Dr. Margherita Trento
“Beschi’s attempt to gain political influence did not only entail his own self-fashioning as a scholar-poet, a pulavar worthy of being the counselor of a king. He also founded a school, thus appropriating the authority reserved to teachers in the Tamil country. Indeed, the catalogue of the Jesuit missionaries working in the Malabar province in 1734 describes Beschi’s main activity in the previous year with two words: docuit Rhetoricam, “he taught rhetoric.”
This laconic statement refers to his role as headmaster of the school for the literary training of the catechists that the missionaries instituted at Ēlākkuṟicci in 1731, as we learn from the annual letter of that year. The school offered a formalized environment where the catechists could approach traditional Tamil erudition with the prospect of using it as a tool for preaching, persuasion, and conversion. In line with Tournon’s requests, it allowed for the study of Tamil literary texts to happen in a safe environment controlled by the missionaries, who could select the best passages — “free from obnoxious superstitions” — from those texts.
Notwithstanding its brevity, the statement docuit rhetoricam also provides insights on the purpose and curriculum of the school, at least in the perspective of the missionaries. First of all, it was a school of Tamil rhetoric, not literature. As Marc Fumaroli first pointed out, the category of literature has often been superimposed by modern critics onto a range of literary activities that most scholars in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, especially Jesuit scholars, would have defined as rhetoric.
The sermons and treatises many Jesuits wrote, in Europe like in Asia, were first of all aimed to persuade their audiences, and thus rhetorical rather than literary pieces. In our case too, Jesuit missionaries intended to train their catechists so that they would acquire the technical set of skills — rhetorical skills — necessary to please, convince and convert in Tamil. The study of Tamil literary texts was just one part of this overarching project. The passage referring to the school in the annual letter of 1731, written by Beschi in 1732 and mentioned in the previous chapter, should be read in this perspective:
‘Finally, on the same year [1731] we opened a school for the exercise (ludus) of Tamil erudition for the catechists in the village of Ēlākkuṟicci, since there was no longer anyone among them who had the least knowledge of literary Tamil. The missionaries, aware that such eloquence (litteraturam) could contribute in no small degree to the charm (decor) of the divine law, and help the catechists to propagate it, decided by common accord to choose some among the catechists of all residences who for some time would apply themselves to that work….’
At a close reading, this passage contains a dense network of references to the world of Jesuit humanism and rhetoric. We are introduced into this world by the use of the word ludus (“play, sport, training”) to define Beschi’s school, a word often used for grammar schools attended by young men in early modern Europe. Moreover, the subject taught at Ēlākkuṟicci was Tamil litteraturam, another key-word that in the early eighteenth century had not yet taken on its contemporary meaning of “literature.” In this context, it rather meant eloquence. And indeed, in the very same sentence the letter mentions the principal aims of Christian rhetoric in this period, namely to add beauty to the expression of the divine law (in other words, delectare), in order to teach, and convert, more easily (docere and movere). In this context the word decor, literally beauty and charm, is crucial to understand Beschi’s own literary strategy, which we will explore in the next chapter. The text continues to play on the two complementary poles of delectatio and doctrina when mentioning the litterae humaniores together with the exercitia spiritualis as the two ways of fortifying of the catechists — a double armor — before sending them to evangelize the Tamil countryside. This passage closely mirrors the Ignatian vision at the foundation the Society of Jesus, namely the capability of its members to mobilize humanistic as well as theological and spiritual knowledge for the greater glory of God.
And yet in this conventional description, Tamil substitutes Latin. How was this switch possible, and even desirable, in the missionary context of South India? And what were its consequences?
The network of Jesuit humanistic ideas and key-terms must have made the enterprise look familiar, even reassuring, to the readers of this letter in Rome. These details inscribe the Tamil school within a global humanistic project they could recognize, and in which the study of local languages was subsumed within a larger Western rhetorical framework that nevertheless had the capability to interact with local learned tradition, and create a variety of hybrid realities. As recently argued by Stuart McManus, in this period “Jesuit humanism became something akin to a “world philology” […], not in its universality, but in its ability to interact with learned traditions from Asia, Africa, and the Americas. This included multiple hybrid textual cultures, which we might call “Indo-humanisms” (borrowing the Iberian meta-geographical idea of the “Indies”), that became naturalized in the Christian societies that grew up in the wake of Iberian expansion and Jesuit missions.” Within this framework, the Ēlākkuṟicci school represents a case-limit, insofar as the Tamil language provided the grammatical and literary framework of the project. In most other cases, Latin — even though never theorized as the übersprache for Jesuit schools — supplied the metalanguage that missionaries used to understand the languages they encountered and described throughout the world. Indeed, Beschi’s Latin grammars of Tamil, written for the use of his fellow missionaries, show how he negotiated local grammatical knowledge in order to represent Tamil in this global framework. By contrast, the Tamil textbook he composed for the Ēlākkuṟicci school, the Toṉṉūlviḷakkam, subverts this balance. Beschi incorporated in this grammar those elements of the Latin tradition that he reckoned to be necessary for creating Christian poetry in Tamil. Yet the overall purpose of the Toṉṉūlviḷakkam is to make Christianity, its poetry and poetics, part of the Tamil literary and grammatical tradition.
The urgency for Beschi, his fellow missionaries, and their catechists to become proficient in literary Tamil, and to take active part in the Tamil cultural world, is at the same time obvious and novel. The role of language acquisition in the Jesuit missionary enterprises has been stressed multiple times. Like many of his colleagues, Beschi argued for the importance of local authors as a source of topics and ideas to promote Christianity locally, and suggested that they could function as auctoritates upon which Catholics could rely to structure their arguments, in a way analogous to the role Greek and Latin classics played in the development Christian rhetoric in the West. In this perspective, it was crucial for the catechists to learn Tamil grammar and literature in order to preach effectively. As it will appear more clearly in the next chapter, Beschi also aimed to connect the Tamil realm of the literary with that of oratory and persuasion. How the written and the oral dimension played into his plan to Christianize Tamil is hard to assess. Certainly, homiletic was a concern for missionaries.” (Excerpt from the book Writing Tamil Catholicism . A Social History Of Persuasion And Devotion In The Eighteenth Century, Brill, 2021. In progress.)
About the Author:
Margherita Trento is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellow at the Centre d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (CEIAS) in Paris. Her current project, located at the crossroad of history, literature, and ethnography, explores ideas and practices of martyrdom and self-sanctification in early modern South India. Before joining the CEIAS, she was a research fellow at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” in the framework of the ERC project ŚIVADHARMA. She received her PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in March 2020, with a dissertation on the social, cultural and literary history of Tamil Catholicism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She has authored articles on the cultural history of early modern South India, including ““Translating the Dharma of Śiva in Sixteenth-century Chidambaram: Maṟaiñāṉa Campantar’s Civatarumōttaram” forthcoming in May 2021, and “Śivadharma or Bonifacio? Behind the Scenes of the Madurai Mission Controversy (1608–1619)” (2018).
