By Frederick Noronha It's 2012 and Vincent and Martha are falling "instantly in love with Goa". Four sentences into Ashwin Sanghi's The Rozabal Line (Westland, 2008), we encounter the Inquisition.
Predictable? Like few others, the Inquisition motif is one which comes up repeatedly in writing on Goa. It does so once more in "India's bestselling theological thriller". This has happened with so much regularity, that we just seem to take it as a given now. >From novels to works in Konkani, translated texts, video CDs and even official accounts of Goa's history, this story is writ large. But how much of this is really true? You get a hint of something not quite being right if search up for information on the Black Legend. Put briefly, the Black Legend is a style of writing - or propaganda - that demonises the Spanish Empire, its people and its culture. As if to suggest that the blackest were the Spaniards, while other colonial empires were rather pleasantly-run enterprises. For understandable reasons, this at times extends to the Portuguese too. Spanish history gets projected in a deeply negative light; the reasons why this happens is interesting in itself but beyond the scope of this discussion. Suffice to note that depicting exaggerated versions of the Spanish Inquisition form a key part of this. Ever since Priolkar's book on the subject (The Goa Inquisition: The Terrible Tribunal for the East), published thrice by a State university, a Hindutva publishing house, and locally, the first time being just before Liberation, this motif is taken for granted in Goa too. Expectedly, over time, it gets new life of its own. Scratch a bit below the surface, and it becomes obvious that there's a whole different reality out there. Globally too, questions are being asked. One place to start unwrapping the knotted ball of thread and mythification is perhaps a 1994 BBC documentary on the myths of the Spanish Inquisition. See it online at http://bit.ly/BBCSpIn. Turns out from a detailed and closer look that not only were accounts of the Inquisition grossly exaggerated, but there was in fact also a whole industry of creating these myths that survived centuries. It was promoted by various quarters, from manifold reasons. What one learn in the above documentary would go so much against what one is used to believing, that it takes quite some time for the reality to soak it in. In Goa itself, the accounts of the Inquisition depend largely on the versions of Buchanan (1766-1815) and Dellon (1650-1710). The first was a Scottish theologian, whose biases about faiths other than his own have been documented elsewhere. David Higgs (in The Inquisition in Late Eighteenth-Century Goa, in Goa; Continuity and Change, edited by Narendra K Wagle and George Coelho, University of Toronto 1995) gives us another perspective when he acknowledges the role Priolkar's 1961 study played in shaping the debate. Higgs writes: "Priolkar drew heavily on secondary sources in his sketch on the Goan Inquisition, especially on a late seventeenth-century Frenchman, Gabriel Dellon, arrested in Goa, whose case was made famous by the denunciatory account of his experiences published after his return from France". He calls Dellon's version an "exuberant account of his misfortunes". Likewise, Higgs points out, Priolkar also used the "over-imaginative account of a British clergyman, C Buchanan, who wanted to think that what he was not allowed to see in Old Goa in 1808 was what Dellon inveighed at more than a century earlier". >From the time these accounts first came about, they were taken to by a number of diverse quarters. For different reasons. Jansenists, Gallicians, pro-Protestants and anti-Spanish Frenchmen highlighted such writing. Dellon has himself been identified with pro-Calvanism and the Gallician policy of Louis XIV, to whose court Dellon had been admitted. Since then, the mythification of the Inquisition has been used to push 21st century communal battles. Perspectives from Judaism and Hindutva also take the debate along a road of its own. But it is not only the world of fiction that is shaped by the assiduously created Inquisition lore. When former top cop Julio Ribeiro voices alarm over the communalisation of Indian public life, someone in cyberspace thinks it fit to remind him: "We, perforce, have to talk about the utterly violent and murderous record of Christianity in India, with specific reference to the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa". In a recent online thread, the noted Indo-Portuguese historian Teotonio R de Souza spoke out publicly about how his writing on the Inquisition had been mauled and manipulated, to project a certain vision. He complained of his writing being hijacked, and text which he never wrote added under his name. Commented Souza: "One first paragraph is drawn from an article of mine in a book edited by M D David, and the rest is all added from elsewhere and with orthographic and syntax mistakes galore. That article is cited as footnote no 25 for the text on The Goa Inquisition in the Wikipedia". It has survived in cyberspace over many years, and all attempts to get the situation corrected have failed so far. He added: "I am quoted from a book (without date) that I never wrote... it has misled many!" Such issues play a crucial role in shaping the debate and deciding on our 'reality'. Unlike its counterpart in the Vatican, the Church in Goa seems unwilling to open up this debate, to separate the wheat from the chaff, to accept what it needs to, and to effectively challenge all the mythification. http://www.navhindtimes.in/the-inquisition-lore/-- DEV BOREM KORUM Gabe Menezes.
