Disputed mission : Jesuit experiments and brahmanical knowledge in seventeenth-century India / Ines G. Županov.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 249-270) and index.

"Disputed Mission casts a fresh glance at the social and cultural laboratories that were Jesuit missions in pre-colonial South India." "Confronted with social and cultural idioms which appeared to them as both strange and familiar, Jesuit missionaries embarked on a titanic, utopian, somewhat naive and slippery project of cultural translation, social engineering and ethnographic description. Before they could effectively convert and establish spiritual and political authority over souls and bodies, the Jesuits had to ascertain that they possessed the right knowledge over Indian culture." "By focusing on a dispute between two missionaries in Madurai in the beginning of the seventeenth century, this book chronicles these first efforts at explaining the origin, the structure and the nature of local religious practices." "This book will be of great interest to historians of colonial India and scholars of religious studies and comparative religion."--Jacket.