During the first Jesuit mission to the Mughal Court (1580-1583), the Jesuits presented among other gifts seven[1] volumes of Plantin’s Royal Polyglot Bible to Mughal Emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605). In this essay, I focus on the gift of the Plantin Polyglot because this gift is discussed most thoroughly in the letters of the Jesuits to Goa, as translated by John Correia-Afonso.[2] The Plantin Polyglot is a sixteenth-century illustrated bible with translations in five languages: Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Aramaic and Syriac. The gift served a religious cause for the Jesuits, a political cause for Akbar and ultimately influenced the Persian artistic tradition. In this essay, I explore the divergent motives behind this gift exchange and I analyse to what extent this specific gift had been fruitful.
I argue the ambiguity of the Jesuits’ presence at the court of Great Mogul Akbar. The Jesuits had religious motivation, for Akbar it was both religious and political and the Jesuits’ presence eventually led to carefully selected cultural appropriation on the side of the Moguls. Despite the religious intentions of the Jesuits, they carried with them a gift that also had political overtones, namely the Plantin Polyglot which referred to the Spanish Kingdom under Philip II. The gift of the Plantin Polyglot was therefore religiously and politically motivated, and it had a cultural outcome. The illustrated bible created a demand for western iconography which inspired western visitors to the Mughal Court to give engravings and other works of art. The illustrations also led to imitation, translation and emulation of western iconography into the Mughal tradition. The appropriation served a primarily political purpose, as it presented the Shahs as divine. Perhaps the Jesuits had not foreseen the ambiguous motives of Shah Akbar when he asked for Jesuit to teach him the laws of Christianity, or they hoped to overcome them, but the early departure in 1583 and the failure to meat the initial goal of the mission show that the ambivalent intentions eventually tended to Akbar’s side.
[1] The Plantin Polyglot consists of 8 volumes in total. Based on the Jesuits’ letters, the last volume, a lexicon, was probably not brought by the Jesuits. However, there is evidence that also the eight volume was present at Akbar’s court. John Correia-Afonso, Letters from the Mughal Court; the First Jesuit Mission to Akbar, 1580-1583 (Published for the Heras Institute of Indian History and Culture by Gujarat Sahitya Prakash, Anand, 1980): 29, note 4.
[2] Being a contemporary source, the letters from the Jesuits should be closely analysed and used with care for their liability is questionable. According to Correia-Afonso, these letters were “accurate and truthful” but they should be handled with care because they probably do not offer complete information. For his thorough examination of the value of the Jesuit letters from India, see John Correia-Afonso and Valerian Cardinal Gracias, Jesuit Letters and Indian History 1542-1773, 2nd ed, Studies in Indian History and Culture of the Heras Institute 20 (Bombay [etc.]: Oxford university press, 1969); Edward MacLagan, The Jesuits and the Great Mogul (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1932): 17-18. The inclusion of the events as written in the Akbarnama, written by Abū al-Faḍl (1551-1602), would compensate for this one-sidedness. This was however not possible in this essay.