CRASSH

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and for much of the eighteenth, missionaries were responsible for most of the best European scholarship on Indian religions. Although in the nineteenth century missionaries were overtaken as scholars by professional Indologists, they remained important in shaping perceptions of Indian religion among the wider European public. This paper will examine two mid-nineteenth century editions of a work on South Indian religion by the early eighteenth-century German missionary, Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg. Both the 1867 German edition (Genealogie der malabarischen Götter) and the 1869 English translation (Genealogy of the South-Indian Gods) drew heavily on more recent missionary writing on Indian religion. The paper will show how missionaries in the south, facing renewed debate about the effects of missionary activity in the wake of 1857, contested elements of the Indological presentation of Indian religions which privileged the authority of the brahmanical textual tradition and the philosophy of non-dualism.