Recall The Goa Inquisition

Vatican owes us an apology

Coffee Break Kanchan Gupta

His Majesty the king has ordered that there shall be no Brahmins in his land and that they should be banished.”“In the name of his Majesty I order that no Hindu can or shall perform marriages…” “The marriages of the supplicants are superstitious acts or functions which include Hindu rites and ceremonies as well as cult, adoration and prayers of Hindu temples…” “I order that no Hindu temples be erected in any of the territories of my king… and that Hindu temples which already have been erected be not repaired…' Anybody familiar with the brutalisation of Hindu customs and practices, indeed Hindu faith and belief, could mistakenly believe these extracts have been taken from royal decrees issued during Muslim rule. The harshness with which suppression is prescribed in these decrees, the callous disregard that is advocated for the other’s sentiment, the cruelty that is so palpable in both thought and action, suggest that these firman could have been issued by one of the “shadows of god” who ruled this land, laying to waste Hindu lives and temples.But these are not extracts from firman issued by the Mughal court of, say, Aurangzeb. They have been taken from firmans issued by the Portuguese who ruled Goa and recognised no religion other than Christianity as the legitimate means of communion with god. It was no secular rule that they imposed, but a ruthless system of pillage disguised as trade and a cruel administration for whom Hindus were nothing more than “supplicants” to be crushed into submission or exiled into oblivion. The horrors inflicted on Galileo Galilei by the Inquisition — the Vatican has now admitted that the Church was wrong and Galileo was right — are well known. Not that well-known, and tragically so, are the horrors inflicted by the Goa Inquisition. Every child reads about Galileo’s trial and how it is symbolic of the triumph of science over faith. But there is no reference — indeed, all reference is scrupulously avoided — to the brutal attempts of the Church to stamp out Hinduism in the territories controlled by the Portuguese in India. And this silence is not because there exists no evidence: There exist, in full text, orders issued by the Portuguese Viceroy and the Governor. There exist, in written records and travelogues, penned not by the persecuted but by the persecutors, full details of the horrors perpetrated in the name of Christ. Hindus who dared oppose the persecution were punished, swiftly and mercilessly. Those who were fortunate, got away with being banished. The less fortunate had their property seized and auctioned — the money was used, in large measures, for furthering proselytisation. The least fortunate were forced to serve as slave labour on the galleys that transported loot from Indian shores to Portuguese coffers. Viceroy D Constantine de Braganca issued an order on April 2, 1560, instructing that Brahmins should be thrown out of Goa and other areas under Portuguese control. They had a month's time to sell their property — it is obvious who gained from such distress sale. Those found violating the viceregal order, it was declared, would have their properties seized. Another order was issued, this time by Governor Antonio Morez Barreto, on February 7, 1575, decreeing that the estates of Brahmins whose "presence was prejudicial to Christianity" would be confiscated and used for "providing clothes to the New Christians". The attitude of the Portuguese administrators in India and the Church hardened over the years, to a point where each fiat, each decree, each order, each letter, became an instrument of religious persecution. The Third Concilio Provincial — a gathering of bishops and other clerics — met in 1585 to review, among other things, the progress of converting the “heathens” to the “only faith”. The Concilio adopted a resolution which said, ‘His Majesty the king has on occasion ordered the Viceroys and Governors of India that there should be no Brahmins in his lands, and that they should be banished therefrom together with the physicians and other infidels who are prejudicial to Christianity, after taking the opinion of the Archbishop and other religious persons who have experience in the matter. As the orders of His Majesty in this regard have not been executed, great impediments in the way of conversion and the community of New Christians have followed and continue to follow.” One can quote from many other orders, resolutions and instructions that resulted in the hideous Vatican-backed Goa Inquisition. The details are not unknown to most of us; they are definitely well known to the Vatican. The reason I have raised the issue of the Goa Inquisition is two-fold. First, Pope Benedict XVI should bear in mind the horrors inflicted on Hindus in the name of Christianity before he berates them for being intolerant towards Christians. Second, the Vatican owes an apology for the crimes committed during the Goa Inquisition; it must apologise and repent for its misdeeds against Hindus and gross attempts to stamp out Hinduism. Not to do so would amount to continued endorsement of the crimes and the unfair practices of missionaries. Ten years ago, the Vatican issued a 14-page document, ‘apologising’ and ‘repenting’ for not doing enough to save Europe’s Jews from the Holocaust. While it is common knowledge that Pope Pius XII did not feel particularly appalled by Hitler’s ‘final solution’, the Vatican claimed in its 1998 document that he was unaware of the concentration camps, the mass slaughter, the gas chambers and the furnaces. The document, understandably, failed to impress Jews who have made it clear that Pope Benedict XVI is not welcome to visit Israel unless he offers an unqualified apology and makes public documents of that period which are now stored in the Vatican’s archives. The Vatican may have eliminated the phrase “perfidious Jews” from its liturgy and Pope John Paul II may have made it fashionable for the Pontiff to refer to Jews as “older brothers”, these are seen as no more than meaningless, insincere gestures. The purpose of securing an apology for the Goa Inquisition is not to belittle the Vatican, but to drive home the point that it cannot seek to occupy the moral high ground till such time it has apologised and atoned for the sins committed against Hindus. If the Vatican can say sorry to others, there is no reason why it cannot say sorry to Hindus. Their faith is no less than those of the Book.
The Pioneer Coffee Break Sunday, November 16, 2008

TalkBack

COMMENTS BOARD ::

Unite Hindus and protect yourselfBy Swabhimaan on 11/18/2008 5:39:25 PMAll those who are tired of UPA like governments and pseudo secular media, please join Swabhimaan - a movement launched to unite Hindus of India and encourage them to voice their opinion. Interested members please send a mail to swabhimaan2008@gmail.com
DIABOLICAL POPEBy AJAY TYAGI on 11/17/2008 12:06:51 PMStray cases of breaking of window-panes in Managalore churches was blown out of proportions by bishops of Karnataka. English media also lapped up the far fetched theory of hindu terror. Happenings in Orissa and Karnataka are nothing in front of debausherry of perpetrators of Goa inquisition.
Vatican owes us an apologyBy S Kiran on 11/17/2008 11:31:02 AMThe Indian mindset has been tuned in such a way, by decades of rubbish churned out by the spineless, secular media, that they question the authenticity of reports like these. They conveniently believe that the religions from the desert are superior, many of them believing that civilization is a gift of these religions!
This is always been the caseBy Jignesh Shah on 11/17/2008 11:15:47 AMThis is the central truth, we are keen to dwell upon the attrocities committed by the Mughal rulers and we conveniently choose to forget the Christian attrocities committed on our people.The fact remains that the Christian missionaries are on the offensive yet again in garb of EVENGELISTS, this is akin to terrorism. It is indeed a shame, that all crimes committed by the Christians are forgiven.
Missionaries in IndiaBy Narain on 11/17/2008 12:07:14 AMKanchan Gupta is spot on. The old Pope must apologise to the Hindus in Goa for their past crimes. While the Pope is making up his mind, Roman Catholic Sonia Gandhiji could apologise to the Hindus in India.People should read the excellent report, published in the fifties, by Madhya Pradesh Ch. Justice-Neogi, on 'Activities of Christian Missionaries in India'. It was a damning report but Nehru, surprise, surprise, sat on the report. The Christiam Missionaries convert our innocent & poor people.
We are still prisoners of the past!By Sajeev Painunkal on 11/16/2008 10:56:31 PMIt is surprising how even the so called intellectuals try to hold on to events that took place hundreds of years ago, in an effort to justify their present mistakes and atrocities. If the Vatican owes an apology to the Hindus, then how much more the caste Hindus of India should apologize to the so called outcastes of India for the centuries long oppression and humiliation. Just like there is an advancement in science and history, there also an advancement in religious consciousness.
Vatican owes us an apologyBy N.S.Sankaran on 11/16/2008 7:24:42 PMI fully agree with Mr.H.R.Reddy's comments. Even if the Pope is graceful enough to apologise, the secularists will rush to stop him and apologise to him for the article instead.
VATICAN OWES US AN APOLOGYBy H.R.REDDY on 11/16/2008 12:47:20 PMIt is highly humiliating after reading this article. The so called secularists of India who take great objections and comment on Hindus whenever a church is vandalized. They go on to insult the swamis and frame charges of murder. The way the secular leaders in this country betray the faith they practice at home and in public is suicidal and make easy the faild attempts of ex rulers to destroy hinduism.

Rusdie's Akbar isn't so great

Rushdie's Akbar isn't so great
In the day's last light the glowing lake below the palace-city looked like a sea of molten gold. A traveller coming this way at sunset -- this traveller, coming this way, now, along the lakeshore road-might believe himself to be approaching the throne of a monarch so fabulously wealthy that he could allow a portion of his treasure to be poured into a giant hollow in the earth to dazzle and awe his guests. And as big as the lake of gold was, it must only be a drop drawn from the sea of the larger fortune..."
Thus begins Salman Rushdie's tenth novel, The Enchantress of Florence (Random House), with the arrival of Mogor dell'Amore (Mughal of Love) at Fatehpur Sikri, the red sandstone capital city of Emperor Akbar. Mogor dell'Amore is carrying with him a secret so startling that, once told to the emperor, it will force another secret to come tumbling out of the royal family's musty cupboards stuffed with nasty tales of gore and lofty stories of Mughal glory, forcing Akbar to order the redrawing of his genealogical tree by the palace artist, a brooding man given to dark thoughts.
Rushdie has tried to recreate life in two cities separated by land and sea. There's Fatehpur Sikri, where Akbar agonised over faith, fidelity and filial loyalty -- when and how would Salim, remarkably cruel as a young boy, turn on him? -- while unbridled hedonism prevailed in the bed chambers of princes, princesses and others less privileged. Then there's Niccolo Machiavelli's Florence where seductive mistresses cast magical spells -- tulips painted on underclothes -- and authority is exercised through appalling torture even as humanist philosophy sprouts from its violence scorched soil. What is common to both places is the brutality of power.
Mogor dell'Amore, with his distinctive European features and yellow hair, gets to tell his secret to Akbar after demonstrating his 'magical powers': He is the son of a Mughal princess, the forgotten youngest half-sister (the Mughal court, let's not forget, till it lasted, was teeming with half-siblings, each conspiring against the other) of Babar, the grandfather of Akbar. How Qara Koz (Lady Black Eyes) becomes the mistress of Argalia, a Florentine soldier of fortune, and the rest of the tale is told in the manner of The Thousand and One Nights. But Rushdie, for all his efforts to create magic through words -- "His hair was long and black as evil and his lips were full and red as blood"; "It was as if every man in the city had turned werewolf and was howling at the moon"; "So it was that Shah Ismail of Persia drowned in the 17-year-old princess's black eyes"; "She unleashed the beauty she had kept veiled and he was lost" -- fails to take his readers (or at least this reader) on a magical mystery tour. His first historical novel, woven around romance and fantasy, heavily researched (as the detailed bibliography shows) and strenuously crafted, does not quite add weight to his admirable repertoire of fiction. Rushdie began to slip with The Moor's Last Sigh, and hasn't quite stopped sliding down the hill since then. His ethereal Jodha Bai, who satiated the mortal Akbar's desire by scratching him -- "she was adept at the seven types of unguiculation, which is to say the art of using the nails to enhance the act of love" -- is a pathetic parody of history. Was there ever a Jodha Bai in Akbar's palace? "She existed," writes Rushdie, "She was immortal, because she had been created by love."
To his credit, though, Rushdie stops short of venerating Akbar, and mocks at those who refer to him as 'Akbar the Great', for that would be tautology and utterly silly. And when Akbar would say, "Allah-o-Akbar", as he did before chopping off the "unnecessary head" of a "pompous little twerp", the Rana of Cooch Naheen (that's what Hindu rulers, including in brave Rajputana where tales of valour outnumber the grains of the desert's sand, had allowed themselves to be reduced to under Mughal tutelage) did he mean "God is Great" or "God is Akbar"? That's a question nobody would dare ask, for secular myth-making has placed a glowing halo around the head of Akbar, who in real life was as great and merciful as his god but of which little is mentioned in our history books.
In an interview to Reuters, Rushdie said writing The Enchantress of Florence "saved him from the wreckage of his divorce last year from fourth wife Padma Lakshmi". By spinning a yarn from palace intrigue and bedroom politics, by taking refuge in magical realism, he managed to escape the real world which, at that moment, had turned cold to him. "It was a good place to go at a time when my private life was in a state of wreckage, and yes it was, I suppose, a bit of a refuge," Rushdie told Reuters. "I think in the end what got me through it was the long familiarity of the necessary discipline of writing a novel. I found that in the end a lifetime's habit of just going to my desk and doing a day's work and not allowing myself not to do it is what got me back on track. I was derailed for a while. I was in bad shape and it brought me back to myself," the writer explained.
While that cathartic experience may have helped him survive a personal crisis, it has not really produced a book that's worth comparing to his early novels. But then, it does provide a glimpse of what life may have been like within the walls of Akbar's city where charlatans and philanderers, flatterers and chatterers, connived and plotted as a Mughal megalomaniac, not quite sure of his faith as also that of others -- "In the melancholy after battle, as evening fell upon the empty dead, below the broken fortress melting into blood, within earshot of a little waterfall's nightingale song... the emperor in his brocade tent sipped watered wine and lamented his gory genealogy... He was not only a barbarian philosopher and a crybaby killer, but an egotist addicted to obsequuiousness and sycophancy... He felt burdened by the names of the marauders past, the names from which his name descended in cascades of human blood", presided over the destiny of Hindustan. As for life in Florence, we will leave that for another day.

Coffee Break / Sunday Pioneer / April 27, 2008.

Israel Diary-II

India can learn from Israel

Kanchan Gupta

Hidden in the mountains, the stark, grey concrete structure of Yad Vashem looms before you as you approach the Avenue of the Nations dedicated to brave individuals who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Sycamore trees line the avenue, and crowd the rugged space around Yad Vashem, each planted in the memory of men and women who defied Adolph Hitler's 'Final Solution' programme. A gnarled tree recalls memories of Oscar Schindler's valiant efforts to save Jewish men, women and children, using every possible skill, including bribery and lies, often escaping detection by the skin of his teeth. Those who have seen or read Schindler's List would connect easily to the bravery of the few who stood up to the murderous majority in Hitler's Germany and the Third Reich.
It is only fitting that Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, should look like the innards of a soulless concrete jail. Life in ghettoes and concentration camps could not be captured in a different setting. It is equally fitting that a visit to the memorial, which can be at once intensely personal and educative, should begin with an encounter with the first two dark deeds of the Nazis that paved the way for their subsequent brutality. The first was the burning of books which were perceived to be contrary to Hitler's supremacist theory that denied space to intellectual dissent and discounted the non-Aryan's right to flourish (later it would be the right to exist). The burning of books was to result in the burning of bodies -- the pathetic, decrepit remains of millions of Jews gassed to death. The second was the organised attack on Jewish property, business and synagogues on the night of November 9, 1938. The mass vandalism by Hitler's hoodlums was to be later known as Kristal Nacht: By dawn the next day, the streets were littered with shattered glass, charred shops and the burnt remains of any hopes that may have survived Hitler's coming to power.
The story of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews perished, the 'Final Solution' which nearly wiped out Europe's Jewry, is brought alive in the most telling, touching manner in the stone cold chambers of Yad Vashem. The evidence, painstakingly put together, largely stems from the Nazi obsession with documentation. The Nazis would photograph the horrific medical experiments, the wretched degradation, the mass executions, the cattle train rides to concentration camps, the stripping of Jews, the final journey to the gas chambers and the burning of bodies. Each detail would be documented and logged. Children's rag dolls, their shoes and the little things that symbolise life only serve to heighten the scale of the brutality that was perpetrated as the rest of the world slept. Till now, Yad Vashem has documented details, on the basis of testimonies that are bound and filed in alphabetical order, of three million Jews who perished during the Holocaust. These are stored in the last chamber where the only other display is a well which symbolises the dark void of life after the mass murder conducted by Hitler.
The numbing horror is further magnified in the memorial hall dedicated to children who perished in the Holocaust. Inside, in the pitch black darkness, a candle flickers, its image reflected and refracted a million times while a voice chants the names of those whose lives were snuffed out by a mad man and his criminal regime. Shades of that madness are visible in the rant of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his ilk who deny that the Holocaust ever occurred. I am told that a very senior member of the CPI(M), a comrade we often see on prime time television, refused to visit Yad Vashem when he was in Jerusalem this summer to attend a conference of the Israeli Communist Party. He is believed to have told his local guide that he had no intentions of "legitimising Israeli propaganda about the Holocaust" by visiting Yad Vashem. Such concerns did not bother him when, accompanied by his wife, he visited Al Aqsa and Dome of the Rock.
The most amazing thing about Israel is the country's sense of history. Apart from investing huge amounts of resources to restore and preserve antiquities that connect the modern state of Israel with its Biblical past, the Government also ensures that people do not forget their cultural and civilisational identity. At every historical site you can find soldiers and school children: They are taught about their past and encouraged to treasure it. The slogan 'Never Again', which is as much to do with the massacre at Massada as with the mass extermination at Auschwitz, gains significance with the inculcation of a sense of history. Children grow up proud of their heritage; soldiers defend not just Israel's territory but the very idea of a Jewish state. Across the political spectrum, people are resolute about doing whatever it takes to ensure the Jewish nation is not endangered again. No sacrifice is big enough, no contribution too small.
On Thursday night I visited the magnificent home of Frida and Arek Steinberger at a moshev. Frida is a ceramic artist, Arek a gentleman farmer. Their 21-year-old son Itay was killed in last year's war with Lebanon: He was hit by a missile on the battlefield while trying to rescue a fallen fellow soldier. He was among the 119 Israelis who did not return home from a battle that has caused tremendous political upheaval in Israel. What was his first reaction on hearing the news of his son's death, I asked Arek in the sprawling patio of their ranch. "I was stunned, I could not think. Later, I was consumed by anger. Now I have reconciled myself to this fact," he told me. There's a huge poster of Itay in uniform, the last photograph of him with his comrades-in-arms. But tragedy has not deterred either Frida or Arek, nor lessened their passion for Israel. Their daughter has just finished her stint with the Israeli Defence Forces. Their second son is in the Army. Their youngest son, a 16-year-old boy, will follow in the footsteps of his elder siblings.
A nation can be forged by tapping emotion. But for the nation to survive, you need determination and commitment to the national cause. There is more than a lesson here for us Indians.