Intercultural Encounter and the Jesuit Mission in South Asia (16th – 18th Centuries)

Scholarship on the Jesuit missionaries in Indian has recently become a less occult and partisan historiographical field. It is no more an apologetic project, nor a spiteful critique popular among the 19th century Protestant scholars and missionaries. Why studying Jesuit sources? Because they are a window into early modern and modern Indian and global history. When analyzed criically, these sources provide a different perspective on various actors, events and histroical directions. At times they are also the only written documents about communities and their histories. In this volume, without trying to be exhaustive in terms of chronology and topics, our modest intention was to present the new scholarship in the field and to show how the interdisciplinary border-crossing can stimulate further research.