298 RES 65/66 2014/2015 Figure 1. Pulpit
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298 RES 65/66 2014/2015 Figure 1. Pulpit (with breasts of na¯ gas removed), Church of Saint Anne (Santana), Talaulim, Tiswadi, Goa. Photo: Author. The pulpit trap Possession and personhood in colonial Goa INES G. ŽupaNov From the mid-seventeenth century, when many the Word, it was a snare not only for saints, but also for churches both large and small were completed in Goa, whatever powers remained outside of Christian holy the Portuguese colonial capital of Asia, a horde of places and sacred objects. What Catholic theology and splendidly crossbred creatures appeared on their gilded orthodoxy excluded had an opportunity to reappear, in wooden pulpits.1 Carved as human from the waist up a slightly modified form, in the spatial, temporal, and with bent fish (or snake?) tails of blue or dark green, or cultural framework of colonial and Catholic Goa. with golden foliage at the bottom, they appear in four In early modern Catholic Goa, often called the types: females with bulging breasts, males with beards “Rome of the Orient,” what needed to be brushed and sometimes wings, androgynous figures, and figures away from memory and from the present was the fact with grotesque or beastlike faces (figs. 1–4).2 Their that Goa was itself just a small dot on a large infidel appearance on the ornate, eye-catching pulpits, located and heathen canvas. In an effort to purify and organize in the middle of the side walls of the churches, especially the space of Catholicism in Asia within the Portuguese after the Council of Trent, is fitting. The pulpit was, after colonial project—a project that both supported and all, a landscape where the divine Word and the demonic hampered what the missionaries considered a spiritual or pagan world staged a cosmic competition. Unlike conquest—various religious orders devised and applied an altarpiece, which Arthur Danto lucidly defined as the method of accommodation to local cultural “a trap for saints,” a baroque pulpit had an even larger practices.4 At the forefront of this effort were the Jesuits. mandate.3 As a renovated post-Tridentine bulwark of Historiography of the Jesuit missions in Asia has recently become a flourishing subfield of the “global” study of cultural encounters precisely because the concept of Different versions of this paper were presented at various conferences in Paris, Lisbon, Bochum, New York, and Austin, Texas. accommodation evokes the noncoercive (cultural and Many scholars offered helpful advice and opinions. I thank all of them, intellectual) side of Catholic spiritual expansion and especially Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Cristelle Baskins, Christophe Z. opens up a space for the expression of non-European Guilmoto, Alexander Henn, Mia Mochizuki, Denis Vidal, and Ângela historical actors.5 Recent scholarship—from analyses of Barreto Xavier. For indispensable editorial help, my gratitude goes to Justin Erik Halldór Smith. 1. Recent works on Goan church architecture include A. Nunes 4. P. Aranha, “Gerarchie razziali e adattamento culturale: Pereira, A Arquitectura Religiosa Cristã de Velha Goa: Segunda Metade La ‘Ipotesi Valignano,’” in Alessandro Valignano S.I., Uomo del do Século XVI–Primeiras Decadas do Século XVII (Lisbon, 2005); Rinascimento: ponte tra Oriente e Occidente, ed. A. Tamburello, A. J. J. Pereira, Churches of Goa (New Delhi, 2002); P. Dias, Arte Indo- Üçerler S.J., and M. Di Russo (Rome, 2008), pp. 76–98; I. G. Županov, Portuguesa: Capítulos da História (Coimbra, 2004); P. Varela Gomes, “Accommodation,” in Dictionnaire des faits religieux, ed. R. Azria and Whitewash, Red Stone: A History of Church Architecture in Goa (New D. Hervieu-Léger (Paris, 2010), pp. 1–4. Delhi, 2011); C. Osswald, Written in Stone; Jesuit Buildings in Goa and 5. The chronology, the geography, and the extent of Portuguese Their Artistic and Architectural Features (Goa, 2013). violence wrought against Muslim and Hindu religious edifices and 2. So far there is only one full-length monograph devoted to Goan objects in Goa continue to be hotly debated. If between 1510 and pulpits: H. Moreira de Frias, Goa: A Arte dos Púlpitos (Lisbon, 2006). 1530 most of the non-Christian temples and mosques had been For pulpit typology see P. Dias, História da Arte Portuguesa no Mundo demolished in the “Old Conquests” (Tiswadi, Bardez, Salcete), this (1415–1822): O Espaço do Índico (Lisbon, 1998), pp. 296–301. For process was never completed in the “New Conquests” (Bicholim, the most recent work, see Esteban García Brosseau’s unpublished Sattari, Ponda, and others) acquired in the eighteenth century. See doctoral thesis, “Nagas, Naginis y Grutescos: La iconografía fantástica Â. Barreto Xavier, “Disquiet on the Island: Conversion, Conflicts and de los púlpitos indoportugueses de Goa, Daman y Diu en los siglos Conformity in Sixteenth-century Goa,” The Indian Economic and XVII y XVIII” (Ph.D. diss., UNAM, Mexico City, 2012). Unfortunately, I Social History Review 44, no. 3 (2007): 270. The accusations of the have not yet been able to acquire a copy of this study in time to use it tabula rasa violence have become contaminated with nationalist (and in this article. Hindutva) zeal, and are currently being nuanced by historians and 3. A. Danto, review of Power of Images: Studies in the History and anthropologists. See A. Henn, Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa: Theory of Response, by David Freedberg, Art Bulletin 72, no. 2 (1990): Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity (Bloomington, 2014). Without 341–342. diminishing the use of force and violence by the Portuguese in the 300 RES 65/66 2014/2015 Figure 2. Pulpit, Church of St. Peter (São Pedro), Panelim, Figure 3. Pulpit (originally built for the Franciscan monastery in Tiswadi, Goa. Photo: Author. Daugim), Church of St. Jerome, Bardez, Goa. Photo: Author. archival documents to ethnographic and anthropological by overseas missions, to cast a second glance, beyond studies—has focused primarily on texts, taking on philological investigation, on the practices of translation topics including strategies of conversion in different (linguistic and transcultural, and the resulting instances contexts; degrees of syncretism, hybridity, or métissage; of misrepresentation, falsification, etc.). Not only do and instances of resistance and failure.6 It is crucial in the translated texts capture the voices (fragmentary as the analysis of these cultural processes, set in motion they may be) of non-Europeans and subalterns, as has recently been stated many times over; they may also be queried for modalities of self-constructed subjectivity, colonial period, Henn underscores the processes of “replacement” both individual and collective. that occurred almost from the moment of the demolition. See also A question remains, however, as to the visual J. K. Fernandes, “Churches, Temples and Mosques! Oh My!” Herald— translation employed in the mission, which necessarily The Voice of Goa, 13 June 2014; http://www.heraldgoa.in/details went hand in hand with the textual. Can we read .php?n_id=74567. 6. See R. J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture “accommodation” in pictorial and visual objects, much and Race (London, 1995); H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, as we read it in texts translated from Latin, Italian, and 1994); and S. Gruzinski, La pensée métisse (Paris, 1999). For an earlier, Portuguese to Tamil, Konkani, or Farsi, and vice versa? In equally entangled and fascinating history of contacts in South Asia his pioneering work on art in the Jesuit missions in Asia from the conquest of Sindh by Arab armies (eighth century) to the and Latin America, Gauvin Bailey has shown that the founding of the Delhi Sultanate (thirteenth century), in which identities were crafted through a nexus of relations and active transactions and migration, circulation, and reception of Catholic sacred engagements, see F. B. Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture images depended largely on the political configuration and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter (Princeton, 2009). and cultural dynamics of the host cultures and mission Županov: The pulpit trap 301 Figure 4. Pulpit, Church of Our Lady of Help (Nossa Senhora de Ajuda), Ribandar, Tiswadi, Goa. Photo: Author. territories.7 In recent case studies, art historians have The sculpted figures on the Goan baroque pulpits focused on the transcultural and mission biographies are products of an intercultural encounter between of specific objects and iconographic types, including two different yet morphologically and thematically the Salus populi Romani and other types of paintings related mythical creatures: one deeply embedded in the of the Virgin Mary, the child Jesus, and saints such as European imagination at least since classical antiquity, Francis Xavier and Ignatius of Loyola.8 Some of these the other long thriving in the devotional practices of migrating images encountered along the way a plethora the Indian subcontinent. Specifically, the sereia, or of unexpected doppelgängers, rooted in host cultures mermaid, brought to Goa from Portugal, underwent and different visual regimes.9 translation into a local idiom—that of the na¯ ga, a snake-like spirit living in rivers, underground, and in trees, and always associated with fertility.10 It is my 7. G. A. Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773 (Toronto, 1999). 8. See P. M. D’Elia, “La prima diffusione nel mondo dell’imagine di Maria ‘Salus Populi Romani,’” Fede e Arte (October 1954): 1–11; coming from the encounter of different, culture-based visual regimes, and J. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York, 1985). see Seeing Across Cultures in the Early Modern World, ed. D. Leibsohn On the Byzantine icon believed to have been painted by St. Luke, and and J. Favrot Peterson (Farnham, 2012), esp. Y. Kobayashi-Sato and the history of its reproduction and reception in Europe, see H. Belting, M. M. Mochizuki, “Perspective and Its Discontents or St. Lucy’s Eyes” Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (pp.