Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance. South India Through European Eyes, 1250-1625. (Reviews).

Joan-Pau Rubies, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance. South India through European Eyes, 1250-1625.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xxii + 4 pls. + 2 maps + 443 pp. $74.95. ISBN: 0-521-77055-6.

The analysis of travellers' accounts has emerged within recent decades as a viable scholarly focus, but usually one of modest achievement. However, Dr. Rubies has transformed this modest field into one of high accomplishment, tying together Europe and India, travellers' accounts with cultural and intellectual history, and spanning medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment history.

Although the author does not use Indian language sources, he makes use of materials in half a dozen European languages, and has done a heroic job of confronting the complex history of South India and Indian religion through sources in Western languages. Indeed, he seems to have mastered the geography of and changes in the area of and surrounding Vijayanagar so well that he can challenge the interpretations of the best historians the region has known including the late Burton Stein. My only caveat is that use of analyses of South India by anthropologists in more recent times might have led him to ask a few more questions about social practices in the era he is exploring.

His main concern is to trace the more religious and the more secular strands in travel writing from Marco Polo to the 17th century and to show what cultural frames the authors used and how their accounts, in turn, were used in a variety of ways by contemporaries and later writers. His textual explications are detailed, subtle, and convincing.

Rather than casting his net around all the travel accounts of Europeans in India during this long stretch of almost four centuries, he has chosen to focus in on Vijayanagar, a Hindu kingdom in the southern Deccan plateau region which flourished from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. This is a more appropriate choice than the later Mughals for a Renaissance specialist and Dr. Rubies ranges far and wide from this center to ancient China to modern Orientalism. He proves it to be a rich and wise choice whereas in the hands of a lesser scholar it might not have been so.

Less concerned with arm-chair theorists or ideologues, Rubies finds that, "It is in this careful observation of customary behavior that travellers contributed most creatively to an ethnological discourse" (291). In showing how "careful observation" emerged in travellers' accounts from Marco Polo to Ludovico de Varthema (early sixteenth century) to Fernao Nunes (sixteenth century) to Pietro della Valle (early seventeenth century), Rubies is also concerned to challenge contemporary critics of Orientalism, mainly Edward Said and those accepting his views uncritically.

Rubies defines Orientalism as "a manipulative historical gaze based on a crude separation between us and other, and which denies the representation of this other any intrinsic voice . . ." (286). He persuades his readers, including this one, that some of these perceptive travellers were able to go beyond this crudeness of approach and tightly describe the customs, religious practices, and political developments of Vijayanagar and South India more broadly. He wants to redeem some of these accounts from blanket condemnation by critics of Orientalism and also to distinguish them from those written by men with a religious agenda. So some of the travellers become the pioneers of Enlightenment ethnological descriptions that enable us to understand and not dismiss the other. At the same time, he must enter into and explain the dilemmas of missionaries in Asia during the 16th and early 17th centuries and show how they were appreciably less able to contribute to ethnological science. But he must bow to such as Roberto di Nobili who tried to separate the social from the religious and attempted to enter into the religious world of the Hindu priest and philosopher in that period. Rubies plays off missionary and traveller, shows the concerns of each, and then how their first-hand accounts were often used for other purposes by European theorists and the Catholic church.

This is a masterful work of history which not only skillfully confronts the critics of Orientalism, but shows how a powerful mind can enrich our knowledge of cultural encounters and make these critics seem like heavy-handed ideologues themselves.