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The Italians who loved Tamil
I AM GLAD to find that the Italian who loved Tamil and wanted it to be made accessible to more people, "removing the sting from literature... and (making) it easy to appreciate for the common reader", has been remembered again after a long, long time. Koothu-p-pattarai recently adapted his "Paramarthaguruvin Kathai" at the Alliance Francaise and revived memories of Father Joseph Constantius Beschi, the Veeramamunivar otherwise remembered only with a little noticed statue on the Marina.
Beschi, a Jesuit, arrived in Goa in 1700 and then travelled to Avoor in what became the Trichinopoly District where he mastered Tamil, Telugu, Sanskrit, Persian and Hindustani. But he became best known for his Tamil writing, which took the classical, the historical and the folk and made them stories for the reading pleasure of the common man. Adopting the sanyasi's robes that another Italian Jesuit, Father Roberto de Nobili of the Madurai Mission had popularised nearly a century earlier, he took Christianity to the people in the local idiom, both philosophic as well as linguistic. But like de Nobili, he was more interested in Indian philosophy, scholarship and languages than in making conversions — making them not the most popular of priests both with Goa as well as Rome.
While Beschi, like Bishop Caldwell and Dr. G. U. Pope, is remembered on the Marina for their signal contributions to Tamil, de Nobili is remembered nowhere, not in Madurai, Salem, Jaffna or Mylapore where he lived and worked. Eric Auzoux, who was director of the Alliance Francaise in Chennai five years ago, "rediscovered" de Nobili and began researching his life. Sitting in Jordan now, I wonder whether Auzoux will ever get around to a book remembering de Nobili, the first of the Christian `sadhus'.
De Nobili, who arrived in Goa in 1605, moved to Madurai in 1606 and became the first of the Christian-`Brahmins', for which he was censured in 1610 by Rome. It took him 13 years to clear his name, but was never accepted by the Church as anything but a maverick even after his death in 1656 in Mylapore. There may be no tombstones or memorials for him anywhere today, but in the world of scholarship he is recognised as the first European Sanskrit and Tamil scholar. Amazingly, his 21 books in Tamil were all written after he became blind!
Beschi, better remembered, only followed in his footsteps.
S. MUTHIAH
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