Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through EuropeanEyes, 1250–1625Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625 byJoan-Pau  RubiésReview by: Phillip B. WagonerHistory of Religions, Vol. 43, No. 1 (August 2003), pp. 78-80Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/381331 .Accessed: 22/03/2012 10:46

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Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes,1250–1625. By Joan-Pau Rubiés. 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 re-corded an important observation on the significance of cow dung in its use as aplaster for floors. Noting that he had earlier assumed this practice to be a “super-stitious 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 byRubiés, p. 377). Not only have the Portuguese in Goa also adopted this custom—said to be effective in protecting against the plague—but, moreover, della Vallewould himself adopt it upon his return to Italy. In thus drawing a critical distinc-tion between the tenets of non-Christian religions (which could only be false) andthe exotic, yet coherent and efficacious sets of social customs of these Gentiles,the passage is emblematic of what Joan-Pao Rubiés describes as “a key distinc-tion [in] early modern ethnology,” namely, “a sophisticated understanding of thedifferences between the analysis of religious diversity and the analysis of diver-sity in forms of civilization” (p. 1).

In this ambitiously conceived study, Rubiés charts the course of this intellectualdevelopment by analyzing the changing conventions and concerns of travel lit-erature in Renaissance Europe. He contends that “by its sheer massive presence,”this travel literature created an empirical ground that “imposed itself in the think-ing of seventeenth-century theologians and philosophers” (p. xi), and that this ledto far-reaching intellectual changes. Where Edward Said and his followers wouldsee the production of “orientalist” images of a passive, non-European “other,”Rubiés is concerned instead with the “genuine interaction” (p. xiv) that unfoldedbetween Europeans and the peoples they encountered. In stressing the very central-ity of this cross-cultural experience and emphasizing its impact on the subsequentunfolding of cultural and intellectual changes in Europe itself, Rubiés provides aviable and compelling alternative to the now-tired “orientalism” paradigm.

So “massive” is the body of extant Renaissance travel literature that Rubiés haslittle choice but to restrict his study in some way. He creates virtue from neces-sity by choosing to focus on accounts dealing with South India and, in particular,with the Vijayanagara empire, the state that dominated the Indian peninsula be-tween the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Following these self-imposed limi-tations, Rubiés is still able to provide extended analysis of the works of some ninekey figures—Marco Polo (1298), Nicolo Conti (1437 and 1441), Vasco de Gama(the Diario of 1497–99), Ludovico de Varthema (1510), Duarte Barbosa (1516–18), Domingos Paes (1520–22), Fernao Nunes (ca. 1531), Roberto de Nobili (andother Jesuits writing ca. 1600), and Pietro della Valle (1620s and earlier)—as wellas literally scores of other figures who are discussed either in passing, or at greaterlength for purposes of comparison. By delimiting his field in this manner, Rubiéshas produced a case study that is as coherent as it is revealing, enabling him to ar-rive at a number of important conclusions regarding the development of this eth-nographic literature and the analytical discourse on human diversity it embodies.

At the risk of oversimplifying his subtly nuanced argument of some four hun-dred pages, I would summarize Rubiés’s central thesis as follows: The more Eu-ropeans 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 thesecultures as valid and rationally coherent systems of social practice. What they por-trayed was “not an image of ‘otherness,’ but rather a complex set of social ruleswhich happen to be different” (p. 219). Although Marco Polo effectively marksthe 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 gen-eration of Portuguese casados established themselves in Goa and elsewhere alongthe coasts. Like Marco Polo, these men had acquired a proficiency in local lan-guages (“Barbosa was a specialist in Malayalam, and Nunes probably learnt Kan-nada” [p. 207]), but unlike him they were more thoroughly integrated into thenew lands as settled merchants and crown officials, and thus produced even moreextended and systematic ethnographic accounts.

Of particular significance for Rubiés’s larger thesis is his suggestion that re-ligion was the sole category that remained resistant to this kind of analysis. Thus,the local forms of “Gentilism” (Hinduism, in today’s terms) were inevitablyviewed from the perspective of Christianity’s universalistic claims, which couldonly lead to the conclusion that these were the idolatrous practices of devil wor-shippers. Nonetheless, such a discrepancy between a positive evaluation of civilsociety and a negative judgment of this society’s religion did not create any “glo-bal problem of interpretation”; instead, it simply “shifted the weight of interpre-tation away from religion, so that what is most remarkable about sixteenth-centurytexts (and in stark contrast to the fascination for the wisdom of the brahmins inancient Greek accounts) is an almost complete lack of interest in the beliefs andfaith of those peoples whose material resources, military power, dress and ritualcustoms attracted such attention” (p. 162). In any case, as lay Christians, thesePortuguese ethnographers “did not have a proper cultural space in which to dis-cuss religion, since that discourse properly belonged to the authorities of theChurch” (p. 222). Independent accounts focusing primarily on the analysis ofSouth Indian religion would not appear until the first decade of the seventeenthcentury, when Jesuit missionaries began working the courts and coastal territoriesof Vijayanagara’s successor states, and the political and economic interests of theearlier lay authors had been made largely irrelevant by the eclipse of Vijayanagaraas a political center (the city was sacked in 1565 and never successfully revived).

What is of real interest here is that Rubiés shows this new missionary genre tohave been the intellectual heir to the lay accounts of the sixteenth century. Thus,the Jesuits continued to observe the critical distinction between civil and religiousdiversity, and some of them, like Roberto de Nobili, proved adept at using thisdistinction to further their missionary ends. The fundamental falseness of Hindureligious teachings was simply assumed by Nobili, yet this did not stop him fromdiscarding his customary dress as a European Jesuit and presenting himself in-stead in the garb of an Indian holy man (sannyasi ) so his audience might betterrecognize him as belonging to the category of “itinerant religious teacher.” Inadopting such a strategy of cultural translation, he was following the same criticalprocedure of disaggregating customary practices from essential religious beliefs,and, accordingly, he could change his dress confident in the knowledge that hewould in no way be compromising his orthodoxy (pp. 325, 338). This critical dis-tinction between religious beliefs and civil customs would have far-reaching con-sequences in subsequent European intellectual history, on the one hand opening

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up the possibility of a more self-reflexive understanding of Christianity, and, on theother, contributing to the increasingly sharp differentiation between religion andsecular society as analytical categories.

If there is one criticism that can be made of this profoundly erudite work, it hasto do with a nagging epistemological issue that remains largely unresolved. Earlyon, Rubiés rightly calls attention to the problem that “current historical interpre-tations of the empire of Vijayanagara rely heavily on the very same sources thatwe need to read critically in order to distinguish a historical reality from a west-ern view of it” (p. 29). Rubiés suggests that this vicious circle can be escaped byconsidering archaeological evidence, yet his discussion of this “evidence” is infact largely restricted to a review of some of the higher-order interpretations thathave been offered of it, themselves similarly determined by a consideration of thePortuguese accounts. If there is indeed any possibility of eventual escape fromthis problem, it must properly begin with a more direct and systematic reading ofthe European travel literature against the background of the “raw” archaeologicaldata, now available in abundance thanks to the ongoing publishing efforts of theKarnataka Directorate of Archaeology and Museums and the Vijayanagara Re-search Project Monograph Series. Similarly, Rubiés’s efforts to compare Europeanaccounts with indigenous literary representations would have been more profitable,I believe, had he additionally considered the more direct representations of con-temporary inscriptions—made accessible through such analyses as Noboru Kara-shima’s Towards a New Formation: South Indian Society under Vijayanagar Rule(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992)—and not just the more problematic rep-resentations of normative and poetic texts like the Ramayana and Amuktamalyada,or post-Vijayanagara historiographic writings like the Rayavacakamu. It must beconceded, however, that this remains only a minor problem, and that it in no wayvitiates Rubiés’s larger argument.

Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance is a work of exceptional importanceand far-reaching implications. It should be mandatory reading not only for scholarsof comparative religion, but also for anyone interested in the dynamics of cross-cultural encounter, the historical analysis of travel literature, the historiography ofmedieval South India and Vijayanagara, or the intellectual history of RenaissanceEurope—a broad audience indeed.

Phillip B. Wagoner

Wesleyan University

The Bijak of Kabir. Translated by Linda Hess and Shukdeo Singh; essays andnotes 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 areeither scholarship that is too diligent or poetry that does not work. Although sev-eral Western students of Indian languages have a nice sense of assonance andrhythm, few have the poetic sensibilities of Linda Hess. Her translations of Ka-bir, prepared in collaboration with the well-known Hindi scholar Shukdeo Singh,