Jesuit Orientalism; - Ines G. Županov

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and highlighted their most noble genealogies and merits often against the claims of the other
faction. Queiros vigorously attacked one such anonymous tract that circulated in Goa in
which the author tried to prove that Brahmans were Indian “natural nobility” originating from
a King who was also one of the Magi. Nobility based on what is written in puranas and other
native stories that are all false fiction, protested Queiros, is not true nobility. “The only true
[nobility] is the one that is derived from the worship of the True God and that there is only
false and imaginary nobility when false Gods are concerned.” 97
It is not only the fact that some “nations of India have …high opinions of themselves”
that bothered Queiros. The educated and highly articulate Goan Catholic elites were rewriting
their own Christian and pre-Christian history and, along the way, asserting their role as not
just informants but as Orientalists in their own right. Works such as Aureola dos Indios and
Defesa da Nobiliarchia Bracmana by António João Frias (1664-1727), on the Brahman side
and Promputario de diffinições índicas by Leonardo Paes and Espada contra o Golias do
Bramanismo by João da Cunha Jacques for the Charodos surpassed in their Orientalist
virtuosity the efforts of the Jesuits. They were able to quote with equal authority Aristotle,
Plato, the fathers of the Church and modern theologians as well as Indian books (or so they
claimed). The genealogies that they proposed for their lineages proposed multiple connections
with Mosaic histories and the legend of St. Thomas‟s visit and death in India. The only
problem was that their diametrically opposing “nobility” claims tended to undermine both
sides. In the last decades of the 17 th century, the Catholic Brahmans succeeded in constructing
yet another “modern” proof of their “ecclesiastical nobility”. The most learned and pious of
them founded a missionary order, Congregação do Oratório de Santa Cruz dos Milagres that
provided Catholic priests and missionaries to Sri Lanka, from 1686 until the end of the 18 th
century. Some of the missionaries became famous both for their exemplary missionary lives
and for Orientalist studies. 98 Jacome Gonçalves learnt both Sinhala and Tamil so well that he
wrote catechetical texts in those languages.
alternative histories in 18 th century Goa”, The Medieval History Journal – Theme Issue Conversions, ed. Monica
Juneja/Kim Siebenhüner, 12, 2, 2009, pp. 303-325.
97 Queiros, p. 126.
98 Ines. G. Županov, “ Goan Brahmans in the Land of Promise: Missionaries, Spies and
Gentiles in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Sri Lanka”, in Jorge Manuel Flores, Reexploring
the Links; History and Constructed Histories between Portugal and Sri Lanka,
Calouste Gulbenkian and Harrassowitz Verlag, 2007, pp. 171-210