35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

106
EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
fire would blaze fiercely and fast, soon sinking the boat and leaving
the authorities able only to record one more illegal cremation.
The missionaries simply couldn’t grasp that another people’s faith
could be as dearly cherished and deeply embedded as their own.
Even those Goans who had converted still clung to aspects of their
old religion. According to Richard Lannoy, Goa’s cultural historian,
the chapels that can be found in most Goanese Christian homes ‘are
direct derivations from the culture of family shrines in Hindu homes.’
And the old Hindu caste system continued on, Christians who had
once been from high-caste families rarely socialising with those who
had belonged to lower castes. To this day, members of low and high
castes almost never intermarry. Many descendants of those lofty
Brahmin families who had converted even continued the traditional
practice of giving annual donations to those temples that necessity
had forced the Hindus to establish beyond Portuguese territory.
Indeed, I was assured this, too, still went on, the Miranda family of
Loutulim dispatching a sack of rice and a heap of coconuts each year
to the Kavalem Shanta-Durga temple. The Gomes Pereiras, pillars
of Panjim society, do much the same for the Fatorpa Mahamayi
temple.
I was accompanied on this trip in 1975 by two acquaintances from
Canada, David and Esther, who were taking a brief holiday in India.
I knew we were entering Goa because I noticed a little shrine by
the side of the road dedicated to the Virgin Mary. A fenced-off
enclosure, it contained a garishly painted concrete statue garlanded
with fresh flowers, surrounded by burning candles and joss-sticks.
A dozen or so miles back down the coast road, near Karwar in
Karnataka state, we’d passed a similar enclosure dedicated to the
elephant god, Ganesh. It, too, had been garlanded and lovingly
adorned with candles and incense. Fifty-odd miles farther south,
outside Calicut, once a major port serving the Lakshadweep Sea,
off the coast of what is now Kerala, there’d been another wayfarers’
shrine. It consisted of a red concrete pyramid topped by a hammer
and sickle. This, too, had been recently garlanded and decorated
with burning candles and joss-sticks. In 1975, as it has had on and
off since then, Kerala had a Marxist government.