Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

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Volume 15 Number 3, December 2014

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The Architecture of Goa: India and the Colonial

by

Jane Duran

University of California at Santa Barbara

 

ABSTRACT

An argument is made that the architecture of Goa, former Portuguese colony on the coast of India, is postmodern in the sense originated by Venturi.  The commentary of Goldblatt and D’Costa is alluded to, and comparison with some Mexican architecture from Puebla established.

 

      Goa, the former Portuguese colony on India’s west coast, represents an intriguing amalgam of European and South Asian influences.1  Most important, its urban style and architecture help demarcate the colonial and post-colonial, while still providing at least some room for speculation about the original groups residing in the area.  One of the factors that makes Goa a unique attraction for visitors is the Portuguese-influenced taste in cuisine, clothing and accommodations that are the hallmark of the center of town and the surrounding areas.  Because of this, it is possible, for example to obtain beef dishes in a restaurant, easily, and without great cost—something unheard of in many other parts of India.  But if the architecture and style of Goa can be described in such a way as to constitute a certain sort of aesthetic, we need to be precise about what that aesthetic is.2

 

            Goa’s stunning architectural diversity gives new meaning to that phrase and, indeed, it might be argued that—for lack of a better term—much that goes on in Goa is a precursor to the postmodern.3

 

            As David Goldblatt has noted, with respect to architecture in general,

 

                        [Venturi makes the assertion that archi-

            tecture] lacks diversity, [and when he does so] he

            means that it fails to achieve what he calls a pluralism.

            What he calls for is ‘Scarlatti and the Beatles,

            if diversity is to be achieved.’ …  What

            Venturi is advocating is eclecticism.4

 

            In addition to the Portuguese influences in Goa—and, given the context of the subcontinent, these might be thought to be the most remarkable—the other influences stem both from Mughal architecture and stonework, and from styles indigenous to the region, situated as it is on the Arabian Sea coast of India.  In short, the style of Goa (in many senses of the word “style”) is unique, and is a harbinger of things to come.

 

I

It might be objected that to try to make the claim that there is a sort of postmodernism at work in Goa, particularly with respect to architecture, is to say very little. Architectural critics such as Goldblatt have acknowledged that the pastiche qualities characteristic of the postmodern are partially a response to a certain sort of “box” quality that seems to be a trope of modernism.5  So, the argument might run, how could one claim that the Goan architecture, a great deal of which predates the twentieth century, has anything to do with notions such as modernism or postmodernism? 

 

One area in which to start with such an analysis might advert to the fact that, as contemporary architects have noted, one draws on the past for inspiration, regardless, in many cases, of what it is in which the past consists.  Thus when Las Vegas was mentioned as a site for possible inspiration by those working in the 1970’s and 80’s, they were already going out of their way in even alluding to Las Vegas as a source of thought-provoking experiment.  But the difficulty with any type of categorization with respect to the artwork or architecture of the subcontinent is that one cannot get off the ground properly, so to speak, without running smack up against the obstacles of colonial conceptualization from the outset.  For what counts as “Indian” in India has a great deal to do with the ways in which the European colonizers originally thought of what they saw on the subcontinent.  Although the British had little to do with Goa, categories established by the British with respect to stonework, for example, drive the patterns in which trained art historians and architects have seen the work that is within India.6

 

The architecture of a region, then, is seen first by visitors who are in a position to form a canon, and then categorized and catalogued by those visitors for a variety of reasons.  Given the Eurocentrism that dominated the formation of the Indian canon—with respect to any sort of work, from bronze Shivas to Mughal miniatures—it is unsurprising that size and sheer quantity of relief had a great deal to do with Western response to both stonework and architecture.  Indeed, the sacred sites are often commented upon in the literature first and foremost for their scope, and then for the quality of the relief work.  Architecture, of whatever provenance, was no exception to this sort of desideratum in the formation of a canon.

 

The first Catholic churches to be built in Goa date to the sixteenth century, and are a part of the Iberian conquest set of structures that sprang up around the globe, also notably in Mexico and the rest of Latin America.  The importance of conversion—and thus the construction of physical churches and their appurtenances--is given to us by a commentator on the history of the region, Anthony D’Costa.  In a work published in India in 1965, he notes:

 

                        We have seen how, although some young

men of Divar became Christians after being

            taken into custody, already before that many

            people of the island had begun to feel that

            they would have to become Christians.  [In

            1564] the greater part of the Islands was already

            Christian but there still remained a fair proportion

            of Hindus.7

 

            Thus, as was the case in a number of other colonized areas, the newly-built churches mirrored the Baroque style of what was then extant on the Iberian peninsula.  Even within another such colonial area, Mexico, tourists in the Puebla region are often taken to the church of Santa Maria Tonantzinla, where they are shown three or more styles of architecture and  artifacts existing simultaneously on the same site.  A similar phenomenon occurred in Goa, but the preceding architecture was South Asian, and not indigenous native American.8

           

Interestingly enough, the care taken in the construction of religious edifices and church buildings in general had a great deal to do, at least according to some commentators, with a desire to inculcate Christian beliefs by virtue of the magnificence and grandiosity of the surroundings.  The size of the naves and the arches, the general height of the structure, and so forth, all spoke to the impressive nature of Christianity—and to colonial power.  Writing on a similar constellation of structures in Calcutta, the Indian critic Somini Sengupta noted that “Every guidebook will opine on the sights of Dalhousie Square.”9  The colonial architecture, whether British, Portuguese, or other, left a lasting impression on all who saw it, and the buildings of Goa—especially given their proximity to the Dravidian south—are no exception to the general rule.  Indeed, they might be deemed, for these very reasons, to be all the more impressive and still more worthy of commentary.

 

            Some of the barriers to conversion in Goa and the surrounding region in the sixteenth century are well recounted by D’Costa, who is aware of the controversial nature of the early attempts at proselytizing, but who is also at pains to try to inculcate respect for what he sees as the humanism of the Jesuits involved in the Christianization of Goa.  In other words, we might be tempted to say that much of what the believing Catholics tried to accomplish with the construction of the churches was also attempted in the ways in which they tried to model a certain sort of Christianity.  Nevertheless, and despite much attempted goodwill, many of the priests met with great resistance, and that resistance in and of itself was repaid in various ways.  As D’Costa notes of a sequence of events that transpired after the killing of a beadle by a number of Brahmins:

 

                        The Viceroy sent the Chief Justice to hold

            an inquiry on the spot.  It was proved that they

            had killed the beadle, who had had nothing to

            do with [an] earlier incident; moreover, they

            themselves admitted that they would have

            killed the priest if he had escaped.  Accordingly,

            all the temples of the village were ordered to

            be burnt.10

 

            One might inquire into the nature of the “temples of the village” that were destroyed by the activities of the Church in this particular reprisal.  It is in making the contrast between the local architecture—much of which was influenced by the Dravidian-based cultures of Vijayanagar—and the architecture of the European Christians that some of the most important differences can be developed.  The temples most likely had at least some of the classic Vijayanagar influence, a style that this still renowned in South Asia today.

 

II

            Indeed, some of the commentary that we have on the canonical Dravidian style of the South is provided by the Portuguese.  Vijayanagar remains, again, such a locus in the literature that it is even alluded to in the work of Benjamin Rowland, and is, in any case, often set off against the more frequently-cited temples of the North.  Since a great deal of the temple site is today covered with colors, it often receives opprobrious commentary.  Of this site, Rowland says:

 

                        These gigantic pillars flowering into immense

            brackets and entablatures were described by the

            Portuguese visitor, Domingo Paes,…[as appearing]

            “as if made in Italy.”….[The style] attains an

            extravagance that has an inevitable suggestion of

            the grotesque and fanciful….11

 

            Although it might seem naïve to think that visiting Europeans would have been affected in their choice of material for naves, friezes and columns by the local architecture—particularly given the differences in worship that they were trying to inculcate—the fact remains that in many colonial situations precisely that happened.  Thus we can hypothesize that the building of churches in the Goa area by the Portuguese was intensified in level of activity and at least partly influenced, in terms of size and grandiosity, by the presence of the enormous temples of the South throughout the greater region.  Whereas sites such as Khajuraho are large in terms of acreage, Dravidian sites impress in another way.

 

            Typically more narrow in their construction, with columns on the outside of the main temple area, the temples of the South often lack the erotic friezes of the Konarak and Khajuraho areas, but also standardly offer a greater profusion of scenes and gods and goddesses for worship.  If these temples are today considered in some respects to be “inferior” to the temples of the North, it may have a great deal to do with colonial attitudes toward the South in general.  The British, especially, seemed to buy into tales told by those speaking the Sanskrit-derived languages that placed the Southern cultures at a far remove from “Aryan” cultural traits, and in some cases simply repeated blatant accusations of backwardness and lack of development.  That the arts of a region might come to be seen in this same way was more or less a given, and most of the historians of India note that the prevalence of belief systems (repeated in historiography) about the South is difficult to eradicate.12

 

            Because of the lower esteem in which many of the Vijayanagar-style temples are held, it is also not easy to obtain reliable art historical sources about them.  Nevertheless, as some have argued, this conceptualization pattern has its own magnificence, and, as noted above, at least some Europeans were struck by the mode of creation of the temples when they first saw them.  Part of the hardship for the viewer is that the Southern Hindu temples seem to elevate incorrect artistic elements, so to speak.   Again, they do not feature comparatively clean-cut lines with carvings on the outer rims that catch the visitor’s eyes; instead, these temples have massive gateways or gopuram.  Rowland claims with respect to Madura that:

 

                        These immense structures are covered from top

            to bottom with a vast number of heavily

            stuccoed images of the Hindu pantheon. It is

            hard to believe that each of these hundreds

            of drily carved and vulgarly finished images

            was…held in the same regard by their makers

            as we consider the few surviving masterpieces

            of the Gupta period.13

           

            But as D’Costa indicates, the process of Christianization and church construction was attended by episodes of violence and retribution.  In an effort to try to make the churches as impressive as possible, the construction of Christian buildings in Goa (as was the case in the New World) often left the viewer with impressions of a greater degree of Baroque grandiosity than would have been available even on the Continent.  Although the churches of Goa did not feature the same profusion of carvings as some of the well-known buildings in, for example, Mexico, one feature that both sites have in common is size of the church, and height and scope of the façade.  The Cholula site in Mexico, Santa Maria Tonantzinla, was intended to alleviate some of the misery that the indigenous must have felt upon having to leave behind their own cosmological systems.  Thus the interior of the church features carvings that are, in fact, indigenous.  Although the same might not be said for the churches of Goa, a parallel attempt was made to replicate some local features by the use of columns and columnar supports.

 

            As D’Costa writes, it is important to try to become clear on the actual motivation behind the Christianization of Goa.  Even today, we often lose sight of what motivated those who worked both for evangelization, and on the construction of the places of worship in which much of the evangelization took place.  Trying to clarify the issues, D’Costa notes:

           

                        The evangelists of Goa were inspired by the ideal that

            all men constitute one family, and that they are

            moreover called to divine fellowship in Jesus Christ.

            Simao Botelho, Manuel Nunez, Antonio de Heredia,

            all of them acknowledged that the evangelists

            wanted to be loyal to their ideal.  “I well believe

            that they proceed in everything with holy zeal and

            true,” wrote Botelho.14

 

            How better to make a statement designed to impress a local population than to construct churches that by size and scope not only remind them of their own structures, but that simultaneously impress some notion of a deity at the same time?  Interestingly, it is only recently that there has been (thanks to the rise of postmodernist stripes of criticism) a genuine move toward demarcating how it is that what is now termed canonical in the Indian artworld came to be.  Since we are now a great deal more aware of the sorts of social factors that go into the creation of a canon, we are in a much better position to try to be precise about those moves with respect to South Asia.15

 

            Not only was size of great import to the colonials, but it goes without saying that there was a Euro-determined view of any sort of carving on most of the edifices in India that held them to be representational, even when they were not.  In other words, the desire to make sense of a tradition relies, obviously, on the employment of certain tropes and interpretive devices from the tradition of origin.  In the case of the subcontinent, colonials would naturally tend to interpret everything that they saw in one sort of way.

 

III

            The churches of Goa have the Baroque, or in some cases Romanesque, style so common to Catholic churches throughout the Continent of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the arches, colonnades and other architectural appurtenances characteristic of the time.   What is most remarkable, however, is that the churches (and, indeed, other buildings, such as government offices and simply artisanal structures within the town) exist in an overall climate of Hindu worship, and that many of the remaining structures within the area reflect that climate.  Unlike in Mexico, where at least some effort was made to incorporate elements of the indigenous into the worship and forms of worshipful construction, in India the elements that tend to characterize the multicultural nature of what went on exist side by side—it is almost as if a scene for a play were being staged, or as if it had been deemed necessary to leave a certain sort of building in an area that already had a completely different cultural background.  As D’Costa indicates, it had been important to attempt to coerce the Hindus into acceptance of the Christian religion, and, as we have seen, at least some of these efforts involved violence.  Because of the length of time that the Portuguese were in Goa—the area was only ceded in the twentieth century—a great deal went on that reflected the desire of the colonial masters to achieve some sort of worldview, at whatever cost.

 

            In general, without advertence to the differences between the Northern and Dravidian styles, certain kinds of generalizations can be made about places of Hindu worship.  Because of the importance of celebrations and festivals in the Hindu calendar that involve dance, drama, and the extensive use of color and floral garlands, any Hindu place of worship becomes associated with such ceremonies, and the appurtenances of such ceremonies mark the locale.  Holi festival is one such celebration; thanks to the South Asian diaspora, many North Americans have now seen variations on this festival in Canada or the United States among immigrant Hindu populations.  Although it is located on the other coast of India, some descriptions of the Jagganath festival at Puri might be thought to be relevant in attempting to provide an overview of what the Hindu calendar involves.  This particular festival is rich in its decorative aspects, and is a Vaishnavite gathering.   With respect to it, W.J. Wilkins has written:

 

                        In many respects it [the homage paid to the

            image] is the most imposing sight in Hindu

            worship.  The image, which has been kept in its

            shrine for a year, is brought outside, and on a

            lofty platform, bathed, anointed with oil, and

            clothed by the priests, in the sight of an immense

            concourse of people.16

 

            Not mentioned at this point in the text, although obvious to anyone who has seen even a part of the festival, is that the image is also garlanded in flowers, and that the use of similarly-garbed elephants in the ceremony,  plus numerous specially-colored other items, marks this particular celebration as one that would strike even the casual observer as extremely varied in its visual impact.

 

            Because of the importance of trying to establish a connection between Christianity and the believer that might parallel some of the emotional force occasioned by Hindu festivals, the Portuguese were forced into attempting to impress the viewer as greatly as possible.  Thus the churches established in Goa replicated structures on the Continent, but with a more ornate focus, and with greater size and scope.  D’Costa indicates that all of this was important in attempting to establish Christianity in the area.  For instance, as D’Costa relates, there are recorded instances of the place and construction of the church building as having been of import to the conversion of the locals.  He recites one such example with the following material:

 

                        [When asked why he was converting] he

            answered that a long time before, when the

            Portuguese first came to this land, they began

            to build high on a hill the first church which

            is called the church of Nostra Senhora de

            Monte, and that this was regarded as a sign

            that the Christians would spread their

            conviction among the inhabitants.17 

 

            In a parallel fashion, many of the churches in Mexico were also constructed so that they were on hills or promontories; indeed, this describes a number of the churches of Cholula, Puebla, which is famous for having a dense concentration of religious sites within a very small space.18  There can be no question that the Iberians were sophisticated when it came to making a visual impression, and documentation from many geographical areas shows that this was so.

           

Finally, although it might seem a small point, visitors to Goa are regularly told that the buildings constructed by the Portuguese represent an amalgam of styles, and, indeed, this is supposed to be one of the selling points of the area with respect to tourism.  Just as one might be inclined to offer the visitor a view of a site on the European continent because it represents a sort of purity of style—a demarcator of a certain type of consciousness during a certain period—in Goa one points out the buildings for the opposite reason.  The Portuguese struggled, as the historians make clear, and in so struggling they learned to adapt.  Even an internet site on Goa reports that the styles of the region represent a melding; it is said, of the Basilica de Bom Jesu (wherein are found relics of St. Francis Xavier) that “The grand golden altar shows influences of Indian craftsmen.”19  Presumably the point here is that it is comparatively rare that one encounters such a mingling of styles anywhere, and even more rare than one encounters an amalgam on the subcontinent that represents Iberian styles taken together with those local, rather than Anglo or French stylistic devices.

 

            In our original examination of the input from Venturi with respect to eclecticism, we noted that Goldblatt had asserted that what Venturi was after was “Scarlatti and the Beatles.”  Goldblatt wanted to think of this as a pluralism; we can also conceptualize it as something akin to a musical segue, only with respect to the sort of criticism we are after here, it is an architectural segue.  But one cannot find such eclecticism everywhere, and this is precisely why, in trying to demarcate what might be constitutive of the postmodern, it is important to be specific about where these minglings might occur.  As has been argued here, Mexico, taken in toto, is one such region—so is Goa, a coastal region of eastern India.

 

IV

            I have been arguing that we can attach a certain sort of meaning to the phrase “postmodernism” by examining the colonial work of the Iberians, specifically the Portuguese in Goa.  Both the construction of their churches and the supporting belief systems indicate a type of eclecticism, or pluralism, that is very much of a piece with that indicated in the commentary by Venturi and others.  But perhaps more important for all of the work under description is the notion of fluidity—this notion is not merely an architectural or aesthetic category, but instead a notion that attaches to a variety of cultural constructs, including religions, belief systems and varieties of metaphysics.   For Hinduism, fluidity is a crucial concept, since it explains how it is that much of what was taken on to the subcontinent by Europeans from a variety of backgrounds is, in fact, adopted into the Hindu worldview, and even promulgated.

 

            Speaking in terms of architecture, it was noted at an earlier point that postmodernism was supposed to have been, at least at its outset, a response to the alleged or purported boxiness of modernism.  But those who make this claim often fail to note that much of what has been deemed postmodern does incorporate strong modernist elements—and the buildings of Las Vegas, of whatever type, often bear this out.  Whether or not this is an important point depends upon some of the very lines of argument adduced here; postmodernism is a mélange or hodgepodge, and working within that framework helps us to determine both its antecedents and its outgrowths.

 

            As has been contended here, the architecture of Goa, particularly of its churches, has something in common with architecture found throughout the Americas wherever the invading Spaniards (or Portuguese) decided to make use of tropes taken from the local culture.  As was noted, certain Mexican churches, such as those of Cholula in the state of Puebla, are well-known  for this very reason—it has been argued that they are paradigmatic of the meshing of several styles simultaneously that is the hallmark of colonial work of a certain period.  The argument here has been that, even if it is not as obvious, the same may be said of the buildings and structures of Goa.  Although these do not often have the profusion of features characteristic of Santa Marîa Tonantzînla (and that sanctuary is itself a remarkable artifact, even within Mexico), the way in which they were constructed, their sites, size and sheer scope all speak to the issues addressed here, and there are, of course, some churches that do contain elements parallel to those found in the indigenous-influenced churches of Latin America.

 

            In short, it might well be contended that postmodernism is where we find it.  However odious some of the colonial proselytizing, there is reason to believe that colonial intentions were often better than they have been made out to be.  In any case, workers among the colonized on more than one continent participated in the construction of these buildings that we now admire as hallmarks of a certain time period and a certain way of life.   It seems important to acknowledge the provenance of this construction and to take into account the many, and somewhat surprising facts, surrounding its origin.  We fail to pay adequate respect to the past when we fail to acknowledge how it predicts the future.