A summary of the themes covered in St. Xaviers letter to the Society of Jesus at Rome about his mission in India.

c) On healing people: People often called St. Xavier to heal the diseased and ailing. He was supposed to have direct contact with God and the power to perform miracles. He would heal them instantly and sometimes even woke the dead. This just made people’s faith in him become stronger and they began adopting Christianity after witnessing his magical powers.

d) On Brahmins:  St. Xavier’s detests the Brahmins to the core and considers them a class of people who are ‘perverse’, ‘wicked’, ‘liars and cheats’. They believed and performed the superstitious customs of the Hindu religion, and took care of the idols. St. Xavier averred that they were the craftiest people in the whole world and the only real job they performed was to deceive the ignorant and simple masses by asking them to make offerings of the things in the temple that they wished to have. They had instilled such a fear of God in the people that they would listen to the Brahmins blindly and in the name of God, supply food, wine, clothes, etc for the Brahmins’ wives and children.

The Brahmins were eager to get St. Xavier on their side and for that matter, they used to try to bribe him with gifts and presents that he would return to them all the time. They were largely illiterate but knew all the tricks to fool the masses and control them.

He also mentions his meeting with the Brahmins in a pagoda where he tried to teach them about God and Christianity and nearly convinced them that it was the only true religion that existed.  Yet he was able to convert just one Brahmin to Christianity and took great pride in that.

Trends observed in St. Xavier’s style of writing.

St. Xavier in his letter to the Society of Jesus at Rome has been widely pessimistic about the Hindu religion and believes that Christianity is the only measure of escape that could provide relief to the masses from the atrocities and fraudulence of the idolatry Hinduism. He despises Hinduism so much as to say that it is a religion of devil worshippers who could only be saved if they were baptized. He accuses the Brahmins, who were the religious leaders of Hinduism, of being ‘wicked’, ‘perverse’,  ‘crafty’, ‘superstitious’, ‘ignorant’, ‘liars and cheats’. The tone of Xavier’s writing is therefore far from diplomatic; it is in fact quite judgmental when it comes to religion and faith. He was undoubtedly a firm believer of Christianity but his hatred for Hinduism, the religion practiced by people he considered ‘black’ and probably less developed (‘ignorant’) than Christians(Europeans) is what I found really striking in his account.

St. Xavier seems to have double personalities, that of a hater of Hinduism, a religion he finds lowly and diabolic and also of a compassionate teacher and healer who heals people miraculously and teaches them Christian doctrines with love and warmth. When he writes about his methods of teaching people at Comorin, he speaks passionately about how badly he wants them to have a better life through practicing Christianity. His faith comes off more as his passion, which he tries to propagate by engaging himself in it day and night without even getting enough sleep. The younger generation (‘the children run at the idols, upset them, dash them down, break them to pieces, spit on them, trample on them, kick them about, and in short heap on them every possible outrage.’) was clearly more influenced by his teachings because they were brought up with it(‘baptized as infants’) and therefore, were greatly involved in its practice and shared the same hatred and rage for idolatrous worship as St. Xavier. It seems more like a schema employed by the great priest to successfully convert the Hindus. He seems to have intentionally targeted the youth (by carrying out countless baptisms ‘that it often happens to me to be hardly able to use my hands from the fatigue of baptizing: often in a single day I have baptized whole villages’), because he knew they were the real carriers who would carry Christianity forward to the next generation. Although, he accomplishes his mission with great love and kindness, his treatment towards the crowd is more like a savior who is trying to indoctrinate Christianity to save ‘a multitude of souls’ from a ‘blind heathen’ and damnation in the hell.

Overall, I found his manner of his writing quite manipulative as he carries out the task of converting Hindus hiding cleverly under the pristine mask of love and kindness. Along with his teachings about God, he propagates his hatred for idol worship (Hinduism) to the people.

Yet, somewhere I find him convincing because Hinduism with its caste system and customs governed only by the Brahmins at one point did become very oppressing for the masses. It might have been the case that Brahmins took undue advantages of their power by chanting mantras only a few understood (because the common language was not Sanskrit) and looted money from the petty, illiterate people with lengthy and overbearing pujas and customs. St. Xavier was wise enough to tap the ailing nerve of the people by openly loathing these customs and the idol worship and providing them with a better alternative of Christianity.