As the Christmas draws closer and so the festive mood of the season, it may be appropriate to reflect upon what it means to different sections of the society. I say different sections of the society, because non-Christians neighbours may not share the spiritual meaning that the Christians attribute to this festival, but get drawn into the social gaiety and the marketing activities that feed it through Santa Claus.
Curiously, at least in Goa we know since bygone times, the village Church or chapel feasts and celebrations are incomplete without fairs, where kaddio-boddio, laddu and khajim are sold. Some fairs assume a larger scale, as in Mapuça, Pomburpá or Panjim, where food provisions and household furniture are sold on the eve of monsoon, largely by non-Christian businessmen. Several Hindu festivals also provide similar business opportunities.
This makes us recall an historic event that marked Goa’s colonial past in the late sixteenth century. When the Jesuits demolished the local temple, seeking to replace it with a Christian church, a violent rebellion ended in murder of nearly half dozen Jesuit missionaries and some of their local converts in 1583.
The economy of Cuncolim depended on a bazaar located at the end point of more than one caravan routes, connecting it with the hinterland through the ghats. The temple festivals were essential for sustaining this market of Cuncolim and its satellite villages of Assolna, Velim, Ambelim and Veroda. The demolition of temples implied an assault on economic interests sustained by social and cultural traditions, rather than mere spiritual-religious change.
When we speak of theists we refer to believers in God, without having to be necessarily monotheists, or believers in one God. Even among the societies where monotheism prevails, there are always popular cults of saints or minor deities, verging on idolatry. This is true among the Hindus as well Christians, whose dominant elites defend doctrinal definitions that condemn idolatry, but cannot do without the popular devotions that provide them with mass base. As regards Islam, we are made painfully aware of the Sunni-Shia differences, reminding the Christian West of its own fanatic crusades and the religious wars of the reformation during several centuries.
Deism is less understood in common parlance, where atheists are identified as opposed to theists, without even seeking to pay attention to the existence of a significant section of the society that regards itself as agnostics, namely as uninterested in the existence of God or Gods, or in religious issues in general. Often this attitude is attributed to those who are viewed as tainted by materialist view of life, and often associated with the Western notions of progress, identified with material well-being. India since ancient times had its own brands of agnostics and atheists, generally classified as charvakas. The philosophical schools or dharshanas, such as Sankhya- Yoga, are associated with this trend, and the Buddhism is its better known illustration. It is often quoted that when the devotees asked Buddha to explain what was nirvana, or what happened after death, he would only smile, suggesting that they should rather worry themselves with the more urgent and relevant issues of the present life.
The deists we mentioned earlier represent a rational trend of the Western Enlightenment. It sought to “dignify” God as supremely more intelligent than a potter-god of the Book of Genesis, and did not admit revelation. It is a supreme being who lets his human creatures shape their destiny, which is limited to this life.
The Catholic Church declared a war against these modernist European concepts of God, and Pope Pius IX through his encyclical Quanta Cura with a famous list of errors against religion, named Syllabus Errorum (1864). The same Pope had proclaimed the dogma of Immaculate Conception ten years earlier in his Encyclical Innefabilis Deus in 1854. In 1870 he declared a new dogma of Pope’s infallibility. It was a way of compensating psychologically for the loss of temporal power with spiritual authority. The Italian independence that year took away the Papal provinces, and it would be only in 1929 that the so-called Roman Question would be resolved by Mussolini with the creation of a sovereign Vatican State. We need to know history to understand why organized religions invite opposition and many find it difficult to accept God manipulated by human interests.
To conclude, while growing in rational explanations and scientific solutions to human problems, human beings will continue to resort to supernatural powers to survive against the abuses of rationality and scientific progress. The old St. Francis Xavier and the new St. Joseph Vaz will continue to provide comfort and hope to many Goans who have not been able to trust the promises of the political representatives elected by them. The politicians themselves seem to need the saints to survive their political battles.
(Teotonio R. de Souza is the founder-director, Xavier Centre of Historical Research, Goa and tweets @ramkamat)
