By "pre-colonial" I mean before the British takeover, around 1500-1800.
Some time in the seventeenth century, two celestial nymphs went on a journey across southern India.
One nymph, named Visvavasu, was the type that saw the glass half full – he was always cheery, buoyant, and optimistic. The other was named Krisanu, and he could not have been more different from his friend. Krisanu was more like a grumpy uncle than anything. For him the glass was always half empty, while India was a terrible place that was quickly growing even more terrible.
Krisanu complained about lecherous priests, brain-dead doctors, and about barbaric "Huns." Krisanu had a few sharp words to say about a town ruled by these "Huns":
Here is a populated city filled with evil people, mostly Huns, devoid of all virtue ... There is no-one worse than Huns in this world: they are merciless, they treat Brahmins [Hindu priests] with contempt, as if they were no better than blades of grass; language cannot express their vices; they care nothing for rules of purity.
Huns and others, devoid of purity, get rich; paragons of virtue win only misery. Fools are given regal wealth and power, and wise men reduced to begging. Low-caste women have great beauty, while others, their betters, are born ugly.
Alas, dreadful Fate, what a mess you've made of your creation!
But as always, Visvavasu is here to show the bright side of things:
Look, even these people have their own excellent qualities.
They never take others' money unjustly, by force; they speak no falsehood; they create marvelous things; they punish offenders in their own manner, according to rule.
Observe these virtues even here, among the Huns with their many flaws!
But of course, there was neither nymph nor Hun in seventeenth-century India. The entire story is an allegory of his homeland, written by the seventeenth century Tamil poet Venkatadhvarin. Venkatadhvarin glosses the word "Hun" as "whitefaces" – in other words, Europeans. More specifically, the city that Krisanu so bitterly criticizes was the English trading post of Madras; its Hunnic inhabitants were Englishmen.^1
This story reveals two motifs that dominate Indian accounts of Europeans before the eighteenth century. One is the side represented by Krisanu. In this interpretation – which is more popular by quite a margin – the Europeans are barbaric, fanatical, and extremely filthy brutes. But there is another interpretation, symbolized by Visvavasu and his complimenting the English as "creators of marvelous things," that Europeans were great merchants and purveyors of wondrous technology.
By the seventeenth century, there were three great world religions with a significant presence in South Asia. Islam predominated politically over the majority of the continent, though in most places the population remained resolutely Hindu. Hinduism was the majority religion of the people and much of the local elite, while Buddhism survived in fringes of the subcontinent (namely Sri Lanka).
These three religious traditions differ on much, but they all concur on one thing: Europeans are base people, disgusting and fanatical.
The emphasis on Europeans being the nemesis of the true faith is most commonly found in literature from areas with the greatest European presence. Before the collapse of the Mughal empire, this meant mainly southern India and Sri Lanka. And accounts from here (except for some Christian ones) are almost entirely hostile to the European, the very archetype of the savage infidel.
Consider, for example, Gift to the Holy Warriors in Some Tales of the Portuguese, a sixteenth-century history of Portuguese depredations in southwestern India written by a local Muslim in Arabic.
[To punish the Muslims' sins, God sent] these Christian Franks – May God abandon them! – who tyrannized them [the Muslims], corrupted them, and practiced ignoble and infamous acts against them. The acts of violence were numberless, the disdain and the jeers when they obliged them to work; they would drag their vessels onto dry land; they would throw sludge on their faces and the rest of their bodies, and spit on them; they despoiled them of their trade, and above all they impeded them in their pilgrimage [to Mecca], robbing them, and burning their cities and mosques, and seizing their ships, mistreating their Holy Book and other books by trampling them and burning them. They would profane the sacred sanctuaries of the mosques, incite Muslims to apostasy and to adore the cross, bribing them to this end; they decorated their own women with the jewels and the rich dresses that they had torn from the women of the Muslims, and assassinated pilgrims and other Muslims with all sorts of violence. They would insult God's Prophet publicly, capture Muslims and put heavy chains on them, and then drag them to the market-place to sell them as slaves.
Here, the Portuguese are displayed as ruthless enemies of the true faith. They are intent on destroying Islam from the ground, exterminating trade that does not belong to them (by seizing ships and dragging them onto land), and being very abusive in general.^2
A very similar portrait of the Portuguese is drawn by Buddhists in sixteenth-century Sri Lanka. Indeed, the Buddhist peoples of Lanka suffered much more from the European presence than the Muslims of southwest India; while the European takeover of the latter region was bitterly contested and not completed until 1799, the balance of power in Lanka had already firmly swung to the Europeans by the late seventeenth century. War between the Europeans and the Sinhala (the Buddhist people of Lanka) was also unusually bitter. With this in mind, consider how one Sinhala poem speaks of the Portuguese sack of the capital of Lanka:
And thus they [the Portuguese] went and built the fort at Balane and raged in havoc through the country round.
And many a sacred shrine and palace proud and the very temple of the Sacred Tooth [of the Buddha] were consumed in the devouring flame,
While many a fertile land of fruit and flower, mango and plantain, jak and areca nut, betel and coconut, were ravaged by the destroying host.
Our gentle herds of kine were slaughtered to fill the maw of these devouring ogres, and many a wanton deed was wrought,
As when long ago the cruel Tamils did land and sack our city Amarapura.
This description shows the Portuguese as despoilers of the Buddha's Favored Island, so sacrilegious that they dare destroy the holiest temple in all of Theravada Buddhism. They ravage the land all around them and devour cattle, the basis of thousands of households. (Also consider how Buddhism looks down on eating meat.) Indeed, the Europeans are like the ogres that tried to disturb the Buddha on his meditations – or like Tamils, the historical rivals of the Sinhala people. The Portuguese are thus not only enemies of the true Buddhist faith, but are also (like the Tamils) enemies of the Sinhala as a whole.^3
The nature of the Portuguese as inveterate foes of the Buddha are even more clearly outlined in the following chronicle:
[The Portuguese] having seized and destroyed temple lands, temples, libraries and sacred Bo-Trees in Lanka, established false doctrines by imposing heavy punishments and created unrest by oppressing many people in a number of areas. The many low-country folk who refused to accept Christianity were imprisoned with their wives and children and burnt to death.
The first major Sanskrit description of Europeans is written by Venkatadhvarin, and I've already discussed his far from rosy picture of the "Huns" in the introduction.
What about the Muslims of northern India? Europeans had some political power here too. An episode about how the Portuguese took control of the citadel of Diu touches on another Indian cliche about the European, his greed.
One day they [the Portuguese] came to him [Sultan Bahadur, who ruled Diu at the time] and stated that the merchants of their ports who came to the island of Diu were obliged to leave their goods and merchandise lying about; but if the Sultan would give them as much land in the island as a cow's hide, they would build four walls round it, and then they would store their property in it, and would feel at their ease about it. The Sultan granted their request. When Bahadur was called away from Diu to oppose his enemies, the Europeans took advantage of the opportunity. They cut up a hide into strips, and enclosed as much ground as they could measure with them. Then they built up a strong stone fort, and armed it with guards and muskets, and took up their residence in it.
How ingeniously duplicitous these infidels are!
(Continued)
^1 This fascinating text is the epic poem Visvagunadarsacampu, "Mirror of All Qualities." See Velceru Nayaranaravu, Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka Period Tamilnadu, p. 1-12; M-C. Porcher, Un Poème Satirique Sanskrit: La Visvagunadarsacampu de Venkatadhvarin.
^2 See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Taking stock of the Franks: South Asian views of Europeans and Europe, 1500-1800," p. 73
^3 Alan Strathern, Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Sri Lanka: Portuguese Imperialism in a Buddhist Land; Michael Roberts, Sinhala consciousness in the Kandyan period: 1590s to 1815; C. R. de Silva, "Beyond the Cape: The Portuguese Encounter with the Peoples of South Asia" in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, p. 295-323