When Jesuits and the ecclesiastical authorities in Goa in the mid-sixteenth century raised and debated the question of slavery, it was not to abolish the practice, but to provide a legal and theological framework. From the early fifteenth century, the Iberian slaving network expanded and intersected with established Islamic and other oceanic and land networks. In the process, it assimilated and engaged with different conceptions of servitude, bondage, dependency, household, military, or agrarian slavery. In South Asia, as Richard Eaton noted almost two decades ago, slavery was no ‘one-size-fits-all phenomenon’. It was practised, imagined, and storied into multiple forms. Moreover, as their different contexts ‘may or may not relate one to the other’, one would do better to think about it, according to Emma Kalb, in the plural, as slaveries.Footnote 1 Plural or singular, South Asians remain—as Ananya Chakravarty recently stated—blind and amnesiac about slavery and how it harmed society and shaped their history.Footnote 2
Although the Portuguese never became leading slave merchants in the region dominated by the Gujerati slave network, their descriptions (and those of other Europeans) of local patterns of managing unfree labour acquired visibility.Footnote 3 While there was a profit to be made, slavery posed a moral problem. This article is partly about how the Portuguese tried to solve it and how it morphed and entangled itself in situations of negotiated social mobility.
For a Christian empire, providing a sufficient legal-cum-theological justification for enslaving people was a huge and slippery intellectual endeavour. It was an important ingredient of the Portuguese imperial ideology in the early modern period. Although the papacy authorised the Portuguese overseas expansion, conquest, and trade monopolies through the mid-fifteenth-century bulls, including the Dum Diversas of 1452, which allowed the enslavement of infidels, gentiles, and other unbelievers in return for the propagation of the Catholic faith, the historiography of the empire tended to neglect the link between politics and religion. Against formerly accepted arguments that the Portuguese empire was merely a commercial operation, Giuseppe Marcocci argued a decade ago that imperial conscience mattered and was carefully grounded in moral theology, which provided the tools for just political action. The Portuguese king Manuel (1469–1521), scornfully and jealously named ‘le roi epicier’ (the Grocer King) by French king François 1 (1494–1547), may have been interested in economic profit, but, in 1532, the Portuguese Crown had already established the Mesa da Consciência (‘Board of Conscience’) to deal with any possible conflict between secular and religious aspects in imperial decision-making.Footnote 4 In 1548, the first Jesuit missionary in Asia, Francis Xavier (1506–1552), wrote a famous letter instructing Simão Rodrigues (1510–1579), the Jesuit confessor of João III (1502–1557), to warn the king with a quotation from Mt 16:26 that there is no profit in winning the world and losing one’s soul.Footnote 5
Possessing enslaved people was economically indispensable for colonial Goa, but also potentially a sinful burden on any Christian soul and a problem for the moral theology in Europe and overseas, building on Roman law, canon law, and scholasticism. Most notably at the University of Coimbra and Évora and later in Salamanca, the Jesuit theologians versed in casuistry pored over reports from the Iberian colonies.Footnote 6 The current research on Jesuit Goan casuistic tradition argues that there may have been, in addition, a Goan school of casuistry, nourished by first-hand missionary information and processed by the prodigious theological mind of the Jesuit Francisco Rodrigues (circa 1515–1573).Footnote 7
The theological normative materials developed in casuistry, for the Goan Provincial Councils, and in the Constitutions of the Archdiocese of Goa—predominately results of Jesuit diligence—were the mortar and cement that built tropical Goan Respublica Christiana.Footnote 8 The enslaved were converted and incorporated into this composite body of Goan Christians, but at the price of creating moral unease when local and global forms of social identification and stratification collided in loco. Historical sources are obscured by inconsistent terminology that barely distinguishes between escravo/escrava from moço/moça, boy, fulano, negro, and other Marathi and Konkani names used for the relationships of servitude. Slave status was also entangled with another form of stigmatised identity that the Portuguese named ‘castas’.
The name initially applied by the Portuguese to the perceived ranked structures of local distinctions ultimately stuck to the phenomenon that British colonial descriptions made famous as ‘caste’.Footnote 9 In particular, the highest Goan converted castes formulated their ‘noble’ Christian identity by insisting on their pure-blooded lineage and ancient priestly profession, as opposed to the descendants of ‘mixed’ marriages between the Portuguese settlers, the so-called ‘casados’, and the local population, including enslaved people.
By looking into three types of archival, albeit discontinuous and incomplete, documents, I discuss slavery/servitude employed in Goa—focusing in particular on household slaves—during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: 1) in the legal and moral framework for the ‘just’ slave society debated and prescribed by ecclesiastics, 2) as it was seen and represented by outsiders such as foreign travellers, 3) and in the seventeenth-century history rewriting of elite Goan Christian theologians obsessed with the purity of blood of their ancestors.
Servants/slaves in Goan households received inordinate attention from European, non-Portuguese visitors who noticed their massive presence in the published accounts upon return from Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They provided vivid, dramatic, ironic, and often hostile descriptions of cruelty and violence inflicted on the house slaves, many of whom were women who provided sexual and reproductive services.Footnote 10
In contrast, Portuguese official sources, in particular, contemporary ecclesiastical legislation, treat slavery as an economic and moral issue (the so-called ‘cases of conscience’). Estimated at half to two-thirds of the population, of substantial economic importance, and exercising pervasive if subterranean cultural influence, slavery in Goa fits Moses Finley’s model of a ‘slave society’.Footnote 11 Following his classification, the Goan colonial social structure developed much like that in Brazil, another Portuguese colony. It was thus different from the polities that surrounded it in the Indian subcontinent, all of which, according to the theory, had been classified as ‘societies with slaves’.Footnote 12
The Portuguese empire was so profoundly dependent, economically, psychologically, and symbolically, on slave labour and the slave trade in Brazil, Africa, and Asia from the fifteenth to the late eighteenth centuries that all internal critical voices stopped short of denouncing the practice.Footnote 13 Although not at the centre of the debate, slavery contributed to the construction of the ‘Black Legend’ of Portuguese colonialism in Asia and fitted into the major complaint regarding the moral dissoluteness of customs due to the mixing of population and economic corruption of the Portuguese imperial institutions.Footnote 14 The argument was that the Portuguese imitated, intermarried, and started closely resembling gentiles, some of whom they first enslaved.
Unlike the ‘externalist’ Black Legend taking shape in the accounts of the North European visitors who were quick to vilify the Portuguese empire, the Golden Legend, on the other hand, had a long internalist genealogy. Famous writers such as Luís Vaz de Camões (1524?–1580) and the Jesuit António Vieira (1608–1697) to the self-congratulatory Luso-tropicalist sociological theory of Gilberto Freyre (1900–1987) theorised that the Portuguese were creating the adaptable and adapting, racially mixed society in the tropics.Footnote 15
Against (and after) the black and golden texture of representations of Goan slavery and the archives of debates on the legal and theological justification of slavery in the sixteenth century, in the last part of the article, I follow opinions of the colonised Goan elites of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As an invisible ‘worm’ that insinuated itself into the heart of colonial family and society, the question of slavery was submerged below a discourse on intrinsic native (‘Indian’) nobility. From the late seventeenth century onwards, the purity of blood and lineage became the measuring rod of social hierarchy in Portuguese colonial Goa, promoted and debated by local Christianised elites and Portuguese nobility. Catholic Brahmans and Charodos—the two highest castes that considered themselves native ‘nobility’—started a war of (printed) words against both 1) the Portuguese casado descendants’ (settler) society whom they considered the progenies of Portuguese men and female slaves with broken and thus contaminated lineage and 2) each other.Footnote 16 In the case of Goa, the degradation of casado status had a local twist. The convergence of purity-of-blood statutes of the fifteenth century, initially designed for Jews and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula, found a felicitous resonance in already existing Goan caste distinctions. Educated, wealthy, and Lusitanised, the Goan Christian elites knew well how to combine these proto-racist (or ethnic) distinctions for their profit. The self-designated true Christian nobility (nobreza cristiana)—Brahmans and Charodos—argued that they were the traditional, antique pure-blooded aristocracy of India, and thus reaffirmed caste spirit and their privilege and high birth that the Portuguese colonial order and Christianisation tried to level out at the beginning of the sixteenth century.Footnote 17
In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in a series of identity narratives, Christian Brahmans and Charodos ‘colonised’ the discursive space of the ‘coloniser’ by retelling the myths of the origins of their mythical Indian peninsular ancestors and linking them directly to biblical and New Testament narratives. The looming suspicion that the coloniser casado society in Goa had been the product of miscegenation with enslaved women facilitated the argument of the degeneration of Portuguese blood and civility in the tropics. In the long run, the slave origins ceased to index a social category, but merged into ethnicised and racialised—and essentialising—classification applied to the lowest groups of the Goan population, such as farazes, or the untouchables.
Slavery between laws and piety
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, foreign visitors and travellers mostly saw Goa as a delightful and impressive colonial edifice. Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri (1651–1725), who may or may not have visited Asia at all, but collected materials and wrote a bestselling book, remarked that ‘Goa […] became the key to all the commerce in the Orient’.Footnote 18 However, by the end of the seventeenth century, all visitors complained about lawlessness, dirt, street violence, and administrative corruption. Part of the problem stemmed from the administrative organisation of royal appointments and offices into three-year tenure tracks, with a blurred idea of the distinction between private and public funds. From the viceroy to the lowest officeholder, all official appointees were engaged in plundering whatever department they were given to manage.Footnote 19 Unsurprisingly, many returned to Lisbon either rich or in chains. Nepotism and bribes were systemic and, as Diogo do Couto (1542–1616)—a soldier, historian, and head archivist—perfectly described the system in his Soldado Prático, viceroys and governors who actually wanted to reform the corrupt arrangements were rare, based on chronically understaffed bureaucracy and graft.Footnote 20 A text that remained in manuscript form until the nineteenth century by another Portuguese soldier in India in the late sixteenth century, Francisco Rodrigues de Silveira (1558–1635), furnished even stronger proof of the decadência thesis, showing that the army had been neglected. Its resources were pilfered by the noblemen, the viceroy included, so the soldiers deserted and joined non-Christian continental armies of the Estado da Índia’s neighbours in the Deccan, who were perceived as a constant threat.Footnote 21
It is also true that, although both foreign visitors and some priests among religious orders denounced blatant forms of social injustice on many occasions, the institution of slavery received comparatively little official attention. Indeed, the Church was forced to address the question of slavery, as it addressed all other issues about the salvation of the Christian community and the conversion of non-Christians.Footnote 22 After the Council of Trent, five important Provincial Church Councils (or Synods) were held in Goa (1567, 1571, 1585, 1592, 1606) to discuss and legislate on the burning issues of Church and society. Neither of the councils condemned slavery as an institution, but they tried to construct a legal framework for its sinless practice.
Already in the fifteenth century, through a series of bulls, the papacy had legally granted Portugal the right to enslave Africans in the context of the wars with the Muslims that were waged intermittently from the time of the Crusades and during the Reconquista. Dum Diversas (Until Different) was a papal bull issued by Pope Nicolas V on 18 June 1452, which authorised Afonso V of Portugal to conquer ‘Saracens’ and ‘pagans’, confiscate their land, and consign them to ‘perpetual servitude’.Footnote 23 This papal law provided the juridical basis for all future conquests and enslavement of people, supported by the theory of a ‘just war’ that became an angular stone and the stone of contention of all discussions on slavery.Footnote 24 Unfree labour had become so ubiquitous and economically indispensable that even the whistle-blowers, critical of Portuguese administrative corruption and incompetence, remained silent on the existence of thousands of enslaved people who were transported from one end of the empire to another. From the mid-fifteenth century, approximately 1,000 slaves were imported into Portugal per year, and most households of some means possessed them.Footnote 25
According to Marc Bloch, the type of slavery practised in European Antiquity ended in the medieval period. It survived, however, during the Reconquista skirmishes and the razias along the North African coast.Footnote 26 Even if, in the early sixteenth century, theologians and humanists agreed that baptism as a force of spiritual regeneration (regeneratio) that liberates the soul of the former nonbelievers, other theories such as Aristotelian ‘natural servility’ ingrained in specific populations—living without ‘king’ and ‘letters’—had been preferred by the Iberian monarchies at the time of overseas conquest.Footnote 27 Nicolas V paraphrased Roman law to claim that ‘a slave is not a person (servus non habet personam)’. A slave is a ‘thing (res)’ to be exploited and traded.
Not all religious specialists considered the converts or Christian ‘black slaves (negros)’ as ‘things’. Still, even they were not allowed to go too far in encouraging them to request freedom, which, in theory, was due to them after conversion.Footnote 28 Gaspar Correa (circa 1496–1563) gives a cautionary tale of the Dominicans who established a confraternity of Our Lady of Rosary for the African slaves in Goa, as well as in other Portuguese colonial towns, such as, famously, in Salvador de Bahía de Todos os Santos. It seems that the Dominicans preached so well against the ills of slavery that the slaves threatened their masters to join the Dominican order.Footnote 29 The Dominicans backtracked their words, of course. Therefore, there was intelligence to argue against slavery, but the interest of the colonial state and society would not allow it.
This particular problem was brought to the discussion at the Council of Trent in 1547, when a Franciscan, in a closed-door session, complained about the bad treatment of the baptised slaves (formerly Muslim and African) who were regularly called ‘dogs’, ‘Saracens’, etc.Footnote 30 The conversion not only served little towards being accepted into the Christian community of the ‘whites’, but also made the converts vulnerable to being persecuted by the Lisbon Inquisition. In 1553, a Wolof (Senegalese) slave incapable of even answering the questions in Portuguese was tried for heresy.Footnote 31 Similarly, Gabriel, whose case was tried by the Goan Inquisition in 1595, also spoke through an interpreter, but he played his hand well because he was a seasoned slave. Born a Jew, first enslaved and then converted to Islam, he was sold to a Christian. He converted to Christianity—a fact that brought him before the Inquisition desk, but it finally also saved his life when he duly repented.Footnote 32 Some slaves, on the other hand, turned into witnesses for the Inquisition and helped in the prosecution of their New Christian (descendants of converted Jews) employers.Footnote 33
However, the decisions of the First Provincial Church Council (O Primeiro Concilio Provincial, 1567) and the publication of the Constitutions (1568) of the Archbishopric of Goa—both providing the blueprint for the ideal Christian spiritual and active life in the overseas colonies—addressed the question of slavery. As elsewhere, ‘unjust’ slavery due to the ‘unjust war’ was condemned, but, under the pressure of slave owners, theologians found a way to spell out rules for the justification of slave ownership by referring to additional circumstances.
The archbishop who enthusiastically supervised the implementation of the Tridentine rules in Goa, Dom Gaspar de Leão Pereira (?–1576), had a vision of the Respublica Christiana in the Dominican and Franciscan spiritual tradition, combining extreme piety and spirituality with a certain legalistic intransigence. He was also the author of the Acts (conclusions) of the first two Goan Provincial Councils and the Constitutions. His treatment of slavery is in line with the ideas of Francisco de Vitoria’s (1483–1546) De Indies as well as those of Spanish theologians Dominican, Domingos de Soto (1494–1560) and Martín de Azpilcueta (Doctor Navarro) (1491–1586).Footnote 34
Action 4 (Reformation of the customs), decree 10 of the 1st Provincial Council expressed the doubt that the slaves brought to Goa were legally acquired. The prescribed remedy to save the souls of the slave owners, since their conscience was in peril, as was the whole Christian community in Goa, was transparent and honest information about the provenance of the slaves in question. Thus, a legitimate slave was defined as one who 1) was born of slave parents, 2) was captured in a just war, 3) sold oneself to slavery, 4) was sold by one’s parent due to poverty, and 5) was sentenced to slavery because of a crime in one’s own country.Footnote 35 The confessors of the slave owners were encouraged to guide their conscience in this quest for truth and, if there was no proof that the ‘captives’ were legally acquired, then they were to be freed.
All conversions to Christianity brought to the enslaved people the obligation to behave as Christians, but their civil status was not automatically changed. In a word, Christians could own Christian slaves and non-Christian slaves, but had a duty (not always respected) to convert them. On the other hand, under no pretext were non-Christians allowed to own Christian slaves. Thus, decree 40 (1st Action, Protestação da fe) also prescribed that, if ‘“infidels” bring slaves of various nations, some of whom may be Christians such as “Abyssinian, Circassians, Georgians, Armenians and other nations” and convert them to Islam, and want to sell them to Christians and non-Christians, it was essential to examine their cases. If found Christian, they would be confiscated and given back their liberty’.Footnote 36 This generous principle was good enough in theory, but, in practice, very few cared to check or disclose the legal status of their slaves. From 1530 and the institution of the pai dos cristãos (Father of Christians), royal orders and legislation in support of catechumens to be observed in all Portuguese settlements kept on reaching Indian authorities and remained a dead letter, even though one of the duties of the priest who was appointed ‘Father’ was to liberate converted slaves.Footnote 37 However, slave owners, both men and women, generally disregarded ecclesiastical and secular rules, and kept their Christian slaves without freeing them. Only those who escaped from the territory of the sultanate of Bijapur to Goa were considered free after conversion.Footnote 38 The worst treated were galley slaves and prisoners, usually punished for both minor and significant offences, and kept in a bhangasala (a storehouse and a prison). From 1559, the Jesuits collected money for the prisoners by fasting seven or eight successive Fridays because the conditions and hygiene of the place were appalling.Footnote 39
In theory, household slaves were better off because they were considered the responsibility of the masters, who had to take care of their spiritual and temporal needs. In addition to providing Christian instruction and baptising their slaves, the slave owners had to make sure that they confessed regularly, received the sacrament, and were provided with medical help in case of illness.Footnote 40 On the other hand, a master’s testament, with a provision to free his slaves after death, was to be respected according to the ecclesiastical laws, even if a person who ‘co-owned’ the slaves opposed it.Footnote 41 Moreover, all (Christian) slaves were to be buried in a Christian way and three masses were to be paid for by the master, who was also responsible for informing the priest and the parish of the slave’s death.Footnote 42 In theory, of course—however, many slaves were buried anywhere without the last rites and sacraments. Even more unrealistic was a provision of the Third Provincial Church Council (1585) commanding the master to buy back the enslaved men he took to war and who were captured by the ‘infidel enemies’.Footnote 43
One of the most challenging questions that Indian prelates had to resolve through legislation concerned slave marriages. The Fourth Provincial Church Council (1592), Action 2, decree 7 reaffirmed a medieval ‘natural’ and ‘canonical’ law that:
no person of whatever quality or condition can impede the sacrament of the marriage of his male or female slaves. If they marry, with or without their master’s consent, he cannot sell them outside of the country, which would impede the practice of marriage, under penalty of 200 xerafins, half of it going for the person who accused him.Footnote 44
According to Rômulo da Silva Ehalt, the Goa prelates were the first in the Portuguese territories to address the issue. As on other occasions when dealing with sacraments, matrimony did not mean freedom for slaves.
Moreover, the couple had to endure administrative hassle in procuring the correct documentation by providing a certificate that they were not married already in another parish, their baptism certificate, and so on. These papers were difficult to procure without the help of one’s master. When the documentation was completed, the priests took the last step: public admonitions and baths. These clarifications were enshrined in the Constitutions (Dos casamentos dos cativos) that stipulated that, even when married, the slaves were legally obligated to serve their masters. This clause was included to reassure slave owners that they were still in charge.Footnote 45
Dom Gaspar de Leão Pereira imagined an ideal Christian community based on Christian laws and customs and profound spirituality that despised all expression of sensuality. Perhaps he had in mind what prelates in other parts of the globe thought about slave marriages as well—that they were a ‘remedy for mundane ills such as desire among those who found abstinence impossible’ because ‘a settled married life […] offered the way to spread order through a scattered, inherently disorderly and unruly population’.Footnote 46 In his literary production—most notably his dialogue, Desengano de perdidos, published in Goa in 1573—he portrays human senses as wicked small boys who are insatiable and want to add ‘sugar to sugar’.Footnote 47 Despite such a purist perspective, inspired mainly by opposition to the peninsular religious alterity—Islam and Judaism—that he so ardently denounced, his legislating efforts were, according to Ângela Barreto Xavier, in dialogue with local reality, especially in his literary publications.Footnote 48 The Council of Trent, unwittingly perhaps, opened Christianity to address multicultural and multilingual conditions.Footnote 49
Physical violence was also a sensual and bodily experience, and it had no place in a perfect Christian republic—except, of course, when it was employed for the salvation of the souls, as the argument for establishing the Inquisition had been made. The First Provincial Church Council specifically condemned physical cruelty and violence against slaves in action 4, decree 3:
Some people punish in this province their slaves so cruelly and use with them other injustices, it is ordered that nobody from now on punishes them with fire, with rattan stick or other extraordinary punishments; and it is ordered that all the other people who know of somebody who punishes excessively be denounced to the Prelate; and that nobody orders his slaves to work on Sunday and Holidays.Footnote 50
It is evident from the conclusions of the Provincial Church Councils in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that they were shot through with colonial anxiety of both the Estado da Índia and ecclesiastical administration. How does one structure regulate, legalise, and pacify a Christian society that grew isolated, far from the metropole and amid hostile gentile and Muslim polities? Not only outside Goa, but also inside, for two centuries, most of the population had remained ‘gentile’.Footnote 51 Therefore, the Provincial Church Councils were studiously, if frantically, trying to devise a blueprint for a viable and homogenised Christian colonial society and abolish social and cultural diversity, which was a double-edged sword, as they discovered. Although Christianisation was partly due to the ‘reasons of God’, it was also in equal measure due to the ‘reason of the state’. Or, to put it bluntly, Christianisation was a political tool, and it seems that nobody was happy with any official solution at any time. If slaves were indeed not satisfied with their lot, then neither were, for different reasons, the slaveholders.
The nuns in the famous Convent of Santa Monica in Goa, an elite female institution, according to Augustinian historian Agostinho de Santa Maria (1642–1728), complained that 120 female servants (criadas) allotted to them by the bishop D. Fr. Miguel da Cruz Rangel (d. 1646)—following the royal recommendation—was insufficient given that ‘Asian [slave] women’ were not efficient (para o pouco que podem).Footnote 52
‘The Indian slaves and servants were so vain, precious, and inimical to work (regardless of their nation). For this reason, noble people need much more service.’ The nuns insisted that a Farrier (Ferrador) ‘who is a mulato’ and without children had 26 female slaves ‘without mentioning male slaves’.Footnote 53 Another example they gave was of an ordinary citizen ‘who was an ecclesiastical clerk (escrivão do ecclesiastico) and now is a judge (Juiz ordinário), has 85 female slaves’. Finally, ‘a rich woman such as D. Luiza da Sylva, who lived in Cochin had more than 300 female slaves’.Footnote 54 Agostinho de Santa Maria commented on this phenomenon with a classical comparison: ‘The slaves of the old Romans must have been of the same quality because they had so many that it is hard to believe.’Footnote 55 He concluded that the poor quality of slaves had to be compensated by quantity. The best female slaves were, according to Agostinho, African (Cafras from Monomotapa and other parts), as they were humble and did more work.Footnote 56 At least, Agostinho approved, the Monicas, as the convent’s nuns were called, were not engaging in reselling slaves.
Buying and selling slaves were routine transactions in a slave society, but the ecclesiastical laws tried to prevent the well-known abuses. Thus, another decree (no. 4) of the First Provincial Church Council addressed the question of young free native boys (moços da terra forros) who were sold as slaves by people who were supposed to employ them and teach them Christian doctrine. To prevent this treatment by those ‘who fear no God’, the Council ordered the pai dos christãos to keep a list of such boys and the masters to whom they were given. The Council invited anyone who knew of such a case to report it to the priest.Footnote 57 This kind of profiteering must have been a persistent problem, as, in 1545, the vicar general of India wrote to the king, João III, complaining that some Portuguese bring boys from the Coromandel coast and other parts to make them Christian. For some extra profit, such as four pardaos, they sell them to the Muslims in Batkal and Dabul and other parts.Footnote 58 When, in 1558, the viceroy D. Constantino de Bragança issued another alvará granting freedom to the converted slaves without compensation to their owners, Christian slave traders continued their business and the Portuguese Crown mostly looked the other way.Footnote 59
For a Brazilian-born Jesuit, Francisco de Sousa (1628–1713), the traffic of female slaves from Macau via Melaka to Goa, probably consisting of Japanese and Chinese female cargo, was clearly ‘a vice’. Yet, his pen slipped to blame the enslaved women. These ‘pricey female slaves (escravas de preço)’ were like ‘drogas’ and ‘peste (plague)’ who could spoil both India and the souls of men.Footnote 60 He presumed that these ‘pricey’ and toxic objects—with a tinge of sarcasm—would ultimately fall into the Portuguese and casado hands, and were most probably destined to provide sexual services.Footnote 61 Even those poor casados who had barely enough money to feed themselves insisted on maintaining a large household of slave girls.Footnote 62
Jealous gaze, hostile sources
Beyond the rules and regulations spelled out in ecclesiastical decrees of the Provincial Church Councils and in royal or vice-royal orders, when non-Portuguese travellers’ sources documenting mostly domestic slavery in Goa are read closely, what immediately strikes are two things: the ‘corrupt’ and cruel nature of colonial society and the focus on gender. The first foreign travellers’ descriptions came from the pen of Portuguese commercial rivals from northern Europe, primarily Dutch, French, and English, although Italians were equally critical, if less overtly despising. An early modern bestseller of the travel genre, translated immediately into other European languages and disseminated widely, was Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s (1563–1611) famous book Voyage (Itinerario), first printed in 1595. According to historians, Itinerario inaugurated ‘the Black Legend’ of Portuguese colonialism in Asia. The ‘corruption’ of the colonial institutions that affected both the family and the state is squarely placed on the miscegenation or mixing of Portuguese men and Indian and Asian women. If, early in the century, Afonso de Albuquerque (1453–1515), the 2nd Viceroy of India, imagined the beginning of a settler empire, as João de Barros (1496–1570) claimed, along the antique Roman model of capturing the women of the conquered Sabinians, other documents indicate that these marriages were controversial from the start.Footnote 63 Albuquerque’s model of society closely followed that constituted in the Atlantic Islands and later in Brazil.Footnote 64
This Portuguese early-settler project had been subverted in Goa. The reason was that the fear of contamination of one’s blood lineage—a mixture of humoral and climate theories combined with proto-racial hierarchy—had been equally present among Portuguese nobility (fidalguia) and Indian converted elites. Gil Vicente (1465–circa 1536), a famous playwright and poet, in his Auto da India, makes a Portuguese spouse tell her husband who had recently returned from ‘India’ (that stood for all of Africa and Asia): ‘Jesus how black and burnt [you are]. I do not want you, I do not want you.’Footnote 65 The mere fact of staying too long in the tropics, in the opinion of a Dominican, Duarte Nunes (circa 1489–1528), the bishop of Duma in 1520, changed the ‘qualities and nation’ of Portuguese men, who all became followers of ‘sensuality’.Footnote 66 The Archbishop of Goa, Gaspar de Leão Pereira, made the same point in his Desengano do perdidos. The climate transformed the Portuguese into slaves of carnal passions. Effeminate, idle, and unwilling to fight and conquer further territories, surrounded by slaves and paraded in palanquins, Portuguese men were losing India.
Linschoten’s is also the first hostile and authoritative description of a Goan household, and it set the tone and ‘inspired’ other descriptions. Accompanied by De Brys publisher’s engravings, it provided unforgettable images of the Portuguese and their possessions in Asia, much abhorred (and coveted) by the northern European maritime nations.Footnote 67 He spent five years (1583–1589) in Goa working as a secretary to Archbishop D. Vicente da Fonseca (d. 1586), with access to strategic political information and everyday accounts of life in the city. Upon his return to the Netherlands, Linschoten converted to Protestantism and joined the circles of Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen (1604–1679), who opposed Habsburg’s presence in the Dutch territory.Footnote 68
Detail-oriented Linschoten reported on what may have been both public knowledge and hidden, intentionally or not, from the view of a passing traveller. For this reason, the hidden grew in importance in his narrative, but, as the descriptions appear juicier, the distinction between private and public got fuzzier. Thus, he claims that ‘Portuguese, Mestiço and Indian Christian women’ were housebound and rarely left their houses except to go to church or to visit friends.Footnote 69 Even when they emerged from their homes, they were carried in palanquins, protected from the view of outsiders. On the other hand, unlike their mistresses, who cannot be seen on the street, their male and female ‘slaves’ were portrayed as freely criss-crossing the city and doing errands. A Goan lady would only walk the city street when attending a church night service. The noble Goan women were also captive and constrained to dwell in their houses.
Wives and daughters of the casados were never shown to (male) guests, and not even a male cousin above the age of 15 was allowed to sleep under the same roof with the master’s family: ‘Their male and female slaves always guard them for their safety and service.’Footnote 70 Should one take purdah, as this custom was called among Hindu and Muslim elites, a state of unfreedom to move, as a kind of slavery? Linschoten’s descriptions contradict his arguments. He spent pages describing the interior of the casado household, which he could not have witnessed if what he stated were true. The Goan household is portrayed as a den of illicit pleasures because all ‘women are luxurious and unchaste’. Wives take lovers and poison their husbands into stupor with the datura plant while they have adulterous sex with ‘soldiers’.Footnote 71 Exotic spices—cloves, betel, ginger, pepper—and other foods inciting senses are added to these eroticised descriptions. These substances were generally considered aphrodisiacs, as the medical and botanical treatises claimed. Garcia de Orta’s Collóquios and Cristóvão da Costa’s Tratado advised Portuguese men on the effects of certain spices that ‘lift the member’. The linking of women and spices as commodities to be kept locked up in storage rooms to prevent them from being ‘spoilt’ is not accidental in a tropical colonial world obsessed with ubiquitous forces of ‘corruption’.Footnote 72 An interesting detail in Orta’s text reveals his close relationship and collaboration with his ‘criada (servant or slave?)’, who seemed to have known as much as her master about remedies and concoctions, and how to store them.Footnote 73
Women were, according to Linschoten, easily corruptible and freely chose to engage in carnal encounters with ‘soldiers’. He even claimed that he knew how they ‘felt’ about it. As husbands were known to kill lovers on the spot, Linschoten stated that women had no fear and that they affirmed that ‘there can be no better death, than to die in that manner, saying that they are sacrificed for love, which they think to be a great honor’.Footnote 74 This Freudian insight into the connection between desire and destruction, avant la lettre, was probably concocted from Linschoten’s classical education and referred to the famous Greek twins (Eros and Thanatos). It also helped to spice up his text and enhance his literary tone.
For Linschoten, all women have the same psychological predisposition: slave or free. In terms of ‘lechery’, he did not see any difference between female household slaves and their mistresses. When female slaves accompanied their mistresses to church, they ‘slipped into some shoppe or corner […] where their lovers meet them’.Footnote 75 Just like their mistresses, their sexual encounters were with soldiers, who were also subaltern actors in Portuguese colonial Goa, living on a pittance during the entire rainy season when there was no employment. The same female servants/slaves stole from their households to feed them, according to Linschoten.
His excursus into the ethnography of Goan slavery ends with interesting legal and social issues concerning children born to household slaves. A shard of female agency is caught or, more likely, imagined by Linschoten when he stated that the slave women were ‘proud’ to have children with Portuguese or white men.Footnote 76 According to Goan legislation, the child of a slave was automatically a slave of the master. For that reason, masters were ‘well content’. However, if the father of the child paid the master of the slave woman some money, then he could reclaim the child, who would thus become a free person, while the mother remained a slave.Footnote 77
The final point that Linschoten wanted to make about Goan colonial society concerns the question of race—although he does not use the word, the meaning of which, in any case, has not yet been fixed in its modern definition—as he straightforwardly identifies the difference in skin colourFootnote 78:
The Portingals of India, are many of them marryed with the natural borne women of the country, and the children proceeding of them are called Mesticos, that is half countrymen. These Mesticos are commonlie of yellowish colour, notwithstanding there are manie women among them, that are faire and well formed. The children of the Portingales, both boyes and gyrls, [which are] borne in India, are called Castisos, and are in all things like [unto] the Portingales, onely somewhat differing in colour, for they draw towards a yealow colour: children of those Castisos are yealow, and altogether [like the] Mesticos, and the children of Mesticos are of colour and fashioned like the natural borne Countrrimen or Decaniins of the countrie, so that the posteritie of the Portingales, both men and women being in the third degree, doe seeme to be natural Indians, both in colour and fashion.Footnote 79
Linschoten claims that the Portuguese were in the process of becoming Indian or, more precisely, like Deccanis, as the Adilshahi kingdom was still the closest and the most dangerous enemy surrounding Goa.Footnote 80 In this astounding statement on skin-colour variation, it is easy to read the echo of the medieval Iberian purity-of-blood statutes that defined the traces and quantity of Jewish blood by degrees of consanguinity. The Portuguese casado community in Goa had been constituted by Linschoten into a biological minority, similar to New Christians in Portugal and Spain. While he was in Goa, working in the office of the archbishop, the inquisitorial processes against New Christians were picking up speed. Of course, it was common knowledge that many casado households may have been established by intermarriage with enslaved or captive women who had converted to Christianity only recently. Without direct accusation, Linschoten managed to plant doubt about the contamination of infidel/gentile and slave blood running through casado veins.
From Lischoten’s account onwards, the image of Portuguese Christians in Goa as degenerate and the progeny of mixtures of different Asian peoples, slaves included, continued to reverberate in hostile European visitors’ accounts. Asian and African women, who all, whether slave or free, possessed and revealed in their behaviour a slavish mentality combined with a robust sexual drive presumably corresponding to the tropical climate, were—according to this discursive thread—at the root of Portuguese civilisational decline and political disaster. Some Portuguese historians who lived in Goa, such as Diogo do Couto, added other problems, but confirmed the theory of corruption and decline.
In the early seventeenth century, a French apothecary and merchant, Jean Mocquet (1576–1617), painted an even more devastating portrait of the Goan colonial society. With no steady income, he experienced hardship and poverty in a way that Linschoten certainly never did. However, many of his descriptions repeat some commonplace topoi in Linschoten’s text and other travel accounts: jealous husbands, unfaithful wives, honour killings, the use of datura to drug, humiliate, and kill one’s husband, and so on, and the presence of numerous slaves in the household and on the street. However, it is the extreme manner of the torture of servants and slaves that stands out in the narrative. Men and women, gagged to prevent them from screaming, were mercilessly beaten with sticks while the master ‘counted the strokes on his rosary’.Footnote 81 Mocquet portrayed Portuguese as a ‘perverse and malignant’ nation. However, the presence of the enslaved daughter of the king of Siam inspired Mocquet to describe cruel tortures inflicted on the Portuguese captured by the ‘pagans’ as well.Footnote 82 They were boiled in huge casseroles and trampled by elephants, and so on. Torture—imagined or true—was proof of the ingrained cruelty of the oriental others.
While Mocquet was in Goa in 1609, he also met his compatriot François Pyrard de Laval (1578–1621), who stayed longer and travelled more widely in the Indian Ocean and through Asia. He also had his book published before Mocquet’s travel account. His opinion of the Portuguese in Goa is no better and follows the same Linschoten’s ready-made topoi with some novel, somewhat surprising, and not wholly credible twists. Thus, male and female slaves who accompanied their mistresses to church had their legs shackled to prevent them from running away.Footnote 83 Just a few pages later, Pyrard gets all enthusiastic about the beauty of slave girls ‘from all the nations of India’ when they parade dressed in silk while accompanying their mistresses to church.Footnote 84 The discrepancy between wearing shackles and silk is marvellously reduced in Pyrard’s description of the public walking patins (shoes), demi pied (a half foot) high, worn by the casados’ wives.Footnote 85 Goan mistresses had their shackles, too. They had to be assisted by servants and took 15 minutes to walk from the entrance of the church to their seats. These and other tidbits of Goan delinquent sociability and gender relations in the tropics appear in other travel narratives, with slight changes.
Francesco Carletti (1573–1636), a Florentine merchant who stayed in Goa for 21 months (1599–1601), is a case in point. He noticed excessive tropical sexuality and seemed to have been fascinated by what he saw, but omitted to address Portuguese cruelty and ‘bad’ character. However, he barely distinguished married women of the casados from the numerous female slaves and servants described by Mocquet, Pyrard de Laval, and Linschoten.Footnote 86 In one vignette, a female servant bailed out her mistress who was about to be caught in adultery. She suffered beatings but kept the secret. Carletti appreciated the slaves’ loyalty and spotted their beauty: ‘[The women] have forty to fifty slaves of various nations, and most of them beautiful.’Footnote 87 He did not report the inhuman treatment they usually got from their owners, nor did he ‘notice’ the working of the Goan Inquisition. This may be because his travel narrative was conceived as an oral presentation to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Fernando I de’ Medici (1549–1609), and the subject was the marvels and riches of the world, not the social critique of Portuguese tropical colonialism.
Pietro della Valle (1586–1652)—an Italian humanist, linguist, and antiquarian, who visited Goa between April and November 1623 and wrote a famous letter about his stay in India—commented dryly about Portuguese excessive self-esteem and pride as well as their sycophantic morals.Footnote 88 By the mid-seventeenth century, the dark and crumbling side of the golden Goa promoted by the initial enthusiastic visitors who had admired the affluent markets, sumptuous buildings, the lushness of nature, and the pomp of the colonial society, had already become well known. Despite that, even for Pyrard, Goa was still ‘the most celebrated and famous city in the East’.Footnote 89
Although Portuguese royal officials were aware of the economic, demographic, and social troubles brewing in much of the Estado da Índia, and Goa in particular, that would lead, in the long run, to a lamented ‘loss’ of India, they kept denying it. The demographic decline was, nevertheless, a fact. Thus, the city’s population decreased by the end of the century to 45,000.Footnote 90 In António Bocarro’s famous census of the 1630s, the city of Goa’s population consisted of 3,000 households (800 Portuguese and 2,200 ‘black casados’). He also estimated that the Portuguese owned, on average, 10 slaves per household of two kinds: two men capable of bearing arms and eight women and ‘useless’ young slaves (bichos).Footnote 91 The number of enslaved people was higher if one adds those who worked for religious orders (Franciscans, Dominicans, Discalced Carmelites, Jesuits, Augustinians), of whom 691 resided in Goa.Footnote 92 Therefore, Pietro della Valle’s terse statement that ‘the greatest part [of the Goan population] were slaves, black and lewd (=ignorant) generation, going naked for the most part, or else very ill-clad, seeming to me rather a disparagement than an ornament to the City’ had not been simply a figment of a resentful foreigner’s imagination.
Economic and racial distinctions played a complicated guessing game in travellers’ accounts when they tried to classify people and determine the correct social stratification. For this reason, the category of slave/servant was used in multiple senses. Domestic or household slaves in Goa were, to a degree, a privileged category—often designated men and women who were a part of the household, but at the bottom of the hierarchy, and whose status could change in the course of their lifetime. They could be sold to another household, but they could also be ‘freed’ or even married (rare as it may have been) in the household. From the beginning of the sixteenth century, the slaves came mainly from Japan, Macau, Bengal, and East Asia through the commercial slave networks already in existence.Footnote 93 By the end of the century, when Japanese slaves were forbidden, it was the East African slaves who were imported to Goa, in addition to a limited number of those who were captured on Muslim ships carrying pilgrims to Mecca.Footnote 94 The slave trade was a lucrative daily business at the public auction (leilão) in the city’s central commercial street, rua direita. It was a fact and feature of Portuguese colonial life in Goa for over three centuries.
Recreating genealogy of indigenous purity
Slave ownership and trade tarnished the Portuguese self-professed moral high ground in foreign visitors’ eyes, but everyone was interested in continuing the practice. As reproaches of slavery moved into the murky background of ‘envious’ voices, the stain of uncleanness stuck to the Portuguese colonial society in Goa.Footnote 95 The key concept, used casually and descriptively to define social distinctions in the early decades of the sixteenth century by Portuguese traders such as Duarte Barbosa (d. 1521) and Tomé Pires (1465–1540), was the ‘caste (casta)’. At that point, it was used to classify and rank people whom they encountered during their travels along the Indian coast based on ‘colour’ and social customs such as endogamy, occupation, and civility.
However, by the mid-sixteenth century in Goa, both ecclesiastical sources and travellers’ accounts seemed to have grasped the importance of caste. It was identified as a stumbling block in conversion to Catholicism. The First Provincial Church Council (action 1, decree 2) provides a glimpse into the problem. It strictly forbade anyone to convert a person by giving him/her food prohibited by their ‘caste’.Footnote 96 Casta was also interchangeable with ‘nação (birth/nation)’ and ‘raça’, and was attributed to the smallest unit of the society that the Portuguese identified as a marker of social distinction and stratification:
Gentiles are distinguished by caste and generation of major and minor dignity, and they consider Christians the lowest. They adhere to this [principle] so superstitiously that nobody of higher caste can eat or drink with the lower because if they do, they would lose their caste and dominance (preminencia) and would stay in the degree and honor of the lowest person with whom he ate, […]. This superstition is ordered by their sect to be followed, and even in case of extreme necessity, they cannot eat or drink with inferior [person]. They are rather obliged to die.Footnote 97
The First Provincial Church Council defined caste as a religious institution because it was sanctioned by the gentile ‘sect (seita)’.Footnote 98 This definition excluded the possibility of caste divisions among Christians. That, however, turned out to be a chimera. Through baptism (regeneratio), the converted Christian landholding elites in Goa officially acquired a status that was equal to those of Portuguese-born casados and retained their pre-Portuguese distinctions. Unwittingly, the pro-Christian legislation had, in theory, the capacity to abolish the difference between coloniser (Portuguese casados) and colonised (Goan Christians). However, new sharp distinctions emerged partly from the Goan pre-Portuguese social ancient régime. These distinctions were not spontaneous, but willed, negotiated, and imposed reactions by the Goan elites, newly re-empowered through conversion.
Christian egalitarian ideology (rarely indeed practised anywhere) reshuffled pre-existing social order. Still, those who were able to profit immediately from the changes in power relations were precisely those who were powerful landowners before the Portuguese. Two convert communities, Brahmans and Charodos (or Kṣatriya/kings), who formerly held the highest status, started a fight for recognition of—in the coloniser’s language—their ‘nobility’. Initially, at least, they positioned themselves in opposition to casados, who were, in their eyes, ‘half-Indian’, of mixed blood, and lacked uncontaminated family genealogy. The term ‘caste’—already employed to qualify and distinguish social divisions and rank them according to ‘nobility’—carried another association of purity and chastity (adj. castus). For that reason, Portuguese in India who did not intermarry with local women were called ‘castizos’ as opposed to ‘mestiços’, who were identified as mixed-blood casados.Footnote 99
If, after the initial levelling conquest-cum-conversion effect, Portuguese Goa started to resemble a more diversified society based on some old and some new status distinctions, then, by the seventeenth century, divisions based on purity and pollution re-emerged, and the concept of caste helped to crystallise and rigidify social hierarchy. The new order—including caste divisions, formerly sanctioned by the ‘gentile sect’—was reproduced, with some variation, but this time with the sanction of the Catholic Church. While slavery all but disappeared from the debate (not from practice, alas) about Christian moral life in Goa, caste-inspired divisions took all the discursive space.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Goan Christian elites made an ideological offensive against the casado descendants, portraying them as impure and degraded Portuguese, while presenting themselves as pure Indian aristocracy comparable to the highest Portuguese fidalguia. At the same time, as the two factions—Brahmans and Charodos—fought between themselves to prove the higher status of one over the other, they constructed a mythical geography and temporality of pure antique India in which ‘castes’ (confounded with varnas) prospered without mixing.
Both groups intervened by way of treatises published in Goa and Lisbon. They professed their Catholic orthodoxy and proselytising zeal in these texts while arguing for the purity of their Indian/Goan lineage (and caste). The outlier, and the first among them to make a mark in Rome, was Mateus de Castro (circa 1594–1679), whose Espelho dos Bramenes was a ‘political guide’ in epistolary form. He was the first Brahman to address, self-consciously, in the first-person singular, the question of Brahman identity for the European audience.Footnote 100 In earlier European texts, Brahmans were mere ‘informants’. In this treatise, they speak (through Mateus) for themselves. He expressed his loyalty to the Portuguese Crown, but also demanded that ‘natives’ be ‘treated as vassals and not as slaves’.Footnote 101 When in Rome, he presented himself to the Pope as belonging to the ‘casta dos brâmanes’, while the Portuguese in Goa were, in his opinion, all mixed-blood progenies of ‘market women, Malabars, Bengalis and blacks (pretos)’.Footnote 102 His pride in Brahman identity was geared toward effacing Jesuit opinion that Brahmans were ‘worse than goats’. He developed topoi that would be repeated over and over in this kind of identity narrative: that Gaspar, one of the Magi kings, was a Brahman and that St. Thomas the Apostle had been sent to the Orient for the Brahmans who ruled it.Footnote 103 Written in perfect Portuguese and the language of Western political grammar, he openly supported the Portuguese empire to secure the highest aristocratic position and other privileges for his Brahman lineage.
All of the diligent writers of identity narratives, Brahmans and Charodos, following in the steps of Mateus de Castro, held ecclesiastical offices and positioned themselves as ardent servants of the Portuguese empire and defenders of the Catholic Church.Footnote 104 They all claimed that they were writing histories of India’s ‘antique’ past in which their ancestors ruled, in one way or another, as kings or priests.
António João Frias (1664–1727), born in the village of Talaulim (Tiswadi island), wrote Aureola dos Indios, in which he proved the antiquity and usefulness of Brahman hereditary nobility.Footnote 105 He draws his ‘Indian’ examples almost exclusively from Portuguese ‘Orientalist’ literature to make sweeping comparisons:
When Moses wanted to appoint Governors who would substitute him for the Israelite People, said the Sacred Scripture, he chose noble people from each Tribe[…]. In the same way, there was in Malabar an esteemed family of Brahmans (Bracmanes) whose occupation could not be taken up by any other person unless he was a close relative of a governing King.Footnote 106
He staked out his priority claims for everything that Brahmans did or created in whichever direction he ploughed his sources. Thus, the first philosopher was a Brahman, and all European nations came to learn from him.Footnote 107 He did not quote all his sources, some of which involved orally transmitted knowledge that the Catholic missionaries had excavated in the preceding century, such as the myth of the origin of varnas from the primeval being: ‘Brahmanes come from the head of the Brahma, Ghetris from arms, and Nayars from feet.’Footnote 108
The very same sources inspired an entirely different ‘historical’ argument. As Frias established a genealogy of the Brahmans connecting the ‘ancient’ king Cherimperimale with Gaspar, one of the three Magi, baptised later by St. Thomas the Apostle, Leonardo Paes (1662–1715) responded in 1713 with a counter-narrative: Promptuario de diffinições indicas. He opposed a Brahmanical vision of Indian history with his own Charodo or Kshatriya vision and legitimised discourse on Indian nobility, similarly, within an overarching Christian universalist framework.
He dug deeper into biblical history to counter the Brahmanical genealogical story of Gaspar and St. Thomas. His treatise started with the Creation, and it was Indo, ‘Noah’s third nephew [great-grandson?], son of Gogo and nephew of Saba […] the eighth nephew of Adam’ who was sent to India. Indo became the ‘progenitor of the Kings of the nation (naçao=caste) of the Raja or Raja Putruquetry’.Footnote 109 A long list of military commanders and soldiers who fought valorously for the Portuguese king consisted of ‘Charodos genus militum Indicorum’.Footnote 110 In his eulogy to Kshatriya, he hints that some Kshatriyas can be incorporated into the Portuguese empire, although they can also be independent and even hostile commanders of Indian armies.
In addition to promoting Charodo lineage, Paes debunked Brahmanical theories of supremacy in Aureola dos Indios by pointing out inconsistencies and falsifications, and topping them with his falsifications. João da Cunha Jaques, another Charodo, in his Espada de David, contra o Golias do Bramanismo (a manuscript written between 1705 and 1713), claimed that Brahmans descended from fishermen.Footnote 111
These conflicting elite narratives of origins suffered from the excess of imaginary history (Indian and European), while at the same time fixing the identities of Brahmans and Charodos in the atemporal present with their essential ‘aristocratic’ qualities. In the long eighteenth century, social life in India started to resemble a caste-like system, and the rank and corporate essence crystalised in the separate population units.Footnote 112 Historicised genealogies and identity narratives sanctioned by rulers such as Mughal emperors and even Portuguese kings helped reformulate and reinvent political and social order within changing and expanding polities. Wealthy and prominent elites with murky origins endeavoured to mark their difference by fabricating their genealogies through links with mythical founders and Kshatriya varna.Footnote 113
Slave stories and fiction
Historical archives in Goa did not record slave voices, and there are no slave ‘identity’ narratives because slaves had neither community nor identity to defend. However, their impure status and lack of genealogy defined a negative model of personhood in Goa, against which all social groups endeavoured to build their own ritual purity and social rank. Caste and slavery fed into each other’s stories.
Outside of Goa, away from the ‘purity’ complex of the Goan elites, in the Malay–Indonesian archipelago, however, ‘mestiços’ with some political, cultural, and linguistic connections to the Portuguese formed a separate entity, often called ‘black Portuguese’. Many of them were freed slaves. Leonard Andaya named them a ‘Portuguese tribe’. They mostly thrived economically and blended further with the indigenous population.
When the twentieth-century Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freire briefly visited Cabo Verde, Angola, Mozambique, and Goa (1951–1952), he saw the ‘wonderful miscegenation’ of Portuguese and Indian races. He attributed it to the ‘plasticity’ and adaptability of the Portuguese in tropical regions, inspired by ‘Arab and oriental concepts of slavery and polygamy […] and social policy scarcely European’.Footnote 114 For him, Luso-tropicalism, mostly a sociological phantasy, was a ‘singular position’ held by the Lusitans among the European imperial powers. His enthusiasm was kindled by his local informants, who were pro-Portuguese and advocated resistance to the ever-growing menace of the Indian state. He left Goa without knowing about the long-term social conflict between various factions and, most of all, about the animosity directed against the mestiços.Footnote 115 He did not understand that very few, if any, social groups, lineages, or castes in Goa wanted to be associated with the ‘stain’ of miscegenation and slavery. The shiny, ‘golden’ story of Luso-tropicalism and gentle Goan Portuguese customs was a convenient political fiction for yet another authoritarian regime.
The exploitation of unfree labour remained on the dark side of the Lusitanian tropics. All principal actors whose archival remains are discussed in this article—European travellers, Portuguese ecclesiastics, and Goan Catholic elite castes—denounced slavery from a moral/Christian high ground while profiting economically from the institution. The Goan case shows that studying slavery and enslavement illuminates in more than one way the processes of identity formation of the elites as well as the broader social shifts of differentiation, ethnicisation, and racialisation on the Indian subcontinent in the early modern period.
Acknowledgements
This article was written and completed in the distressing 2024 post-Covid New Delhi. It started as a paper presented in Bonn (Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies) and Amsterdam (International Institute of Social History). I thank the organizers. Different people encouraged me personally and/or contributed in various ways to the ideas expressed in the text: Divya Cherian, Ananya Chakravarty, Nandini Chaturvedula, Nandini Chatterjee, Indrani Chatterjee, Richard M. Eaton, Rômulo da Silva Ehalt, Patrícia Souza de Faria, Marie Fourcade, Sumit Guha, Christophe Z. Guilmoto, Stephanie Hassell, Emma Kalb, Mahmood Kooria, Giuseppe Marcocci, Stuart McMannus, Carmen Nocentelli, Rosalind O’Hanlon, Matthias van Rossum, Nitin Sinha, Cynthia Talbot, and Ângela Barreto Xavier.
Competing interests
None.
