Alexander Henn, Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa : Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity

As the first line of Alexander Henn's fine book avers, "Goa is a special place" (1).It is unusual in India for its large Catholic population, the clear impact of Portuguese rule on its landscape and culture, and for the fact that nearly five hundred years of Portuguese rule in the region ended only in 1961, fourteen years after India's independence from Britain.Goa is also peculiar for the complexity of its Hindu-Christian relations, in part because Portuguese rule produced both paroxysms of extreme, iconoclastic, anti-Hindu violence, and some of the most fascinating and thorough-going forms of Hindu-Catholic syncretism to be found.In fact, one of Henn's central and most original claims is that both of these Portuguese Catholic postures with regard to Hinduism (the aggressive/iconoclastic and the assimilative/syncretistic) were related and emerged from the same source: a profound ambiguity and anxiety about the category of religion itself in this transitional historical moment when many Europeans still thought of religion in the singular, with true (Christian), false (Jewish, Muslim), and corrupted ("idolatrous," "pagan," and "gentile") versions, and when the modern notion of multiple discrete, "world" religions was just beginning to come into being.What then to do with Hinduism?Did its obvious similarities to European Catholicism suggest it was just a perverted form of it?Was it something demonic?Or was it something entirely new, something which did not fit into received categories?In Portuguese Goa, to use Henn's own words, "religion constituted a domain that was ridden by deep and lasting uncertainties, variously expressed in qualms as to whether similarities or differences, hermeneutics or violence, syncretistic mediation or religious self-assertion, should have strategic priority in the proselytizing mission and colonial conquest" (177).The identification of these "deep and lasting uncertainties" help Henn provide a nuanced analysis (in chapter 1) of what I have long considered the single most