"The Relic State: St. Francis Xavier and the Politics of Ritual in Portuguese India" by Pamila Gupta

Pamila Gupta

Deposited 2004

Abstract
This dissertation explores the evolving shape of a series of Catholic festivals that took place throughout the duration of Portuguese colonial rule in Goa, India (1510–1961), and for which the centerpiece was the corpse of a (Spanish) Jesuit missionary and saint, Francis Xavier. Understanding ritual practices as sites for church and state politics and tensions of empire(s), I trace how shifting hierarchies, materialities, and discourses between and among Portuguese colonial officials and Jesuit missionaries in Goa manifested themselves in both small-scale Jesuit-organized Catholic feasts and larger colonial state-organized “Solemn Expositions” at critical junctures (1554, 1624, 1782, 1859, 1952, 1961), Xavier's memory sustained through his very mutability as a political, religious, and spiritual symbol. My research illuminates how the “incorruptness” of a saint's corpse—despite its very real physical decay—is first engendered and then sustained in and through ritualization, its periodic display serving to represent and reinforce colonial and missionary practices, first in the face of a rise and then a decline in imperial power, to an evolving public that is both an instrument and effect of Portuguese colonial rule. Ritual analysis offers insight into the ways church and state structure and are structured by one another over time, and sheds light on the processes by which an increasingly diverse and expanding public, in shaping the form and content of ritual, defines and delimits colonial authority. In combining archival and ethnographic methods, I utilize a variety of source materials from different time frames—Jesuit biographies of Francis Xavier, European travelogues on Goa, colonial legislation, state-commissioned books and ritual manuals dedicated to this saint, articles from various Goan presses, and a series of medical reports documenting the changing condition of Xavier's corpse—as well as interviews and observations that were conducted in both Portugal and Goa, to explore the multiple ways that ritual practices in a colonial setting are configured by contending state structures, religious organizations, and individuals. Lastly, the dissertation traces the metaphoric and metonymic quality of Xavier's corpse and relics.