Portuguese Goa

The trip ended in Goa, and the ending was a deliberate provocation. For two weeks the course had been building the world that existed beforeEurope — Vijayanagara courts, Chalukya temples, the Sanskrit cosmopolis. Then it dropped us in front of whitewashed Baroque churches, holding the body of a Spanish Jesuit, built by Hindu craftsmen for a Portuguese colonial church. The point lands without anyone having to say it: by 1550, in this one corner of the subcontinent, “before” was already over.

Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498; in 1510 Afonso de Albuquerque took Goa from the Bijapur Sultanate and made it the capital of the Estado da Índia, the Portuguese maritime empire that ran from East Africa to Japan. Old Goa grew into one of the largest cities in Asia — Europeans called it the “Rome of the East” for the density of its churches and its role as the hub of Catholic mission across the continent. Then it emptied: malaria and cholera in the low river delta, the Mandovi silting, the Dutch and English pressing in. By the 18th century the capital had moved downstream to Panjim and the great churches stood in a reverting jungle. Portugal held Goa for 451 years, until the Indian Army annexed it in December 1961.

Goa was a Counter-Reformation project. Francis Xavier, a co-founder of the Society of Jesus, arrived in 1542 and made the city the launch point for missions across South and East Asia; he died off the Chinese coast in 1552, and his body was returned to Goa, where it has remained ever since in the Basilica of Bom Jesus, displayed for veneration roughly once a decade.^[1] The same fervor had a darker institution: the Goa Inquisition, established in 1560 (Xavier himself had urged it) and not abolished until 1812. It targeted mostly New Christians — converts suspected of keeping their former practices — along with Hindus and others, through denunciation, tribunal, and at the extreme the auto-da-fé. It was, by most accounts, especially severe, and its effect on Goan Hindu society — forced conversion, temple destruction, the flight of families to neighboring territory — was profound. The architecture and the Inquisition are the same project seen from two sides.

The Basilica of Bom Jesus(consecrated 1605) is the one church in Old Goa never whitewashed — its exposed laterite facade glows a deep red-ochre, distinct from the brilliant white of its neighbors, and it holds Xavier’s relics in a Medici-donated silver-and-marble reliquary. The Sé Cathedral, dedicated to St Catherine (on whose feast day Goa fell in 1510), spans the Manueline-to-Baroque transition and houses the resonant “Golden Bell.” The Church of St Cajetanwas built by Italian Theatine friars on the model of St Peter’s in Rome — a Greek-cross domed plan, a literal piece of the Vatican set down on the Konkan coast. And Fontainhas, the Latin Quarter of Panjim, is the same story at street scale: narrow lots, wrought-iron balconies, pastel lime-wash, Hindu and Catholic shrines on the same wall.

The construction itself is the argument. The churches are built in laterite— soft local stone that hardens in air — by Indian masons, then whitewashed with lime to seal the porous rock and to mimic the white churches of Lisbon. The plans are European: the Latin cross of a Counter-Reformation church, or, at St Cajetan, the Greek cross of St Peter’s. But the carving on the capitals and bands keeps slipping into Hindu vocabulary — lotus, vine, the human figure in temple postures — and behind the plain exteriors the interiors erupt into gilded Baroque retables, twisting Solomonic columns covered in gold leaf. The restraint outside and the excess inside are a single rhetorical move.

Every “pure” tradition the course had studied turned out, on inspection, to be a translation — the Hindu temple borrowing across regions, the Deccan tomb fusing Hindu craft and Islamic form. Goa is where that argument stops being subtle. These are not Indian buildings adapted by Europeans, nor European buildings planted in India. They are a third thing that did not exist anywhere before 1510: Indian hands, Indian stone, an Indian decorative reflex, grafted onto a European liturgical program, producing a Goan Catholic culture with its own feast days, its own music, its own saints. M. N. Pearson’s word for it is the right one — not conquest, not conversion, but hybridization, running both ways.^[2]

Even the food is the thesis: vindaloo is the Portuguese vinha d’alhos — wine, garlic, pork — rebuilt by Goan cooks with chili and tamarind. No single origin, no single culture. The encounter on a plate.

Goa is the thinnest stop on my shelf, and the thinness is the point. The seventeen books were chosen to build the pre-colonial world — so that the churches, at the end, would read as rupture rather than as background. Pollock is the strongest connection in spirit: his Sanskrit cosmopolis, a prestige language adopted across Asia that always produced hybrids rather than replacements, is the structural twin of what Portuguese did in Goa, only Portuguese arrived backed by the Inquisition rather than by prestige alone. Chitre’s Marathi poetry and Boo’s Mumbai sit at the modern edge of the same coast. But there is no book on the Portuguese here, and that absence is deliberate: you have to spend a semester not reading about Europe in India to feel what it means that the course ends here.