Francis Xavier was never particularly “saintly” in all the years of his life and career that dovetailed along – and became synonymous with – Portugal’s rapid and rapacious 16th century maritime expansion across the Indian ocean.
In fact, this notably cantankerous cleric wasn’t even Portuguese, and his Basque family had fought against the church-led Catholic states of Spain throughout his childhood and adolescence, before their painful defeat by the famously intolerant Cardinal (and Grand Inquisitor) Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros. It was a mere accident of timing that brought the budding athlete from Navarre (his speciality was the high jump) into the Paris circle of his much older Basque countryman Íñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola – aka Ignatius of Loyola - and it was another sheer fluke that sent him towards Asia, when he was roped in to replace a sick fellow Jesuit.
Xavier left Europe for the first and last time on his 35th birthday in 1541, and spent the remaining 11 years of his life on the go via Mozambique to Goa to Kanyakumari (and various points of India’s southern coastline) to Malacca and sundry other islands in the Indonesian archipelago to Japan, eventually dying on an island not too far from Hong Kong. His letters copiously demonstrate one-track zealotry, an almost total incomprehension about the societies in which he found himself, and constant seething impatience with what he considered the intransigence of wilful unbelievers. This is what he wrote with palpable excitement about leaving the subcontinent in 1548: “All the Portuguese merchants coming from Japan tell me that if I go there I shall do great service for God our Lord, more than with the pagans of India, for they are a very reasonable people...”
As we know, of course, the “very reasonable people” he sought in Japan would turn out no more receptive to his indoctrinations than “the pagans of India”, and Xavier’s hard-line, paranoid brand of Christianity never succeeded to any appreciable extent in Asia. What is more, in the following centuries, wherever substantial conversion has taken place in our part of the world – whether amongst the Naga Baptists or Khasi Presbyterians or Konkani Catholics – it has happened with the exactly the kind of accommodations, syncretism and inculturations he derided, which has developed into a far more universal (and in my view, superior and vastly more appealing) version of Christianity than has ever been traditionally practiced in Europe. With truly beautiful irony, our homegrown desi Catholicism has wound up firmly embracing Xavier himself, as India and Indians have adroitly converted the highly dogmatic “Apostle of the East” into an all-access Pir who can be approached by anyone for his intercessions, and the object of profound veneration by millions of people who have never been baptized, and will never become Christians.
Earlier this year, on an extended research stay in Rome, the contrasts with our Goencho appreciation of Xavier became vividly palpable in my visits to the extravagantly baroque Chiesa del Gesù “mother church of the Jesuits”, where the right arm “by which he baptized 300,000 souls” (a most dubious calculation) was taken from Goa by Claudio Acquaviva, the “second founder of the Jesuits” in 1614. In its silver reliquary, it is displayed on an altar with lurid, orientalist paintings like “Baptism of an Indian Princess” in an explicitly racist, colonialist and ahistorical contextualization that makes no concession to the world view of the converts, and demonizes those who did not immediately fall at the feet of the incipient evangelist. I found myself yearning for the very different Xavier we know and understand, and the far more realistic encounter that Angelo da Fonseca painted with such power and sensitivity in Pune in 1944 (see pic).
In her excellent The relic state: St. Francis Xavier and the politics of ritual in Portuguese India (Manchester University Press, 2014), the South Africa-based scholar Pamila Gupta shows how the SFX relics are “a site to chart multiple [colonial] encounters, not only between colonial officers and missionary priests, but also between Catholicism and Hinduism, ‘Portugueseness’ and ‘Goanness’, differing publics and personalities, and, finally, the world as imagined and lived.”
In this regard, the 2024 Exposition is wonderfully revealing about how Catholicism in Goa has far outgrown the narrow-mindedness of Xavier’s cohort. Everything is impressively inclusive, and the universalist atmosphere of devotion is wisely reinforced by prominent display of relevant maxims from many religious traditions.
All that good feeling – so much more welcoming than Rome – extends to the newly restored Church of the Convent of St. John of God, where a host of contemporary artists from the state have contributed to ‘Footprints of Hope’, an exhibition that speaks volumes about Xavier’s continuing transformations in India. As the Rome-based scholar-priest Délio de Mendonça writes in his curatorial note, “the historical Francis Xavier, one understands, was conditioned by cultural limitations, prejudices, and Eurocentric stereotypes of his society [but after this exhibition] no one will ever have any doubts that Xavier is wholeheartedly embraced and constitutes a landmark in the cultural, social, and political identity of Goa and beyond.”
Footprints of Hope is uneven, with far too many insipid artworks that have unthinkingly reproduced the all-too-familiar tired colonial tropes. However, very happily, there are also some real standouts, including Viraj Naik’s allegorical portrait of Xavier at the chessboard, Dr. Razia Pires’s lustrous depiction of the actual relics as we experience them, Manjunaath Naik’s many-layered Hindu-Christian iconography, and Loretti Pinto’s anguished appeals for intercession on behalf of her beloved, beleaguered homeland. There are lots of good works to see in this very nice new Old Goa space for culture and heritage, but most of all I found myself drawn back to Shailesh Dabholkar’s muted, beautiful and compelling painting (reprinted on this page) entitled Prayer House, which radiates sincerity and sense of place. Here, finally, in my opinion, is the Goencho Saib dwelling in the Goan heart.
41-year-old Dabholkar grew up in Verem, in the shadow of Reis Magos. Earlier this week, he told me that “we are four brothers and four sisters. My father was a carpenter who died when I was three, and my mother was always busy with her work selling tamarind at the Friday market in Mapusa, and other days in Panjim, where her fellow vendors were Christians. She never talked about other religions, and never had a barrier too. That harmony is what I love the most. My mother and sisters always used to take me to the SFX feast, and as a child I was most interested in the toys, and among these toys what was making me curious were the wax votive sculptures of human body parts. Now I know that they symbolise healing [but] why I paint, and what I paint doesn’t matter for me. What matters is what made me paint. It’s what resides in our memory that makes us express ourselves. For me, this artwork is about life, death and devotion, but there will be multiple interpretations to it, and I like if it provokes people to think.”
(Vivek Menezes is a writer
and co-founder of the Goa Arts
and Literature Festival)