Search results
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.
recognize the contributions of a missionary who had both converted so many ‘idolaters’ to the Roman Catholic faith through his alternative methods and requested a Holy Inquisition for Portuguese India. Given that they received the news only approximately eighteen months later, 4 church and state officials in Goa postponed the veneration of their saint until they could properly organize an event befitting
the field but in the extraordinary and the everyday, which, in turn, suggests that he is very much entrenched in Goa’s landscape today precisely because of his seminal role in Portuguese India’s past as a religious, political, and spiritual figure. I interviewed a woman who had prayed to the saint before the birth of each of her three children, and encountered numerous Goans of diverse backgrounds and
audience than on previous occasions. This ritualized moment marks a discursive and material shift from past celebrations, state officials now capitalizing on newly emergent technologies of industrialization and communication developed in the nineteenth century to publicize their patron saint more widely, including outside the strict confines of Portuguese India. They also distributed Xaverian relics and
centenary event in Portuguese India. Not only was the biographical date in question in need of verification before any such planning could take place, but such celebrations were required to be public by nature, with no expense spared, and with religiosity at their core; they were also to be staged on or near Xavier’s saint’s day of 3 December. Together, these specific conditions point to the defining
local level. In Portuguese India, within the space of ritual, the church is represented at various moments by multiple institutions (the Archdiocese, the Vatican, the Padroado, the Propaganda, the Inquisition, etc.) and religious orders (the Jesuits, Franciscans, Augustinians, Oratorians, etc.), operating individually and jointly. 9 Neither do these church organizations function harmoniously, for, as my analysis will show
twenty-three years earlier, their legacy unwittingly thrives in the space of ritual by way of rumours and the actions of certain individuals which undermine the state’s sole claim to Xavier (and by extension Goa), a point borne out in the above popular saying regarding the defining role of the Society of Jesus in constituting Portuguese India. More generally, the Estado da Índia had underestimated the
drive for his canonization on the part of church and state officials based in Portuguese India in the second half of the sixteenth century – including the role of Jesuit biographies in producing and circulating this information in both metropole and colony – it is necessary first to provide the contours of this Jesuit missionary’s ‘life and times’. Here I adapt what the historian
king, but not by a prince. Two had earlier travelled to Goa, the major territory in Portuguese India: Prince Augusto in 1871–1872, and Prince Afonso in 1895. Afonso’s tour came in the aftermath of a local revolt, 7 and was intended to reinforce Portuguese sovereignty at a time when memories of the 1857 revolts in British India were still alive and Portugal was concerned about British hegemony in South Asia
: University of California Press, 2002). 56 Stephanie Barczewski, Country Houses and the British Empire, 1700–1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014); Pamila Gupta, The Relic State: St Francis Xavier and the Politics of Ritual in Portuguese India (Manchester: Manchester