L12: Portuguese Influence — Arts, Language, Religion

Good morning, everyone! Please take your seats. Before we pick up where we left off, let me quickly check — how did the neighbourhood observation exercise go? Did anyone manage to do it? I see a few hands. Good, good. We will hear some of those observations a little later in today's discussion segment. So, in our last lecture — Lecture 11 — we set the broad framework for understanding the Portuguese era in Goa. We talked about the four hundred and fifty-one years of Portuguese presence, the distinction between the Old Conquests and New Conquests, the transformation of the social fabric, the built environment, and the fascinating process of cultural syncretism. Today in Lecture 12, we go deeper into three specific channels through which that Portuguese influence flowed most powerfully: the arts, the language, and religion. These three are intimately connected — they are not separate silos — and I hope by the end of today you will see how they interweave. [0–10 minutes: Introduction] Let me open with a story. In 1557, the first printing press in Asia was set up in Goa — at St. Paul's College in Old Goa. Think about that. 1557. The Gutenberg Bible was printed in Mainz only about a hundred years before that. And here, on the western coast of India, Jesuit missionaries and Goan scholars were already printing books in Konkani, Tamil, and other Indian languages alongside Portuguese. One of the earliest works printed was a Konkani catechism — a religious instruction book — compiled with the help of local Brahmin converts who understood Konkani grammar deeply. This press was the beginning of a long and complicated relationship between the Portuguese presence and the Goan intellectual and artistic tradition. I want you to hold that image — the printing press at St. Paul's — as a symbol of the paradox we are going to explore today. The same Portuguese power that suppressed elements of indigenous culture also, inadvertently or deliberately, created conditions for new forms of artistic and intellectual expression. Let us unpack that. [10–40 minutes: Core Content] Let us start with language. The language situation in Goa under Portuguese rule is one of the most layered and interesting in South Asian history. Konkani was — and is — the mother tongue of the majority of Goans, both Hindu and Catholic. But Konkani's fate under the Portuguese was turbulent. In 1684, the Viceroy Conde de Alvor issued a decree prohibiting the use of Konkani — forbidding it in public life, in churches, in courts. The intention was to force the use of Portuguese as the language of the colony. This was a colonial language policy that many other European powers also imposed in their territories. Now, the practical effect of this decree was uneven. In cities and among the educated elite, Portuguese did become dominant. The Goan Catholic intelligentsia of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — people like the great novelist and poet Francisco Luis Gomes, or the journalist and freedom fighter Tristão de Bragança Cunha — wrote and spoke primarily in Portuguese. The Casa Portuguesa — the great houses of Goa — had libraries full of Portuguese literature. Young men went to the University of Coimbra in Portugal to study law and medicine. There was a genuine Luso-Goan intellectual culture. But Konkani never died. In the villages, in domestic life, in folk songs and proverbs, Konkani survived. And it survived in two scripts — the Roman script used by Catholic Goans, and the Devanagari script used by Hindu Goans. This is itself a reflection of the divided world Goa lived in. The same language, written differently, carrying different cultural freight. We will have dedicated lectures on the language issue in our Unit III — because after 1961, the question of which language and which script should be official became one of the most politically charged issues in Goan history. I should also mention Marathi. In the Novas Conquistas — the New Conquests — where Portuguese cultural penetration was lighter, Marathi was widely used, especially for religious and literary purposes among Hindus. The Bhakti poets writing in Marathi had deep roots in Goa. So you have this multilingual landscape: Portuguese for officialdom and elite culture, Konkani for everyday domestic life and folk culture, Marathi for Hindu religious and literary traditions. And in the trading communities, you also had Gujarati and Arabic circulating. Goa was never monolingual. Now let us turn to the arts. And here I want to make an important argument: the arts that emerged from the Portuguese period in Goa are not Portuguese arts practised in an Indian colony — they are genuinely new forms created at the intersection of two traditions. Take music. The mandolin, the violin, the guitar — these are European instruments that came to Goa with the Portuguese. But Goan musicians did not simply play Portuguese folk songs. They fused Western harmonic structures with Konkani melodic sensibilities. The result was something extraordinary. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Goa became one of the most musically sophisticated societies in South Asia. Goan musicians were in enormous demand all over India and beyond. The great bandmasters, the pianists, the orchestral musicians who staffed the grand hotels of Bombay, Calcutta, Karachi, Rangoon — many of them were Goan Catholics who had grown up in villages in Salcete or Bardez learning Western music at the local church or village school. The mando — a beautiful, slow, romantic song form that was born in the nineteenth century — is perhaps the most perfect expression of this synthesis. The mando uses the violin, the guitar, and sometimes the piano. Its harmonies are Western. But the language is Konkani, the themes are deeply Goan — love, longing, the village, the river, separation and return. The mando has been called the national song of Goa, and it was declared an Intangible Cultural Heritage by the Goa government. If you have never sat on a balcao in old Panaji and heard a mando sung on a quiet evening, that is something you must add to your list. Then there is the tiatr — spelled t-i-a-t-r — which is a form of Konkani musical theatre. The tiatr developed in the late nineteenth century, drawing on European theatrical forms brought by the Portuguese but filling them with Konkani language, Goan humour, and sharp social commentary. Even today, tiatrs are enormously popular in Goa. They deal with contemporary social issues — corruption, migration, family conflict — in a way that is wickedly funny and sometimes surprisingly moving. The great tiatrist Anthony Mendes, known as Anthony the Great, was a towering figure of this form in the twentieth century. In visual arts, the period produced the extraordinary tradition of Indo-Portuguese religious art. The altarpieces, the painted wooden panels, the gilded retablos in churches like the Church of St. Francis of Assisi in Old Goa — these were made by Goan craftsmen trained in European techniques but working with local materials, local iconographic references, and local sensibilities. Look closely at the carvings in the Church of St. Francis of Assisi and you will see floral patterns that are clearly Indian in origin woven into what is ostensibly a European Baroque composition. That is the synthesis made visible in stone and gold. Now, religion. I want to address this directly and with some care, because it is emotionally charged and there are common misconceptions. The Portuguese brought Catholic Christianity to Goa, and the project of converting the Goan population was central to their colonial enterprise. The Jesuits, led by figures like St. Francis Xavier who arrived in 1542, established schools, orphanages, hospitals — the full apparatus of missionary work. Francis Xavier baptised thousands of people in Goa, travelling up and down the coast, working with such intensity that he reportedly said his arm ached from baptising so many. The Inquisition, established in Goa in 1560, is the darkest chapter. We will have a dedicated session on this. But briefly — the Goa Inquisition targeted not only Hindus who had converted and were suspected of reverting to Hindu practice, but also New Christians — Jews converted in Portugal who had come to Goa — and various other perceived heretics. It lasted until 1812 and is considered one of the most brutal of the Inquisitions operated in Catholic territories. Yet — and this is important — even through the trauma of conversion and the Inquisition, Goan Catholics retained deep connections to their Hindu past. There are Goan Catholic families in Salcete who maintain household deities, who observe what they call vows or promises that originated as Hindu votive practices. The festa — the annual village feast celebrating the patron saint — is structured in ways that echo the Hindu temple chariot procession. In some villages, Hindus and Catholics share patron deity identities — the Catholic village saint and the Hindu village goddess are understood by local communities as manifestations of the same protective power. This syncretic religious culture is unique to Goa. You will not find it in the same form anywhere else in India or in the world. It is a direct product of the particular way the Portuguese colonial encounter unfolded in this specific place. [40–55 minutes: Activity and Discussion] Now let me hear those neighbourhood observations that some of you brought. Who would like to start? Anjali, you mentioned you had noted something about your grandmother's house in Margao — please, share. [Allow student response] Beautiful. The balcao with the oyster-shell windows — yes, those translucent panels made from Placuna placenta shells are so specifically Goan. You do not find them anywhere else. They came from a combination of local materials and European architectural design. What an example of synthesis. Anyone else? Carlos, what did you find? [Allow student response] The word for the bread-seller — padeiro — that is pure Portuguese. Padeiro means baker in Portuguese. And yet your family has been calling the bread-seller that word for generations without thinking of it as foreign. That is exactly the point. So let me pose a question for the whole class now. We talked about the mando as a cultural synthesis. So let me ask you this — is synthesis always equal? Or can one side of the synthesis be more powerful, more present, than the other? When we look at Goan music, language, religion — does it feel to you like Goan culture absorbed and transformed the Portuguese, or did the Portuguese absorb and transform Goa? Think about it. There is no single right answer. Take two minutes with your neighbour. [Allow discussion] Good. I am hearing two camps forming, which is exactly right. Some of you are saying the Portuguese layer is so visible — in the churches, the surnames, the language borrowings — that it dominates. Others are saying, but look underneath: caste persists, folk practices persist, Konkani persists. Both observations are correct. The heritage of Goa is genuinely dual. It is both things at once. That is its uniqueness and its complexity. [55–60 minutes: Summary and Assignment] Let me wrap up. Today we covered three major channels of Portuguese influence: language — the complex fate of Konkani alongside Portuguese and Marathi; the arts — the mando, the tiatr, Indo-Portuguese visual art, and the extraordinary tradition of Goan musicianship; and religion — the conversion project, the Inquisition in brief, and the remarkable syncretic religious culture that emerged. Your assignment: I want you to listen to one mando — you can find many on YouTube, search for 'Goan mando music' — and write a half-page reflection. What do you hear that is European? What do you hear that is Indian? What do you hear that seems to be genuinely something new, something that belongs to neither Europe nor India but to Goa specifically? In our next lecture — Lecture 13 — we move to one of the most fascinating and least understood aspects of traditional Goan society: the Gaunkari system. This is the ancient village community institution that preceded the Portuguese by many centuries and managed to survive — in modified form — right through the Portuguese period and into the present day. Come ready with questions about how land, community, and governance intersect in Goan village life. See you then!