The DOI matches its Crossref record, with a small difference in title or year; 11 of the 11 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 106 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.
Absent Vedas
Open accessAbstract
The Vedas were first described by a European author in a text dating from the 1580s, which was subsequently copied by other authors and appeared in translation in most of the major European languages in the course of the seventeenth century. It was not, however, until the 1730s that copies of the Vedas were first obtained by Europeans, even though Jesuit missionaries had been collecting Indian religious texts since the 1540s. I argue that the delay owes as much to the relative absence of the Vedas in India—and hence to the greater practical significance for missionaries of other genres of religious literature—as to reluctance on the part of Brahmin scholars to transmit their texts to Europeans.
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98 Sources not found · 62 Own result · 38 Own interpretation · 16 Not checked yet · 10 No basis given
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“All realized the much greater significance for daily religious life in India of other texts, mostly texts in vernacular languages .”
§ The Absent Vedas > Abstract
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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“In India, on the other hand, the missionaries, who-overwhelmingly-were responsible for the best information on Indian religious literature that had reached Europe, took a quite different view .”
§ The Absent Vedas > Abstract
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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“The only European to have read parts of the Vedas before the 1720s-the Jesuit Roberto Nobili-knew the Vedas described sacrifices to multiple deities .”
§ The Absent Vedas > Abstract
plainSingle case- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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In the paper
“The only European to have read parts of the Vedas before the 1720s-the Jesuit Roberto Nobili-knew the Vedas described sacrifices to multiple deities .”
§ The Absent Vedas > Abstract
plainSingle case- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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- Load-bearing: unclear — It is unclear whether the paper’s conclusions depend on it.
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In the paper
“But Azevedo, like almost all missionaries writing on Hinduism prior to the 1720s, in fact relied on vernacular-in his case, Tamil-texts for his own account of Indian religious belief .”
§ The Absent Vedas > Abstract
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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Citations
Cites
Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-century India
Županov, I. G. (1999) · Medical Entomology and Zoology · Cited by 161
The making of Western Indology Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the East India Company
Rocher, R., & Rocher, L. (2012) · Cited by 48
Rubiés, J. (2012) · London School of Economics and Political Science Research Online (London School of Economics and Political Science) · Cited by 41
Greenberg, M. (2010) · French Studies · doi:10.1093/fs/knq042 · Cited by 25
The atheist's bible: The most dangerous book that never existed
Cusack, C. M. (2013) · Culture and Religion · doi:10.1080/14755610.2013.840141 · Cited by 19
Filliozat, J., nationale, B., & manuscrits, B. N. D. D. (1941) · Medical Entomology and Zoology · Cited by 8
Conversations in Tarangambadi: Caring for the Self in Early Eighteenth Century South India
Irschick, E. F. (2003) · Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East · doi:10.1215/1089201x-23-1-2-254 · Cited by 8
Ziegenbalg's Malabarisches Heidenthum
Ziegenbalg, B., & Caland, W. (1926) · Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen te Amsterdam eBooks · Cited by 5
The Atheist's Bible: The Most Dangerous Book That Never Existed
Minois, G., & Weiss, L. A. (2012) · doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226530307.001.0001 · Cited by 4
Manuscrits Telugu : catalogue raisonné
Colas, G., & Colas-Chauhan, U. (1995) · Medical Entomology and Zoology · Cited by 2
Research works printed but not linked: 9
- Patrick Olivelle, Manu's Code of Law: A Critical Edition and Translation of the Mānava-Dharmaśāstra (Oxford: Oxford Univ . Press, 2005), 60, 17 .
- Willem Caland, "Roberto de' Nobili and the Sanskrit Language and Literature," Acta Orientalia 3 (1924): 38-51, at 50-51 .
- George Gispert-Sauch, "The Bhṛgu-Vallī of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad: An Early XVII Century European Translation," Indica 5, 2 (1968): 139-44 .
- Peter N . Miller and François Louis (Ann Arbor: Univ . of Michigan Press, 2012), 313-67 .
- Laurie L . Patton (Albany: State Univ . of New York Press, 1994), 201-33 .
- Doubts about the existence of the Vedas persisted into the late eighteenth century . Around 1774, the Capu- chin missionary Marco della Tomba thought it probably they had "never existed, at least as real books" (David N . Lorenzen, "Marco Della Tomba and the Brahmin from Banaras: Missionaries, Orientalists, and Indian Scholars," Journal of Asian Studies 65, 1 [2006]: 115-43, at 116) . Pierre Sonnerat, reporting the Brahmins' belief that the fourth Veda was lost, wondered if the other three also no longer existed (Voyage aux Indes orientales et à la Chine [Paris, 1782], 2: 32) . 87 . Fonds Brotier 82 . 88 . Gargam to Souciet, 15 Sept 1726, Fonds Brotier 82, f . 72r .
- Calmette to Souciet, 26 Aug 1730, Fonds Brotier 89, f . 25v; Calmette to Souciet, 25 Aug 1732, Fonds Brotier 89, f . 35r . Further references to these two letters will be given in the text by year and folio . The works were sent to Europe in the early 1730s and remain in the BNF: Ṛgveda (Sanscrit 214); Sāmaveda (Sanscrit 310-12);
- One of these may have been Calmette's convert Maṅgalagiri Ānanda, who later composed a summary of the Gospels in Telugu verse entitled Vedānta Rasayanam (Léon Besse, "Liste Alphabétique des Missionaires du Car- natic de la Compagnie de Jésus au XVIIIe siècle," Revue Historique de l'Inde Française 2 [1917/18]: s .v . Calmette; see also C . P . Brown, "Notices of some Roman Catholic Books, existing in the Telugu Language," The Madras Journal of Literature and Science [July 1840], 54-58) .
- Colas and Colas-Chauhan, Manuscrits telugu . 97 . It seems likely that the same method was used by John Marshall in 1674-77 to produce an English version of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and of another text that he identified as the Sāma Veda . Marshall, an English East India Company factor in Bengal from 1668 until his death in 1688, had been educated at Cambridge and was close to Henry More, one of the Cambridge Platonists . A Bengali Brahmin, Madhusudana, translated orally into Bengali from a Sanskrit original, on the basis of which Marshall produced a written English text (Anna Winterbottom, Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016], 95-96) . Mar- shall described the latter text as "the Epittomie or the Sum of the four Beads," an indication that this is likely not the Sāma Veda . 98 . Le Gac to Souciet, 28 September 1732, Fonds Brotier, 89, f . 35r . 107 . Sweetman and Ilakkuvan, Bibliotheca Malabarica, 21 . 108 . They cite also other European scholars, including Mosheim and Thomas Hyde . 109 . HB 39: 418 . 110 . They cite also Bernier and the Jesuit Lettres édifiantes et curieuses . 111 . Their letter is printed in HB 45: 1182-85 . The translation of the text appeared in the next installment (HB 46: 1251-94) . 112 . Although they do not here mention the Lettres édifiantes, they had cited an earlier reference in them to the Vedas in their 1734 diary . 113 . Albrecht Weber, "Ein angebliche Bearbeitung des Yajurveda," Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 7 (1853): 235-48, at 236 . 114 . Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum Bibliothecae regiae . Paris 1739 . Étienne Fourmont was likely respon- sible for the entries in the section "Codices Indici ." 115 . A fragment of the Vedas-a single hymn from the first maṇḍala of the Ṛg Veda (I, 89)-was collected in Surat by James Fraser in Khambayat in the 1730s (Bodleian Library, MSS . Fraser Sansk . 30) . Fraser aspired to translate the Vedas but was aware he had only a fragment of them . He notes that the "Pourans and Shasters are 123 .
Cited by
Sweetman, W., & Županov, I. G. (2019) · Comparative Studies in Society and History · doi:10.1017/s0010417519000203 · Cited by 27
Self-citationSweetman, W. (2021) · doi:10.1093/obo/9780195399318-0243
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Sweetman, W.
- Affiliations
- University of Otago (NZ)
- Corresponding author
- Sweetman, Will
- ORCID
- Sweetman, Will
- Venue
- Journal of the American Oriental Society
- Publisher
- American Oriental Society
- Published
- 2021-09-19
- Volume
- 139
- Issue
- 4
- ISSN
- 0003-0279 (ISSN-L)
- 2169-2289
- OpenAlex
- W3147000594
- Cited by
- 3
- References
- 10
- Citations by year
- 2024: 1 · 2021: 1
- FWCI
- 5.81
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Journal of the American Oriental Society (publishedVersion)
- Otago University Research Archive (University of Otago) (acceptedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Religious studies › Indian and Buddhist Studies
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › Libraries, Manuscripts, and Books
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Historical Linguistics and Language Studies
- Keywords
- Vedas, Jesuit missionaries, Jesuit missions in India, history of Sanskrit studies
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