Cloaked “Pagods”: Portuguese and “Heathen” Churches in Sixteenth-Century Malabar

Abstract

Vasco da Gama’s arrival in Malabar on 21 May 1498, would hasten an epoch of social and cultural transformation in Malabar’s history. This article examines one development of this transformative period. Namely, it seeks to understand how the arrival of a people who came in search of “Christians and spices” would result in lasting changes to the form and the style of Christian architecture in Malabar, in present-day Kerala (southwest India). It highlights the efforts of the Estado da Índia (Portuguese State of India) to reconcile concomitant political, religious, and economic ambitions in the region by broadly sketching interventions to the practice of Christianity and the architectural style of churches in sixteenth-century Malabar. The article further proposes the reading of Portuguese-style façades in churches that, to the Portuguese, recalled Hindu temples or “pagods” as an interventional program to hide or cloak the political, religious, and historical portent of the traditional Malabar church.

1. Introduction: Context in History

They had come seeking “Christians and of spices”, the convict said.

A few days after a small group of initial travelers were sent ahead to Calicut’s shores, boats carrying the explorer Vasco da Gama and his company would follow. Da Gama’s chroniclers tell us that the party was brought to a shrine that was built of stone with a tiled roof and stairs leading to a door they could not enter. They would pray at this “chapel”, with its many bells and its walls that were painted with “saints” who had multiple arms and teeth that protruded “an inch from the mouth”. Details from the account suggest that the Portuguese company was aware that they were not in a church. Joāo de Sá, who was kneeling by the side of da Gama, is reported as having said, to da Gama’s pleasure, “If these be devils, I worship the true God”.1

In the century after that visit to a Hindu temple, the Estado da Índia2, and with it the missionary Padroado,3 would engage in efforts for the intercession for a true God and mercantile control in Malabar.4 This article highlights a material consequence of this engagement at the intersection of commerce and piety by suggesting that the architectural style of Malabar’s churches stood as a proxy for ideologies that the Portuguese sought to dismantle in their effort to gain authority in the region. In proposing that the heterotopic alterity enacted in Malabar church architecture in the sixteenth century was politically, religiously, and iconoclastically motivated, this article aims to complicate any notion that churches in Malabar (Figure 1), in the Portuguese-style, were merely stylistic successors to the traditional Malabar church or a result of acculturation. Instead, it proposes a deliberate program of subversion that was aimed at disrupting, concealing, or cloaking the identity and authority of the Malabar church for the benefit of the Estado and the Padroado.

As the living churches of centuries-old Christian communities, extant churches in present-day Kerala that date to the sixteenth century have lost much of their original architectural character. Thus, the contributions of researchers who have studied the archives of early churches and documented and written about the region’s churches prior to modern-day interventions have been invaluable in reconstructing the architectural form and cultural and ritual traditions of the indigenous church.5 The accounts of “churchmen” in the colonial period are also abundant sources of information on the earlier architectural, ritual, and cultural character of the Malabar church—and particularly so because of their access both to documents now long dispersed and to churches now no longer extant.6 Thus, this article references, among others, Michael Geddes, chancellor of the Cathedral Church of Sarum and British chaplain in residence in Lisbon, who, in the seventeenth century, wrote his account of Christianity in Malabar from the Portuguese writings of Antonio de Gouvea, who had himself documented the actions of the enforcer of a synod in Malabar in 1599, and the accounts of Reverend Thomas Whitehouse, the minister of the Government Church in Cochin in the nineteenth century.7 The decrees of the aforementioned synod, known as the Synod of Diamper (Udayamperoor),8 also serves as a rich reference for our understanding of the architectural style of the indigenous Malabar church. The actions and decrees of the Synod outline the changes prescribed for the character of indigenous Christianity in Malabar and its churches.9

It should be noted that homogeneity of the architectural form of the Malabar church in premodern history is neither assumed nor implied here; Christianity in Malabar was made up of a variety of communities and classes, and diversity in the architectural styles of her churches was likely. The Udayamperoor Synod’s decrees confirm variety, noting, for instance, that churches with and without side altars should have images installed.10 The collective histories of Malabar’s Christians also support an approach that should account for heterogeneity. One oral tradition dates the arrival of Christianity in the region and the founding of the Thomas Christian community, also known as the Vatakkumbhāgar or the Northists, with the arrival of the apostle Thomas in 52 CE in Malabar (Figure 2). A second tradition, cherished by the Thekkumbhāgar or the Southist Christians, dates the arrival of the Knanyan Christians, named for a bishop, Thomas of Cana, to 345 CE. While the historical uncertainty of these dates is compounded by the cataclysmic losses that were caused by the Synod, which included the removal of books and documents,11 both the Northists and the Southists claim a centuries-old link with the East Syriac rite and with the Church of the East, which was active in the Iraq, Syria, and Turkey tripoint.12

2. Christians and Spices

The notion of Christians in India had long occupied the minds of Europeans, as had attempts to establish Christianity in the region. The thirteenth-century accounts of the travels of Marco Polo would report that the “body of Messr St Thomas the Apostle lies in the province of Maabar13 at a certain little town having no great population” (Yule and Cordier 1929, p. 353), while a bull, reportedly issued by Pope John XXII on 5 April 1330, would appoint the Dominican friar Jordanus as the bishop of Christians in Malabar to “adjure their schism and enter the unity of the Catholic church”, according to Whitehouse (Whitehouse 1873, p. 77). Although Jordanus would seemingly fail, he had plans to install the Catholic faith firmly in Malabar, writing that had he had “200 or 300 good friars, who would faithfully and fervently preach the Catholic faith”, conversions would have been swift (Whitehouse 1873, p. 78).

In the end, it was the importance of the legend of Thomas in India and the happenstance discovery of the so-called “bleeding cross of Saint Thomas” (Figure 3) in 1547 in Mylapore (present-day Tamil Nadu) that would anchor colonial Christianity in the region. For the Portuguese Padroado,14 the implied antiquity of the Thomas legend was a welcomed tool through which they affirmed their role as fixers of an ancient form of Christianity, which they felt had been corrupted in a “heathen” land. The Portuguese also conflated the miracles of their religion with the antiquity of the legend of Thomas. Whitehouse writes that “as miraculous crosses [associated with the apostle in India] were all the fashion among the Portuguese, it was said to possess strange powers—Christians could not prostrate themselves before it without a new spirit of compunction for sin being awakened in their hearts; and the heathen there made their vows, brought their offerings of oil and wax to replenish the lamp that burnt before it, and went thence, recovering their lost health or property (as the case might be) but not becoming converts to the faith” (Whitehouse 1873, p. 26).

While the Padroado would decide that heathenism and Christianity had walked too close a path since the apostle’s days, Malabar’s Christians cherished the antiquity of their collective memory. Their Christianity drew life from none other than an apostle whom they believed had erected crosses and founded ezharapalikal (“seven and a half churches” in the Malayalam language) in Malabar and who had been martyred in Mylapore. When the cross in Mylapore was found during the rebuilding of a church in 1547, the discovery would have affirmed their identity as the descendants of an ancient Christianity that was anchored in the larger socio-cultural context of their history in Malabar.

Churches in Malabar once followed the regional style15 of sacred architecture, a corollary of the seventy-two diplomatic privileges that Christian and other merchant communities received from rulers in the Cēra period (c 800—1124 CE).16 Copperplate inscriptions dated to 849 and 883 CE record what survives of some of these agreements, and name Mār Sāpir Iśō, a bishop who was likely associated with the Church of the East, as the principal designee.17 Control over the levy of taxes and vassals, including artisans, was part of those privileges, as was the land where the angadi (guilds) would conduct market transactions. This manner of conducting business with trade guilds would endure for centuries.18

The connection between Malabar and the Church of the East may have continued for some time, as later accounts refer to the presence of “Nestorians”, an imprecise term for Christians associated with that church in South India (Yule and Cordier 1929, p. 358). But a break in the connection between the church and Malabar is implicit in the journey of three Christians who traveled to Gazarta d’Beth Zabdai (present-day Cizre, Turkey) to request clergy for their churches at the end of the fifteenth century. A translation by George Schurhammer of a letter sent by the newly appointed bishops of Malabar to the Church of the East confirms the limited nature of church services in Malabar at the time; it indicates, for instance, the need to consecrate churches and ordain priests for the large community of Christians that they had encountered upon arriving at their appointments (Schurhammer 1934, pp. 2–4). One expects that the bishops would have also encountered the newly arrived Portuguese Christians at that time.

The Portuguese were initially involved in the friendly and seemingly cooperative rebuilding of churches in the early part of the sixteenth century, perhaps partially due to the loss of churches during Portugal’s fight against the rulers of Calicut for control over the export of pepper. The Portuguese appear to have found safety in a church of Saint Thomas in Quilon (Kollam) in 1504 in one violent struggle, and they attempted to make amends for the resulting loss of that church by arranging for the local king to grant land for the rebuilding of a new church (Teles E Cunha 2011, p. 50). Two decades later when, according to A.M. Mundadan, the ruler of Kodungallur requested the support of Portuguese agents in the fight against Calicut’s forces, the loss of a church of Saint Thomas would be invoked in his appeal. A Portuguese captain, Dom Luiz de Meneses, is said to have responded that, had he been forewarned of the assault, “he would have defended it in person” (Mundadan 1967, p. 102). While support did not arrive for Kodungallur, money was allocated the following year by the Portuguese governor of India, Dom Amrique de Meneses, to rebuild that church (Mundadan 1967, pp. 102–3).

In letters to the Portuguese king Dom João III, a bishop named Mār Jacob emphasized the potential for mutually beneficial cooperation between Malabar’s Christians and the Estado da Índia. Mār Jacob appealed to the Portuguese king for help in recovering lost land, and flexed his bishopric authority by offering to submit 25,000 Christian warriors to the disposal of the Estado (Subrahmanyam 1998, p. 26). In a preview of growing tensions, however, Mār Jacob also advocated for his legitimacy in ecclesiastical matters. Mār Jacob was becoming increasingly weary of Portugal’s investment in missionary work in the region, and his letter to Dom João III in 1530 hinted at resistance to submission to Rome. He acknowledged the arrival of the Latin priest Alvaro Penteado in Malabar, for instance, by assuring the ruler of his [Jacob’s] ability to conduct baptisms and of his knowledge of “the Holy Scripture old and new” (Schurhammer 1934, pp. 15–16).

For their part, as agents of the Estado with the political privilege of the Padroado, missionaries found themselves forced to reconcile efforts to reorient Malabar’s Christians with the persistent authority of the Church of the East, their assumptive suspicions of that church’s Nestorian character, and the need to avoid any implication of the dilution of the Latin doctrine. The sixteenth century would see the arrival of Augustinian, Dominican, Franciscan, and Jesuit missionaries in Malabar. Also present were bishops of the Chaldean church, which had separated from the traditional Church of the East and submitted to Rome in 1553, and Malabari priests who were trained in the Catholic doctrine.19 Despite the Latin missions’ strength in numbers, the authority of the East Syriac bishops over Malabar’s Christians persisted.

Recognizing Malabar’s ecclesiastical leaders as persons with considerable power in their communities, the Estado had made the early decision to partner with Syriac bishops such as Mār Jacob. By the second decade of the sixteenth century, this bishop and a prelate named Juan Caro had collaborated on the supply of pepper sourced from Christian merchants in interior Malabar for delivery to Portuguese trading posts (Subrahmanyam 1998, p. 25). The letters from Mār Jacob to Dom João III reveal this character of ecclesiastical leadership in the indigenous church. Mār Jacob offered to convince Quilon’s Christians to trade directly with Portugal for everyone’s benefit, meaning that the Portuguese could potentially avoid paying taxes to Kochi’s ruler (Schurhammer 1934, p. 14). Mār Jacob also offered to increase the quality control of exports and supported the building of the Portuguese fort in Kochi (Schurhammer 1934, pp. 13–14).

By the time the last bishop of Malabar associated with the traditional Church of the East was appointed, things had gotten progressively disagreeable between the Estado and Malabar’s Christians. The bishop in question, Mār Abraham, appears to have been in an impossible situation. He was disliked by the foreign clergy and alternately reproached by the leadership of both the Padroado and the Church of the East. Joseph Panjikaran has noted how this bishop was asked at the Council of Goa in 1585 to re-ordain his priests because of the invalid “imposition of hands” and “empty chalice and paten [in the East Syriac manner]”, only to be rebuked by the patriarch of the Church of the East for having done so (Panjikaran 1912, pp. 41–42). Mār Abraham is said to have responded to the patriarch’s scolding with the lament that the Portuguese clergy “were over his head as a hammer over an anvil” (Panjikaran 1912, p. 42).

In contrast to the relative, if curbed, autonomy allowed to the Malabar church in the early part of the sixteenth century, the second half of that century would witness the establishment of the Portuguese Archbishopric of Goa in 1557, the Inquisition of Goa in 1561, and campaigns against Malabar’s bishops, including Mār Joseph, Mār Simon, and Mār Abraham, in the years between 1557 and 1583.20 A synod in 1583 in Angamaly also aimed to remove the Syriac language and priests suspected of their affiliation with the orthodoxy of the Church of the East. Supported by the Jesuit Alessandro Valignano, this synod required concessions from Mār Abraham on corrections to Syriac books, rules on the celibacy of priests, and matters of confession and communion (Subrahmanyam 1998, p. 30). Following the synod, the Jesuit priest Francisco Ros was instructed by Valignano to correct “Nestorian” heresies in Syriac liturgical books.21

Recent scholarship by Antony Mecherry on the history of the Jesuit Order in South India argues for an acknowledgment of the “praxis of accommodation” adopted by Jesuits such as Francisco Ros in missionary work in the region. In this view, rather than a mission to convert “heathens”, the mission in Malabar was one of “reduction and reconversion” through accommodation, which involved full and inclusive engagement with indigenous languages, cultures, and contexts in service of the mission (Mecherry 2019, p. xxxvi). Mecherry’s work cautions that “[by] attributing general categories such as Nestorians and schismatics to the ancient Christians of Malabar, the Padroado missionaries tried to define the Catholicism that they wanted to import to India in its Western attire; but at the practical level, the missionaries, in general, overlooked the cultural and social dimensions of Malabar in South India, the testing ground of their mission methods” (Mecherry 2019, p. xxxiv).

Mecherry’s research and argument are compelling in the context of the later years of Ros’s mission, which extended to 1624 in Malabar. Nevertheless, Ros’s early interventions were uncompromising on the perceived heresies of Christianity in the region. In addition to writing a treatise in Syriac and Latin, titled De Erroribus Nestorianorum qui hac in India Orientali Versantur, in 1586 on the “Nestorian errors” practiced in India,22 Ros corrected the liturgical books of Malabar’s Christians with an eye toward Latinization and burned those books he considered suspect (Mecherry 2019, p. xxxi). Moreover, it is important to note two developments that coincided with these events. First, the Estado was growing frustrated with the interminable barriers posed by the Mappillas and increasingly worried that Malabar’s bishops would use their authority to encourage pepper trade with Muslim merchants to the detriment of Portugal’s interests.23 Second, the decrees of the Council of Trent, held between 1545 and 1563, that marshaled the Roman Catholic Church’s response to the doctrinal criticisms of the Protestant Reformation, had affirmed the Catholic church’s position against heresy in this period.

The shared concerns of the Estado and Padroado over the local church’s potential to foil their respective ambitions in the region would engender a political and religious campaign for the imposed recovery of Christianity in Malabar that included the architectural style of the indigenous church. The following section briefly introduces the form of this church to situate its relevancy to the codification of control over doctrinal practice that occurred in sixteenth-century Malabar.

3. The Indigenous Church before the Sixteenth Century

The style of church architecture that the Portuguese encountered on their arrival in Malabar was a development informed equally by the needs of the rites of the Church of the East and the centuries-old development of the regional form of sacred architecture (Figure 4).24 The practice of the East Syriac rite required, at minimum, a space for the preparation of the host, for an altar and cross, and for receiving liturgy. While the indigenous Malabar church’s limited ornament is in line with the style of the architecture of early medieval churches associated with the Church of the East,25 there were significant developments that arose independently of the influence of the Church of the East.

The church structure would have been built on a tall foundation, similar to the adhiṣṭhāna26 of regional temples, and the roof over the sanctuary and the nave would have been tiled or thatched, as was the regional custom. The roof over the sanctuary would have been taller than the roof over the nave—but just tall enough, as the 1599 Synod’s decree XXIX (Action VIII) indicates: “… where the kings and Bramens of the Pagods27 will not content to their having a building higher than the Church, which often happen through their imagining that the Pagods are made melancholy by the hearing of such bells” (Geddes 1694, p. 375). Sunil Edward’s study of the architectural development of “pre-European” churches in Kerala has found that church naves would have had three central openings, one at the west end, and one on either side of the nave (Edward 2005, p. 191). Some churches would have also had front vestibules (James 1979, p. 104) not unlike the regional mukhamandapa (front hall or porch).

The walls of churches, like other religious architecture in the region, would have been built of wood, laterite, or brick on a granite foundation. While Protestant missionaries were thrilled at what they found to be “little superstitious ornamentation” (Whitehouse 1873, p. 179) in Malabar’s churches, the wooden ceilings and the beams that supported those ceilings would have been decorated with animal and floral motifs of the type still extant at Valiyapalli (literally, “big church”) in Kottayam. According to Mundadan, the missionary Alvaro Penteado’s observations confirmed this, saying, “They have crosses in their churches on the altars as well as engravings, but no images or engraved outlines of profiles and faces”.28 Valliyapalli retains several features informed by regional architectural and sculptural developments, including an exquisite archway with crosses flanked by peacocks and elephants—not unlike Gajalakshmi, the goddess Lakshmi, flanked by elephants. The animals stand on pillars recognizable as the type installed in Hindu temples dating after the fourteenth century (Figure 5). Churches, both indigenous and new, were built and in use during the sixteenth century.29

The plinths of Malabar’s unique open-air granite crosses are a valuable guide for imaging both the architecture and the sculptural apotropaic ornament that once adorned Malabar’s churches. They suggest that the church’s foundation would have been articulated with mṛghmāla (a sculpted chain of animals) and faces within kuḍu (horseshoe-shaped dormers). The wooden doors of the main church would have also been adorned, as was required of Hindu temple doors, according to the prescriptions of the Tantrasammucaya, a regional sixteenth-century ritual and architectural treatise. A gable at Pazhaya Suriyani (literally, “old Syrian”) church in Chengannur shows a door of this type decorated with lotus motifs (Figure 6).

The vast acreage of the oldest church complexes recalls the power of the trade guilds that used church land for market transactions, as was allowed by the privileges afforded to them by local rulers. Churches were, and still are, surrounded by tall walls; several still retain small stone cups which would have once held oil and a flame. The church complex would have also had a dhvajastambha (flagpole) and a dipastambha (lamp). An excellent example of an early dipastambha survives at the church in Chengannur, with ornate foliate forms decorating the rim of each of its tiers (Figure 7). A padipura (gatehouse) at the entrance of the church was typical and would have been built on a tall granite platform, similar to the padipura of the Malabar region’s other religious and vernacular complexes.30 E.J. James’s study of surviving churches in the 1970s identified further structures of the type we would find in temples of the region: kottupura (music storeroom), natakasala (drama hall), and vedipura (fireworks storeroom), as well as a uttupurra (dining room) (James 1979, p. 191).

Open-air crosses (Figure 8) in church complexes shared much in common stylistically with the valiyabalikkal (ritual stone altars) of regional Hindu temples (Figure 9). The plinth of the approximately forty-foot tall open-air cross built at the church at Kaduthuruthy, possibly the last of its kind to be built before the Synod, was designed with a mṛghmāla, faces within kuḍu, a padmapitha (platform adorned with lotus-petal shapes), and kapota (rolled-cornice) typical of the temple adhiṣṭhāna.31

4. The Interventions of the Synod of Diamper

Whereas of all the evil Customs that are to be rooted from among the Faithful, those are the most dangerous which have something of the Heathen Superstition in them, of which this Bishopric is full; therefore the Synod desiring that all such customs were totally extirpated, that so Christians may enjoy Christianity in its purity…

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Alexio de Menezes, the archbishop of Goa, would consecrate Kaduthuruthy’s cross in 1599 in place of the bishop Mār Abraham, who had passed by that point. In that same visit to Malabar, de Menezes summoned the region’s priests, under the threat of ex-communication, to the Synod held in Udayamperoor. The Synod appears to have been a profoundly personal crusade for de Menezes.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam characterizes the convoker of the Synod as a man of considerable influence and political ambition (Subrahmanyam 1998). Having arrived in Goa in 1595, de Menezes would remain for roughly fifteen years as Archbishop of Goa, and briefly as Archbishop-Governor of Goa. De Menezes’s campaign to “correct” the Malabar church involved the deliberate removal and erasure of the history and culture of its people. He sought to amend, if not remove, many of the claimed social and cultural traditions of Malabar’s Christians, including, for example, requiring that Christians no longer attend temple festivals.33 Geddes’s translations of these excerpts from decrees VII and XVII in Action IX lay bare this attitude, and they are worth citing at length:

The Synod being informed, that some wicked Christians are not content only to go to Witches to consult them, but do furthermore send for them to their Houses, where they join with them in the Invocation of their Pagods, and in making offerings and Sacrifices to them, in killing Dogs, and performing other Ceremonies, that are contrary to the Faith… which they do often publicly to the great scandal of Christianity, as if they were not Christians, and at other times permit the Heathens to perform them in their Houses, doth command in virtue of Holy Obedience, and upon pain of Excommunication to be Ipso facto incurred, that no Christian shall presume to perform any of the said Ceremonies, or consent to the performing of them in their Houses, and that all that do transgress therein, shall be declared Excommunicate in the Church, until they shall beg for mercy, and have undergone condign and public Punishment in the Church,…. and they who shall go to offer anything to a Pagod or shall make any Vow to one, shall be punished after the same manner, and with the same Penance, and shall incur Excommunication Ipso facto, in all which Matters the Vicar must be very watchful for the prevention of all such Idolatries.

(Geddes 1694, pp. 395–96)

Whereas the distinction of the Faithful from Unbelievers, even by outward signs and habits, is a thing which has always been endeavored, that so the one may be known and divided from the other, therefore the Synod having observed that there is no distinction neither in their Habits nor in their Hair, nor in any thing else, betwixt the Christians of this Diocese and the Heathen Naires, doth command, that henceforward no Christian do presume to bore their Ears, or to do any thing to make them large, except Women, among whom it is an Universal Ornament and whosoever shall transgress herein, shall be punished at the pleasure of the Prelate, who shall not suffer them to wear an Ornament of Gold or of any thing else in their Ears and whosoever shall presume to wear any such Ornament, shall be thrown out of the Church….

(Geddes 1694, pp. 405–6)

The Synod’s attempts to remodel the church in the Latin way included the building of vestries, the addition of cupboards (protected with locks), and baptismal fonts that were to be “erected in a decent place, in the corner of the church”.34 A bright sanctuary was also necessitated, with the requirement that openings be made in sanctuaries for the ingress of light—but only in such a way that “the Heathens when they come may not see the Divine mysteries [through] them”.35 Careful supervision by the Padroado’s agents was also a part of the Synod’s decrees. In prescribing the addition of images in churches, decree XXIX (Action VIII) declares:

Whereas almost all the Churches of this Diocese are without Pictures, which has the effect of their being governed by Nestorian Hereticks, who do not allow of the healthful use of Sacred images; therefore the Synod doth command, That in Churches that are finished the first work that shall be done after that of the Baptismal Font out of the Alms of the Parish, shall be to set up some images, according to the directions of the Prelate, who shall always be consulted about every Picture.

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In an analysis of the political motivations behind the spoliation of art in the history of the Indian subcontinent, Catherine Asher reminds us of the “need to recognize that throughout history, visual messages, that is, art which represents ways of thinking, have been destroyed in order to eradicate their messages” (Asher 2004, p. 38). Similarly, David Freedberg has argued, in an analysis of the social and political contexts of response in acts of iconoclasm and censorship, that to “censor or destroy a work is to testify to its hold over its public” (Freedberg 2016, p. 68). For the Padroado’s agents, changing the form of the church was a means by which to dismantle that hold, which they defined variously and dogmatically. An account by a Jesuit friar named Fenecio, who wrote about enclosing an existing wooden church within a new church in ca. 1607, is illustrative of this mode of censorship:

The stone church which I began two years ago had risen to the height of windows. At this stage no one would dare to pull down the old wooden building, fearing to be struck down by sudden death: it stood surrounded by the walls of the new erection, but after I prayed and removed their timidity, the old structure was pulled down, and the new building stood out in such fine proportions that the Hindus, the Mohammedans, and the Jews flocked to see it.

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In similar fashion, the introduction of the distinctive and imposing “Portuguese-style” frontispiece to the architectural style of the Malabar church in the sixteenth century is emblematic of censorship. The concealment of the church’s indigenous character behind a new façade addressed a central issue that had long caused consternation for missionaries, who found the Malabar church, with its hipped and gabled design,³⁸ to be shockingly indistinguishable from “pagods” or Hindu temples. While it is conceivable that the Portuguese-style façade would have been in vogue following the construction of St. Francis church in 1518 in Kochi, and, therefore, the stylistic choice to adopt these façades in the construction of new churches39 (both Latin and Syriac) was not improbable, Edward’s careful study has revealed that façades were also added to existing churches. For instance, Edward has shown that a façade was joined to the walls of the nave of the Thumbamon church, a façade was built above the existing front wall at Kallooppaara church, and façades were built in front of the original walls at Mulakkulam and Vadakara churches (Edward 2005, p. 198).

Considered alongside the Estado’s and the Padroado’s activities in the region, the disruption of the view of the old church with the face of the new church can be read as an attempt to arrogate the public identity of the indigenous church. It must be remembered that, because Malabar remained largely under the jurisdiction of local kings, the limits of Portuguese control in the region pivoted on their engagement with Christian communities. This is in stark contrast to the Portuguese colonial history of Goa, which had been conquered in 1510, and where the Estado da Índia had established a viceroyalty and appropriated sites from its pre-colonial history.40 As Alexander Henn has found in the case of Goa, “[in] little more than two decades, most Hindu temples, shrines and images in the Portuguese controlled territories were either destroyed or removed, and most Hindus who were not willing to convert to Christianity were expulsed or had fled the area”.41 While “bad Christians”42 were also identified in Goa, consequences were swift and wide-ranging in that Portuguese territory. In Malabar, on the other hand, the parameters of Portuguese intervention were restricted by its primary points of control: the church and its people. Still, just as in Goa, where the building of churches was part and parcel of establishing Portuguese expressions of authority, the transformation of churches in Malabar signaled the ascendancy of a unified and new Christian trading authority.

5. Conclusions: Cloaking “Heathen” Churches

The Synod of Diamper’s decrees suggest that interventions to Christianity and the Christian church in Malabar were deliberate efforts to ensure that the weight of change would drive the character of the previous church underground. By suppressing any reminder of the spirit of that previous church, the Padroado could, in essence, remove from view that which would elicit disobedience. The resulting destabilization of the identity and meaning of the traditional church, not coincidentally in hubs of pepper production, allowed for a void (pecuniary and ministerial) that was opportune for the anchoring of new political, spiritual, and economic meaning and authority.

In addition to the actions and decrees of the Synod, de Menezes commanded ports to turn away priests from the Church of the East (Panjikaran 1912, p. 44). While these orders were in keeping with an earlier decision on the part of the Portuguese to disallow clergy from the Syriac and Syriac-adjacent world from joining the Malabar church, for fear of the arrival of a bishop who might take Mār Abraham’s place upon his death (Mecherry 2019, p. 128), de Menezes’s redoubled efforts seem to have aimed for the effective erasure of the traditional leaders of Malabar’s Christian communities. To wit, de Menezes was assured of increased control over these communities, including in matters beyond doctrine.43

A reference, in a letter from de Menezes in 1597, to the skilled use of firearms amongst Malabar Christian warriors who were obedient to their bishops provides additional insight into de Menezes’s plans.⁴⁴ In the letter, de Menezes noted that a Latin bishop could result in “fifty or sixty thousand” more warriors added to the Portuguese fold (Subrahmanyam 1998). When compared to the earlier plans of the Dominican friar Jordanus to install the Catholic faith in Malabar with “200 or 300 good friars”, de Menezes’s emphasis on Christian warriors is a testament to his function not simply as a missionary, but also as an instrument of political power. We might conclude then that, in Menezes’s view, Malabar’s churches stood to function as bastions of Portuguese power—a potentiality that would have been particularly irresistible on the heels of a failed Portuguese campaign against the Mappilas and concerns about Dutch and English incursions into Asia.

This article has argued for consideration of Portuguese-style church architecture in sixteenth-century Malabar at the intersection of mercantile and canonical ambition and localized history and resistance. The particular constellation of events that led to architectural interventions to the style of churches in this transformative period was neither assimilative nor syncretic in its motivation,45 but was rather a measured attempt to subvert meaning and authority. Not unlike other historic sites in South Asia, where architectural intervention, transformation, removal, and re-use were enacted,46 the Estado and Padroado were guided by political and economic aims. In appropriating her churches, they could buttress Portuguese gains47 in Malabar, for with the church came the church’s land, people, and influence. Furthermore, it is significant that the Portuguese king’s presence, and thereby his authority, would have been implicit in churches built in the Portuguese style. As António Nunes Pereira has suggested in a study on churches in Goa, Portuguese churches were essentially royal commissions, since state and religion were entwined in the Estado (Pereira 2011). With their ambitions for monopolizing the trade of pepper mitigated by the involvement of local kings in Malabar, churches with their Portuguese-style façades would have served as synecdoches for the rising power of a new contender on the scene.

A shared visual culture informed the history of sacred art and architecture in Malabar, and the iconic sameness that so offended those who saw heathen “pagods” in Malabar’s churches and “Heathen Superstition” among her Christians was a result of the region’s cosmopolitan history. While the enaction of dissimilarity and difference to ensure that churches did not recall “pagods” was subsumed within a perceived corruption of Christianity, Portuguese colonial agents evidently also saw an opportunity. The assumed heretical character of the Malabar church served as a means to usurp its political power. By installing the Latin rite in place of the East Syriac rite, their priests in place of the traditional priests, and a new (Portuguese-style) church in place of the old (hipped and gabled) church, they ventured to cleave attachments and install a new authority in its place.

This occupation, as history has shown, was not to last. In 1653, in a “culmination of a series of resistance movements”, which was prompted by the death of the Syriac bishop Mār Ahatullah, who had been arrested by Jesuits in Cranganore and condemned as a heretic by the Inquisition of Goa, people gathered to swear an oath to disregard the authority of the Padroado.48 The Padroado had been failing in their efforts toward change for some decades by that point. A Carmelite who visited the region in 1636–1637, writes Whitehouse, had noted the discontent amongst the region’s Christians. Philip de la Trinité apparently found that the “enforced celibacy of the clergy, the introduction of images into their churches, and the attempts to supersede the Syriac language by the Latin in their religious services, were specially offensive [to the Malabar Christians]” (Whitehouse 1873, p. 158).

Crowds are believed to have arrived at the open-air cross at Mattancherry Parish church outside of Cochin on 16 June 1653, fifty-four years after the Synod of Diamper. Here, writes István Perczel, the “Christians rejected their obedience to the Portuguese and the Jesuits, the then archdeacon, Thomas Pakalomaṭṭam, was consecrated metropolitan of India with the name Mār Thoma, and the community pledged their obedience to the Chaldean patriarch” (Perczel 2019, p. 685). The efforts of the Portuguese Padroado to reconcile the Christianity they encountered in Malabar with their own would thus eventually fail. Not long after, in 1663, with the rising fortunes of the Dutch East India Company in Malabar, the Estado’s attempts for monopoly over Malabar’s pepper would fail as well.