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In 1556, a printing press left Portugal on a ship. A new religious order called the Society of Jesus , or Jesuits, wanted to use this hot new technology — just over a century old — to spread Christianity in the East. This press was meant for Abyssinia (Ethiopia), but the winds took it round Africa and up to India, where it docked in Goa.
It was getting ready to sail again, when it was learned that the Abyssinian emperor no longer wanted it. Francis Xavier, one of the Jesuits’s founders, had established a strong presence in Goa. So, when this news came, the Jesuits quickly set up the press.
Printing using carved surfaces may have existed in India before this, but this press produced the first Indian books using movable type. This was in Roman script, but attempts were made to cast types in Indian scripts, first Tamil and then Devanagari. The earliest texts were religious, but in 1563, the press printed a book whose title translates as Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India (1563).
Written by physician and naturalist Garcia da Orta in the form of dialogues with a fictional friend named Ruano, it describes the useful plants of India. Through the conversations, which include visits to patients, a fascinating picture emerges of the trading world of India and the Arabian Sea. Travellers’ tales at that time tended to the fantastic, probably to make any merchandise they were selling seem more valuable.
Garcia’s observations are sober and generally accurate, with him admitting when he doesn’t know something directly. He describes asafoetida as “the nastiest smell in the world”, but notes that dishes made with it don’t smell bad. Ruano marvels at the appearance of jackfruits and how their cooked seeds taste like chestnuts.
Garcia teaches Ruano how to eat mangoes, which the latter exclaims “surpass all the fruits of Spain”. This part of the text has one of the first mentions of the islands of Bombay, from where Garcia received mangoes and jangomas berries. The Colloquies were well received in Europe, helping to advertise the trading potential of Western India.
It was one example of the influence of the Jesuits’s mission to communicate knowledge. Many things about them have been controversial, like their evangelisation mission and involvement with the Inquisition. European colonial powers were wary of the Jesuit emphasis on universal education, suspecting that this would empower the colonial subjects they wished to exploit.
This is shown dramatically in the film The Mission, based on Jesuit attempts to create ‘republics’ of the natives in Paraguay and resist European attempts to make them slaves. Religious expansion takes new knowledge and products with it. The spread of Islam to North Africa, Spain and Sicily took products like dates, citrus and sugarcane, and the knowledge of cultivating them in water-scarce regions.
More recently, Hindu temples and Sikh gurudwaras have brought vegetarian food to the West in their canteens and langar halls. Christian religious orders were particularly suited to disseminate agricultural and food production knowledge because after the collapse of Rome, they became the main repository for such information. “By growing and storing food surpluses, the monasteries became business, cultural and financial centers, as well as dietary hubs,” write Evan DG Fraser and Andrew Rimas in their history, Empires of Food.
In the run-up to the decennial Exposition of the Relics of St Francis Xavier, which started this week in Goa, some have attacked the event by pointing out controversial aspects of the Jesuits. But as that first printing press shows, their role was complex. The importance of their dissemination of knowledge, both to and from the East (like the Colloquies) was real.
Bakers in Europe and South America make pastries called jesuites shaped like the triangular hats the first members wore (you see this in the TV serial Shogun). It is a delicious way to acknowledge the often unexpected, and global, influence of the Jesuits..
