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

Abstract

Ritual transgression and religious hybridity have emerged as major themes in the study of South Asian religions, and indeed religion more broadly. At least since the publication of Selva J. Raj and Corinne C. Dempsey’s edited volume, Popular Christianity in India: Riting between the Lines (SUNY Press, 2002), the study of Hindu–Christian relations in South Asia has shifted decisively out of a rigid framework of top-down, clerical enculturation into more limited, dynamic accounts of the lived, grassroots practices of lay Hindus and Christians. Indeed, in the past decade, quite a number of fine monographs have added further depth and nuance to questions of syncretism and hybridity, as applied to these traditions. Alexander Henn’s Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa stands in this scholarly trajectory, and contributes significantly to it. In the volume, Henn advances two major claims. First, he sets out to show that ‘the historical distinction between Hindus and Catholics’ in Goa should be viewed as ‘an enormously protracted and contested process’ (p. 18), rather than as a stable status quo. Indeed, he goes on to claim, ‘the transgression of the conventional boundaries between Hindus and Catholics, and the assertion of these boundaries, go literally hand in hand and cannot, at least in practical terms, be separated from each other’ (p. 181). From this observation emerges his second claim, proposing the distinction between pre-modern and modern ‘philosophical modalities’ (p. 181)—rather than a distinction between Hindu and Christian—as key to understanding the significance of syncretistic religious practice in modern Goa. The problematic of ‘syncretism’ emerges in modernity, not because religious boundaries have suddenly become porous or because of anything distinctive to Hinduism or South Asian religion, but because the locus of epistemic value undergoes a radical, fragile and continually contested shift in this period from the realm of ritual and embodied activity to the realm of meaning and belief.