Saintly Stones, Fading Bones by John Borthwick
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When an Indian army attacked the Portuguese colony of Goa in 1693, the desperate Viceroy placed his baton of command in the hand of a mummy. Miraculously, it seemed, the attackers withdrew, but this wasn't just any mummy - it was the colony's most prized possession: the cadaver of St Francis Xavier. No one allowed the facts - that the attacking Indian army had withdrawn due to an assault from the rear by Mughal enemies - to spoil their 'miracle'. In 1961, when India's Prime Minister Nehru ordered his troops to take Goa, the last Portuguese Viceroy appealed to St Francis for another miraculous intercession, this time to no avail.
Goa, India's smallest state, nestles on the mid-west coast 400 km below Mumbai. The Portuguese ruled here from 1510 until 1961 and Goa still displays everywhere the evidence of its centuries as the headquarters of an East Indies trading empire that reached as far as Malacca, Timor and Macau. In its glory days this was Goa Doirada - Golden Goa. 'A noble city full of beautiful buildings and palaces,' wrote a Dutch traveller in 1639 of the then-thriving port and capital, Old Goa. Its streets were 'handsome and broad, full of the shops of jewellers, goldsmiths, lapidaries, carpet weavers, silk mercers and other artisans.' Old Goa boasted a larger population than Elizabethan London or Paris, and eventually came to rival Lisbon itself. It was said, 'Quem vin Goa excuse de ver Lisboa' ('Whoever has seen Goa need not see Lisbon'). Old Goa remained the colony's capital until I759, when the Mandovi River silted up.
Today I find a ruined city where the surviving churches - enormous, moss-bearded, laterite structures - recall the Jesuits, Dominicans and Augustinians, not to mention Inquisitors, who built their own rival empires here. Old Goa's Cathedral of Saint Catherine da Se (1652) is still Asia's largest church, while the Basilica of Bom Jesus (1605), a World Heritage structure, houses the body of St Francis Xavier.
This being India, almost everyone can speak English. Despite the ubiquitous Da Costa, De Souza and Fernandes surnames, only the older people still speak Portuguese, although Portuguese signs are still common. Panjim's Church of the Immaculate Conception overlooks the Mandovi River, as it has done since 1541. Its tall twin bell towers were the first sign of port for the caravels making the long voyage from Lisbon, Africa or Macau. This regatta of treasures - pepper, spices, pearls and silks - that passed up the river could be viewed by the Viceroy from the balconies of his handsome white palace, now the administrative Secretariat, which has stood on the broad riverside quay since 1615.
In a park facing the river is the life-sized statue of a cloaked man gesticulating above a reclining female beauty. Novelist Evelyn Waugh graphically described the tableau as 'a wildly vivacious statue of the Abbe Faria, a Goan mesmerist of the Napoleonic era, caught here in hot bronze at the climax of an experiment, rampant over an entranced female.' A plaque explains that Faria, a pioneer in hypnosis, was born in here in 1756. If he weren't so entirely forgotten everywhere else, he might have been Goa's second favourite son.
A landscape of emerald green paddies is dotted by little whitewashed chapels, attesting that some 35 percent of Goa's 1.2 million people are Catholics. Iberia in the Orient. Brazil in a sari. With 105 km of Indian Ocean coastline, Goa has some 40 beaches, the most famous being Colva, Calangute and Anjuna. I once spent half a year on these beaches when they were the helio- and psychotropic mecca for hundreds of Overland Route trippers in the 1970s. 'Goa for Christmas' was the freaks' navigational mantra. The palm-fringed shores of Baga, Vagator and Anjuna were annually invaded by the best, worst, brightest and dopiest minds of their generation - hirsute pilgrims come to gatecrash heaven with a chillum. Here culture and chronology were confounded; fishermen whose lives had been little changed by 400 years of Portuguese rule suddenly found their nights charged with guitars and tablas, tapedecks booming Astral Weeks and Let It Bleed, full moon lunacy amok on their beaches, and their houses full (for a suitable rental) of Westerners who looked like they'd just stepped off that moon. Bare bums and ganja. Tolkien and tantra. Hesse and Leary.
I recall that an avowedly 'Christian' Goan landlord impounded my meagre luggage. He had discovered that a lamp in my rented room had been chipped by the previous tenants, also travellers. His vengeful logic was truly Biblical, even if arse-about: 'Until you pay for lamp, I am keeping baggage. Jesus paid for sins of others - and so must you.' I then discovered him perving through a hole in the wall. A matchstick deftly jabbed into his eye produced a most satisfying, profoundly un-Christian response.
'Those sweltering, swaggering fidalgos and their sickly womenfolk with their palanquins and sweets and scents and retinues of handmaids were not real ladies and gentlemen but the riffraff of Portugal, over dressed and over privileged.' The author of these barbed comments was Evelyn Waugh, sniffing - some 300 years after the fact - at society in the 17th-century colony. These days Goa's Arabian Sea coastline and palm-shaded resorts attract one million visitors a year, but when Waugh (best known for novels such as Brideshead Revisited and The Loved One) visited in 1952, he did so not as a sun-tripper, but a saint-chaser. A devout Catholic, he had travelled to Goa for the exposition of the body of St Francis Xavier.
St Francis (1506-1552), co-founder of the Jesuit order, spent only a few months in Goa, but remains its favourite son. Several years after he died and was buried in China his body was disinterred and found to be miraculously intact. His remains were shipped to Goa where they were subjected to great veneration and sometimes bizarre mortification. One over-pious woman bit off his toe. In 1614 the Pope had St Francis' right arm detached and sent to Rome. On both occasions there was said to be a fresh flow of blood from the wounds. The holy bones St Francis may live on, but the stones of Golden Goa, sacred and secular, are fading.
Panjim (known as Panaji), Goa's capital, stretches along the southern shore of the wide Mandovi River. With a population today of around 90,000 it is India's most picturesque state capital. Its colonnades and balconies, red pantile roofs and whitewashed churches make this an architectural gem. One day Panjim may be recognised as a masterpiece of colonial Iberian city building, although I fear this will come too late. Due to infrequent maintenance in recent decades, many of the city's grand structures are in terminal decay, undone by the vandalism of official apathy.
Wandering old Panjim I find block upon block of historic houses. The finely crafted details of their iron, ceramic and stone work is a strong indication that the glory of Golden Goa is going from rust to dust with each monsoon. I ask myself whether modern India is embarrassed by Goa, wanting these colonial memories to simply rot away? Ironically, a nostalgia for things Portuguese is heavily emphasised in Goa's tourist promotions.
The Archaeological Survey of India and a World Heritage project are preserving the basilicas of Old Goa. Even the miraculous cadaver of St Francis Xavier might preserve itself for another century or so, but once-glorious Panjim is history on the run. Catch it while you can.