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This book is a study of the complex nature of colonial and missionary power in Portuguese India. Written as a historical ethnography, it explores the evolving shape of a series of Catholic festivals that took place in Goa throughout the duration of Portuguese colonial rule in India (1510-1961), and for which the centrepiece was the “incorrupt” corpse of São Francisco Xavier, a (Spanish Basque) Jesuit missionary (1506–1552)-turned-saint (1622). Using distinct genres of source materials produced over the long duree of Portuguese colonialism in India (Xaverian biographies, European travelogues, royal decrees and Jesuit letters, a state commissioned book dedicated to Xavier, Goa guidebooks, newspaper articles, and medical reports), the book documents the historical and visual transformation of Xavier’s corporeal ritualization in death from a small-scale religious feast arranged by Jesuit missionaries (1554), into an elaborate celebration of Xavier’s canonization organized jointly by church and state (1624), and finally, into a series of “Solemn Expositions” designed by colonial officials at regular centenary intervals (1782, 1859, 1952), including the last colonial exposition of 1961 staged amidst Goa’s liberation and integration into postcolonial India. These six ritual “events”, staged at critical junctures (1554, 1624, 1782, 1859, 1952, 1961), and always centered on Xavier’s biography and corpse, provide the conceptual framework for individual chapters of the book.
once that India has two most beautiful mausoleums – the Taj Mahal at Agra and (on a smaller scale) the silver casket of St Francis Xavier in Goa – P. Rayanna, S.J., 1982 2 In December 2004 government officials in Goa staged the sixteenth exposition of the ‘sacred remains’ of St Francis Xavier. While it took place amidst a
Introduction Nothing remains of this city [Old Goa] but the sacred, the profane is entirely banished. – Denis L. Cottineau de Kloguen, French priest and visitor, 1827 1 Old Goa has few charms when seen by the light
Yards distant from it. Now if any should question the Truth of Xavier’s Story of Goa , they would be branded with the odious Name of an obstinate incredulous Heretick, and perhaps fall in the Hands of a convincing Inquisition. – Alexander Hamilton, 1692 2 In 1624 the Estado da Índia staged a reception to honour
Introduction As the ritual articulations of myths, commemorations play an important part in creating a usable national history. 1 Goa may be a minor pimple but it is a pimple that disfigures
Introduction Viceroys of India may come and go, but the Jesuit Fathers are always with us [in Goa]. – popular eighteenth-century saying 1 The persecution of the Society of Jesus was unleashed under
deserted island of Sancian (off the coast of China) where he had died only three months earlier. His body was found to be ‘incorrupt’ 2 – meaning that his flesh had not decomposed – and was put on the next westward-bound Portuguese ship, stopping briefly in Malacca and arriving in Goa on 16 March 1554, where he was honoured in a small reception. The Viceroy led the procession that carried Xavier
acts of resistance speak to their troubled and troubling relationships with the idea of resistance. The characters that I analyse below are an unnamed middle-aged Indian male immigrant in Australia in Homework , who agitates, often comically, for Goa’s liberation following its takeover by India; Moushumi, a young Bengali-American woman in The Namesake , whose ostensibly
taken the ‘sacred remains’ of Goa’s Apostle and Defender, São Francisco Xavier, with them when they were forced to leave by Indian troops bent on liberating this colonial enclave (1510–1961) located in the midst of a newly independent nation-state (1947). That the Estado da Índia desired the removal of Xavier’s body from Goa as a last colonial act suggests his crucial role
in Bombay, London, Goa, Lisbon and Bombay itself, but also the regional and geopolitics of Mughal, Maratha and Dutch expansion, as well as the critical intersection between maritime and territorial sovereignty. In the process, this story offers some lessons about the complications at the heart of European claims to colonial sovereignty. Laws in Asian European empires were just as overlapping and ‘entangled’ as in the Caribbean, 3 if not even more so, in an Asia that even Europeans understood as having a very different relationship to indigenous histories, people