Drugs, Health, Bodies and Souls in the Tropics ... - Ines G. Županov

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Heroic individual feats, especially martyrdom were not whole-heartedly encouraged,
as this was suspected of being reckless and wasteful behavior. In the light of a
hagiographic history or an edifying letter re-telling a recent death in the field,
regardless of whether it qualified for red or white martyrdom, Jesuit martyrs were
cherished and their deeds amplified to suit European readers and to boost the spirits
and expectations of the young novices and other members. The Jesuit argument was
that there was nothing intrinsically bad in dying as a witness of faith, in the manner of
an early Christian saint, but that it was even better to exercise "discretion" and
prudence and preserve one's body for more strenuous work. 112 In fact, each case of
martyrdom was looked into by the Jesuit authorities in order to discern whether the
death could have been avoided, or was inevitable and thus divinely inspired. The first
death of a member of the Society in India, Antonio Criminali, who had been struck by
an "infidel" hand, was judged imprudent in spite of a torrent of enthusiastic letters
about his courage. 113
Circuitously, descriptions of scenes of martyrdom and of tortured and
fractured bodies serve as one more proof of Jesuit adaptability. Staged as a
providential, but temporarily tragic battle between forces of good and evil, martyrdom
was the surest inscription of the Christian message on the pagan landscape. The blood
spilled on the ground becomes a fertile compost for the new Christian vine, according
to the Jesuit historical imagination employed to make the best of an otherwise
complicated issue. In the same way, local religious folklore in Salsete, south of Goa,
where the second and more important martyrdom occurred in 1583, accorded a special
place to the spilling of blood. Martyrs, just like any other type of martial heroes, were
easily translated into the tutelary deities of particular lineages and clans. In the
seventeenth century, the blood of a Jesuit missionary, João de Brito, would transform
the color of the sand into terra-cotta red. To this day, it is reputed to have
thaumaturgic qualities and is taken away as a relic from Oriyur by the pilgrims.
Before the Jesuit martyrs left their blood and bones in the soil, European relics
were steadily imported. We read about them on the ships where they helped to calm
the stormy weather and turbulent seas. They were paraded in processions or, in the
last moment of extreme danger, thrown into the sea. All these and similar rituals
marking, as some would say, the possession of space, appear as favorite topoi in the
literature of maritime disasters, in Jesuit correspondence and in hagiographic histories
and paintings. 114 Just as Portuguese "discoverers" planted memorial columns
(padrãos) along the coasts of their maritime passage, as an exaggerated token of their
presence and their claim to proprietorship of the land, Jesuit bodies, alive and dead,
were planted with a similar end in mind. Moreover, Jesuit sanctity grew and
flourished in the tropics and became part of the social landscape, to the point of
resisting centralizing efforts of the Roman curia, as the scramble for Francis Xavier's
relics clearly revealed. Except for Xavier's right hand, chopped off and sent to Rome
in 1614, where enshrined in a reliquary it consecrated the side chapel of the Bom
112 See the classification of the Jesuit "athletes" into saints, blessed, venerable, etc. in Tylenda, Joseph,
N., Jesuit Saints and Martyrs, Chicago, 1998.
113
See my unpublished article "The Art of Dying in the Tropics: Jesuit Martyrs in India (16 th c.)"
presented at the conference Religion and Violence, organized by Ronnie Hsia, Hartmut Lehmann, Peter
van der Veer, at the University of Amsterdam, 25-28 May, 2000.
114 Brito, Bernardo Gomes de, Historia Tragico Maritima. Em que se escrevem chronologicamente os Naufragios
que tiverão as Naus de Portugal, depois que se poz em exercicio a Navegação da India, Lisboa, 1735-1736, 2 vols.
(anthology of 12 shipwrecks]. See also French translation (in abridged form), Histoires tragico-maritimes; Trois
naufrages portugais au XVIe siècles, Paris, 1999.
Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris