On 26 January, ThePrint published an article by Anirudh Kanisetti that distorts the history of Goa, my home state. The article makes sweeping statements such as: “Goa had become a province alternately dominated by the Sultanate of Bijapur and its rival, the Vijayanagara Empire. The Portuguese fortified and transformed it into a sprawling city, half-European and half-Indian.”
Kanisetti doesn’t mention that when Portuguese general Afonso de Albuquerque conquered Goa on 25 November 1510, by his own estimate, about “800 Turks and over 6,000 moors were put to death” in just one day, and the toll included civilians as well as soldiers. (Farar Far: Local Resistance To Colonial Hegemony in Goa, page 39)
Kanisetti further writes, “Conversions were not always forceful.” To support this hypothesis, he quotes Angela Barreto Xavier’s statement, “Locals might have seen the Virgin Mary (for instance) as yet another local goddess” to give an instance of ‘voluntary conversions’.
The writer bases the tenuous hypothesis on his observation of Indian elements in artefacts housed in the Museum of Christian Art in Old Goa. Local artisans added Hindu elements to Christian art because they lacked proper training and knowledge of the latter. Many of these artisans were Hindu and they applied Indian aesthetics and knowledge of Hindu art to create objects relating to the new religion. Even though there was a decree by governor Barreto in AD 1557 prohibiting the employment of non-Christian artisans, Christian religious orders continued to employ Hindu artisans because of their better workmanship. The Jesuits made use of Hindu carpenters and masons. (Craftsmen and Artisans in Goa A.D. 1000 to 1700 by Christopher DeSouza)
Also read: Christianity in India wasn’t always imposed. Just look at its Portuguese art
The real 16th-century Goa
The reality of 16th-century Goa was vastly different from what Anirudh Kanisetti has written in his article. Soon after Albuquerque conquered Goa, evangelisation had already started. The first diocese in Goa was established in 1534. Systematic persecution of Hindus living in Portuguese-controlled territories and forced conversions were officialised in 1540 after the arrival of fanatical Catholic clergymen, Miguel Vas and Diego Borba.
The Portuguese regime officially launched a policy of ‘Rigor De Misericordia’ (rigour of mercy). (The Christianisation of the Goa Islands 1510-1567 by Anthony D’Costa, page 29).
The policy involved converting Hindus by force, which the Portuguese believed was an ‘act of mercy’ toward ‘heathens’.
In 1546, the Portuguese king issued an order that allowed the destruction of Hindu temples in Portuguese territories and prohibited public celebrations of Hindu festivals. By 1549, all Hindu temples on the island of Divar were razed to the ground and their properties attached to the new churches that were erected in their place. (Contesting Sacred Space in the Estado da India: Asserting Cultural Dominance over Religious Sites in Goa, Ler Historia Journal by Timothy Walker, page 6-10)
In 1560, the Portuguese viceroy of Goa ordered all Hindus living in the Portuguese territories to either convert to Christianity or leave the place. On top of it, some decades later, Hindu marriages were banned throughout the Portuguese territory. Cremations were also outlawed, and Hindus were forced to cremate their dead on rafts and set them afloat in the river. Between 1560 and 1575, almost 300 temples were destroyed in the district of Salcete alone. (The Goa Inquisition by Anant Priolkar, pages 60 to 86)
In 1559, Portuguese king D. Sebastian passed an order that orphan Hindu children must be “taken immediately and handed over to the College of St Paul of the society of Jesus of the said city of Goa, for being baptised, educated and indoctrinated”. The royal order was endorsed by viceroy D. Antao De Noronha in 1564 and Governor Antonio Moniz Barrete in 1575.
As a result, there were many cases of Hindu children being kidnapped and forcibly converted to Christianity. Many Hindus smuggled their children out of Portuguese territories to relatives settled outside Goa.
The Portuguese did not just impose Christianity on the people of Goa, they ensured the complete erasure of the local culture, language, and even attire. Hindus were prohibited to wear the sacred thread or their traditional outfits. Hindu religious books in Marathi and Sanskrit were burnt publicly. In 1684, the use of Konkani was banned in the seminaries.
Converted Christians were forced to adapt to a totally alien way of life — forced to wear Western outfits and eat pork and beef. Converted Christian women were prohibited to follow cultural practice such as wearing flowers in their hair.
Francis Xavier, who is ironically, now venerated as a saint, came to Goa as a Jesuit missionary. He nurtured a deep hatred for the ‘idolaters’ and expressed it in his letters:
“Whenever I hear of any act of idolatrous worship, I go to the place with a large band of these (converted) children. The children run at the idols, upset them, dash them down, break them to pieces, spit on them, trample on them, kick them about, and, in short, heap on them every possible outrage.”
The Goa Inquisition was established when Francis Xavier requested it in a letter dated 16 May 1546 addressed to King Joao III of Portugal.
It is believed that between 1561 and the year of the temporary ban on the Inquisition in 1774, more than 16,000 people were brought to trial. Some of them were Hindus and Jews, but most of them were newly converted Christians who were tortured and later even burnt at the stake because they were believed to be practising their old faith in private. The Portuguese were violent not only toward non-Christians but the newly converted people as well.
As French historian and philosopher Voltaire wrote: “Goa is sadly famous for its Inquisition, which is contrary to humanity as much as to commerce.”
What the Portuguese regime did to the people of Goa was a crime against humanity, a cultural genocide that hasn’t been forgotten. We cannot forget the crimes of colonial powers or whitewash them based on any one individual’s appreciation of Christian art.
Views are personal.
Author Anirudh Kanisetti’s response:
The rebuttal ignores the actual arguments presented in my article to show history as black and white. Nowhere does my article deny the violence inflicted by the Portuguese, nor does it claim that all conversions were voluntary. What I am saying, though, is that the Portuguese conquests were not a uniform story of merciless Europeans oppressing Goans. It works very well for emotional politics, but not very well as a description of a historical process. Take, for example, “They were applying their Indian aesthetic and prior knowledge and training in Hindu art to create objects venerating the new religion that they were forced into.” The Archdiocesan Councils of Goa attempted in 1567 and 1585 to stop non-Christian locals from making Christian artworks; in 1606, the Fifth Archdiocesan Council complained that “the churches and the private houses of the province were still filled with holy artworks created by the unconverted”. This supports my argument that the Portuguese authorities were quite uncompromising. But, as I wrote, the Portuguese were more than willing to adjust their actions in practice: The private houses of the province, which is to say the majority of the Portuguese in Goa, were purchasing artworks created by non-Christians. This does not seem to me like a “complete erasure” of culture and language, but suggests pragmatism and cultural interactions. I am sure that Goan Christians will have much to say about the claim that they went through “cultural genocide”.
There are other evidence I present, and the experts I have quoted, on how Portuguese people assimilated into the Indian Ocean, including their conversions to Islam and intermarriage with Indians, as well as how Indian powers pushed back against their aggression. This is a position that has been developed based on decades of study of Portuguese, Persian, Marathi, and Konkani literature, State records, and art objects. This does not make my “hypothesis” tenuous.
Once again, I would like to reiterate that there is no denying that 16th-century Portuguese authorities were merciless in trying to impose their beliefs. As I wrote in the article: “The Portuguese Crown was not exposed to the multicentric world of the Indian Ocean and approached it with an extremely rigid policy.” But the history of Portuguese authorities is not the history of all Portuguese. The history of a handful of hateful people does not define centuries of interactions between rich cultures.
Views are personal.
ThePrint closes the discussion here.