Missionary Enchantment in South Asia, 16th-18th Centuries

Max Weber’s classical notion of enchantment serves in this book to highlight the clash and rewiring of ethical and cosmological codes in European and Indian early modern cultural encounters from the 16th century onward. Since Portuguese imperialism was unable to justify itself without invoking otherworldly intervention, Catholic missionaries provided the vocabulary and narrative of global salvation. Each chapter in this volume explores a range of enchantment techniques used by missionaries, encompassing historical prose, poetry, images, and translations, woven through with emotions and wrapped in illocutionary force. Catholic missionaries in India wrote from and about the soft belly of tropical colonialism with certainty about the triumph of Christianity. Understanding the subterranean bond between history and fiction is at the heart of this book.