A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India by Danna Agmon

Author:Danna Agmon [Agmon, Danna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, Europe, France, Asia, India & South Asia, Political Science, Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, General
ISBN: 9781501713064
Google: GUo4DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell
Published: 2017-09-15T13:18:55+00:00

Missionaries and the Law

Missionaries in Pondichéry also used the legal arena to act out their rivalries and conflicts, both with the French colonial state and with one another. After all, as Dale Van Kley has noted of the Old Regime, “religious matters are only metaphysically distinguishable from constitutional and jurisdictional ones during this entire period.”100 Several French missionaries in India joined the appeal effort in the Nayiniyappa Affair. Even as the Jesuits were writing petitions asking that Nayiniyappa be severely punished, the head of the Missions étrangères mission in Pondichéry was writing letters to France vigorously defending him. Nayiniyappa’s fate became a new battleground in the ongoing strife and power struggle between the Jesuits and the other missionaries in town. Father Tessier, who headed the MEP outpost in Pondichéry, wrote to his superiors in Paris the summer after Nayiniyappa’s conviction. In his first letter, he described Hébert and his son as being “the instruments of the Jesuits’ vengeance.”101 He argued that the persecution of Nayiniyappa was to be abhorred not only because of the price paid by the man itself but because a reputation for injustice harmed the colony as a whole: “Pondichéry has truly come to be viewed with horror by all the nations, and no one wants to come here,” he warned. Any appeal to the Héberts for justice would be pointless, he wrote, since “nothing restrains them, neither justice, nor conscience, nor honor, nor religion.”102

The judicial record shows that missionaries regularly and actively participated in the colony’s legal arena. Not only did they make regular appearances before Pondichéry’s court, they also made an effort to shape and direct legal proceedings. In some cases this reflected an interest in local law: Father Bouchet, who was the Jesuit superior in Pondichéry at the time of the Nayiniyappa Affair, had himself authored a text on local practices of dispute resolution in 1714.103 In the course of the Nayiniyappa Affair, the Jesuits attempted to shape legal proceeding more directly, although they tried to conceal their interference. That they played a role in the collection of witness testimonies (as chapter 2 explained) and in the sentencing of Nayiniyappa—a process in which they had no official capacity whatsoever—demonstrates the extent to which they were embedded in the processes of colonial rule and judicial action.

The French missionaries in India held a complicated position with respect to judicial authority. French missionaries in Pondichéry fell under the ecclesiastic authority of the bishop of Mylapore, who was appointed by and acted under the auspices of the Portuguese Padroado in India.104 Yet the French Jesuits arrived in the East as emissaries of the French king and therefore acted by his authority, not that of the Padroado, and the Pondichéry Superior Council had judicial authority over them in secular matters. Both Capuchin missionaries and the MEP procurateur also fell under the authority of the French king in his role as the head of the Gallican Church. Pope Gregory XV had also tried to exert authority over missionaries abroad when

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