Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa

Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity

Alexander Henn

• Editorial: Indiana University Press
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780253013002
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Storia dell'India e dell'Asia meridionale

The state of Goa on India's southwest coast was once the capital of the Portuguese-Catholic empire in Asia. When Vasco Da Gama arrived in India in 1498, he mistook Hindus for Christians, but Jesuit missionaries soon declared war on the alleged idolatry of the Hindus. Today, Hindus and Catholics assert their own religious identities, but Hindu village gods and Catholic patron saints attract worship from members of both religious communities. Through fresh readings of early Portuguese sources and long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this study traces the history of Hindu-Catholic syncretism in Goa and reveals the complex role of religion at the intersection of colonialism and modernity.

1 Vasco da Gama’s Error

Conquest and Plurality

The true Religion can be but one, and that which God himselfe teacheth[,]… all other religions being but strayings from him, whereby men wander in the dark, and in labyrinthine error.

—Samuel Purchas, 1613 (Smith 1998: 272)

On sunday, 20 May 1498, after eleven months of adventurous navigation, the small fleet of Vasco da Gama reached Malabar, the southwestern coast of India. The Portuguese captain cautiously waited a few days on board to ascertain that the local population had no hostile intentions against them and then went ashore with some of his men to pay his respects to the local king. When he arrived in Calicut, the capitol of the little Indian kingdom, he had a curious adventure, which was handed down by one of his crew members, most likely the soldier Álvaro Velho,¹ to whom we owe the oldest manuscript of the Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama.

They took us to a large church and this is what we saw: The body of the church is as large as a monastery, all built of hewn stone and covered with tile. At the main entrance rises a pillar as high as a mast, on the top of which was perched a bird, apparently a cock. In addition to this there was another pillar as high as a man, and very stout. In the center of the body of the church rose a chapel, all built of hewn stone, with a bronze door sufficiently wide for a man to pass, and stone steps leading up to it. Within this sanctuary stood a small image which they said represented Our Lady. Along the walls, by the main entrance, hung seven small bells. In this church the captain-major said his prayers, and we with him. We did not go within the chapel, for it is the custom that only certain servants of the church, called quafees,² should enter. The quafees wore some threads passing over the left shoulder and under the right arm, in the same manner as our deacons wear the stole. They threw holy water over us, and gave us some white earth, which the Christians of this country are in the habit of putting on their foreheads, breast, around the neck, and on the forearms. They threw holy water upon the captain-major and gave him some earth, which he gave in change to someone, giving them to understand that he would put it on later. Many other saints were painted on the walls of the church, wearing crowns. They were painted variously, with teeth protruding an inch from the mouth, and four or five arms. Below the church there was a large masonry tank, similar to many others which we had seen along the road. (Ravenstein 1998: 52–54)³

The episode in the Calicut “church” caused great sensation at its time. Even though this was not fully unexpected, the assumption of finding Christians in this faraway region of India was news of greatest significance for the king and the people of Portugal and was immediately communicated to other European nobles and the pope in Rome. To be sure, the iconography in the “Indian church” showed some bizarre details, and the appearance of “Indian Christians” who were said to “go naked down to their waist” was certainly peculiar to contemporary Europeans. These circumstances notwithstanding, the Portuguese seafarers had no doubts that “the city of Calicut [was] inhabited by Christians,” some of whom, they felt, were wearing a special hair dress “as a sign that they are Christians” (ibid.: 49). In fact, they claimed to even have seen “another church” on their way to the king’s palace showing “things like those described above” (ibid.: 55). To modern scholars it is of course obvious that Da Gama and his men had succumbed to a bold mistake. The details of their description clearly indicate that they had not been visiting a Christian church, but a Hindu temple in Calicut, most likely a Vishnu temple, as Sanjay Subrahmanyam argues (1997a: 132), adorned with an image of Garuda, the eagle-shaped vehicle of the Hindu god. The most intriguing question, which I address in this chapter, therefore is, how could Vasco da Gama fall prey to such a gross error?

Interestingly, the answers presented by leading historians in the field vary largely. Charles Boxer prosaically observes that “Da Gama on his arrival at Calicut was unable to distinguish between Hindu temples and Christian churches” ([1969] 1991: 34), and relates the explanation to the search for “Prester John,” the legendary Christian priest who allegedly ruled a large kingdom somewhere in the East. More precisely, Boxer argues that it was the myth of a lost Eastern Christianity, the rediscovery of which had become a messianic vocation of the Portuguese royalty, that made Da Gama mistakenly find “friendly (though not rigidly Roman Catholic) Indian ‘Christians’” (ibid.: 37).

Michael Pearson’s analysis hints in a very different direction and relates the Calicut episode to what he perceives to be a “tolerant attitude” by some of the early-modern European explorers toward the foreign Indian world. The Portuguese, he notes, developed a curious “desire to find familiar things in Asia” (1987: 116). Beginning with Da Gama’s error, Pearson shows, famed Portuguese chroniclers visiting India or writing about it in the sixteenth century such as Tomé Pires (1465–1520?), Duarte Barbosa (d. 1545), and Fernão Lopes de Castanheda (1480–1559) were fascinated by what they perceived as “similarities” between certain religious concepts and rituals of the gentiles and their own Christian beliefs and practices. In particular, the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Mary, and certain baptismal rites, as Pearson and Donald Lach (1994: 387, 401) point out, were seen as theologically comparable, if not genealogically related, notions and practices of gentiles and Christians. Pearson, however, also notes something utterly enigmatic about this curious “search for the similar.” While understandable as an initial hermeneutic attempt to invest the alien with familiar traits, why did this attitude prevail for so long? Why, in particular, did Pires, Barbosa, Castanheda, and others continue to refer to Hindu-Christian affinities long after it seems to have been clarified that Hindus were not Christians, not even very lapsed ones. “How could they get it so wrong?” he asks ([1992] 2005b: 156). Even more puzzling, why did assumptions about Hindu-Christian affinities live on after the impact of the Counter-Reformation had turned the initially “peaceful” encounters between Portuguese and Indians, Christians and Hindus, into a hostile iconoclastic onslaught against Hindu culture? Pearson does not pretend to have plausible answers to these questions and, faute de mieux, explains them by philanthropic leanings. “It is possible,” he writes, “that those who continued, despite the evidence, to find the Same were simply more humane, less intolerant than most of their fellows who launched vicious attacks on Hinduism” (ibid.).

Sanjay Subrahmanyam pays the closest attention to the Calicut episode of all modern scholars of Indo-Portuguese history, yet he conspicuously abstains from addressing the intricacies mentioned by Pearson. For Subrahmanyam, Da Gama’s error simply was a short-lived “gaffe” triggered by “the fact that the Portuguese were momentarily convinced that large Christian kingdoms awaited them in Asia, and could be used as allies against the Mamluks and other Middle Eastern Muslim rivals” (2001: 26). He buttresses his thesis in another book by relating it to the curious information regarding the Christians living in the East that was delivered to the Portuguese captain by a man known as Gaspar da Gama or Gaspar of India. This Gaspar, a Jewish merchant with profound experience in the Indian trade who Da Gama had captured off the Kanara Coast and baptized a Christian in his name, certainly must have impressed his new Christian master when he presented Vasco Da Gama with a fantastic list showing no less than “ten Christian kingdoms” spread over India and the Far East, all allegedly waiting to support the Portuguese with mighty armies in their war against the “Moors” (1997a: 152–153).

Subrahmanyam also points out that the situation in South India must have been confusing for Da Gama as a group of Christians did in fact—and do to this day—live in southern India. These Christians are known as St. Thomas Christians because they trace their mythological origin back to proselytizing activities of the Apostle Thomas. Scattered rumors about these Thomas Christians were spread in Europe since the medieval age and gradually solidified in the Renaissance and early-modern period, when first Marco Polo (1254–1324), then Nicolò de Conti (ca. 1385–1469) reported to have seen the grave of the Apostle Thomas in a city called Mylapur (Chennai, Tamil Nadu) in southern India. At the time of Da Gama’s visit, the numbers of these Thomas Christians are uncertain and are estimated at anywhere between thirty and seventy thousand (Bayly 1989: 247; Frykenberg 2003: 41). Although there is no certified evidence for Subrahmanyam’s assumption that Da Gama or anyone of his crew may in fact have met with St. Thomas Christians in Malabar during their first voyage (Subrahmanyam 1997a: 119), it is easy to imagine that news about their existence had influenced Da Gama’s perception of the situation in this faraway country. Most importantly though, Subrahmanyam argues that Da Gama’s error was rectified almost instantaneously, something he attributes to the fact that, arguably, proper knowledge about the religious identity of the “gentiles” had long been available in Europe. “By the return to Lisbon of the second Portuguese voyage of Pedro Álvares Cabral (1500–1),” Subrahmanyam notes, “matters had been clarified to a large extent and the knowledge already possessed from the fifteenth century descriptions like that of Nicòlo de Conti had been reconsolidated: the term ‘Gentile’ (gentio) was now used to designate Hindus and Buddhists alike, and to distinguish them from Christians and Moors” (2001: 26).

In summary, historians are largely at variance regarding the interpretation of the Calicut episode and raise more questions than answers. What motivated the curious error of the Portuguese captain: expectations to find the mythical Christianity of the East, philanthropic leanings toward the familiar in the alien, or wishful thinking regarding allies in the conflict with the Muslims? Was Da Gama’s error thus an anachronistic short-lived gaffe or even a harbinger of an Enlightenment perspective of cultural relativism, or were other epistemic conditions of cognition and perception involved? What does the episode in Calicut tell us about the dynamics of the attitudes of the Christian Self toward the Indian Other in the early-modern colonial encounter?

Prester John and the Search for Eastern Christianity

The assumption that Da Gama’s confusion in Calicut was the result of longstanding rumors about certain Christians living in the East is supported by the celebrated disclosure, “We came in search of Christians and spices,” reportedly made by one of his sailors on their arrival at Malabar (Ravenstein [1898] 1998: 48). In accordance with this information, Velho’s travelogue shows that the Portuguese, once they had reached the coastline of East Africa, were constantly searching for hints and signs indicating the presence of Christians on their route. In Mozambique, they rejoiced for the first time when some of the natives, whom they repeatedly interrogated on this issue, allegedly spoke about “many cities” in the region that were populated by Christians. Moreover, they understood their native informants saying,

that Prester John resided not far from this place; that he held many cities along the coast, and that the inhabitants of those cities were great merchants and owned big ships. The residence of Prester John was said to be far in the interior and could be reached only on the back of camels. These Moors had also brought hither two Christian captives from India. This information and many other things that we heard rendered us so happy that we cried with joy, and prayed God to grant us health so that we might behold what we so much desired. (Ibid.: 24)

Unfortunately though, Da Gama’s hopes to go on land the following day in the city of Mombasa and “hear jointly mass with the Christians reported to live there” were disappointed, as well as the hope of finding “many large cities of Christians and Moors, including one called Quambay (Gujarat)” on their way across the Arabian Sea (ibid.: 35, 47). Nevertheless, the Portuguese captain and his men refused to give up their efforts to find Christians and continued to undertake tests and seek signs revealing the suspected Christian identity of local people, even where these signs seemed rather far-fetched. For instance, Da Gama’s men claimed to have recognized two “Indian Christians” in Mozambique, describing them as “tawny men” who wore little clothing, had long beards, ate no beef, and spoke a language different from Arabic. Two rather curious forms of behavior convinced the Portuguese that these Indians, who were said to be owners of big vessels and who had visited one of the Portuguese ships, were in fact Christians. First, it was reported that, when the visitors were shown an altar-piece representing Our Lady, they immediately prostrated themselves, murmured prayers, and, most curiously, made “offerings of cloves, pepper and other things” to the image. Second, when Da Gama and his fleet left the harbor, the “Indian Christians” were said to have “fired many bombards from their vessels and when they saw him pass they raised their hands and shouted lustily ‘Christ,’ ‘Christ’” (ibid.: 44–45).

On another occasion in Mombasa, Da Gama was invited into the house of “two men, almost white, who said to be Christians,” something that the Portuguese captain found confirmed by a “paper” shown to him, which he interpreted as an “object of their adoration” depicting the “Holy Ghost” (ibid.: 36). These and similar incidents suggest that Da Gama was ready to stretch evidence, if only to keep the hope alive that he was going to find Christians in India. The details of the audience he had with the king of Malabar further confirm this. To begin with, Da Gama took the doorman of the palace to be a sort of “bishop … whose advice the king acts upon in all affairs of the church” and saluted him “in the manner of the country by putting the hands together, then raising them towards the Heaven, as it is done by Christians when addressing God” (ibid.: 56, 57). When meeting with the Zamorin, or king of Malabar, Da Gama told him that the Portuguese king, Dom Manuel, and his ancestors had undertaken “discoveries in the direction of India” for many years because they knew “that there [in India] were Christian kings like them.” Therefore, he continued, “Dom Manuel … had ordered him not to return to Portugal until he should have discovered this King of the Christians [in the East], on pain of having his head cut off” (ibid.: 58).

These circumstances show that Vasco da Gama’s search for Christians had little to do with modern notions of discovery. When the Portuguese captain spoke about discovery, he did not have in mind finding novelties or seeking new experiences, let alone changing his ideas or worldview. Instead, he sought to reconfirm what he already thought and, thus, was certain, against all evidence and facts, to find Christians and also, incidentally, immense riches and resources in India:

We understood them to say—is therefore another information which he repeatedly believes to hear from the words exchanged with the natives in Africa—that all these things [silver, gloves, pepper, ginger, rings, pearls, jewels, and rubies] with the exception of gold were bought by these Moors; that further on, where we were to go, they abounded, and that precious stones, pearls and spices were so plentiful that there was no need to purchase them as they could be collected in baskets. (Ravenstein [1898] 1998: 23)

Like Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama pursued what Tzvetan Todorov called a “finalistic strategy of interpretation,” that is, an interpretation whose operations were grounded not on experience but authority (1985: 26). The two early-modern explorers, in other words, took to be known in advance the meanings of the signs and gestures encountered on their journeys and, to a considerable extent, the messages conveyed to them in foreign languages. There are striking parallels therefore in how Columbus and Da Gama reasserted assumed knowledge against factual evidence. Convinced of finding a great and civilized continent, Columbus, in a celebrated episode of his journey, made his entire crew go on land in Cuba and swear a solemn oath that this was the great mainland of India for which they were searching, though a number of his men were doubtful (ibid.: 32). Da Gama was sure to find Christians in India and thus made his men, in a no less spectacular confusion, pray to images of saints in a Hindu temple in Calicut, though again some of them were not convinced that these were representations of saints. In fact, Hernan Lopes de Castanheda mentions in his version of the Calicut episode that a certain João de Sá, one of the men accompanying Da Gama to the “church,” was doubtful and anxious that the “saints” he was ordered to worship may not be authentic. As a precaution, he therefore murmured, “If these are devils, I worship God” (Castanheda 1582: 44–45).

What made the two explorers so self-asserted about their assumed knowledge were not only certain authoritative texts, such as Pierre d’Ailly’s Imago mundi for Columbus and the mysterious Acts of Thomas for Da Gama, which supposedly prefigured and predicted what they were hoping to find.⁴ More specifically, the two explorers joined Luís de Camões (1524–1580) in trusting in what might be called a Christian epistemology that assumed the truth about the world in its entirety had been prefigured by Christian doctrine, if perhaps in an encapsulated form or cryptic signs waiting to be deciphered. History of literature scholar Shankar Raman, analyzing the great epic Os Lusíadas (Camões [1571] 1973), which Camões had composed on the occasion of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage to India, comes to a similar conclusion when summarizing the great poet’s view about the foreign land of India: “It is illogical to believe that God could have created parts of the world that were not from the very beginning available in some way to [Christian] man and thus part, even dimly, of man’s knowledge, since proper contemplation of the created world requires such knowledge. Ergo, these lands must already have been known, our failure to acknowledge them a mere consequence of not having read the ancient texts with the requisite care” (Raman 2001: 69).

Among the “ancient texts” that arguably inspired Vasco da Gama’s search for Christians in India were, as already mentioned, the Acts of Thomas. Dated to the second century, these documents are of unknown origin and provenance and have survived in Syriac (Aramaic) versions believed to have been produced in fourth-century Edessa (Greece). They are regarded as the oldest documents reflecting Christian traditions in southern India. The Acts of Thomas are interpreted as evidence of missionary activities undertaken by the apostle Thomas and, together with written and oral Malayali and Tamil literature, are claimed today as proof of the ancient and independent Christian origins of the Thomas or Syrian Christian communities of Kerala and Tamil Nadu (Frykenberg 2003: 34ff.). Although considered apocryphal by the Western church, the Acts of Thomas were a major source of myths and rumors circulating in medieval Europe about a Christianity of considerable proportion and power that allegedly was lost or hidden in the vast territories of the Indies somewhere between Ethiopia in the west and Cathay (China) in the east. Two sites became especially important for the dissemination of myths and news regarding these lost Eastern Christians. One was the Near East and, in particular, Jerusalem, where Western pilgrims not only learned about the idiosyncrasies of the Christian churches of Jerusalem, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch, but also their various Armenian, Jakobite, Maronite, Chaldean, and Syrian subdivisions, some of which were said to have relations with the lost Christians of the East (Rogers 1962; Aubin 1976). The other site was the Western church in Rome whose leaders and theologians entertained ambiguous attitudes toward the lost Eastern Christianity. On the one hand, the Western church had a longstanding record of efforts at trying to unify the theological principles and political actions of the Christian churches of East and West, something that included repeated attempts to contact and communicate with the enigmatic Eastern Christians associated w...