Signs of the Portuguese
It had not been the first time that Chief Minister Pramod Sawant had called attention to what he deemed the deleterious effects of colonialism in Goa. One of the longest held European colonies in the world, Goa was under the Portuguese from 1510 to 1961; the region’s violent annexation by post-British India may have ousted the Portuguese but also circumvented and denied Goan self-emancipation, resulting in an ongoing colonialism. Strikingly, in 2021, Sawant declared that it was necessary to rebuild temples allegedly destroyed by the Portuguese, so as to “preserve Hindu Sanskriti and Mandir Sanskriti (Hindu culture and temple culture)” (Express New Service, 2021, par. 6). Yet, a year later, despite exhortations by Sawant’s administration to “citizens, NGOs, and historians” to provide evidence of the destruction of temples so they could be reconstructed, Goa’s Department of Archaeology reported that none had been forthcoming (Kamat, 2022, pars. 3-5). Not to be undone by this lack of corroboration, this year, Sawant stepped up his belated anticolonial rhetoric. Again linking his retributive aspirations to his belief that the colonizers had destroyed Hindu temples, the politician declared at a public event that 60 years after their departure, “the time had come to wipe out signs of the Portuguese” in totality (TNN, 2023, pars. 1-2).
As someone with a Portuguese name from a Goan family, this gives me pause. Lusophonic familial appellations mark Goans of Catholic heritage, who are a minority. The Chief Minister’s statement is chilling, because there is no mistaking what the postcolonial remnant “signs of the Portuguese” are: it is us. In what follows, I seek to demonstrate the political purpose of constructing Goan Catholic identity as “other” in the contemporary moment while also considering how Portugueseness, as it develops beyond the metropole and in the tropical lusosphere, is an explicitly Goan identity.
The Crossing by R. Benedito Ferrão, 2023.
The Postcolonial Other
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to which Sawant and his administration belong, is also the one currently at the helm of the Indian nation-state. Presently run by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the party’s Hindu-supremacist and right-wing authoritarian fundamentalist (or Hindutva) praxis has escalated in the first decades of the 21st century across India (Kalhan, 2023, 379). Resolved to establish a Hindu Rashtra (or state) in India (which already has a Hindu-majority population), India’s Hindu right has been supported financially by the diaspora (Kalhan, 2023, 338). In the meanwhile, contemporary postcolonial India, which is the world’s largest democracy ironically, has seen a rise in the persecution of minorities, including (but not limited to) Muslims, Dalits, members of tribal communities, and Christians (Hassan 2023). These subjects are regarded as impediments to the making of the Hindu Rashtra because of their identitarian divergence. As Saba Mahmood articulates it, minorities are those whose “difference (religious, racial, ethnic) poses an incipient threat to the identity of the nation that is grounded in the religious, linguistic, and cultural norms of the majority” (2015, 32).
Aligning himself with his party’s national politics around the creation of a Hindu Rashtra by advocating for “Hindu Sanskriti and Mandir Sanskriti (Hindu culture and temple culture),” Sawant’s crusade against remainders of colonial history execrates Goan Catholics, defined as they are by their Portuguese names. Simultaneously, such malignment of minorities has as much to do with religious chauvinism as it does with statecraft (or, perhaps, the deflection of its actual practice). As Vivek Menezes apprehends, the bogeyman of the Portuguese past is a “[distraction] in [Goa,] India’s smallest state, where governance has effectively collapsed ... Unemployment crested to nearly 17% in January [2023], and … remains double the rate of the rest of the country” (2023, par. 1). Evidently, the conflation of Iberian colonialism and Catholic identity in Goa functions as a convenient scapegoat. When Goan Catholicism is simply viewed as a product of Portuguese colonialism, one in which early converts are thought to have expressed no agency or choice, then Goan Catholics who continue to be of the faith postcolonially are easily construed as, both, colonial remnants (even apologists) and the other to a once-secular state that now hurtles towards exclusionary religious monolithicism.
Portugueseness in the Tropics, or Goan if in Goa
Although the roots of Catholicism in Goa may be pinned to the arrival of the Portuguese in South Asia a half-millennium ago, the religion has developed into a distinct regional form, one akin to, yet cleaved from, its Iberian likeness. Nowhere is this more tangible than in the construction of early churches in Goa by Goans. Builders of these churches imbibed European aesthetics from the sixteenth century on but remade them to employ locally sourced materials and for the edifices to endure tropical climatic conditions (Kandolkar, 2021). Moreover, such architectural developments were not solely discernable in Catholic church design, as domesticated European Renaissance influences even featured in Goa’s Brahmanical temple forms in the seventeenth century (Kanekar, 2018, 254). One wonders what Sawant might make of these signs of Portugueseness. In the case of churches, their displays of Goan domestications and reworkings of European built forms serve as indices of the localization of the faith and the instantiation of new ideas. Not just simulacra of Portuguese culture, they exist as their own manifestations of Goan ingenuity and agency within a colonial milieu. To state this differently, nothing in Goa, even if inspired by or contributed to by Portuguese colonialism, is Portuguese. In its tropical lusopheric form, it was and always will be Goan.
References
Express News Service. (2021, December 22). “Goa CM Pramod Sawant: Temples Destroyed by Portuguese Need to be Rebuilt to Preserve Hindu Culture.” The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/goa/goa-temples-destroyed-portugese-hindu-culture-pramod-sawant-7684509/
Hassan, Tirana. (2023). “World Report 2023: India.” Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2023/country-chapters/india
Kalhan, A. (2023). Tipping Point: A Short Political History of India. Routledge.
Kandolkar, V. P. (2021). “Rain in the Basilica: Protecting Goa’s Bom Jesus from the Ravages of Climate Change.” ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 20(2), 95–113. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.20.2.2021.3814
Kanekar, A. (2018). “The Politics of Renovation: The Disappearing Architecture of Goa’s Brahmanical Temples.” In Joaquim Rodrigues dos Santos (Ed.), Preserving Transcultural Heritage: Your Way or My Way? Questions on Authenticity, Identity and Patrimonial Proceedings in the Safeguarding of Architectural Heritage Created in the Meetings of Cultures (pp. 253-263). Caleidoscópio
Mahmood, Saba. (2015). Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report. Princeton University Press
Menezes, V. (2023, June 25). “Hidden Truths.” O Heraldo. https://www.heraldgoa.in/Edit/By-invitation/Hidden-Truths/206619
Shweta, K. (2022, December 6). “There’s Still no Data or Inputs on Temples Destroyed during the Portuguese Regime.” O Heraldo. https://www.heraldgoa.in/Goa/There%E2%80%99s-still-no-data-or-inputs-on-temples-destroyed-during-the-Portuguese-regime/197734
TNN. (2023, June 8). “Time to Wipe out Goa’s Portuguese Signs: CM Pramod Sawant.” The Times of India. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/time-to-wipe-out-goas-portuguese-signs-cm-pramod-sawant/articleshow/100832346.cms?from=mdr
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