Joan-Pau Rubis, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 12501625 Travel and

Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 12501625 by Joan-Pau Rubis Review by: Phillip B. Wagoner History of Religions, Vol. 43, No. 1 (August 2003), pp. 78-80 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/381331 . Accessed: 22/03/2012 10:46
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Book Reviews

Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 12501625. By Joan-Pau Rubis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xxii+ 443, 2 maps, 12 plates. $74.95. Writing from India in the 1620s, the Roman aristocrat Pietro della Valle recorded an important observation on the signicance of cow dung in its use as a plaster for oors. Noting that he had earlier assumed this practice to be a superstitious rite of religion, he emphasizes that he has now come to realize it is used only for elegance and ornament ( per pulitezza e per ornamento) (quoted by Rubis, p. 377). Not only have the Portuguese in Goa also adopted this custom said to be effective in protecting against the plaguebut, moreover, della Valle would himself adopt it upon his return to Italy. In thus drawing a critical distinction between the tenets of non-Christian religions (which could only be false) and the exotic, yet coherent and efcacious sets of social customs of these Gentiles, the passage is emblematic of what Joan-Pao Rubis describes as a key distinction [in] early modern ethnology, namely, a sophisticated understanding of the differences between the analysis of religious diversity and the analysis of diversity in forms of civilization (p. 1). In this ambitiously conceived study, Rubis charts the course of this intellectual development by analyzing the changing conventions and concerns of travel literature in Renaissance Europe. He contends that by its sheer massive presence, this travel literature created an empirical ground that imposed itself in the thinking of seventeenth-century theologians and philosophers (p. xi), and that this led to far-reaching intellectual changes. Where Edward Said and his followers would see the production of orientalist images of a passive, non-European other, Rubis is concerned instead with the genuine interaction (p. xiv) that unfolded between Europeans and the peoples they encountered. In stressing the very centrality of this cross-cultural experience and emphasizing its impact on the subsequent unfolding of cultural and intellectual changes in Europe itself, Rubis provides a viable and compelling alternative to the now-tired orientalism paradigm. So massive is the body of extant Renaissance travel literature that Rubis has little choice but to restrict his study in some way. He creates virtue from necessity by choosing to focus on accounts dealing with South India and, in particular, with the Vijayanagara empire, the state that dominated the Indian peninsula between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Following these self-imposed limitations, Rubis is still able to provide extended analysis of the works of some nine key guresMarco Polo (1298), Nicolo Conti (1437 and 1441), Vasco de Gama (the Diario of 149799), Ludovico de Varthema (1510), Duarte Barbosa (1516 18), Domingos Paes (152022), Fernao Nunes (ca. 1531), Roberto de Nobili (and other Jesuits writing ca. 1600), and Pietro della Valle (1620s and earlier)as well as literally scores of other gures who are discussed either in passing, or at greater length for purposes of comparison. By delimiting his eld in this manner, Rubis has produced a case study that is as coherent as it is revealing, enabling him to arrive at a number of important conclusions regarding the development of this ethnographic literature and the analytical discourse on human diversity it embodies. At the risk of oversimplifying his subtly nuanced argument of some four hundred pages, I would summarize Rubiss central thesis as follows: The more Europeans succeeded in mastering foreign languages, the more they were able to

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participate effectively in local cultures, thus leading to their perception of these cultures as valid and rationally coherent systems of social practice. What they portrayed was not an image of otherness, but rather a complex set of social rules which happen to be different (p. 219). Although Marco Polo effectively marks the beginnings of this development (he surely spoke and read Mongol, Turkish, and Persian [p. 51]), the heyday was in the sixteenth century, when a new generation of Portuguese casados established themselves in Goa and elsewhere along the coasts. Like Marco Polo, these men had acquired a prociency in local languages (Barbosa was a specialist in Malayalam, and Nunes probably learnt Kannada [p. 207]), but unlike him they were more thoroughly integrated into the new lands as settled merchants and crown ofcials, and thus produced even more extended and systematic ethnographic accounts. Of particular signicance for Rubiss larger thesis is his suggestion that religion was the sole category that remained resistant to this kind of analysis. Thus, the local forms of Gentilism (Hinduism, in todays terms) were inevitably viewed from the perspective of Christianitys universalistic claims, which could only lead to the conclusion that these were the idolatrous practices of devil worshippers. Nonetheless, such a discrepancy between a positive evaluation of civil society and a negative judgment of this societys religion did not create any global problem of interpretation; instead, it simply shifted the weight of interpretation away from religion, so that what is most remarkable about sixteenth-century texts (and in stark contrast to the fascination for the wisdom of the brahmins in ancient Greek accounts) is an almost complete lack of interest in the beliefs and faith of those peoples whose material resources, military power, dress and ritual customs attracted such attention (p. 162). In any case, as lay Christians, these Portuguese ethnographers did not have a proper cultural space in which to discuss religion, since that discourse properly belonged to the authorities of the Church (p. 222). Independent accounts focusing primarily on the analysis of South Indian religion would not appear until the rst decade of the seventeenth century, when Jesuit missionaries began working the courts and coastal territories of Vijayanagaras successor states, and the political and economic interests of the earlier lay authors had been made largely irrelevant by the eclipse of Vijayanagara as a political center (the city was sacked in 1565 and never successfully revived). What is of real interest here is that Rubis shows this new missionary genre to have been the intellectual heir to the lay accounts of the sixteenth century. Thus, the Jesuits continued to observe the critical distinction between civil and religious diversity, and some of them, like Roberto de Nobili, proved adept at using this distinction to further their missionary ends. The fundamental falseness of Hindu religious teachings was simply assumed by Nobili, yet this did not stop him from discarding his customary dress as a European Jesuit and presenting himself instead in the garb of an Indian holy man (sannyasi ) so his audience might better recognize him as belonging to the category of itinerant religious teacher. In adopting such a strategy of cultural translation, he was following the same critical procedure of disaggregating customary practices from essential religious beliefs, and, accordingly, he could change his dress condent in the knowledge that he would in no way be compromising his orthodoxy (pp. 325, 338). This critical distinction between religious beliefs and civil customs would have far-reaching consequences in subsequent European intellectual history, on the one hand opening

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up the possibility of a more self-reexive understanding of Christianity, and, on the other, contributing to the increasingly sharp differentiation between religion and secular society as analytical categories. If there is one criticism that can be made of this profoundly erudite work, it has to do with a nagging epistemological issue that remains largely unresolved. Early on, Rubis rightly calls attention to the problem that current historical interpretations of the empire of Vijayanagara rely heavily on the very same sources that we need to read critically in order to distinguish a historical reality from a western view of it (p. 29). Rubis suggests that this vicious circle can be escaped by considering archaeological evidence, yet his discussion of this evidence is in fact largely restricted to a review of some of the higher-order interpretations that have been offered of it, themselves similarly determined by a consideration of the Portuguese accounts. If there is indeed any possibility of eventual escape from this problem, it must properly begin with a more direct and systematic reading of the European travel literature against the background of the raw archaeological data, now available in abundance thanks to the ongoing publishing efforts of the Karnataka Directorate of Archaeology and Museums and the Vijayanagara Research Project Monograph Series. Similarly, Rubiss efforts to compare European accounts with indigenous literary representations would have been more protable, I believe, had he additionally considered the more direct representations of contemporary inscriptionsmade accessible through such analyses as Noboru Karashimas Towards a New Formation: South Indian Society under Vijayanagar Rule (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992)and not just the more problematic representations of normative and poetic texts like the Ramayana and Amuktamalyada, or post-Vijayanagara historiographic writings like the Rayavacakamu. It must be conceded, however, that this remains only a minor problem, and that it in no way vitiates Rubiss larger argument. Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance is a work of exceptional importance and far-reaching implications. It should be mandatory reading not only for scholars of comparative religion, but also for anyone interested in the dynamics of crosscultural encounter, the historical analysis of travel literature, the historiography of medieval South India and Vijayanagara, or the intellectual history of Renaissance Europea broad audience indeed.

Phillip B. Wagoner Wesleyan University

The Bijak of Kabir. Translated by Linda Hess and Shukdeo Singh; essays and notes by Linda Hess. New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. xiv+200. $45.00 (cloth); $17.95 (paper). Scholarly translations of religious poetry too often disappoint because they are either scholarship that is too diligent or poetry that does not work. Although several Western students of Indian languages have a nice sense of assonance and rhythm, few have the poetic sensibilities of Linda Hess. Her translations of Kabir, prepared in collaboration with the well-known Hindi scholar Shukdeo Singh,