Entangled Literary Genres in Syriac from Malabar in the Aftermath of the Synod of Diamper (1599)

Abstract

During the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries, the Syriac literary heritage of the Malabar Christians shifted from a standard East Syriac (“Nestorian”) canon of texts to a Catholic post-Tridentine literary output in Syriac, a fusion of Western (Latin) and Middle Eastern (Syriac) sources and elements. The present article analyzes the literary networks of the community of the Malabar Christians, as expressed in the production of Syriac texts undertaken by the Catholic missionaries and arguably their Indian Syriacist pupils. The period under investigation is around the time of the Synod of Diamper (1599), a turning point in the ecclesiastical history of Malabar. The synod marked the Portuguese’s attempt to impose Tridentine Catholicism on the Malabar Christians and ordered to correct their Syriac books according to Catholic Orthodoxy or burn them as heretical. My paper focuses on the relationship between (1) collections of sermons and (2) liturgical poetry, since these two are entangled literary genres. Occasionally Syriac sermons (translated from Latin or composed on the spot by Catholic missionaries) were replicated in liturgical poetry and show the chains of transmission of Syriac knowledge from Catholic teachers (especially Jesuits) to their Indian students. Such relationship between literary genres comes clearly to the fore in the case of prose compositions coming arguably from the Syriacising circles of Francisco Ros, the first European Bishop of the Malabar Christians (1601-1624), and newly discovered pieces of Syriac poetry which might have been written by his Indian disciple Alexander the Indian/Kadavil Chandy Kattanar (1588-1673). The groups of texts under discussion show the transfer of knowledge from both the Latin West and the Syriac-speaking Middle East that created a new theological literary culture for the Malabar Christians as an expression of the Jesuit missionary principle of *accommodatio*. Source analysis of such texts allows one to dive into various aspects of the ecclesiastical and confessional life of the Malabar Christians, and into the cross-cultural encounters between them and the Catholic missionaries.