‘I picked these flowers of knowledge for you’ : Jesuit rules of statecraft for the emperor of Mughal India

Abstract

The Jesuit missions to the Timurid Mughal court of India began in 1580, and flourished between 1595 and 1615 under Jerome Xavier (d. 1617), who headed the third mission at the courts of Akbar (r. 1556–1605) and his successor Jahangir (r. 1605–1627). These encounters have been studied as the consummate example of a cultural, and primarily religious, Islamo-Christian confrontation – a collision of two worlds, and the competing interests of their attendant Mughal and Spanish-Portuguese Empires. The encounter’s historical fate has been as it were sealed by the missions’ resounding failure to convert the population, an attempt which had in vain proceeded by attempting to first persuade the Muslim emperors of the superiority of Biblical divine law, inspired by a profound misreading of Mughal religious eclecticism as a serious interest in apostasy. This failure was compounded by the gradual but irreversible eclipsing of the Portuguese-Spanish imperial fortunes on the subcontinent by the British.