Religion and Empire in Portuguese India: Conversion, Resistance, and the Making of Goa

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How did the colonization of Goa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries take place? How was it related to projects for the conversion of Goan colonial subjects to Catholicism? In Religion and Empire in Portuguese India, Ângela Barreto Xavier examines these questions through a reading of the relevant secular and missionary archives and texts. She shows how the twin drives of conversion and colonization in Portuguese India resulted in a variety of outcomes, ranging from negotiation to passive resistance to moments of extreme violence. Focusing on the rural hinterlands rather than the city of Goa itself, Barreto Xavier shows how Goan actors were able to seize hold of complex cultural resources in order to further their own projects and narrate their own myths and histories. In the process, she argues, Portuguese Goa emerged as a space with a specific identity that was a result of these contestations and interactions. The book de-essentializes the categories of colonizer and colonized, making visible instead their inner-group diversity of interests, their different modes of identification, and the specificity of local dynamics in their interactions and exchanges--in other words, the several threads that wove the fabric of colonial life. Contents Preface Glossary Abbreviations Maps Introduction 1 Reform in the Kingdom, Reform in the Empire The “Crisis of the Asian Empire” and the Political Culture of the Sixteenth Century Other Images on Old Themes: Refractions from a Confessional Focus 2 Designing Conversion “Apparatus and Disposition to Reform and Create a New World”9 Incentives for Conversion and the Legal-Political Framework Dissenting Voices, Mismatched Interests 3 New Temples and New Priests: The Establishment of Religious Orders in Goan Villages The Political, Institutional, and Economic Status of the Religious Orders Methods of Implantation: A Case in the Village of Sirula 4 Tools of Christianisation: Shaping Memory, Understanding, and Will “This will cost the Fathers much work and sweat, So that they may reap the fruit over much time” “Such images cannot be said to be Gods”: Miracles and Cures as Instruments of Christianisation 5 Initial Moves: Discontent, Resistance, Acquiescence The Social and Religious Landscape of the Island of Chorão Dreams and Threats: Facing the Jesuit Presence Reconstituting the Village Order: Crosses, Churches, and Rituals 6 The Martyrs of Cuncolim and Other Episodes of Resistance The Village of Cuncolim Before 1583 Setting the Stage for Martyrdom Periphery and Resistance 7 The Defence of the “Genuine Nobility”: Conflicts of Memory, Identity, and Power Institutional Routines, Social Alignments, Discursive (Re)inventions Brahman Nobility or Chardo Nobility? Conclusion Bibliography Index