9 - The missionary discovery of South Indian religion: opening the doors of idolatry

Summary

Throughout the sixteenth century Europeans in India and elsewhere overseas had elaborated an ethnological language with which they could approach human diversity in its natural setting through an immediate use of common analytical categories. They had also captured a historical vision which, in its inclusion of alien traditions, went far beyond previous European rhetorical conventions. The gap that still separated discourse generated overseas and discourse at home now offered ample room for the creation of orientalist clicheâs, but the power of the new historical vision was precisely its ability to do the opposite, to historicize Europe's other and thus challenge any clicheâs. The answer had to be an intellectual debate in which empirical issues could not be ignored.

In South India, Federici had witnessed, along with the end of the old and most splendid Vijayanagara, also the end of a phase in the history of European attitudes towards gentile civilization. Of course a rump kingdom of Vijayanagara survived for a few decades in the Indian hinterland and, perhaps more important, the idea of a mythical dharmic kingdom remained central to the political imagination of Hindu southern India. But the context had been transformed. Now European travellers confronted the problem of how to grapple with a civilization which had lost its political centre.