Reversions of converts is not a novelty anywhere, and certainly not in Goa, where the foreign rulers took over the destinies of the people of the territory with some frequency along its history. Political pressures and new socio-economic opportunities served as allurement, without needing physical force, for some individuals or underprivileged communities to change their religious affiliations and to benefit from the changed ruling environment.
Goa’s Portuguese colonial past saw this phenomenon on a significant scale. The Portuguese Church patronage (Padroado) was the essence of its politics of expansion. Being a small nation, with limited human and natural resources, Portugal had to resort to religion as a strategic tool of winning collaboration of the native populations, reducing thereby the costs of military action. Once made brothers in Christ, it was easier to handle the native converts.
The Religious Orders, particularly the Franciscans and the Jesuits in Portuguese India, were paid by the State to pursue their missionary activities. They also got military assistance when preaching and allurement were insufficient to achieve the objectives. The destruction of Cuncolim temple and the murder of the Jesuits involved in 1583 was one such case.
On the whole, the socio-economic benefits offered to converts did well in Goa, particularly because the new Christianity in Goa retained the more sensitive aspects of the Hindu traditions, particularly the caste system. That enabled the Catholic Church to win over the higher castes. Hence, it was not a conversion of scavengers struggling to lead their daily lives that got converted in Goa.
RSS historians who keep harping on forced conversions in Goa ought to speak also about their counterpart opportunists of the past who fell for the Portuguese material allurements. The Jesuits and Franciscan chroniclers of the sixteenth century and seventeenth centuries, namely Sebastião Gonçalves, Francisco de Souza, and Paulo de Trindade, have recorded how the Sinay Brahmins of Cortalim, or the conservative Brahmins of Moirá, joined the conversion drive as a calculated move to preserve their traditional social control under the new political dispensation.
The Portuguese in Goa had mounted an official support structure for ensuring that the converts were given preferential treatment in public jobs and public services. The structure was headed by a “Pai dos Cristãos” (Father of the Christians) on the State payroll. The post was occupied by a Jesuit or a Franciscan, and by their advice the State had enacted legislation entitled “Leis a favor da Cristandade”, or Legislation favouring Christianity. Its original can be consulted in the Goa archives, and a published edition by Joseph Wicki, S.J. (1969) is also available.
Despite such an elaborate organization, the evolution of colonial history saw many travails of the local society, leading many, time and again, to attribute their sufferings to their guilt about forgotten gods, and to relapse into Hindu ritual practices that were closely watched by the Inquisition. As late as 60s of the seventeenth century several families from Moirá village of Bardez in the north and elsewhere in Goa were condemned in solemn autos-da-fé by the Goa Inquisition to various types of punishment, generally short term imprisonment and some other forms of penance. A few had moved to the Ghat regions to evade Inquisition control, as did many from Bardez, and are still known as Ghantkar and Bardezkar. More about them may be read in my book Medieval Goa, and some other published articles [https://grupolusofona.academia.edu/TeotonioRdeSouza]. Curiously, these events were closely followed by a Shivaji’s invasion of Bardez, seeking allegedly to punish the excesses of the Goa Inquisition.
Perhaps the most spectacular case of reversion to Hinduism took place in Goa in February 1928. The ground was prepared by clandestine visits of Vinayak bhuva Masurkar from Nasik and the Hindu Mahasabha president Dr. Chitrav. The main reconversion centre was in Calapur, centrally located for gavda communities in the surrounding villages. It made news in all-India press, while the local Herald treated it as a non-event. Only the Diário da Noite hogged public attention and alerted the Goan Patriarch and Governor, who acted swiftly, but cautiously, so as to avoid further damage.
To conclude, the reconverted gavdas of Goa acquired OBC status in the post-liberation era. A poor gain indeed. The promoters of the new Ghar Wapsi campaign may need to convince these gavdas and the Indian citizens at large that Ghar Wapas is not a declaration of the failure of the Indian Constitution. In the meantime the Church of Goa cannot remain unconcerned and Goa Congress cannot behave like the fiddling Nero, gharwapsying NRI funds. It ought to emulate T.B. Cunha in 1928, when his freshly created Goa Congress Committee denounced the exploitation of Goan gavdas who were bullied into slavery by Assam tea planters with connivance of local Portuguese officials.
(Teotonio R. de Souza is the founder-
director, Xavier Centre of Historical
Research, Goa).
