Portuguese architects and Goan artisans worked together to create more than monuments – they celebrated art, fusion of iconography and styles. While the Muslim craftsmen introduced Islamic motifs, the Hindu sculptors and engravers borrowed heavily from temple forms and figures.
Most churches have plain facades that are the whitest of whites. The opulence of the interiors, calculated to move even the sternest non-believer, is heightened by these facades – magnificent in their starkness, as seen in the church of Santa Cruz, the Church of Immaculate Conception, or Reis Magos. The brilliance of white contrasts with the skies and the vivid green of the hill-top surroundings equally.
The opulence and glitter in the church interiors, created by the counter-reformist movement in Portugal, found a ready response in the craftsmen who had, so far, carved and chiselled stone to intricate perfection. They created engraved palanquins of wood for the church, like they had created carriages for the Hindu gods. At the pulpit of Bom Jesus is the figure of the snake-woman, adapted to the baroque curves of the church – spectacular, and suitable.
St. Augustine towers over the history, and the other churches of Velha Goa. Made of the local laterite blocks, it lends austerity to the otherwise grand structures. The styles tell the story of the fusion: Se Cathedral and Nossa Senhora are clearly modelled after European monuments, Bom Jesus and St. Augustine Tower display the genesis of the Indian style, and at Espirito Santo of Velha Goa and Margao, Santana of Talaulim, Nossa Senhora da Piedade, Divar and Santo Estevao, Jua (the last church to be built in Goa) – the Indianisation is complete.
Statue of Jesus, Se Cathedral, Velha Goa
The wall paintings at both Our Lady of the Rosary, and the Lady of the Mount (beautifully and painstakingly restored) with floral motifs and flowing lines are very distinctly Indo-Islamic, and yet, are not out of place.
The stories of the people who devoted lives and overcame weaknesses to build these churches gives their imposing facades the softness of humanity. Julio Simao, the architect of Se Cathedral, the largest cathedral in Asia, was worried about dowries for his daughters as he landed in Goa to start his work. Padre Antonio Joao de Frias, author of a laudatory work on the Brahmin caste, took inordinate pride in his work. Believing that Santana at Talaulim was flawed, he corrected it at Divar.
Woven with a thousand stories, the churches here are symbols of faith that has grown from hesitant beginnings and through troubled interludes to a mature belief.
Text: Savita Rao