Europe and India : Collections, representations, projections, ^16th-18th centuries (3)

The third lecture considered a series of texts from the ^seventeenth and early ^seventeenth centuries describing and analyzing the question of "gentile religion" in India. Essentially produced in peninsular and southern India, these texts offer both an empirical density that was absent in the ^sixteenth century (although they too rarely rely on rigorous translation of Indian material) and a contrasting, fragmentary set of images and representations. And yet, against all odds, by the early ^eighteenth century, these diverse materials were being put to work in the service of a set of projects aimed at demonstrating that Indian "gentiles" (or "Hindus") all belonged to a single religion, just as "caste" was understood not as a loose organizing principle, but as a rigid, unitary system.