Religion And Empire in Portuguese India: Conversion, Resistance, And The Making of Goa

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How did the colonisation of Goa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries take place? How was it related to projects for the conversion of Goan colonial subjects to Catholicism? And how did these contribute to the making of Goan identity?.

In this closely argued work, Angela Barreto Xavier asks these questions by reading the relevant secular and missionary archives and texts. She shows how the twinned drives towards conversion and colonisation in Portuguese India resulted in various outcomes, ranging from negotiation to passive resistance to moments of extreme violence.

She reveals that, in the process, Portuguese Goa emerged as a space with a specific identity resulting from these contestations and interactions. The Goan elites were also able to internalise this complex body of cultural resources to further their interests and narrate their own myths and histories.

ANGELA BARRETO XAVIER'S research interests include the history of political ideas and the cultural history of early-modern empires, specifically issues related to power, religion, and knowledge. She is currently a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon.

Professor Barreto Xavier's several books include Catholic Orientalism: Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge, 16th-18th Centuries (co-authored with Ines G. Županov, 2015); Monarquias Ibéricas em Perspectiva Comparada (Iberian Monarchies in Comparative Perspective, edited with Federico Palomo and Roberta Stumpf, 2018); and O Governo dos Outros: Imaginação Política no Império Português (Governing the Others: Political Imagination in the Portuguese Empire, edited with Cristina Nogueira da Silva, 2016).

THIS BOOK IS a shortened version of A Invenção de Goa: Poder Imperial e Conversões Culturais nos séculos XVI e Imprensa de Cien- cias Sociais. It has been adapted to suit the needs of an English- speaking readership.

More than a decade has passed since its original publication, yer The Invention of Goa still provides essential clues for the study of Portuguese imperialism and its colonial expressions in India in general, and Goa in particular. The book discusses the multiple agencies at work in the empire, including the hopes and strategies of Europeans and local societies as they faced the challenges of co- lonialism. As a result, it de-essentialises the categories of coloniser and colonised, making visible instead their inner-group diversity of interests, their different modes of identification, the specificity of local dynamics in their interactions and exchanges - in other words the several threads that wove the fabric of colonial life.

At the same time, this work considers the inhabitants of Goa in the longue durée, zooming into Goan society as part and parcel of a long political tradition of dominance, from the Bijapur and Bahmanid sultanates to the Vijayanagar and Portuguese empires. It thus parts company from the assumption that the inhabitants of Goa shared centuries of political culture that had framed their mechanisms for coping with external political domination. I show that their experience allowed locals to occupy the established position to use the vocabulary of the sociologist Norbert Elias- while naturally perceiving the Portuguese as yet another group of outsiders. However, since the Portuguese were also competing to be the established, conversion policies were devised to allow them to become the point of reference for Goan society.

Religion and Empire focuses not on the city of Goa itself - the usual focus of traditional scholarship - but also on the rural hin- terlands that became part of Goa. It contends that the relation- ship between the Portuguese Crown and the villages of Goa was a crucial factor in the persistence and durability of Portuguese imperial and colonial presence.

**Contents and Sample Pages**