Re: [Goanet] The Inquisition Lore
Dearest Gilbert, Blessings! Thank you so much for your valuable inputs. Our Trust is definitely focused to research, collect and assemble hidden facts, as well as segregate distorted facts as presented in today's day and age. We would definitely love to share notes on the subjects, and together take things forward for a better Goa. As is our vision. We could also be glad and look forward to actually meet up. warm regards, Adrian Simoes Managing Director; The Judeo-Christian Heritage of the West Coast of India Trust Panjim - Goa On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 7:17 AM, Gilbert Lawrence wrote: > Adrian Simoes wrote: Managing Director; The Judeo-Christian Heritage of > the West Coast of India. > Panjim - Goa > > > it was just a "holy purging", 3000 Jews including Garcia de Orta's sister > being killed in Ela, Old Goa was an exaggeration! Was it? > GL Responds: > Yes! What you have quoted above is a gross exaggeration if not fiction. I > would have expected better with your title. Please read some factual > accounts and the following are a few of them. So thanks for giving me the > opportunity to present them. > The Inquisition period extended from 1560 to 1812 with a short period when > it was abolished. During the approximate 250 years, authoritative > historians report fifty seven (57) perpetrators (Europeans and Indians) > were sentenced to death and executed. An equal number died in effigy; > suggesting the desire of the authorities to use the Auto de Fe event as a > deterrence to crime for the local population. > My reading of Goan history: During the interim period when the > inquisition was abolished, a few hundred Goans died in forced labor camps > in the efforts of the Portuguese colonial authorities to build its capital > in Vasco and later at Panjim. Likely the lack of an "Inquisition > authority" over the governor permitted the colonial government to brutalize > the native population as a whole with more vicious measures with compulsory > forced displacement of the native male population from their villages to > labor camps. > Absolute power and atrocities of the monarchs during this period of > "Absolute Monarch" (16th -19th centuries) was not confined only to Europe. > Similar state-ruler atrocities / cruelties were committed by Hindu Rajas > and Muslim Sultans in the Indian subcontinent. A visit to Hampi and > Bijapur displays the prisons and torture techniques. While Europe saw the > kings rule by "divine right" after the 16th century, that cloak of divine > authority was assumed in India much earlier as seen by the royal titles of > the Indian kings. > Some of the old uncivilized torture techniques even exist today as > water-boarding, electric shocks etc in several civilized countries of > Europe, Americas and Middle East. > Regards, GL >
Re: [Goanet] The Inquisition Lore
Adrian Simoes wrote: Managing Director; The Judeo-Christian Heritage of the West Coast of India. Panjim - Goa it was just a "holy purging", 3000 Jews including Garcia de Orta's sister being killed in Ela, Old Goa was an exaggeration! Was it? GL Responds: Yes! What you have quoted above is a gross exaggeration if not fiction. I would have expected better with your title. Please read some factual accounts and the following are a few of them. So thanks for giving me the opportunity to present them. The Inquisition period extended from 1560 to 1812 with a short period when it was abolished. During the approximate 250 years, authoritative historians report fifty seven (57) perpetrators (Europeans and Indians) were sentenced to death and executed. An equal number died in effigy; suggesting the desire of the authorities to use the Auto de Fe event as a deterrence to crime for the local population. My reading of Goan history: During the interim period when the inquisition was abolished, a few hundred Goans died in forced labor camps in the efforts of the Portuguese colonial authorities to build its capital in Vasco and later at Panjim. Likely the lack of an "Inquisition authority" over the governor permitted the colonial government to brutalize the native population as a whole with more vicious measures with compulsory forced displacement of the native male population from their villages to labor camps. Absolute power and atrocities of the monarchs during this period of "Absolute Monarch" (16th -19th centuries) was not confined only to Europe. Similar state-ruler atrocities / cruelties were committed by Hindu Rajas and Muslim Sultans in the Indian subcontinent. A visit to Hampi and Bijapur displays the prisons and torture techniques. While Europe saw the kings rule by "divine right" after the 16th century, that cloak of divine authority was assumed in India much earlier as seen by the royal titles of the Indian kings. Some of the old uncivilized torture techniques even exist today as water-boarding, electric shocks etc in several civilized countries of Europe, Americas and Middle East. Regards, GL
[Goanet] The Inquisition Lore
Santosh Helekar writes: Priolkar's book relies naturally on secondary sources. But it was well-received by eminent historians such as C. R. Boxer. Regarding Dellon and Buchanan, I should have said that they are eyewitness accounts rather than well-researched. No independent facts contradict what they have written. They have been maligned based on pure speculations and biases of their detractors, and generalization of such ideological concoctions as the "Black Legend" to the Goan situation. GL responds: Eyewitness accounts too can have biases and an ax to grind. It is for later readers to sift through the facts or see through the account presented on the issues; with the benefit of hindsight. FACT: Dellon was a French physician practicing in Diu having an amorous affair with his patient; who happened to be the mistress of the (Portuguese) governor of Diu. What would be the punishment for that offence be TODAY? Loss of medical license and a charge of rape of the patient. (there is nothing like consensual sex between a physician and the patient). Dr. Dillon (by his own account) was given opportunities to repent and leave Diu and Goa. But the French physician may have thought he was smarter than the Portuguese. What should the authorities have done to the doctor when the complaints were made against him? What would have been done TODAY if a physician had these undeniable complaints lodged against him? Reading Dillon's work, the author maligns himself as a nobel professional with poor judgment and poor character who took advantage of his position; and who just refused to accept his mistakes and misjudgments.Regards, GL
[Goanet] The Inquisition Lore
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 arti
[Goanet] THE INQUISITION LORE
The "Inquisition Lore" in today's "Navhind Times' Panorama" written by the great writer, journalist and book publisher Mr. Frederick Noronha is an excellent article. It is an appropriate commentary to various writings on Inquisition and touches on contentious statements and nails the terrible lies that have been spread on the subject. I wish it is read by all including one netizen who uses rabid language out of context. Dr. Francisco Colaco
