Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India Through European Eyes, 1250-1625

Rubiés, Joan-Pau. ''Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India Through European Eyes, 1250-1625. ''Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Joan-Pau Rubiés examines the experience of a wide range of travel writers who traversed the South Indian kingdom of Vijayanagara from the end of the Middle Ages to the dawn of the Enlightenment in his intriguing work, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India Through European Eyes, 1250-1625. By chronicling the European Renaissance from a relatively newer perspective of South Asian travelogues, he is able to shed light on the importance of travel narratives in the context of intellectual history, citing them as a relatively untapped resource in this specific historical field. He brings the Renaissance into the fold of intellectual history, claiming it has previously been overlooked in favor of the Enlightenment; he even suggests that the evolution of these writings over the course of the Renaissance helped to bring about the Enlightenment as an intellectual movement. Rubiés states explicitly that “the focus of this study is rather the way travel literature, understood as a set of related genres of undeniable importance in a defining period of early European colonial expansion, informed ethnological, moral and political thought, contributing in ways still poorly understood to the transition from the theological emphasis of medieval culture to the historical and philosophical concerns of the seventeenth century.”(xxii) Modern ethnography, in his perspective, evolved from the joining of two analytical languages of religion and history, which he terms throughout his text as Christianity and civilization, and he stresses the importance of the understanding of these texts on a multitude of layers in order to bring depth and greater clarity to their meanings and purposes. He argues convincingly that “the rationalist transformation of European culture during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cannot be explained without the structuring agency of the discourses of travel literature, in all their moral and empirical diversity.”(398)

Rubiés focuses specifically on the Vijayanagara empire on a case-study basis, examining the writings of numerous authors of European descent, while also incorporating the voices of several non-Christian authors in order to further his comparative analysis of the texts and their significance. He continues to note the difference between the “itinerary-type” of travel literature and the “historical narrative” form of analysis each of these figures perpetuates.(25) In comparing writers from different social as well as cultural backgrounds, he is able to build upon their experiences throughout the chapters to create a solid foundation of his analysis of the rise of humanist and imperialistic thought through their ethnographic accounts, and traces the movement of “merchant-traveler to the philosophical traveler,” noting its significance as also being a movement “from the popular to the elite discourses”(394) across the centuries. He bookends this period concisely, beginning with Marco Polo’s journals and tracing the rise of humanism and historical narrative in travelogues up until Pietro della Valle’s letters of 1623, displaying clearly the progression through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the beginning of Enlightenment thought through the voices of these numerous travelers and their accounts, and convincingly arguing the importance of their writings to their European audiences at the time.

Throughout his text, Rubiés disputes the traditional “Orientalist” theory posited by Edward Said, arguing instead for the presence of an active dialogue between the two cultures instead of the passive analysis of east by west. Countering Said’s argument, he states that “the logic of this cultural change was driven by interactions (and often misunderstandings) with other cultures, rather than by a mere projection of European aims and dialogues,”(x) emphasizing the importance of dialogue between the numerous cultural players in each period chronicled. He observes the challenges inherent in overcoming obstacles put in place by orientalism and the recent backlash of post-colonial theorists to devalue the validity of Western accounts, and supports that each account is valid within its own contexts and helps to paint a more complete picture of the culture in question, whether from Western, Muslim, or Hindu eyes. Rubiés notes that “the frontiers between empirical observation and conditioned interpretation will of course remain difficult to establish, but what is perhaps more interesting is that today the roles of one century ago can be reversed, so that whilst Indian historians like Meera Nanda can appropriate to a large extent the secular western gaze as their own, many western critics insist on questioning it.”(390)

Perhaps his most interesting theory is the explanation of cultural history written as a series of “language-games,” with a need for a complex interpretation of each text, taking into account the author, intended audience, and process of re-interpretation and transmission.(19) He elaborates on this theory with particular clarity in Chapter Eight, when he compares Muslim and European historiographies of non-Muslim peoples, re-defining Orientalism to include other non-western perspectives and the importance of the interaction between these players in adding depth to each individual text in question. He notes how “at least three ‘historiographical voices’, Portuguese Christian, Telugu Hindu and Persian Muslim, sought to give meaning to the experience of the crisis of Vijayanagara at the end of the sixteenth century,”(286) and goes to great lengths to compare the reactions of each travel writer not only with the ethnographies they recorded, but also with their understanding (or lack thereof) of the works of their contemporaries across cultural lines through translated texts, mythologies, or first-hand interactions. These varied interpretations and the dialogues created between them helped to advance European thought through the Renaissance and into the empirical and naturalistic observations of the Enlightenment.