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Leading scholars attribute extraordinary achievements to Roberto de Nobili, an Italian Jesuit who worked in a Catholic mission in South India in the seventeenth century. De Nobili is not only said to have enabled the "accommodation" of Indian and, by implication, Hindu social and cultural traditions in the community of converted Christians by distinguishing "religious" from "civil" practices and meanings in the lives of the so-called Gentiles. Through his engagement in the translation and hermeneutic mediation between European and Indian languages and religions, the missionary scholar is also celebrated today for having prepared the ground for the formation of a modern, that is, universalist and pluralistic, concept of religion. The article presents an in-depth reading of original writings of de Nobili and critically discusses modern historical and philological scholarship about his work. It questions the thesis that de Nobili was the harbinger of a groundbreaking new concept of religion. Critical propositions are the following: (1) de Nobili's distinction between "religion" and "civility" was part of a strategic focus on the conversion of Brahmans in South India, not the theoretical vision of a new concept of religion. (2) Even if communicating between diverse cultures, the missionary translations embraced political contexts and scholarly paradigms that willfully invoked hostile tensions between their linguistic and cultural referents. (3) De Nobili's redefinition of "idolatry" reveals an aggressive "semiotic ideology" that seriously undermines the argument of a friendly mediation between Christians and Gentiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mid-nineteenth century movement towards Christianity in Chotanagpur in central India, the missionary Constant Lievens (1856–1893) played a pioneering role in the establishment of the Catholic Mission among the Adivasis (indigenous peoples). Through Lievens' legal advocacy, Adivasis not only adopted a faith, but also began to reclaim their lands and their indigeneity. Drawing on ethnographic research around the intercessory prayer for the beatification of Lievens, this paper analyses the present-day lived contestations of Adivasi Catholic identity-making. The paper argues that Adivasi Catholic identities are lived in contestation and continuous negotiation with their present realities, while also borrowing from the legacies of their own past struggles and their intermediaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins with a simple problem: given the implicit Ignatian model for conversion and of conversion narratives for those already within the Christian fold, how did Jesuit missionaries in the colonies represent native conversion? To what extent were these colonial conversion narratives responding to the demands of Jesuit representational norms and to what extent did they reflect local realities? To address this question, this paper will examine stories of conversions of natives in public letters sent from Bahh and Goa and their immediate environs during the first thirty years of the missions in Brazil and India--annual letters but also other letters which were published in popular collections such as the Nuovi Avisi delle Indie di Portogallo series printed in Venice. The public cartas particulares, as opposed to the private hijuelas, were meant to be carefully crafted, and were explicitly intended to give a good account of the mission to the public in Europe. Since the public letters considered here were guided by Ignatius' epistolary conventions and often placed into wide circulation, they provide an index of the rhetorical strategies and conversion narratives deemed successful by the Jesuit order in Europe in a period when Ignatius' influence was still strongly felt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]