Book Reviews The Jesuits, Goa and the Arts, edited by Rinald D’Souza, S.J. and Anthony da Silva, S.J. (Charles J Borges SJ)
Frederick Noronha
Book ReviewsThe Jesuits, Goa and the Arts, edited by Rinald D’Souza, S.J. and Anthony da Silva, S.J.
This richly illustrated volume, combining photographed works of visual art with meticulously researched historical contexts, documents the cultural heritage of the Society of Jesus in Goa in western India. The volume, the latest contribution to a series of publications produced by the Xavier Centre of Historical Research since 1979, is a commendable addition by Jesuits Rinald D’Souza and Anthony da Silva, an impressive team of writers, and photographer David de Souza to the study of art—including altars, paintings, and statues—found within the churches of Goa, as well as on their exteriors. The art displayed in the book represents the convergence and collaboration of missionary European and Goan imagination and creativity that culminated in works of various forms during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.
A series of written articles accompanying the photos provide background on how members of religious orders (primarily Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian members of the Franciscan, Jesuit, Dominican, Augustinian, and Theatine orders) came to project the tenets and practices of Western faith onto an Indian landscape, while operating in the premier center of the Christian faith in the east under the Padroado system of governance.
They came face to face with a land that had much to commend in the fields of philosophy and theology, with formidable tracts written in Sanskrit and with eminent exponents of these, among them Shankaracharya, Madhava, and Ramanuja. Goa could also boast of its eminent epic composers; the Jesuit Thomas Stephens was quick to draw from this talent pool in his composition of Kristapurana (Epic of Christ) (Kristapurana of Father Thomas Stephens S.J., translated and edited by Nelson Falcao, S.D.B. [Bengaluru: Kristu Jyoti Publications, 2012]), set to verse and meter very similar to that used by the Hindu poets.
Jesuits Roberto de’ Nobili and Francisco Ros studied the original Hindu Vedas and the accompanying scholarly expositions of the time, showing how cultural and theological accommodation is possible in the work of converting individuals to the Christian faith on many levels. Antony Mecherry, S.J., published an interesting study on Bishop Francisco Ros in Testing Ground for Jesuit Accommodation in Early Modern India: Francisco Ros S.J. in Malabar (16th–17th Centuries) (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2019).
The above-cited luminaries stand out in contrast to the works of other Portuguese and French missionaries in India who were not admirers of Hindu culture and ideas. One has only to read Diogo Gonçalves’s História do Malavar (1615) (ed. Joseph Wicki, S.J. [Münster: Aschenforffshe Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1955]) to discover the disapproval this Jesuit presents of the Hindu and Muslim religions he describes at considerable length.
The informative articles included in the volume are those of Rinald D’Souza, “The Cultural Encounter of the Jesuits in Goa” (inviting one to make space for the spiritual and to find God in the arts); Délio Mendonça, S.J., “Ignatius and Xavier as Influencers” (hailing the role of these Jesuit giants as embracing the new world of their age); Cristina Osswald, “The Jesuit Modo Goano” (describing a then-emerging art form unique to church building in Goa); Mónica Esteves Reis, “Forgotten Altarpieces in Goan Churches” (shifting our gaze to altarpiece productions in places outside Goa); Natasha Fernandes, “Understanding Goa’s Christian Art through the Jesuit Collection at MoCA” (describing the art collections at the Museum of Christian Art in Old Goa); and Anthony da Silva, “Art, a Path to Interiority” (exploring how the art of earlier centuries can speak to us in new ways today).
The attempts of many academic articles on the artwork of churches in Goa, other than those mentioned above, have aimed to prove how well the merger of Western and Eastern forms of architecture and art occurred, when one studies ecclesiastical history. Laudable as the writings are, one must study these attempts in the context of how the thrust of evangelization in Goa and its exterior environs was often of a hostile and less accommodating nature. Art and actual evangelization did not usually work in a smooth unison. One recalls research on this subject, such as Antony da Costa, S.J.’s The Christianization of the Goa Islands (Bombay: Heras Institute, 1965), to discover how overt strong-arm evangelizing tactics went hand-in-hand with architectural building and embellishments, especially in sixteenth-century Goa when massive structures like the Se Cathedral and the Basilica of Bom Jesus were built.
Much has been made of a so-called “Goan style” of church architecture, and although local forms have been employed in some areas of church decorative motifs, the overarching style of churches and their interiors is foreign to local sensibilities and certainly European in nature. True, circumstances made it inevitable that local building materials were used (stone slabs came from afar as Bassein in the Province of the North), and local craftsmen were enlisted to embark on the large-scale ecclesiastical buildings of the period. But nowhere does one find that local craftsmen were given a free hand or pride of place in the construction of these structures. The blueprints and layouts were the work of European architects.
St. Francis Xavier and others did arrive in Goa with an overtly European mindset, as one of the articles rightly suggests, and, excluding the few priests like the ones mentioned above, whose names are often stated to clinch the argument, whether in literary forms or in architectural design followed along the lines envisioned in Europe.
This is not to detract from the commendable work done by the Jesuits and other religious men in the fields of communication, thanks to the then-nascent printing press of the time and in the areas of ecclesiastical construction. But one cannot read too much into thinking that these were reflective of a strong merger of Western and Eastern forms of production in these areas.
The thrust of the book is a summons to see things anew with regard to Jesuits, Goa, and art, as the Society of Jesus celebrates the anniversaries of the conversion of its founder and the canonizations of St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier, respectively. A more detailed study would certainly be helpful to put these subjects into the context I have mentioned above.
Evangelizing practices on the one hand and church building and art on the other impinged on each other, with the former having the more overarching influence on the latter. One certainly must look at the evidence anew but with the hope of seeing more clearly the issues that existed at the time when ecclesiastical art and architecture were produced in Goa.