'Gods, Guns and Missionaries' excerpt: When Jesuits met devils and monsters in India

Many of these stereotypes, to be sure, were not inventions of the Society and its fathers. For centuries prior, information about India, much of it spurious and even laughable, had been trickling West. Marco Polo’s diary from the thirteenth century was an influential model, for instance. As the art historian Partha Mitter notes, Polo was among the first to describe devadasis, or female temple servants, when he wrote of ‘abbeys in which are gods and goddesses to whom many young girls are consecrated’, who on holy days ‘sing and dance before the idol with great festivity’.

By the fifteenth century, this found visual representation through a Parisian illustrator, except that, having never witnessed what he drew, the picture was a peculiar mash: The devadasis took the form of European nuns, complete with robes and veils, dancing before an image, also dressed like a Catholic sister. This ‘putting [of] European clothing on an Indian subject’ became a ‘constant feature of the early Western image of Indian gods’ as well.

For few Europeans had direct experience of the topics they described, with the result that un-Christian subjects were pressed into ready-made, more familiar Christian templates. As multi-armed, many-headed Hindu deities were heard of, these too were retrofitted into available medieval categories. Or as Mitter tells, ‘classical monsters and [pagan] gods, Biblical demons and Indian gods were all lumped together’ in one universal master class: ‘monsters’.

This perception of pagan gods as devils lay in Europe itself, and in Christianity’s early phase of expansion. In seventh-century Rome, for example, when the Pantheon was seized and turned into a church—which it still remains—the gods who resided there were branded a ‘multitude of devils’. So also, early missionaries to Britain found locals conducting animal sacrifices; the deities receiving these were lumped under the same term. Idols were bad, and memoirs of pious Christian figures often speak of their breaking these, physically as well as via miraculous powers.

One 6th century bishop in France could not understand why pagans were so angry when men with the ‘thought of God’ burned their shrines and asked them to stop praying to trees and springs. In resisting, they were ‘deserting the light and running to darkness’. The prevailing Christian belief, after all, was that pagan gods were attendants of Satan who had been cast out from heaven; it was demonic powers that ‘persuaded men to build them temples, to place there images or statues of wicked men and to set up altars to them, on which they might pour out the blood not only of animals but even of men’.

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Received (un)wisdom of this variety was to go a long way in framing India and its culture in the West now. Thus, for example, by the time the Dutchman Jan Huyghen van Linschoten joined Portuguese service in Goa in the year of Acquaviva’s death, it was normal to describe gods in temples as demons. Or as the man wrote, Hindu shrines housed ‘Idoles’ that were ‘cut most ugly, and like monstrous Devils’. Indeed, the devil spoke through these images, which was why Hindus venerated him and made offerings: ‘to keepe friendshippe’ and ensure ‘hee should not hurt them’. Their religion, in other words, was not about finding the light as much as cowing to darkness—the opposite of Christianity.

Once van Linschoten passed by some villages and ‘at everie hil, stonie Rocke or hole’ there was a ‘Carved Pagode, or rather Devils, and monsters in hellish shapes’. An image he saw on this journey was ‘so mishaped and deformed’ that it surpassed all the ugliness so far suffered—the deity (probably Narasimha, the man-lion form of Vishnu) had ‘hornes, and long teeth that hung out of his mouth, down to the knees, and beneath his Navel and belly it had an other such like face, with . . . tuskes’. There was on its head something ‘not unlike the Popes triple crown’ so that ‘in effect it seemed to be a monster [of the] Apocalips’. No matter which way he looked, van Linschoten saw in Hindu gods the very creatures Christian mythology warned the faithful to beware (of). To Indians, of course, these images were ‘visual theologies’ and ‘visual scriptures’, but, made of black stone and housed in dark sanctums, outsiders conjured up unpleasant associations.

Interestingly, these descriptions were recycled formulaically by European travellers, resulting in a standardized (and negative) image of Hindu culture. Indeed, there is a strong chance that our Dutchman plagiarized his reports from a man who preceded him by decades. Ludovico di Varthema, an Italian, in an account published in 1510 spoke of gods on the Kerala coast. ‘The King of Calicut is a Pagan,’ begins the relevant section, and he worshipped a ‘devil’ called Deumo—a distortion of the Malayalam deivam or god. On the doors of Deumo’s shrine were wooden devils, but the chief idol was metal.

Revealingly, di Varthema added how this particular deity had ‘a crown made like that of the papal kingdom, with three crowns; and it also has four horns and four teeth, with a very large mouth, nose and most terrible eyes’. Its hands were like ‘a flesh hook, and the feet like . . . a cock’.

While van Linschoten’s description of what he saw is suspiciously similar (as is Johan de Mandelslo’s from the 17th century, which may, in turn, have been ‘borrowed’), di Varthema himself was hardly being original. He claimed to have also seen a Sathanas (Satan) seated in a flame of fire, ‘wherein are a great number of souls’, one drawn into its mouth, and another ensnared by hand. As Mitter notes, this was just a lazy description of Satan as painted in pictures of hell in Europe. In other words, even as travellers related sights they had seen in Hindu lands, they also consciously manufactured material, inspired by medieval tropes, in the interests of titillating their audience.

 

In fact, though things had improved from the age when India was thought to be home to talking serpents and one-eyed beings, there was yet much nonsense published overseas. Leaving aside Marco Polo’s bundle of overstatements, there was one like Odoric Mattiussi who in the early 14th century described in coastal India an idol ‘which is half man and half ox’ and ‘giveth responses out of its mouth’. This god, the Italian friar insisted, consumed ‘the blood of [exactly] forty virgins’ regularly, so that if in the pure Christian world parents vowed to give children to church service, in India fathers and mothers pledged their offspring’s heads. He also reported in Kerala a tradition of widow burning; that is, if a dead man left a wife, ‘they burn her alive with him, saying that she ought to go and keep her husband company’. 

It is an odd remark, for while sati was indeed practised in many places in India, Kerala is one region where it was explicitly prohibited. As late as the 19th century, when a migrant wished to burn herself thus, local authorities denied permission, offering to escort her to a neighbouring territory instead where the act was acceptable. Could it be that Mattiussi was mechanically recycling Marco Polo, in an attempt to seem ‘authentic’, only to accidentally apply his claim to the wrong geography? 

In any case, sati quickly became an essential ingredient in travelogues, down to the British era, with the consequence that a real but hardly national custom, limited to certain classes and places, was identified as a defining feature of Hinduism—a rhetorical handle that in time justified the British Raj’s own quest to ‘civilize’ India.

Edited excerpt published with permission from Penguin Random House India.

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