At the beginning of the Eighteenth century the Holy See was called to solve the controversy on the Malabar Rites. The Jesuits that were working in the missions of Madurai, Mysore and «Carnate» were blamed for their tolerance of pagan practices and caste discriminations against the pariahs. This article proposes a category of «glocal», synthesis of «global» and «local», as a tool to interpret the conflict over the Malabar Rites beyond a narrow Romanocentric perspective.The Jesuit accommodatio appears therefore as a particular case of a more generaI trend towards adaptation shared by all the Catholic missionaries operating in South India. The article shows then that the denunciation made by the Capuchin François-Marie de Tours, considered until now as the very origin of a theological conflict on global scale, was in fact just an expression of an anti-Jesuitic front developed along the Coromandel coast and that included also the Venetian traveler Nicolao Manucci or the obscure Calabrian missionary Ignazio Placente. Finally, the article shows how the category of «glocal» may be useful not only to interpret the origin of the Malabar Rites controversy but also to contextualize the project, never accomplished, of an Italian East India Company to be established under the aegis of the congregation of Propaganda Fide.