Rez.: S.J. Francis X. Clooney, Western Jesuit Scholars in India: Tracing Their Paths, Reassessing Their Goals, Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2020
In:
Nidan: International Journal of Indian Studies
vol. 5, no. 2
University of Kwa Zulu-Natal, 2020
S. 83-86
Western Jesuit Scholars in India is a remarkable collection of fifteen articles written over a span of three decades. The volume demonstrates authorial interest in Jesuits missionaries, and the history of Catholic theological interaction with Hinduism in Tamil Nadu between the 16th and 19th century. It is also a critical reading of Jesuit polemics produced in a context emphasizing conversion so deeply, that it disallowed missionaries from appreciating the nuances of Hinduism. Complete with a detailed introduction, this volume constitutes an intellectual corpus of Jesuit knowledge production in Tamil Nadu. Clooney clarifies his own authorial academic position as a Jesuit, and as Indologist interested in Catholic theology—a position strongly reflecting the early Jesuit intellectuals of India, missionaries like Robert de Nobili (1577-1656) himself. Clooney summarizes the core argument of his volume as (p. 5): “a study of the Jesuit missionary scholars in India, their texts, and deeds; the perspective of the Indologist with twentieth- and twenty-first century standards regarding the proper knowledge of Indian religious traditions; attention the missionaries’ theology, its problems but also its continuing relevance in a Catholic Church that even now has not disowned the goal of conversion; and the self-reflective attitude of the Jesuit, attentive to and ambivalent about his own tradition, unwilling to disown it, and determined to contribute.”