Ines G. Županov, Jesuit Missions in Coastal and South India (1543–1773): Between Mission and Empire. Brill Research Perspectives in Jesuit Studies, 15. Leiden: Brill, 2025. Pp. 133. Pb, €84.00.

Županov is arguably today’s foremost scholar of the Jesuit missionary and scholarly tradition in India. She is respected for her comprehensive erudition, facility with printed and manuscript sources in numerous languages, and astute insights into the social and political implications of these materials when read together across multiple languages and authors. For decades her writing has enriched scholarship on the Jesuits in India with many respected volumes, e.g., Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century India (Oxford University Press, 1999); Missionary Tropics, Jesuit Frontier in India (16th–17th century) (University of Michigan Press, 2005); Catholic Orientalism: Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge (16th–18th c.), with Ângela Barreto Xavier (Oxford University Press, 2015). She is also editor of the Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits (Oxford University Press, 2019). Many substantive essays and other edited volumes fill out her impressive knowledge and interpretation of the Jesuit missions in India. Nor is her work finished, even as two others of her volumes have just appeared: Missionary Enchantment in South Asia (16th–18th c.): Catholic Histories and Fictions (Routledge, 2025), and Palimpsests of Religious Encounter in Asia, 1500–1800, co-edited with Mia M. Mochizuki (Brill, 2025).

Županov notes in the acknowledgments to this small volume that the task posed to her was to produce “a properly historical and useful work of synthesis on the topic” named in the title. Given her broad and deep knowledge of so many aspects of the Jesuit missions in the stated regions, she is an ideal person to do the needed synthesis. She succeeds, and this overview and its ample bibliography will be a useful starting point for those unfamiliar with the topics treated, as well as a resource for scholars wishing to read more widely across primary and secondary sources.

After an introduction and brief chapter on the historiographical aspects of the challenge of interpreting the whole set of interconnected Jesuit writings, the book is divided into four major chapters, “Under the Portuguese Padroado” (ch. 3), “Missionary Frontiers” (ch. 4), “French Jesuit Mission” (ch. 5), and “Knowledge” (ch. 6). The first three chart a roughly chronological sequence. Chapter 3 leads the reader through the era when the Portuguese domain was dominant and when religious activities were explicitly intertwined with political considerations, faith often enforced by the authority of the state. In such a situation, missionaries willingly or uncomfortably worked within the bounds of imperial ambitions.

Yet even before 1600, pioneering Jesuits began working outside that domain. Their innovative mission is the overall topic of Chapter 4. Working away from the coast and Portuguese rule, these Jesuits had greater freedom to experiment, even as they became entangled in problems arising from the ways caste structures were accommodated or evaded. In this era, figures such as Roberto de Nobili made bold, often disputed adaptations to the ways and customs of brahmins in particular.

Chapter 5 explores the arrival and rule of the French in Pondicherry and the Madurai Mission in Tamil Nadu and environs. In this era, still more attention was paid to literature, culture, and the arts. Yet at the same time, complaints and accusations did not cease, culminating first in the Malabar Rites controversy that shut down much of the Jesuit experimentation, and later in the wholesale suppression of the religious order.

“Knowledge,” Chapter 6, is a reflective recapitulation of the dynamics of the Jesuit mission between 1543 and 1773, the work and its anticipated and unanticipated implications. Under three headings, “Linguistic Enterprise,” “‘Ethnographic’ Production,” and “Natural History,” Županov ponders how things went so terribly wrong that the mission, brilliant in so many of its features, could be abruptly terminated. She expertly highlights power dynamics, including the unsettling power of Jesuit Indological knowledge and the risky dynamics of shifting discourses and practices as Jesuits navigated the religious, social, and political climate of South India.

Given that the book aims to be a synthesis grounded in those linguistic, ethnographic, and historical matters, it sets the stage for what Županov herself does not undertake, further theological reflection on the theological and allied philosophical views and doctrines of the Jesuits. Even if the Jesuit mission was undeniably political and politicized, and played out as a contest of power, it still had theological grounding and goals. Imbued with the energies of the early Society, and often with perspectives honed and sharpened in Reformation era debates in Europe, these very Jesuits were articulating, even inventing, a global Catholic theology, which was intellectually erudite, capacious, and at times astonishing in its re-use of the classic scholastic Catholic tradition, the teachings of the Tridentine church, and the still fresh genius of Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. It is no small matter that Jesuits like Nobili, Jean Venance Bouchet, and Costanzo Gioseffo Beschi were forced to become comparativists. As narrow and predictable as some of their comparisons were, they were still drawing Catholic theology into an interreligious arena from which it could never again escape. The debates that vexed the Jesuits and their adversaries in Goa and Rome also concerned what Christ and his person and message were to mean beyond the comfortable limits of a largely settled European Christian world. Who really were the deities of Hinduism, when it became clear that dismissing them all as false convinced no one? What to make of brahmins and other religious intellectuals in Asia, people who needed to be communicated with and not merely ignored? How could traditional Hindu hierarchies be condemned, when the Church so staunchly defended similar structures in Europe? Are Catholic images and Hindu mūrtis really so very different? And so on. If such questions have too often been pondered in abstraction from the more complex political realities that permeate their mission and writing, the corrective work of Županov and others enables but does not obviate further theological reflection on issues that still matter, even long after the period treated so brilliantly in this volume.