Abstract
This book by Alexander Henn, originally published in 2014 by Indiana University Press, is an ambitious work. One of its main intentions is ‘to scrutinize the engagements between Hindus and Catholics in Goa and other parts of India as way of understanding the role that religion played in the transformation of old and the emergence of new cultural differences at the historical beginning of colonialism and modernity’ (p. 4). Additionally, due to the length of the Portuguese imperial presence in Goa (between 1510 and 1961), Henn considers that the Goan case also presents ‘an ideal subject for a study on religion, colonialism and modernity’. Henn’s goals are, therefore, twofold: on one hand, they directly refer to the long history of the relations between different Goan religious communities; simultaneously, Henn uses Goa’s history as an opportunity to think more theoretically. By combining historical and anthropological approaches, Henn believes that the Goan case challenges modern anthropological theory related with syncretistic religious practices.
After an introduction that provides a general historical background, the first chapter addresses what could be called a ‘symptomatic case’: Vasco da Gama’s error when he entered a Hindu temple and mistook the image of a Hindu goddess for that of the Virgin Mary. Revisiting early travel writings and the chronicles of the encounters between the Portuguese and the Indians, earlier representations of Indian gentiles and Christians, as well as scholarship on this theme, Henn proposes a thesis that differs from the mainstream literature to explain Gama’s mistake. For Henn, the error of Gama was the result of his impossibility to think of (and therefore to experience) any other religion than Christianity, since Christianity was for him the one and only possible religion. Consequently, there was an epistemological necessity in the affinity between Indian temples and icons and Christianity. For Henn, other hypotheses—namely, the alterity of the Indian religious tissue—were unthinkable for men like Gama and his companions.
I am not sure I can agree with this thesis. Even if attractive, this thesis, which evokes the inspiring Rabelais of Lucien Fébvre, can be disputed by another alternative interpretation of the same event: Was Gama’s mistake an actual fact, or was it merely a discursive event forged on paper to make a larger point? Is it possible to consider that Gama’s mistake was not a mistake at all but only one of the many narrative falsifications that mark the literature of the period? Perhaps this narrative only aimed at legally justifying the Portuguese (re)conquests in Indian territories. Hindu temples were seen as similar to Christian churches and Indian goddesses looked like Virgin Mary, because they were represented to be the material remains of an Indian Christian past. As is known, the myth of the Christianization of India by Saint Thomas was an important rhetorical tool and a proof of the Christianization of Indians previous to the arrival of the Portuguese. Material findings (such as crosses, churches, images) legitimized this idea, justifying the evocation of the legal figure of restitutio [restitution]— the right that Christians had to re-conquest lands that had previously been Christian—in what concerned the conquests in India. If this antique Christian past of India could be assumed, then the wars in India could be definitely glossed as ‘just wars’. In that sense, Gama’s mistake was paradigmatic, indeed, but for different reasons.
If politics and legal culture become crucial variables to understand the sixteenth-century experiences, then the image wars explored in the second chapter can also be understood in a slightly different terms than the one proposed in this book. Henn is definitely right when he refers to the debates on sacred images taking place in sixteenth-century Europe as dividing Catholics and Protestants. The epistemological issues related with them, and their impact in the conception of religion itself, were important contexts to understand the Portuguese attitudes towards Indian sacred temples, images and objects, which were ‘pivotal for Hindu society and culture in Goa and elsewhere in India’ (pp. 45–46). An equally important context was the memory of the Christianization of the territory of what had become the Portuguese kingdom in the late Roman Empire, when Christianity had been imposed on a mainly ‘pagan’ landscape. This tradition of substitution was also an important contribution to what happened in sixteenth-century Goa, especially if combined with the Iberian certainty that they were engaged in another ‘just war’. Moreover, having been educated in an Aristotelian world of cognition, perception and action, the Portuguese were convinced that vision was the most important instrument of knowing. To destroy objects that entailed ‘pagan’ meanings was crucial, therefore, for a complete reconfiguration of the imagination of the Indians. The reconstruction of the materiality of the landscape was complemented by other strategies of reconstructing the deep structures of the mind, the very forms of perceiving, knowing, memorizing and acting. Just like the majority of scholarship that tends to forget the role played by other missionaries and their methods of evangelization, Henn too concentrates on Jesuit literary endeavors, ignoring in the process the methods of other evangelizers. He refers to the vast production of vocabularies, grammars, catechisms, as well as puranas and other writings that imitated Indian poetical forms where Christian contents were displayed, as an expression of the well-known Jesuit accomodatio [adjustment]. But for Henn, accomodatio was another—softer—form of colonial violence, complementing the colonial intention of completely disrupting the Indic Indian socio-cultural foundations of Goa.
The colonial violence embodied in the Portuguese practices in this period was, however, as Henn suggests, resisted by different forms of local agency, namely, in what concerned religion and religious expression. Local religions survived in parallel to Christianity, finding ways to continue, despite the constraints imposed by the Portuguese imperial structures (namely, by Inquisition). For example, Indians continued to see old religious meanings through the new Christian signs and objects, frequently recognizing in the patron saint or in the images of Virgin Mary the familiar ganvdevata or ganvdevi. By using David Freedberg’s idea that iconoclastic violence reconfirmed the power of what had been destroyed, Henn suggests that the wide destruction of the Goan religious landscape strongly reconfirmed the old religious structures, especially because many Christian buildings were erected over old Hindu structures. In fact, Henn argues, the duplicity of these objects would lead to thesingular forms of syncretism that took place since the first encounters in Goa. Two different religious communities, both ‘competing for the same place’ in society (p. 64) could have parallel lives (with adjustments in different spaces and times, of course), consuming the same (or located in the same places) religious buildings and materiality, while simultaneously keeping their identities and forms of differentiation.
The return of old religious practices (though perhaps it would be more correct to call them the reinvention of these practices) from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards—when the religious policy of the Portuguese crown grew lax—was, according to Henn, a demonstration of the structural survival of local religion (pp. 54–64). Henn considers that this structural survival was also visible, as discussed in the fourth chapter, in the way Goan villages were internally organized during the ‘Portuguese period’. He defends that the transformation of the ganukari [village government] into the comunidade [village association], especially after the Christianization of local elites, entailed transformations and continuities, allowing for the persistence of those that were, in his opinion, the ‘three major hierarchical systems of the old ganvkari [village government]’ (p. 98): (a) the ranking of ganvkar [one of the administrators of the village], mundkār [home-keeping]and service groups in vangod [lineage group]; (b) the varna [caste] ranking and jati [caste] differentiation of castes and sub-castes; and (c) the ranking of honours reflecting social hierarchy.
Still, these continuities were not, in his opinion, the main reason for Goan syncretism, but instead, the symptoms and the consequences of a more stable and structural variable—the ways through which religion was grounded in Goan life. For Henn, the divine presence did not represent, in symbolic ways, the socio-economic organization. Instead, it literally embodied it: the goddess was, in many ways, the village itself; or at least the soul of the village (p. 99). This grounded religiosity pervaded both Christians and non-Christians, says Henn, who also shared the idea that deities protected and liberated the village and their people. These parallels anchored the singular forms of syncretism that can be found still today in Goa.
Henn’s intensive research on the practices and forms of zagor [drama festival] —the object of the fifth chapter—and on the multiple and material presences of the divine figure in the villages and towns of Goa—analyzed in the sixth—intend to demonstrate his central thesis. For example, Christian markers in the landscape were/are usually located in the same places where the previous local protector gods of the village were situated, actualizing the old religious structure on one hand, while at the same time allowing the true and genuine Christians to perform their own devotions. Both religions transpired in the same material icons but in a kind of singular syncretism—the same objects served different religious traditions and purposes, and each devotee saw exactly what he wanted to see, simultaneously transgressing the borders of his/her devotion, while at the same time reinforcing them. Persecuted in the times of the Inquisition, zagor survived in the rural world, also between Christians, and was a religious structure relevant in the nineteenth-century reconversions to Hinduism (or one could also put it this way, in the nineteenth-century conversions to Hinduism).
Understanding the ‘Hindu rural point of view’ of these engagements is one of the strongest points of this book. Less informative, in my view, are his engagements with urban landscapes, urban Christians, and different social ‘classes’ or ‘castes’, mainly addressed in the shorter sixth chapter. For example, the idea that for Catholics, ‘the village is an embodiment of the divine or saintly’ might be understood by many of them as an insult, since their ancestors systematically tried to erase from their lives and history every possible sign of previous Indian religious traditions. Still, the affiliation to the ‘local’, the ‘memory, genealogy, and family relationships’ and the belief that gods and saints will protect the villagers from natural catastrophes (pp. 124–25) are features that probably cross both communities, rural and urban.
Albeit following an historical approach, Henn’s work ends up, ironically, concluding with what I would call a somehow ‘essentialist’ thesis. On one hand, he often takes historical narratives as literal descriptions of reality. The counterfactual exercise I did here about Gama’s mistake was intended to draw attention to the risks entailed in assuming that many of the episodes narrated in the Portuguese sources were descriptions. On the contrary, instead of trustworthy descriptions of events and situations, these narratives frequently had rhetorical aims, contributing to the construction of an international (Western European Christian) common sense about the Portuguese presence in India. This rhetorical dimension is even more evident—I dare to say—in some of the so-called ‘first narratives’ that were intended to create a new discursive frame to think and to talk about the new experiences that were taking place in India.
This kind of methodological essentialism is pervasive in Henn’s central thesis. For him, the ultimate reason to explain both the singular religious syncretism that exists today in Goa as well as the historical experiences—and transformations—is the pragmatic (and functional) nature of religion (shared by all religious communities of Goa), as if this was transhistorically true. Adding to that, and apparently for Henn, ‘Hindus’, ‘Christians’ as well as ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Christianity’ are concepts that can be used in similar ways to understand the experiences taking place in early-modern India and in the twentieth century. As is well known, the existence of ‘Hindus’ and ‘Hinduism’ in former periods has been contested by many scholars. My own work discusses whether it is appropriate to use these concepts to early-modern Goa, since its socio-cultural organization was quite diverse from the one that could be identified in later periods, namely, in what concerned the ‘caste system’ and the religious system. It is true that Henn considers that these communities were subject to historical transformation, but the mere use of these words to divide Goa into mainly two religious communities (when the religious diversity was much bigger) is questionable and supplies fuel to an equivocal understanding of Goa’s religious past. This is one of the dangers of Henn’s binary narrative, since it contributes—unconsciously—to the nationalistic image of a lost Hindu Goa, invaded by Muslims and Christians (all foreigners) that altered its previous identity. I am convinced that we do not have enough information (yet) to fully engage in a project as ambitious as Henn’s book. Sociologically speaking, we still know too little about the early-modern ‘Hindus’ (if they existed at all) as well as early-modern ‘Christians’ of Goa; and almost nothing about other religious communities (like Muslims) that also inhabited those lands.
Despite my few disagreements with some of Henn’s thesis, I do believe that this is a refreshing and inspiring book, necessary to this ongoing debate on the Goan religious experience, and it should be read as a challenge and a complement to other recent literature that has the religious history of Goa as an object of analysis.