Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa: Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

Volume 27 Article 12

November 2014

Book Review: Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa: Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity

P. J. Johnston University of Iowa

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Recommended Citation Johnston, P. J. (2014) "Book Review: Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa: Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity," Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies: Vol. 27, Article 12. Available at: https://doi.org/10.7825/2164-6279.1584

The Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies is a publication of the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies. The digital version is made available by Digital Commons @ Butler University. For questions about the Journal or the Society, please contact [email protected]. For more information about Digital Commons @ Butler University, please contact [email protected]. Johnston: Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa: Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity

BOOK REVIEWS*

Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa: Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity. Alexander Henn. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013, xi + 214 pages.

ALEXANDER Henn's Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Gama largely followed his conceptual Goa: Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity proposes assimilation of Indian religion to Christianity – the initially counter-intuitive thesis that before if not to the extent of actually worshiping gods there was religion, there was syncretism. and goddesses, at least to the extent of Before the advent of the world religions explaining similarities between Christianity paradigm in Europe and its pluralization of and Indian religion in terms of theological “religions,” the prevailing conception of expedients such as original revelation. This “religion” was singular, Augustinian, and conceptual assimilation of elements of Indian largely co-extensive with the institutional religion to Christianity allowed “syncretistic” ritual practices of the Catholic Church. ritual forms to develop from the local Operating from this premodern conceptuality, population's experimentation with Christianity the earliest Portuguese explorers when and to be initially tolerated by the Portuguese encountering the religious traditions of India authorities. The concept of “Christianity” and for the first time were unable to recognize a “Hinduism” as separate and mutually-opposed distinction between Christian Self and Indian “religions” which could not “mix” did not Other whenever there were sufficient develop until later, and was itself largely a similarities to Christianity. Vasco da Gama product of protracted cultural negotiation even went so far as to worship a goddess as the between native South Asians and Europeans in Virgin Mary inside a temple he believed was a the colonies. In other words, before there was church. Rather than being a mistake he “religion,” there was “syncretism,” or the speedily discovered and abandoned, Da Gama traffic of religious practices between continued to read “Hindus” as if they were communities on the supposition that “Gentile” “Indian Catholics” and their practices as religion was not necessarily alien to manifestations of Christian religion, doing so Christianity, and vice versa. more out of the peculiarities of his premodern Henn's first chapter narrates the initial paradigm of categorizing religious difference moment of cultural encounter between than blindness to what he was observing. The Portuguese and Indians in Goa, describing the earliest generation of administrators after Da assimilationist hermeneutical strategies of Da

* In the 2013 issue of the Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies Steven Rosen was mistakenly listed also as Swami Suryadas in the review of his book, Christ and Krishna: Where the Jordan Meets the Ganges (2011). The Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies regrets this error.

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies 27 (2014):111-130

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112 Book Reviews

Gama and the first generation of Portuguese preserving Indian religions. Chapters Four, administrators. Chapter Two describes how Five, and Six draw upon more than a decade of subsequent Indian and European iconoclastic ethnographic work in Goa, Maharashtra, and controversies associated with the Wars of Karnataka to document and explain Religion altered the political and theological contemporary instances of Hindu-Catholic landscape globally, shifting the definition of syncretism such as wayside shrines which “religion” in a “confessional” and “semiotic” incorporate both Hindu gods and Christian direction in which text would be increasingly saints in the same ritual site and the so-called prioritized over ritual and image and Jagar ritual in Goa (an all-night ludic ritual impermeable boundaries could be imagined to calling on both the Catholic Trinity and Hindu exist between “religions” on the basis of their gods that serves as a kind of dramatic ideological differences. During this period, the palimpsest of Hindu-Christian interaction since Council of Trent instituted the Goa Inquisition, the arrival of the Portuguese in India). Henn charging it with the clarification of boundaries argues that it is the centrality of the concerns between Christianity and Indian “idolatry” and of the ganv, or village, for Goan religion which the suppression of “idolatrous” rites and unites Hindus and Christians in the same ritual customs, leading to the punishment of Indian space while preserving separate religious Catholics who “reverted” to pre-Christian identities. In his conclusions, Henn examines practices and a violent campaign of religious Portuguese and Konkani records from the suppression. Although the Goa Inquisition colonial period to fine-tune the standard could be described in part as an effort to scholarly history of the world religions eliminate “syncretism,” Indian deities who paradigm offered by Smith and Masuzawa, might otherwise have been annihilated demonstrating that the colonial encounter in survived by being reinscribed as Christian Goa was decisive for the pluralization of saints, deepening syncretism even as the religion, the differentiation of Hinduism from authorities attempted to destroy it. Chapter Christianity, and the development of the world Three discusses the ambivalent legacy of the religious paradigm. In the end, Henn applies Christian Purāṇas and the Jesuit strategy of his theoretical analysis and ethnographic accomodatio, the effort to translate Christian findings to argue for a thoroughgoing belief into native literary forms while rehabilitation of syncretism as an analytical reinterpreting certain aspects of Indian religion category, arguing that “syncretism” distorts as “cultural” and permissible for Christians. both premodern and contemporary religion far While this could be understood as a gesture of less than the standard world religions understanding on the part of the Jesuits, Henn paradigm, which is implicitly based on post- argues that usually occurred in the context of Reformation Christianity and fits other simultaneous suppression of the Indian religions into an uncomfortable “procrustean materials on which the Christian Purāṇas were bed.” modeled, making accomodatio arguably more a Henn's argument remains within the matter of replacing indigenous religious standard presuppositions of secular religious traditions with close Christian replicas than studies, and leaves potentially interesting

https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/jhcs/vol27/iss1/12 DOI: 10.7825/2164-6279.1584 2 Johnston: Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa: Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity

Book Reviews 113

theological issues that arise from his work and Catholics inform scholarly representations unexplored. If the modern analytic concept of of their traditions is noteworthy, especially in a “religion” is a crypto-Christian theological work so dense in theory. Contemporary projection without remainder and distorts non- disciplinary interest in the world religions Christian material, as Henn implies, wouldn't paradigm and the genealogy of particular the more economical options have been either “religions” within religious studies should to abandon the category altogether or else make this an important, persuasive, and revert to an arguably less problematic enduring work for its primary audience, as well premodern theological concept of “religion”? as engaging reading for Christians and Hindus This criticism is a quibble, and primarily of interested in learning from a painful moment interest to Christian theologians. Henn's of cultural encounter. overall thesis is intelligent and well-argued, and should be persuasive for its intended P. J. Johnston audience. Henn's attention to ethnography University of Iowa and resolve to let the lived practice of Hindu

Hindu-Christian Epistolary Self-Disclosures: ‘Malabarian Correspondence’ between German Pietist Missionaries and South Indian Hindus (1712-1714). Translated, Introduced and Annotated by Daniel Jeyaraj and Richard Fox Young. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013, xvi+349 pages.

THIS book is the product of research carried Tamil Hindus and Danish Christian Missionaries out by two eminent scholars: Daniel Jeyaraj of Tranquebar in the early eighteenth century. from Liverpool Hope University (UK), and Although this book is basically a work of Richard Fox Young from Princeton Theological translation, it is distinguished in many ways, Seminary (US). Jeyaraj has been dping research making it uniquely different. 1) It is the very on this topic for about two decades and has first complete English translation of all ninety- published two books, Ziegenbalg’s Genealogy of nine Tamil Letters along with authors’ the South Indian Deities (2003) and A German (Ziegenbalg and Gründler) footnotes. Other Exploration of South Indian Society (2006). Richard available works by Philipps (1717, 1719), Grafe Fox is an acknowledged scholar in Hindu- (1972), Liebau (1997, 1998) are either Christian relations, both historical and paraphrases of select few letters or essays on theological, as evident in his work, Resistant the importance of Tamil Letters, and had left Hinduism: Sanskritic Sources on Anti-Christian out the important corpus of the footnotes Apologetics in Early Nineteenth-Century India written by the European missionaries. Since the (1981). footnotes contain comments and assessments This book is all about the series of of the missionaries on the views and the correspondences that took place between the worldviews of the Tamils, they bear witness to

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