In an age of instant polemics, historical figures like St. Francis Xavier (1506–1552) often become weapons in contemporary cultural battles. Social media and public discourse frequently reduce his letters from 16th-century India to stark soundbites: idols described as “as dirty as they are ugly and horrible to look at,” or joy expressed at the breaking down of “temples of their false gods.” Commentators, including figures like Anand Ranganathan, invoke these passages to highlight missionary zeal bordering on contempt for Hindu practices. Such readings, while rooted in authentic texts, risk cherry-picking or lifting phrases from their episteme while judging them through ours. This produces disturbance rather than understanding. Xavier was undeniably a man of his times: a Counter-Reformation Jesuit driven by evangelical fire amid Portuguese colonial expansion. He did not know the word “Hindu” as we use it today; he spoke of “pagans,” “gentiles,” and “idols” representing to him false God . Framing his words as a blanket condemnation of “all Hindu gods” or “all Hindu temples” adds layers absent from his intent. A more sensitive approach demands hermeneutical care, recognizing the radical rupture between his discursive world and ours.
Michel Foucault’s concepts of episteme and rupture illuminate this divide without excusing or romanticizing the past. An episteme, for Foucault, is the underlying structure of thought in a given historical period: the unconscious rules governing what can be said, thought, or known. It is not a conscious worldview but the condition of possibility for knowledge and discourse. Discursive practices are statements, descriptions, and actions that emerge within these structures and are inseparable from relations of power. Power, in Foucault’s sense, is not merely repressive but productive: it generates truths, subjects, and realities. Knowledge and power (power/knowledge) intertwine; what counts as “truth” about other religions sustains certain dominations while silencing others.
Xavier operated within the episteme of 16th-century Catholic Europe. This was the era of the Council of Trent, intense anti-Protestant and anti-“pagan” zeal, and the fusion of missionary work with Iberian empire-building. Idolatry was not a neutral cultural practice but thought to be a demonic threat to salvation.One of His letter describes oil-anointed black idols as foul-smelling and repulsive, linking them to local preferences for dark skin tones and contrasting them with Christian truth. He celebrated baptisms followed by the destruction of temples and idols, often involving new converts, whose elders brought down their own old temples or worship places. These statements were not isolated bigotry but discursive practices embedded in a power/knowledge regime where conversion equaled liberation from eternal damnation, and colonial authority provided the material means (Portuguese ships, governors, and force) to enact it. The “joy” he expressed was genuine within that frame: a spiritual triumph over what he saw as satanic deception. Within this episteme, thus, brahmins appeared as obstacles or perverse guardians of falsehood because they upheld the very system his episteme deemed damnable.
A profound rupture separates this episteme from our own. Foucault emphasized discontinuities in history: shifts where old ways of ordering knowledge become unthinkable. The Enlightenment, secularization, colonialism’s critiques, decolonization, and Vatican II (in the Church ) created a new episteme. Today, religions are often framed as cultural heritages deserving respect; idolatry is reinterpreted through anthropology or comparative theology rather than demonology. We have theology of religions where the fact of religious plurality is seen within the divine will. “Hinduism” itself emerged as a constructed category in the colonial period, gaining sharper contours in nationalist and academic discourse. We judge Xavier’s language as culturally insensitive or hateful because our discursive practices valorize pluralism, human rights, and interfaith harmony. These are values produced by power relations tied to liberal democracy, postcolonial guilt, and global dialogue forums. Yet this judgment is not neutral; it too exercises power, constructing Xavier (and by extension missionary history) as a symbol of oppression while positioning modern secular or Hindu perspectives as enlightened. Both eras link discourse to power: Xavier’s words justified and were enabled by Portuguese dominance in Goa and the Fishery Coast; our condemnations serve identity politics, historical reckoning, or resistance narratives in contemporary India.
Hermeneutical sensitivity requires us to avoid anachronism while acknowledging pain. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s fusion of horizons merging the interpreter’s world with the text’s complements Foucault here. We must enter Xavier’s horizon empathetically: a man enduring shipwrecks, disease, and cultural alienation, believing with apocalyptic urgency that souls hung in the balance. His zeal, however harsh, stemmed from love for what he saw as the one true path. At the same time, deep empathy toward Hindus is essential. The destruction of temples, desecration of murtis, and pressure on communities caused real trauma and even cultural erasure, social disruption, and intergenerational memory of violation. For Hindus, maybe these events are not abstract history but lived wounds . Reducing Xavier solely to villain or saint flattens this complexity. His letters also show pastoral concern for Parava converts and occasional protection of certain groups from raiders. The past holds lessons: unchecked fusion of faith and empire breeds suffering; yet missionary sincerity can coexist with profound misunderstanding of the other. This facts can enlighten us today.
Foucault reminds us that what remains “unthought” and “unsayable” in any episteme reveals its limits. In Xavier’s time, the positive spiritual depth of Hindu bhakti, the philosophical sophistication of Vedanta, or the aesthetic and devotional richness of temple worship lay largely outside the thinkable. Idols were “devils”; dialogue was conversion or confrontation. In our episteme, certain critiques of missionary history risk becoming unsayable if they complicate victim narratives or question selective secular outrage. Power/knowledge operates on both sides: colonial discourse produced “heathen” subjects to be saved or subdued; postcolonial discourse produces “intolerant missionary” subjects to be critiqued or decolonized or reduced to hate objects. Therapeutic dialogue drawing on Foucault’s later interest in practices of the self and care invites us to excavate these silences without defensiveness. It means listening across ruptures: acknowledging Xavier’s embeddedness in his episteme without whitewashing harm, and recognizing Hindu resilience and pluralism without erasing the agency or convictions of historical actors.
Indian Christian theologians offer pathways forward. Jacques Dupuis, in works like Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism, proposed “inclusive pluralism.” He maintained Christ’s uniqueness while affirming that other religions can mediate genuine salvific grace through the action of the divine Logos beyond the visible Church. Dupuis shifted from ecclesiocentrism toward a kingdom-centered and Trinitarian vision, where God’s saving presence operates “in many and diverse ways.” This allows Christians to encounter Hinduism not as demonic error but as a locus of divine self-communication, fostering mutual enrichment rather than supersession. Though scrutinized by Vatican authorities, one has to agree that Dupuis seems to have modeled hermeneutical openness within fidelity to catholic faith and tradition.
Aloysius Pieris, the Sri Lankan Jesuit, goes further into Asian soil. Immersed in Buddhist contexts yet attentive to Hindu realities, Pieris advocated a “double baptism” for the Church in Asia: immersion in the “Jordan” of Asian religiosity (wisdom, gnosis) and the “cross” of Asian poverty (liberative agape). He saw religions as comprising core experience, collective memory, and interpretation. For dialogue, one must respect irreducible differences while seeking complementary paths that let love meet wisdom. Pieris emphasized prophetic engagement with social suffering alongside spiritual encounter, warning against abstract academic dialogue detached from the marginalized. His approach transcends mere tolerance; it calls for mutual transformation, where Christians learn from Hindu or Buddhist depths, and vice versa, without diluting identities.
Such theologies point toward therapeutic dialogue in Foucault’s spirit: a practice that surfaces the unthought, questions power-laden truths in both missionary and postcolonial discourses, and cultivates ethical subjectivity. It requires humility recognizing that our episteme, like Xavier’s, is contingent and power-infused. Hindus deserve empathy not as perpetual victims but as bearers of profound traditions that sustained civilization amid invasions and adaptations. Christians can honor Xavier’s missionary passion while critiquing its colonial entanglements and embracing pluralist horizons. Dialogue becomes therapeutic when it heals by making space for the unsayable: the grief of desecrated sacred spaces, the sincerity of salvific zeal, the beauty of diverse divine encounters.
Foucault’s ruptures do not imply total disconnection; epistemes overlap and mutate. Xavier’s world and ours remain linked through shared human longings for meaning, transcendence, and justice. By applying hermeneutical sensitivity of reading texts with empathy for their horizon while confronting their consequences, we move beyond reductionism. Commentators like Anand Ranganathan rightly highlight uncomfortable historical records; while his critics rightly protest decontextualized hatred. Both risk discursive entrapment unless guided by a therapeutic ethos.
Ultimately, engaging the past demands that we develop new practices of the self: curiosity over condemnation, listening over scoring points. In India’s pluralistic democracy, this could foster genuine interfaith encounter where Hindu temples stand not as relics of defeat but living expressions of dharma, and Christian mission evolves toward kenotic service rather than triumph. The lessons are clear: power distorts discourse in every age. Only by letting surface the unthought through rupture-aware reflection and empathetic dialogue can we honor the dead without wounding the living.
