
In early modern South Asia, sound worked as a therapeutic agent that crossed textual, ritual, and oceanic worlds. European observers in the Jesuit entrepôt of Goa — one of the most prominent hubs of Catholic missionary activity in India — and household compilers across the Atlantic world translated, adopted, or rejected these sonic practices. This contribution situates “sound recipes” within the logic of the pharmacopeia, according to which a rāga (a melodic framework in Indian classical music associated with specific moods and times) or mantra (a sacred verbal formula believed to have spiritual or healing power) can be dosed, timed, and combined with other substances, such as herbal infusions, perfumed oils, or mineral pastes, much like a drug.[1] Musicological studies on early modern South Asia, roughly spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, have linked rāga, time, and rasa (the aesthetic mood or emotional essence evoked in performance) to somatic and emotional states.[2] Building on this insight, this contribution triangulates close readings of three sources: first, Sanskrit medical and musical sources in which mantra, nāda (primordial or resonant sound), and rāga act as therapeutic agents, (e.g., Bhaiṣajya Ratnāvalī and Saṅgīta Parijāta); second, missionary letters and reports from Goa that frame healing as a site of translation; and third, early modern European recipe books in which prayer and chant appear beside simples.
Goa as a contact zone
On the western Indian coast, sixteenth-century Portuguese physicians such as Garcia da Orta and Cristóvão da Costa catalogued Indian materia medica while operating inside a Catholic imperial world.[3] Their dialogues show how Portuguese medicine negotiated local drugs, practices, and authority. Jesuit letters and mission histories from the same context present healing as a privileged site of cultural brokerage. Missionaries learned and sometimes used local therapeutics, staging cures that blended prayer, relics, and vernacular ideas of efficacy.[4] While the Jesuit archive highlights Christian ritual sound, it also attends to Indian bodily techniques and substances, suggesting that mantra-like repetition and Latin prayer were mutually legible within a shared recipe logic. In Jesuit infirmaries and domestic chapels, healing often unfolded as a multisensory practice: prayers were murmured over decoctions, oils were stirred in rhythm with chants, and Latin invocations blended with Sanskrit syllables. The result was a working grammar of healing in which utterance and dose reinforced each other. The ladle, mortar, and pestle set the rhythm, and the voice kept time. What emerged was not a confused hybrid but a practical recipe culture that judged efficacy by repeatable acts, including speech.
Jesuit correspondence from the Estado da Índia — the Portuguese imperial territories in the Indian Ocean, with Goa as their administrative and missionary center — consistently treated healing as a tool of persuasion. Medical care, herbal knowledge, and ritual sound became the means through which missionaries sought to demonstrate the efficacy of Christian devotion and attract converts. The letters sketch a choreography of roles: a lay brother to measure and infuse, a scholar to recite orisons over the sick, and a converted nurse to translate for patients and procure medical ingredients at the market. Prayer did not cancel the dose; it stabilized it. In practice, for example while cooking, repeated Pater Nosters or litanies functioned like a timer, dictating the duration of the simmer, the cooling, and the interval between spoonfuls.[5]
Garcia da Orta’s Colloquies catalogued Indian drugs and the social settings in which they were obtained. Merchants and physicians visited the houses of the sick, kitchen workers were consulted, and patients received decoctions that tasted of cinnamon and clove as much as of missionary hospitality. Orta weighed local testimony, sometimes admitting to a plant’s healing power while omitting information about the ritual words that accompanied its use. His description of Goa’s medical life reads less like a study than a domestic pharmacy staffed by servants and informants who knew that recipes often traveled with words, prayers, and spells attached to them.[6] Cristóvão da Costa’s printed Compendium extended Orta’s list of drugs and diagrams. Its path from Goa’s kitchens to Europe’s presses shows how a cure that began with a whispered invocation could be reduced to a chemical extract or powdered preparation — stripped of its ritual and sonic dimensions — even as prayer in Goa’s Jesuit college continued to time the stirring of medicines in the infirmary.[7]
Music as medicine
The Jesuits also worked with an acoustic theory of cure. Relics, blessings, and the sign of the cross functioned as spoken technologies. In Goa, missionaries recognized that Indian patients already understood the logic of a spoken remedy. Atharvavedic and Ayurvedic pairings of plant and verse were not exotic outliers but familiar structures with different words. And so, in the mission kitchen, Latin did not replace mantra in the act of dosing so much as stand alongside it . A Konkani-speaking patient might not understand the words or meanings of Latin words but could recognize the pattern: an uttered formula, a breath, and the spoon. Jesuit chroniclers marked successful cures with the language of grace, while local interlocutors could interpret the same cure as the right plant, rightly cooked, with a voice that prepared the body to receive it.[8]
These spaces of missionary healing also served as spaces of translation. At the cauldron, a Jesuit brother preparing remedies learned to name plants as his patients did, adopting local terms and pronunciations so that recipes and treatments could circulate across languages and communities.. He learned timings shaped by coastal winds, monsoon humidity, and fasting calendars. He learned that certain decoctions were best taken at dawn, when the body’s heat and the day’s rāga aligned. Even if the mission did not adopt Indian musicology, it absorbed its clock. The schedule of matins and vespers met local dosing of mornings and evenings. In the Goan kitchen, college bells doubled as timers. The clang that called the community to prayer also told the cook when to lift the pot.[9]
European household medicine and recipe culture had already prepared missionaries to accept words as curative adjuncts. Early modern recipe books placed psalms and charms beside simples without discomfort. A charm to staunch blood might sit next to a syrup for coughs. The value of these entries lay not in abstract theory but in the report that they had proven efficacy. When Jesuits in Goa encountered Indian sound medicine, they carried this idea with them. It allowed them to absorb counts of recitation or the tying of a thread while a verse was spoken. In the Goan mission kitchen, such actions could be recoded as Christian piety without altering the rhythm the patient’s body was used to feeling.[10] Yet the kitchen could also be erased. When cures moved from the voice-filled room to printed missionary accounts or natural histories, the words were often flattened. Efficacy was attributed to the drug alone, and the context of sound was treated as superstition or allowed to fade.
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Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi is an Associate Professor in the School of Languages and Literature at Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, India. He earned his Ph.D. in English at Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2012. At SMVDU, he teaches courses on applied linguistics and stylistics. His recent work has focused on folk songs, folks tales, and Hindi proverbs.
NOTES
[1] Schofield, K. B. (2023). Music and musicians in late Mughal India. Cambridge University Press. https://assets.cambridge.org/97813165/17857/excerpt/9781316517857_excerpt.pdf; Jairazbhoy, N. A. (1971). The rags of North Indian music: Their structure and evolution. Lok Virsa Publishing House. https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.26725
[2] Rowell, L. (1992). Music and musical thought in early India. University of Chicago Press; Kaufmann, W. (1968). The ragas of North India. Indiana University Press. Open Library
[3] Orta, G. de. (1563/1913). Colloquies on the simples and drugs of India (C. Markham, Trans.). Internet Archive. https://archive.org; da Costa, C. (1578/1582). Tractado de las drogas y medicinas de las Indias orientales. Internet Archive. https://archive.org
[4] Županov, I. G. (1999). Disputed mission: Jesuit experiments and Brahmanical knowledge in seventeenth-century India. Oxford University Press; Wicki, J. (Ed.). (1948–1988). Documenta Indica (Vols. 1–18). Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu. HathiTrust Digital Library
[5] Lea T. Olsan, “Charms and Prayers in Medieval Medical Theory and Practice,” Social History of Medicine 16, no. 3 (2003): 343–366.
[6] Garcia da Orta, Colloquies on the Simples & Drugs of India (London: Henry Sotheran & Co., 1913), ix–xii, 65–72.
[7] Cristóbal Acosta, Tractado de las drogas y medicinas de las Indias Orientales (Burgos: Martín de Victoria, 1578), 1–10, 145–150.
[8] Ines G. Županov, Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1–20.
[9] Josef Wicki, Documenta Indica, Vol. III, 1553–1557 (Rome: Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, 1954), 45–47, 112–118.
[10] Guy L. Beck, Sonic Theology: Hinduism and Sacred Sound (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 1–12, 95–108.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Amanda Herbert (October 29, 2025). Sound Recipes: Music as Medicine in Early Modern Goa. The Recipes Project. Retrieved November 17, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15280