"Goa, the Tropical Lusosphere, or (De)Constructing Portugeseness Elsewhere" in eTROPIC (July 2023)

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 21^st 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

From eTropic: Decolonizing the Tropics.

"'This is Not the Basilica' explores how an Iconic Goan Monument became a Victim of its Own Fame" in SCROLL (26 September 2021)

Look up most advertising content about Goa, and it will predictably have some assemblage of the words “sun,” “sand,” and “sea.” But, really, such verbiage could feature in just about any description of a coastal tourism location. Accordingly, in a newly opened art exhibition at Sunaparanta Goa Center for the Arts, Vishvesh Kandolkar suggests that Goa has been set apart from the usual clichés of palm trees, surf, and other seaside imagery due to a visual culture that has incorporated an iconic Goan structure – the Basilica of Bom Jesus. Visible in everything, from tourism promos, souvenirs, and Republic Day parade floats, Kandolkar – an architectural historian and professor at Goa’s College of Architecture – culls such evidence of the widespread representational use of the sixteenth century church in his artistic debut, This is Not the Basilica! Through his research-based installations, Kandolkar demonstrates how the Portuguese-era church, famous for holding the relics of St. Francis Xavier (1506-1552), has come to stand in for Goa’s historical and regional difference in South Asia while becoming a victim of its own fame.

Viewable from September 2021 and part of the group exhibition Goa: A Time that Was, curated by Leandré D’Souza, Kandolkar’s works aim to showcase the long-standing Basilica as a living part of Goa rather than only an emblem of its past or a curiosity consumed by visiting tourists. The title of Kandolkar’s installation series is a nod to that most famous of René Magritte’s surrealist works: La trahison des images (The Treachery of Images), also known as Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a Pipe) (1929). As this indicates, Kandolkar’s intent is to destabilize the usual representations of Goa as India’s pleasure periphery (its preferred holiday destination and real estate market for second homes). Simultaneously, Kandolkar’s installations draw attention to the eponymous subject of his exhibition – the Basilica of Bom Jesus – and, more specifically, the plight of the early modern monument that has served as an archetypal icon of Goa while suffering the vagaries of time, colonial politics, and climate change.

Upon entering the gallery where Kandolkar’s installations are placed, visitors are immediately greeted by the curious sight of suspended, backlit latticed palm leaves that cast dramatic shadows on the wall, which forms the title piece in the exhibition: This is Not the Basilica! But a closer look reveals that the interwoven fronds are obscuring a large image that can only be properly viewed by navigating around the leafy screen. Forced to peer through the network of leaves, visitors will catch sight of a digitally manipulated image of one of the Basilica’s red laterite walls, lashed by rain and with some of its windows surrounded by lime plaster. The stark whitewash around the casements is an embellishment not visible in the actual building, but what remains true to life in the photograph are perceptible signs of the laterite wall crumbling. In fact, the pediment over one of the windows in the photograph has completely vanished. The patchwork lime render and the enmeshed palm leaves a mystery, the clue to this installation’s meaning lies in the long history of Bom Jesus. 

As the curator’s note highlights, the Basilica “is one of the few surviving monuments from the fabled period of Old Goa and an emblem of Indo-Portuguese aesthetics.” Capital of the Estado da Índia from the early-1500s, the colonial Portuguese seat of government in Old Goa, for a time, oversaw an empire that encompassed regions as far apart as Africa and eastern Asia, as well as various locales in South Asia. With construction beginning in 1594, the history of the Basilica of Bom Jesus ran almost parallel to that of the duration of Portuguese India, now even having outlived it with the 1961 annexation of Goa by India. Yet, although the church may have been built during the period of Portuguese rule, its aesthetic is definitively Goan while demonstrating what Kandolkar identifies as “the flowering of Baroque style architecture in Goa.”

Although the legend of the Basilica was sealed when it became the final resting place of the Basque Jesuit missionary saint Xavier in the seventeenth century, the edifice’s architectural legacy is also important. In Whitewash, Red Stone: A History of Church Architecture in Goa (2011), Paulo Varela Gomes recounts the church’s discernibly European influences. Yet, these were remade in Goa, by Goan artisans, according to local taste, bringing together such disparate features as “Flemish ornament, Serlian mouldings, round windows, and French Serlian window frames” in the building’s constitution. In turn, these elements of localized baroque found their way into the design of other churches of the day, Varela Gomes maintains. Likely, this was also true of non-church architecture in the period. Indeed, when people come to Goa in search of so-called “Portuguese houses,” (this also being indicative of much misinformation about Goa and its people’s own hand in their heritage-making) what they are actually seeking to acquire are structures of historically Goan creative provenance.

As further evidence of the built form in Portuguese Goa bearing testament to local inventiveness, consider how the façade of the Basilica of Bom Jesus melded European and South Asian design. This look was achieved through the use of basalt quarried from Bassein, while other external parts of the church were built in the now ever-emblematic red laterite that is native to Goa. With one massive difference – the laterite was rendered invisible. Coated as it was with lime plaster, the Basilica once looked like so many other whitewashed churches that dot Goa’s landscape of red hills and green palms. It was not until the 1950s that the Basilica gained the look it wears now, deliberately denuded of its white lime render by political design. 

Researcher Joaquim Rodrigues dos Santos chronicles how Portuguese architect Baltazar da Silva Castro was tasked in the mid-twentieth century with restoring Goan monuments, including the Basilica, by then-Portuguese Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar. “Restoring” is really not the appropriate term, for Castro had been instructed to age such early modern Portuguese Goan relics as the Basilica. The intention was for these historical structures to appear even older than they really were. In the wake of the decolonization of adjoining British India in 1947, Salazar sought to demonstrate Portugal’s longstanding influence on Goa and its culture. As part of his propaganda to justify the continued presence of Portugal in its overseas territories in South Asia, Salazar believed that architecturally fabricating the antiquity of the Portuguese presence in its erstwhile capital of Old Goa was a viable tactic. The avenue through which this was to be achieved was by giving famous sites, tied to the early modern Portuguese empire, a reverse facelift.

In the case of the Basilica of Bom Jesus, this meant that it was entirely stripped of its protective white plaster barrier. No doubt, this achieved the required result of making the already historic building appear even older. What resulted was the quintessential look the monument bears now, immortalized over and again in such advertisements and tourism-related paraphernalia as can be seen in Kandolkar’s second installation, (T)here is the Basilica. Comprised of everything from video loops of the appearance of the Basilica on Goa’s floats in various Republic Day parades to three-dimensional models of the church available for sale online, the recurring image across the multimedia exhibit is of an imposing (now browned-with-age) laterite building. Certainly, an entire generation of Goans will have only known the Basilica in its present form, entirely devoid of its once highly contrasting white plaster surfaces. And why should this be a problem? The lime cast which was removed during Castro’s renovation was not meant to merely serve as a decorative element, its presence on the walls functioning as prophylaxis against rain damage. Laterite rock is naturally water-permeable, its constitution deteriorating with extended exposure to rainfall. 

Debates have raged about maintaining the Basilica’s current look, especially so as not to upset the sentiments of Goans who have grown accustomed to seeing, and worshiping at, the unplastered church, which happens to be one of the most popular in the region because of the presence of Xavier’s relics. But things came to a head in April 2020 when it became apparent that drastic measures needed to be taken to conserve the building – the rain had found its way into the church. The press picked up the story when the Basilica’s rector. Fr. Patricio Fernandes, wrote a letter to the Archeological Survey of India, accusing them of being negligent of the care of the monument, which falls under their purview. While the furore resulted in expedited repairs of the church’s leaking roof, the question about whether the Basilica will once again be plastered – its best defense against the torrential rains Goa experiences – still remains unresolved.

As Kandolkar explained in a talk earlier this year, Bom Jesus “continues to remain unplastered because people have been fed a particular (mis)representation of the monument’s appearance in the contemporary moment.” In fact, what might help Goans come around to seeing the Basilica differently is a re-engagement with a visual culture that sidesteps contemporary representations of the edifice and provides a longer look at the church in its earlier form. With this in mind, Kandolkar’s third installation, Weather the Basilica?, employs a timeline that starkly shows the difference between the short period during which the church has been unplastered and the significantly longer duration of its having been protected by a coat of lime mortar. 

To visually represent the contrast, this installation is composed of untreated laterite bricks and rubble, sourced from Old Goa, that stand in a vitrine balanced atop a tall whitewashed pedestal. What becomes clear from the timeline matched with the dimensions of the exhibit is that it is the most recent period (represented by the raw laterite) that has borne witness to the most damage sustained by the Basilica. This coincides with the removal of the lime layer, a rise in monsoonal rainfall, and planetwide climate change.

Once commonplace in Goa, the craft of enmeshing palm fronds to create a protective barrier around built structures, especially during the monsoons, is a vanishing skill. Instead, mass produced plastic tarpaulins have come to stand in for mollem, as handwoven palm leaf sheaths are known in Konkani. While on the one hand a statement about the passage of time and changes in technology, that mollem have given way to the less eco-friendly plastic coverings also parallels the evolution of the walls of Bom Jesus, transformations inflected by politics and history.

For This is Not the Basilica!, Kandolkar sought the help of Pingal Prakash Mashelkar, a caretaker at Sunaparanta, to fashion the mollem used in his installation. By incorporating this re-enlivened tradition of defending architecture against the monsoons, Kandolkar’s exhibit invites visitors to rethink how one views architectural history and aesthetics and, indeed, the art of looking itself. Barely visible through the mesh of leaves from Goa’s ubiquitous coconut trees, the image of the Basilica of Bom Jesus that Kandolkar offers is less obscured than it is renewed. It is a glimpse through the past to see what the future could hold for this magnificent but endangered building.   

 From Scroll.