on Adaptation (Palayamkottai: De Nobili Research Institute, 1971), 138/139.
- Rajamanickam, Indian Customs , 47.
- Baldaeus, Afgoderye , 176. Manuel de Faria e Sousa, Asia Portuguesa , vol. 2 (Lisbon, 1675), 2: 682; John Stevens, The Portugues Asia , 3 vols. (London, 1695), 2: 390. Faria e Sousa used an abridged text prepared by another Jesuit, Manoel Barradas; Baldaeus had access to a different and fuller version. See Charpentier, Livro da seita , lxxvii–lxxxv.
- Will Sweetman and R. Ilakkuvan, Bibliotheca Malabarica: Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg’s Tamil Library (Paris: IFP/EFEO, 2012), 43–44.
- There are several printed versions of this letter, the original of which is not extant. The most detailed is in Herrn Bartholomäi Ziegenbalgs und Herrn Heinrich Plü tscho, Kö n. Dä nischer Missionariorum, Brieffe... von neuem heraus gegeben von Christian Gustav Bergen (Pirna, 1708), 18–26.
- Willem Caland, ed., Ziegenbalg’s Malabarisches Heidenthum (Amsterdam: Uitgave van Koninklijke Akad- emie, 1926), 14.
S weetman : The Absent Vedas 793
mostly derived, he admits, from Nobili. 66 Bourzes begins by reiterating the trope of Brahmin
secrecy, stating that to communicate the Veda to others was a crime punishable by many mil-
lions of years in hell. He refers also to the oral transmission of the text, although he adds that
one Brahmin has told him the contrary. He corrects Bouchet (without mentioning his name)
on the question of whether there were at first five Vedas, saying that he has been assured
constantly that there are only four, and mentions also Bernier’s report of the “four Beths.”
He notes, however, that a fifth Veda is spoken of in the same way as we might refer to a poet
as “a second Virgil.” Following Nobili again, he writes that the name Veda is applied by
extension to a whole range of other texts that are not, strictly, Veda. He gives examples, from
Nobili, which include purā ṇic literature. The Vedas proper are never read and expounded
to the people—they would not be capable of understanding them—instead they read other
texts to which the name Veda is lent, above all the Rāmāyaṇa , which is called the Veda of
the Śū dras, the people. He further downplays the Veda when giving reasons why it is not
advisable for the missionaries to learn Sanskrit—Tamil is essential, Sanskrit difficult and not
likely to aid in the conversion of the Indians. Few Brahmins know more than a fourth of the
Veda; one who knows three is regarded as a prodigious scholar.
Bourzes repeats that he knows little of the Veda, but then proceeds to give what is prob-
ably the most detailed account yet to reach Europe of a Vedic rite, the sacrifice of a goat. 67
Insofar as this is based on texts, the proximate source is almost certainly again Nobili, or
rather Ś ivadharma, but Bourzes also includes details—such as the cost of the ritual—that are
likely based on observation (whether by Bourzes or his Indian informants) of contemporary
rituals. Bourzes’s letter also includes an account of Indian chronology—which was one of
the reasons for the intense interest in ancient, non-Christian scriptures in the early eighteenth
century—suggesting that it owed something to Chinese chronology. 68
the vedaS between europe and india
The reputation of the Vedas in Europe around the turn of the eighteenth century dem-
onstrates what Dorothy Figueria has aptly called “the authority of an absent text.” 69 An
intriguing demonstration of this is a mention of the Vedas in a text that was as much sought
after—and as much discussed in ignorance of its actual contents—as were the Vedas them-
selves: De tribus impostoribus. The idea of a blasphemous treatise that grouped Jesus Christ,
Moses, and Muhammad as the three impostors who had fooled the world begins with an
encyclical from Pope Gregory IX against the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in 1239. 70
For the next four centuries, accusations of having authored such a treatise—or even just hav-
ing possessed a copy of it—swirled around Europe, applied to anyone whose orthodoxy was
in doubt—from Thomas Scoto (a Franciscan friar accused, arrested, and probably burned to
death in Lisbon in 1335) to Michael Servetus and Giordano Bruno, burned alive in Geneva in
- Bourzes to Souciet, 23 March 1719, Archives de la Province de France de la Compagnie de Jésus, Paris, Fonds Brotier, 86, ff. 42r–43v.
- Bourzes calls this “Ekiam” (Tamil ekkiyam , Sanskrit yajñ a ).
- Joan-Pau Rubiés, “From Antiquarianism to Philosophical History: India, China and the World History of Religion in European Thought (1600–1770),” in Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Early Modern Europe and China, 1500–1800 , ed. Peter N. Miller and François Louis (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2012), 313–67.
- Dorothy M. Figueira, “The Authority of an Absent Text: The Veda, Upavedas, Upangas, and Upnekhata in European Thought,” in Authority, Anxiety, and Canon: Essays in Vedic Interpretation , ed. Laurie L. Patton (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1994), 201–33.
- Georges Minois, The Atheist’s Bible: The Most Dangerous Book that Never Existed , tr. Lys Ann Weiss (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2012), 1.
794 Journal of the American Oriental Society 139.4 (2019)
1553 and in Rome in 1600, respectively. 71 The text itself, however, proved elusive. When a
version of this notorious text was finally printed, in 1753, it bore a false date of 1598. Caland
dated De tribus impostoribus sixty years earlier still, to 1538, 72 and therefore suggested that
that De tribus impostoribus was likely the first European text to mention the Vedas. 73 In fact,
the reference to the Vedas in De tribus impostoribus is one reason for dating it much later,
most likely to a manuscript of 1688 by Johann Mü ller. 74
The history of De tribus impostoribus itself demonstrates the authority that an absent
text can exert. The mention of the Vedas in Mü ller’s text also shows that the Vedas too had
begun to exert an authority in Europe while still very much absent there. Further evidence of
the Vedas’ reputation in Europe can be found in the 1720s. In 1724 Mathurin Veyssiè re de
Lacroze included a chapter on “the idolatry of the Indies” in his Histoire du christianisme
des Indes. Lacroze, a former Benedictine who had converted to Protestantism in 1696, was
Librarian Royal at the Prussian court. His account of Indian idolatry drew on the published
works of the Jesuits, Rogerius, and Baldaeus as well as Ziegenbalg’s then-still-unpublished
manuscripts. From Ziegenbalg, Lacroze learned that the Indians, despite their outward idola-
try, preserved also a knowledge of the real nature of the supreme being. Rogerius, Baldaeus,
and the Jesuits persuaded him that this could be proven, if only the Vedas could be found
and translated. 75 Lacroze’s opinion was echoed in 1726 by Johann Lorenz von Mosheim,
professor of theology at Helmstedt, in the first published volume of his ecclesiastical history.
By the time his Institutionum historiae ecclesiasticae antiqui et recentioris was completed, in
1755, Mosheim was chancellor of the university at Göttingen and one of the most renowned
theologians and church historians in Europe. In giving an account of the state of philoso-
phy at the time of Christ, Mosheim acknowledged the reputation of Oriental philosophers
for wisdom, but regretted that little more could be said until the “very ancient book of the
Brachmans called Vedam” was translated into another language. 76 Thus despite the doubts
expressed by Ziegenbalg and Bourzes about the practical importance—even the very exis-
tence—of the Vedas, 77 the reputation of the Vedas was firmly established in Europe by the
beginning of the eighteenth century and would be affirmed repeatedly throughout the century,
- Ibid., 39, 61, 55.
- Caland does not explain why he thinks De tribus impostoribus was already published in 1538. The date is associated with Thomas Campanella, who, in the manuscript preface to his Atheismus Triumphatus (1636), denied that he was the author of De tribus impostoribus— which he claimed to have read—on the grounds that it had been published thirty years before his birth in 1568.
- He suggested that this might owe something to Arabic sources, given that Averroës was one of the putative authors of De tribus impostoribus (Caland, Veda , 263–64).
- De imposturis religionum (De tribus impostoribus). Von den Betrügereyen der Religionen: Dokumente , ed. Winfried Schröder (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1999). Mü ller’s source was most likely Baldaeus. Mü ller men- tions the theft of three Vedas by “a son of the gods” (p. 115). This is perhaps a combination of the two accounts in Fenicio of the loss of one Veda and the theft of “the Law” by Hiraṇ yākṣa (see n. 45). Rogerius had identified the stolen law as the four Vedas ( Open-Deure , 94), but in his version of Fenicio’s account of the first avatāra of Viṣṇ u, Baldaeus combines this with Rogerius’s account of the loss of one of the Vedas, which perhaps accounts for Mü l- ler’s idea that the three remaining Vedas were stolen. De tribus impostoribus is to be distinguished from a French text, the Traité des trois imposteurs , which emerged in the same milieu, but does not mention the Vedas.
- Mathurin Veyssière de Lacroze, Histoire du christianisme des Indes (La Haye, 1724), 427, 454, 473.
- Institutiones historiae ecclesiasticae Novi Testamenti (Frankfurt, 1726), 56.
- Doubts about the existence of the Vedas persisted into the late eighteenth century. Around 1774, the Capu- chin missionary Marco della Tomba thought it probably they had “never existed, at least as real books” (David N. Lorenzen, “Marco Della Tomba and the Brahmin from Banaras: Missionaries, Orientalists, and Indian Scholars,” Journal of Asian Studies 65, 1 [2006]: 115–43, at 116). Pierre Sonnerat, reporting the Brahmins’ belief that the fourth Veda was lost, wondered if the other three also no longer existed ( Voyage aux Indes orientales et à la Chine [Paris, 1782], 2: 32).
796 Journal of the American Oriental Society 139.4 (2019)
It is enough that they make them able to pronounce it well and to learn by heart certain things
which they will need later, such as certain stanzas of verse which they will have to recite while
performing certain ceremonies during marriages, burials, sacrifices.
Souciet had been in regular contact with other French Jesuits in the Carnatic mission. Bourz-
es had recommended Memmius René Gargam, to whom Souciet had directed a series of
questions on subjects such as astronomy, fossils, Indian languages, and whether the Brah-
mins were descended from the Jews. 87 In 1726 Gargam told Souciet he had been offered
a translation of the Vedas. Even though he had not yet read it, he thought it would be of
“very great use to all the missionaries... in refuting the errors of the Gentiles.” 88 The cost
exceeded Gargam’s means, however, and his superior Le Gac refused to invest in the project
both because the mission had had high expenses that year and also because a translation of
the Vedas appeared to him “useless for the conversion of souls.” 89 Although the missions
were perpetually short of funds, the resistance to imparting the Vedas seems here to have
been Jesuit, rather than Brahmin.
By the end of 1728 Le Gac’s resistance had given way in the face of the resources and
authority of Bignon and Le Noir. In his response to Bignon in January 1729, Le Gac expressed
his confidence that he would be able to acquire the Vedas and, to a greater or lesser extent,
the other works which had been requested. 90 In August of the following year, Calmette
reported that he had obtained copies of the first two Vedas, which he calls “Rougvédam” and
“Ejourvédam,” and two years later, in August 1732, he was able to add the “Samavédam”
and the “Adarvanavédam.” 91 In both letters, Calmette refers to the Brahmins’ secrecy about
the Vedas:
Ever since India has been known, it does not appear that the Europeans have been able to unearth
this book which the Brames scruple to communicate and which they transcribe superstitiously
in the woods or in remote places where they cannot be seen by any who are not of their caste.
(1730: 25v)
I have at last recovered the four Vedas, of which the first is called Rougvédam, the second
Ejourvédam, the third Samavédam, the fourth Adarvanavédam. The fourth is that which, so long
as there have been missionaries in India, has been said to have been thrown into the sea by the
Brahmins. Thus, that which the Brahmins have until now kept hidden more than the Jews have
the books of Moses, that which they have communicated to no other nation of the world, not
even to Indians if they are not of their caste, finally falls into our hands and the sea itself has
given up its prey. (1732: 35r)
Calmette described how he had confirmed the authenticity of the texts he had purchased
by having young Brahmins who were learning the Vedas recite them to him (1732: 35v).
In his letter he describes how both Gargam, his close colleague in the northern reaches
of the Carnatic mission, and Jean-François Pons, a Jesuit collecting Sanskrit texts in Ben-
gal, had been deceived into buying texts purporting to be Vedas (1732: 35r). Nevertheless,
- Fonds Brotier 82.
- Gargam to Souciet, 15 Sept 1726, Fonds Brotier 82, f. 72r.
- Le Gac to Souciet, 10 Oct 1727, Fonds Brotier 88, f. 115v.
- Bibliothèque nationale de France, naf 6556, f.152r, printed in Omont, Missions archéologiques françaises ,
- Calmette to Souciet, 26 Aug 1730, Fonds Brotier 89, f. 25v; Calmette to Souciet, 25 Aug 1732, Fonds Brotier 89, f. 35r. Further references to these two letters will be given in the text by year and folio. The works were sent to Europe in the early 1730s and remain in the BNF: Ṛgveda (Sanscrit 214); Sāmaveda (Sanscrit 310–12); Yajurveda (Sanscrit 313, 424); Artharvaveda (Sanscrit 177–79, but see below). For details of the contents of the manuscripts see Filliozat, Catalogue du fonds sanscrit, I & II.
S weetman : The Absent Vedas 797
while Calmette did obtain the Ṛg, Yajur, and Sāma Veda saṃhitās, his “Adarvana Vedam”
is in fact an assortment of tantric and magical texts connected with goddess worship called
Ātharvaṇatantrarāja and Ātharvaṇamantraś āstra. 92
Calmette twice states that money alone would not have sufficed to obtain the Veda (1732:
35r, 37r). It was only thanks to “hidden Christians” (1732: 37r) among the Brahmins that he
had been able to obtain copies of the Vedas. 93 Nevertheless, he also remarks that the further
the Jesuits advanced into the hinterland the easier it was to deal with the Brahmins and to
make overtures regarding what they knew and their books (1730: 25r). 94 He notes that not
since the time of Nobili had the missionaries had dealings with learned Brahmins (ś āstris),
for which both a knowledge of Sanskrit and following Brahmin customs (including keeping
Brahmin servants, which he and Gargam could not do in such a small mission) were prereq-
uisites (1732: 37v). In 1733, in a published letter, Calmette noted that once Brahmin scholars
recognized his and Gargam’s knowledge of Sanskrit, and of Sanskrit learning, they began to
engage them in debate. He adds that it was remarkable how few Brahmins understood Vedic
Sanskrit and notes the status of those who had studied Patañ jali’s Mahābhāṣ ya and thus were
able to understand it. 95 Despite the difficulties, Calmette predicted that having “found the
vein,” with time he would succeed in finding whatever Souciet and Bignon requested, and he
did send several other works—mostly philosophical—to the Bibliothè que Royale. Some of
these works, like others sent by the Jesuits, were not so much copies of actual Indian texts as
verbal abstracts of the texts recited by scholars and recorded, on paper not palm-leaves, by
converts who adorned them with Christian symbols. 96 The method would have been familiar
to Azevedo, Fernandes, and Ziegenbalg. 97
Although the Jesuits had thus finally succeeded in obtaining for European libraries at least
parts of the Vedas, Le Gac remained unconvinced of the value of having done so. When in
1732 he wrote to the Souciet to report on the cost of the additional copies he had had made
for the library of the college Louis-le-Grand, he reiterated his comments from five years
earlier:
between ourselves, this is a useless expense. These books can serve as nothing more than a
spectacle in a library. For I cannot believe that anyone in Europe could come to understand them
properly, whatever aptitude one may have for languages. 98
- Filliozat, Catalogue du fonds sanscrit , I, 25.
- One of these may have been Calmette’s convert Maṅgalagiri Ānanda, who later composed a summary of the Gospels in Telugu verse entitled Vedānta Rasayanam (Léon Besse, “Liste Alphabétique des Missionaires du Car- natic de la Compagnie de Jésus au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue Historique de l’Inde Française 2 [1917/18]: s.v. Calmette; see also C. P. Brown, “Notices of some Roman Catholic Books, existing in the Telugu Language,” The Madras Journal of Literature and Science [July 1840], 54–58).
- Calmette’s successive stations saw him push further and further to the northwest of Pondicherry. In 1727 and 1728 he wrote from stations in Arcot; by 1730 he was in Ballabaram (now Chikkaballapura, some 60 kilometres north of Bangalore); and his final letter is from Darmavaram, still further north.
- Lettres édifiantes et curieuses , 21: 457–58.
- Colas and Colas-Chauhan, Manuscrits telugu.
- It seems likely that the same method was used by John Marshall in 1674–77 to produce an English version of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and of another text that he identified as the Sāma Veda. Marshall, an English East India Company factor in Bengal from 1668 until his death in 1688, had been educated at Cambridge and was close to Henry More, one of the Cambridge Platonists. A Bengali Brahmin, Madhusudana, translated orally into Bengali from a Sanskrit original, on the basis of which Marshall produced a written English text (Anna Winterbottom, Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016], 95–96). Mar- shall described the latter text as “the Epittomie or the Sum of the four Beads,” an indication that this is likely not the Sāma Veda.
- Le Gac to Souciet, 28 September 1732, Fonds Brotier, 89, f. 35r.
S weetman : The Absent Vedas 799
less interest in Indian literature than did Ziegenbalg. Although Christoph Walther inventoried
the remains of Ziegenbalg’s library in 1731, five years earlier he had reported that the Tamil
section had been allowed to fall into disrepair, and that many manuscripts had been stolen, or
even burnt. 107 In their writings on Hinduism, the Tranquebar missionaries of this generation
cite more often “the learned Mr. la Croze” than their predecessor Ziegenbalg. 108 It is, then,
not surprising that they remained interested in the Vedas.
In an appendix to their diary for 1734, published under all their names in the Hallesche
Berichte , the Tranquebar missionaries gave a brief account of the Vedas. They report that
despite their efforts to see the Vedas, they have been told that they are not written, but that
boys (who can only be Brahmins) learn sections of them from a priest by repeating it con-
stantly. The language in which they are recorded, which they call Grantha, is so old that no
one can understand it without referring to the śāstra. Few learn the fourth part, because it con-
sists of sorcery. 109 They gloss the word Wedam (i.e., Veda), as “Höllandisch Wet ”—a clear
indication that they are here following the mid-seventeenth-century account of Rogerius, 110
which had stoked the idea in Europe—sparked by Couto’s publication of Azevedo—that it
was the Vedas which were the key texts, despite their predecessor Ziegenbalg’s rather better-
informed view of Hindu, especially Tamil, literature.
Three years later, in 1737, four of these missionaries announced that they had obtained
a translation of the Yajur Veda. 111 They were very likely conscious of the Jesuits’ success
in obtaining copies of the Vedas, announced in Calmette’s letter in the Lettres édifiantes et
curieuses in 1734. 112 The text had been translated for them by a Brahmin named Kṛṣṇ a, after
much persuasion. His reluctance alone provided assurance, they argued, this was indeed the
“veritable Veda.” In fact, although Kṛṣṇ a appears—like Nobili’s informant Ś ivadharma—to
have been a Brahmin of the Taittirīya branch of the Yajur Veda, the text that was published in
the Hallesche Berichte had, according to Albrecht Weber, “not the slightest thing to do with
the Yajurveda,” instead representing “an encyclopedic and systematically ordered representa-
tion of the modern Brahmanical world and life-view.” 113 It is striking that these missionaries
are responding to the desire for the Vedas expressed from Europe at the very time that, in
their hands, Ziegenbalg’s Tamil library was falling into ruin. None of them produced works
on Hinduism that bear comparison with those by Ziegenbalg.
concluSion : vedaS real and imagined
Le Gac’s doubts about the usefulness of the Vedas he dispatched to Europe were well-
founded. Although catalogued, on the basis of the Jesuits’ descriptions of the texts, as soon
as 1739, 114 they remained unread throughout the eighteenth century. 115 One of the few who
- Sweetman and Ilakkuvan, Bibliotheca Malabarica , 21.
- They cite also other European scholars, including Mosheim and Thomas Hyde.
- HB 39: 418.
- They cite also Bernier and the Jesuit Lettres édifiantes et curieuses.
- Their letter is printed in HB 45: 1182–85. The translation of the text appeared in the next installment (HB 46: 1251–94).
- Although they do not here mention the Lettres édifiantes , they had cited an earlier reference in them to the Vedas in their 1734 diary.
- Albrecht Weber, “Ein angebliche Bearbeitung des Yajurveda,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 7 (1853): 235–48, at 236.
- Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum Bibliothecae regiae. Paris 1739. Étienne Fourmont was likely respon- sible for the entries in the section “Codices Indici.”
- A fragment of the Vedas—a single hymn from the first maṇḍ ala of the Ṛg Veda (I, 89)—was collected in Surat by James Fraser in Khambayat in the 1730s (Bodleian Library, MSS. Fraser Sansk. 30). Fraser aspired to translate the Vedas but was aware he had only a fragment of them. He notes that the “ Pourans and Shasters are
800 Journal of the American Oriental Society 139.4 (2019)
might have been able to read them was the Carmelite Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomaeo. He
knew both Sanskrit and the Tamil and Malayalam scripts, and may have recognized Telugu,
even if he had not learned it. Paulinus saw them in late 1789, but in the chaos of the revolu-
tion was not permitted enough time to examine them closely. 116 In 1847 the Jesuit Julien
Bach commented wryly: “aucun indianiste n’est tenté d’en fair usage, et c’est de ces livres
qu’on peut dire: Sacrés ils sont, car personne n’y touche.” 117
But the importance among scholars in Europe in the eighteenth century of the idea of the
Vedas as the most authoritative texts of Indian religion is amply demonstrated by the career
of another set of Vedas linked to the Jesuits. Voltaire received a manuscript in French entitled
Ezour-Vedam in late 1760. Believing, or choosing to believe, it to be a translation from San-
skrit, it became one of his primary sources on India. 118 Although shortly after its publication
in 1778, Pierre Sonnerat correctly identified the Ezour-Vedam as “definitely not one of the
four Vedams” but rather “a book of controversy, written by a missionary,” 119 it became an
important source for some eighteenth-century writers. Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil Duper-
ron, the leading French Orientalist of his time, had another copy. He defended the authentic-
ity of the Ezour-Vedam as late as 1808, even after he had translated the Upaniṣads into Latin
from the Persian adaptation prepared in the early seventeenth century at the order of the
Mughal prince Dārā Shikōh. In Surat, Anquetil Duperron was offered, through a Parsi inter-
mediary, manuscripts containing extracts of the four Vedas. He declined, both because the
Brahmin—and Jain—scholars whom he asked to certify the authenticity of the texts assured
him they were incomplete and because he thought the price unreasonable. He did examine
the texts and provided a description of the structure of the four saṃhitās, which indicates that
the manuscript of the Ṛgveda saṃhitā at least may have been complete. 120
While the Ezour Vedam was being discussed by Voltaire and others, the Vedas sent by
Calmette languished unread in the Bibliothè que Impériale. They were even excluded from
the catalogue of Sanskrit manuscripts prepared by Alexander Hamilton and Louis-Mathieu
Langl ès in 1807, again because they were mostly not in Devanagari script. 121 By this time,
other manuscripts of the Vedas had been obtained in India. In 1781–82 Antoine-Louis-Henri
Polier, a Swiss Protestant who served in the English East India Company’s army until 1775,
had had copies of the Vedas made for him at the court of Pratap Singh at Jaipur. 122 Polier’s
intermediary was a Portuguese physician, Don Pedro da Silva Leitão. A doctor named Pedro
da Silva Leitão had been present at the court of Jai Singh in 1728 and played a part in the
negotiations with the Portuguese regarding the exchange of scientific knowledge, person-
glosses and comments on the Vedh ” and of the Gītā he says “This book the Brahmins call The Marrow of the Vedh. It gives a Light into the most mysterious part of their religion, and explains the substance of the Vedh ” ( A Catalogue of Manuscripts in the Persic, Arabic, and Sanskerrit Languages [London, 1742], 37–39). On Fraser and his collec- tions see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India: Words, Peoples, Empires, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), 144–210.
- Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomaeo, Examen Historico-criticum Codicum Indicorum Bibliothecae Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide (Rome, 1792), 5.
- Julien Bach, “Notice sur la première découverte des Vedas,” Annales de philosophie chré tienne 18 e^ année, 3 e^ série, vol. 16 (1847): 434–43, at 434.
- Daniel S. Hawley, “L’Inde de Voltaire,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 120 (1974): 139–78.
- Sonnerat, Voyage aux Indes orientales , cited in Rocher, Ezourvedam , 13.
- Anquetil Duperron, Voyage en Inde: 1754–1762: Relation de voyage en pré liminaire àla traduction du “Zend-Avesta ,” ed. Jean Deloche, Manonmani Filliozat, and Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat (Paris: École Française d’Extrê me-Orient, 1997), 378–81.
- Ângela Barreto Xavier and Iñes G. Ž upanov, Catholic Orientalism: Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge (16th–18th Centuries) (New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015), 302–3.
- On Polier, see Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India , 239–68.
