Infinite scrawl : A Tamil manuscript in Venice unlocks stories of ancient India

As rain finally poured over Madurai, ending a period of drought, a group of young Tamil catechists returned to their spiritual exercises: meditation, contrition, confession. PREMIUM The manuscript had been mis categorised, making it hard to find in the monastery library. Its 370 slender, long leaves, held together by thread, were in entirely the wrong order too, making it difficult to identify once it was found.

(Tamil Bharathan TK) It was the monsoon of 1718, at a Jesuit mission. The youngsters were studying under Michele Bertoldi (1662 1740), a senior Italian missionary who would spend most of his life here. His specialty was helping young people who were interested in Christianity prepare to act as guides to others in their community.

More than 300 years later, the text he framed to help them — handwritten in Tamil on strips of dried palm leaf — would turn up in an Armenian monastery in Venice, found and identified only because a Tamilian scholar from Delhi wouldn’t stop knocking on the monastery’s doors. When the PhD scholar Tamil Bharathan TK, 27, was finally allowed to examine the manuscript — which he had heard about, then briefly seen on a visit — he still didn’t know what he was looking at.

Because Bertoldi had signed it as Gnana Pragasa Swami, his adopted Tamil name. When this code was finally cracked, it would reveal a network that encompassed St Ignatius Loyola of Spain, Armenian seafaring traders in Tamil Nadu, universities set up by those traders in Venice, and a network of Italian led missions in south India.

It all began, Bharathan says, when he was invited by the Venice based Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post Byzantine Studies to participate in a 21 day seminar on Greek palaeography (the study of ancient and medieval handwritten texts), in July. After each day’s sessions, he found himself with time on his hands, and decided to explore sites that might help in his PhD research (a comparative study of ancient Tamil and Greek texts).

A fellow scholar put him in touch with Margherita Trento, a historian of early modern south India and an associate professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, in Paris. A network of Armenian traders had once connected the Veneto region very directly with south India, she told him.

She had even got a brief glimpse of a Tamil manuscript on San Lazzaro degli Armeni, a small island near Venice home to an Armenian Mekhitarist monastery. It might be worth exploring, she said. Tamil Bharathan TK. “I was thrilled! I was just able to take a picture of it before I had to leave. The monastery was shutting for the day.

The last boat from the island was about to leave too.” Bharathan didn’t know it then, but it would be desperate days before he saw the book again. He returned to the island twice, but the monastery wouldn’t let him access the manuscript; it was a rare work and they didn’t know who he was. He finally returned a third time, with an authorisation letter from JNU.

“And I was granted permission,” he says. The manuscript’s 180 slender, long leaves, held together by thread, were in entirely the wrong order, so Bharathan simply photographed them as quickly as he could, over two and a half hours. He still didn’t know what the book was. Later, studying the photographs, he found the preface.

“Gnana Muyarchi written by Gnana Pragasa Swami,” it read. Gnana is wisdom; muyarchi is practice. The book was an adaptation of The Spiritual Exercises, a book of meditations devised by the 16th century Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Bharathan checked with other scholars, spoke to Trento, and it was confirmed: Gnana Pragasa Swami was Bertoldi.

“He arrived in Goa in 1697 and would spend most of his life in the village of Avoor, south of Tiruchirapalli. He was among the most significant promoters of the practice of spiritual exercises for Tamil Catholic teachers in training,” Trento says. In her 2022 book, Writing Tamil Catholicism: Literature, Persuasion and Devotion in the Eighteenth Century, which draws on letters written by Bertoldi and documents from Jesuit archives, as well as a close reading of the Tamil text, she notes that the Gnana Muyarchi marks the first such record of the practice of Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises in the mission, “even though missionaries must have done them in the 17th century too”.

The Gnana Muyarchi was used for centuries, in fact, and was reprinted several times, as late as the 19th century, by the Mission Press in Puducherry. “The location of this manuscript brings to light the importance of Armenian networks in the early modern period,” Trento says. Nivedita Louis, a Chennai historian, points to how early settlers among the seafaring Armenian traders, such as Samuel Moorat and his father in law Edward Raphael, had close ties to Mekhitarist monks.

Moorat bequeathed his property to the Mekhitarist Order, which used it to set up a college in Venice. It was later amalgamated with a college established in 1836 by Raphael. “There was continuous exchange between Madras and Italy, including through these colleges. The manuscript may have reached Italy in this way,” Louis says.

In the next phase of their study, Bharathan and Trento plan to examine the text for clues to how missionaries of the 18th century studied and used the Tamil language; framed poetry in it; and preached evolving practices such as the Ignatian exercises. Bharathan has also submitted a report on the manuscript to chief minister MK Stalin.

“I am hoping the government will help with digitisation and further research on it,” he says. He is in touch with monastery officials too. They were astonished to learn of the specific language on the leaves, he says. “They are happy to let me access it further, for scholarly work,” he adds, laughing.

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