Christian Subversion And Missionary Activities - 6

[Bharatvarsh2]

Following reveals the true attitudes of Goan Galilaeans I had mentioned before (nostalgia for Portuguese occupation where they could torture Hindu heathens at will) and also notice this anti Hindu Brit scumbag Darlymple's nonsense in sync with that old Galilaean whore's nonsense:

At Donna Georgina’s by William Dalrymple



The history of Goa is written most succinctly in the portraits of the Portuguese Viceroys that still line the corridors of the abandoned convent of St. Francis of Assisi in Old Goa.



The early Portuguese Viceroys are giants among men: chain-mailed warlords like Pedro da Alem Castro, a vast bull of a man with great mutton chop whiskers and knee-high leather boots. The boots terminate in a pair of sparkling golden spurs; his plate-metal doublet is bursting to contain his massive physique. All around Castro are others of his ilk: big men with hanging-judge eyes and thick bird's nest beards. Each is pictured holding a long steel rapier.



Then, sometime late in the eighteenth century, an air of ambiguity suddenly sets in. Fernando Martins Mascarenhas was the Governor of Goa only a few decades after Castro had returned to Portugal, but he could have been from another millennium. Mascarenhas is a powdered dandy in silk stockings; a fluffy lace ruff brushes his chin. He is pictured leaning on a stick, his lips pursed and his tunic half-unbuttoned; it is as if he is depicted on his way out of a brothel. In contemporary North India, a couple of generations in the withering heat of the Gangetic plains turned the Great Moguls from hardy Turkic warlords into pale princes in petticoats. In the same way, by the end of the eighteenth century, the fanatical Portuguese conquistadors had somehow been transformed into effeminate fops in bows and laces.



The Portuguese had first visited Goa in the last days of the Middle Ages. In 1498 Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route to the Indies, and he immediately began planning ways of wresting control of the Indian Ocean from the Muslims, and so diverting the spice trade to Portugal. By August 1507 Afonso de Albuquerque, 'the Caesar of the East', had built a fortress on the island of Socotra to block the mouth of the Red Sea and cut off Arab traders from India, and in March 1510, Albuquerque arrived off the coast of Goa. With him came fleet of 23 caravels, galleons and war barks. Albuquerque massacred the Muslim defenders of the local fort, then carved out for himself a small crescent-shaped enclave clinging onto the Western seaboard of the Deccan. From this fortified enclave, the Portuguese planned to control the Maritime routes of the East.



The conquistador chose his kingdom well. Goa is an area of great natural abundance and the state is envied throughout India for its rich red soils and fertile paddy fields, its excellent mangoes and cool sea breezes. From its harbours, Albuquerque's fleet brutally enforced the Portuguese monopoly of the spice trade.



In its earliest incarnation Old Goa was a grim fortress city, the headquarters of a string of fifty heavily armed artillery bastions stretching the length of the Indian littoral. But by 1600, the same transition that had transformed the conquistadors into dandies turned Old Goa from a fortified barracks into a vast metropolis of 75,000 people, the swaggering capital of the Portuguese Empire in the East. It was larger than contemporary Madrid and virtually as populous as Lisbon whose civic privileges it shared. The mangrove swamps were cleared and in their place rose the walls and towers of Viceregal palaces, elegant townhouses, austere monasteries and elaborate baroque cathedrals.



With easy wealth had come a softening of the hard edges. The fops and dandies had no interest in war and concentrated instead on their seraglios. Old Goa became more famous for its whores than for its canons or cathedrals. According to the records of the Goan Royal Hospital, by the first quarter of the seventeenth century at least 500 Portuguese a year were dying from syphilis and "the effects of profligacy". Although the ecclesiastical authorities issued edicts condemning the sexual 'laxity' of the married women who 'drugged their husbands the better to enjoy their lovers,' this did not stop the clerics themselves keeping whole harems of black slave girls for their pleasure. In the 1590's the first Dutch galleons began defying the Portuguese monopoly; by 1638 Goa was being blockaded by Dutch warships. Sixty years later in 1700, according to a Scottish sea captain, it was a "place of small Trade and most of its Riches lay in the Hands of indolent Country Gentlemen, who loiter away their days in Ease, Luxury and Pride."



So it was to remain. The jungle crept back, leaving only a litter of superb baroque churches- none of which would look out of place on the streets of Lisbon, Madrid or Rome - half strangled by the mangrove swamps.



The most magnificent of the surviving buildings is Bom Jesus, the church which now acts as the enormous vaulted mausoleum of Goa's great saint, the sixteenth century Jesuit missionary St. Francis Xavier. To modern tastes, Xavier seems to have been a brute- when he visited Goa he was so shocked by the lingering pagan practices performed by the colony's converted Hindus that he successfully petitioned for the import of the Inquisition- but this does not stop Goans of all faiths revering his memory four hundred years later. Indeed a decade ago when the miraculously undecayed body of St. Francis was last put on public display on the altar of Bom Jesus, one Hindu lady was so overcome with devotional fervour that she bit off the little toe of the saint's left foot and smuggled her relic out of the church in her mouth. She was only apprehended when removing the mummified toe from her mouth at the queue for the ferry.



Ironically, the healing powers of St. Francis are today particularly sought after by the very 'pagan' Hindus Xavier sought to convert or persecute. Outside Bom Jesus stand the usual lines of postcard and trinket sellers. But among the Catholics selling effigies of the Virgin and pictures of the Pope, are a group of Hindus who squat on the pavement and sell wax models of legs, arms, heads and ribs. I asked them what the models were for:



"To put on the tomb of St. Francis," replied one of the vendors. "If you have a broken leg you put one of these wax legs on the Mr. Xavier's tomb. If you have headache then you put one wax head, and so on."



"How does that help?" I asked.



"This model will remind the saint to cure your problem," replied the fetish salesman. "Then pain will be finished double quick, no problem."



Today the best view of the old metropolis can be had from the Chapel of Our Lady of the Mount. To get there you must climb a kilometre long flight of steps, once a passeggiata for the Goan gentry, now a deserted forest path frequented only by babbler birds, peacocks and monkeys.



Scarlet flamboya trees corkscrew out of the cobbles. Bushes block the magnificent gateways into now collapsed convents and overgrown aristocratic palaces. The architrave of a perfect Renaissance arch has rotted to the texture of old peach stone. Roots spiral over corniches; tubers grip the armorial shields of long-forgotten grand Goan families. As you near the chapel, its facade now half-submerged under a web of vines and creepers, there is no sound but for the eerie creek of old timber and the rustle of palms.



The panorama from the chapel's front steps is astonishing. The odd spire, a vault, a cupula, a broken pediment can be seen poking out of the forest canopy. You look down past the domes and spires of the churches and monasteries and see the evening light pick out the wandering course of the Mandovi River beyond.



The river is empty now: the docks are deserted; the galleons long sunk. Of the one of the greatest cities of the Renaissance world, almost nothing now remains.



"But of course despite everything they hung on," said Donna Georgina, leaning back on her wickerwork divan. "Despite the loss of the trading Empire they ruled us for another three hundred years. They were in Goa for a full two and a half centuries before you British conquered a single inch of Indian soil; and they were still here in 1960, more than a decade after you all went home again."



"Until Nehru threw them out at the liberation of Goa in 1961."



"Liberation?" said Donna Georgina, her face clouding over as quickly as a Goan sky at the height of the monsoon. "Did you say liberation? Botheration more like!"



I had clearly said the wrong thing, and Donna Georgina Figueiredo was now sitting bolt upright on her divan, rigid with indignation. We were talking in her eighteenth century ancestral mansion, not from the outside the largest of the Indo-Portuguese colonial estancias that still dot Goa, but from the inside certainly one of the most perfectly preserved. I had driven to Donna Georgina's village, Lutolim, along a lagoon edged in coconut groves, breadfruit trees and flowering hibiscus. The village revolved around the large white baroque church. In front of it stood a small piazza; to one side was the school, on the other side, the taverna, The Good Shepherd Bar. In it, appropriately enough, you could see the village priest sitting at a table in a white cassock, reading the daily paper. Scattered around the vicinity were the grand houses of the village, and at the grandest of them all was the Estancia Donna Georgina.



Inside, a servant had showed me to a divan. On one side, next to an eighteenth century Indo-Portuguese tallboy, stood a superb tall Satsuma vase. From the walls hung dark ancestral portraits. Other treasures- Macau porcelain, superb statuary, Mannerist devotional images- were dotted carelessly around the wooden galleries. On entering the room, Donna Georgina had clapped her hands. Within seconds another barefoot servant came running down the passage from the kitchen:



"Francis, bring Mr. Dalrymple a glass of chilled mango juice. I will have a cup of tea."



The servant padded off down the bare wooden floorboards. It was then that I had made my gaffe about the liberation. Donna Georgina clasped her hands and raised her eyes to heaven:



"Now understand thees, young man," she said in an accent heavy with Southern European vowels. "When the Indians came to Goa in 1961 it was 100% an invasion. From what were they supposed to be liberating us? Not the Portuguese because the Portuguese never oppressed us. Let me tell you exactly what it was the Indians were freeing us from. They were kindly liberating us from peace and from security."



Donna Georgina had fearsome beady black eyes and her hair was arranged in a tight quiff. She wore a flowery Portuguese blouse bought in Lisbon, offset by a severe black skirt. She nodded her head vigorously:



"We were ruled from Portugal for exactly 451 years and 23 days!" she said. "The result of this is that we are completely different from Indians- completely different! We Goans have a different mentality, a different language, a different culture. Although we are now under Indian occupation, I feel awkward when I cross the border into India... everything changes: the food, the landscape, the buildings, the people, the way of life..."



Donna Georgina stared over my shoulder towards the open window: "In the Portuguese days we never had to lock our houses at night. Now we can never be sure we are safe even during the day. And you know who we fear most? The Indian politicians. Absolutely unscrupulous people. They have cut our forests, ransacked our properties. They have made life impossible for everyone- particularly all us landowners. They offer our land to the people in their election promises: never give anything that belongs to them- oh no, not even a pin- but they never think twice about offering people what belongs to others. Oh yes. That's very easy for them."



What Donna Georgina said reflected stories I had heard repeated all over Goa. The sheer length of time that the Portuguese had hung on in their little Indian colony- some four hundred and fifty years of intermingling and intermarriage- had forged uniquely close bonds between the colonisers and colonised. As a result most Goans still considered their state a place apart: a cultured Mediterranean island, quite distinct from the rest of India. As they quickly let you know, they ate bread not chapattis; drank in tavernas not tea shops; many of them were Roman Catholic not Hindu; and their musicians played guitars and sang fados. None of them, they assured you, could stand the sound of sitars or shenai.



Moreover, like Donna Georgina, most educated Goans still talked about "those Indians" and "crossing the border to India", while happily describing their last visit to their cousins in the Algarve as if they had been revisiting some much-loved childhood home. Absorption into a wider India, they would admit, had certainly brought prosperity to the previously stagnant colony, but at a price. Public life has become corrupted, and the distinct identity of Goa was being forcibly and deliberately eroded.



Portuguese, for example, was no longer taught in the Goan schools; Portuguese places names were everywhere being Sankritised; the superb colonial buildings in Panjim were being deliberately pulled down to make way for anonymous Indian concrete: the Mansion of the Count of Menem, the last of the great Panjim aristocratic town houses, was destroyed only in 1986 to make way for a six storey block of flats.



There were, it was true, still some last remaining corners left: the haphazard, narrow cobbled lanes of Fontainhas, for example, the oldest quarter of Panjim. Fontainhas still looks like a small chunk of Portugal washed up on the shores of the Indian Ocean. Here old spinsters in flowery dresses sit on their verandas reading the evening papers, chatting to each other in Portuguese. Wandering through them of an evening you come across scenes impossible to imagine anywhere else in India: violinists practice Vila Lobos in front of open windows; caged birds sit chirping on ornate art nouveau balconies looking out over small red-tiled piazzas. As you watch, old men in pressed linen trousers and Homburg hats spill out of the tavernas: with walking sticks in their hands, they make their way unsteadily across the cobbles, past the lines of battered 1940's Volkswagen Beatles slowly rusting themselves into oblivion. A Mediterranean douceur hangs palpably, almost visibly, over its streets.



But such corners, insisted Donna Georgina, were becoming harder and harder to find. For twenty minutes my hostess listed the now familiar litany of complaints:



"We could not fight the Indians in 1961," she said. "They were too many. Goa was a small place and could not defend itself. Even today we are only one million people. What can we do against 900 million Indians? But their seizure of Goa was an act of force. The majority here were opposed to the Indian invasion. That was why they had to come with their army, their air force and their navy. That day we all cried bitterly. It was the end of the good old days."



Donna Georgina brought out a small handkerchief and dabbed her eyes.



"In fact, since 1961 we've had two invasions. First it was the Indians. They plundered Goa: cut down our forests and took away our woods. Their politicians created havoc. Then after that it was the turn of the hippies. Disgusting. That's what those people were. Dees-gusting. All that nudism. And sexual acts: on the beach, on the roads- even in Panjim. Panjim! Imagine: kissing in public and I don't know what else. Disgusting."



The previous afternoon I had seen what remained of Goa's once vibrant hippy community. Here instead of the rusting Volkswagens of Fontainhas, a line of Enfield Bullet motorbikes were parked beneath the palm trees. The weekly hippy flea market was packing up as I arrived: the German Holy Man was returning his stock of Hindu charms to his bag while under the next palm tree a Mexican bootlegger was putting his remaining cans of imported lager back into his knapsack. On the dunes by the shore, a bonfire was roaring, and what appeared to be a topless six-a-side female football team- an odd sight anywhere in the world, but an astonishing one in India- were kicking a ball around. To one side another group of bangled backpackers were cheering them on while passing a 10-inch joint from hand to hand:



"Shoot!"



"Intergalactic!"



"Cos-mic!"



In the sixties, Anjuna Beach had been the goal of every self-respecting hippy in Asia. From Hampstead and Berlin, from the barricades of Paris to the opium dens of San Francisco, streams of tie-dyed teenagers crossed Asia to reach this shore and make love on the breakers. Whole nomad communities formed around the beaches: Anjuna, Chapora, Colva and Calangute, previously backwaters barely known even to the sophisticates in Panjim, became mantras on the lips of fashion-conscious acid-heads across Europe and the U.S.



But in time, as the Sixties turned into the long hangover of the Seventies, most of the hippies either died of overdoses or went home. The young who come today are mostly students, generally a pretty affluent middle-class bunch who in due course will no doubt go home, cut off their pig tails and become merchant bankers and commodity brokers. Only very few of the genuine die-hard flower children of '67 still remain. Some have become very rich- it doesn't take much imagination to work out what trade their fortunes have come from- but most of these Stayer's On are good natured old freaks who grow their own, flap around in flared denim, hold forth on dragon lines, the Gaia theory and world harmony, and make ends meet by selling chocolate hash brownies, aromatherapy oils and Indian waistcoats to the backpackers. This fossilised relic of Haight Ashbury is pretty tame stuff, but you would never guess this talking to Donna Georgina:



"Of course its because of drugs that their behaviour is like it is," hissed my hostess. "Disgusting people. Drugs and sexual acts and I don't know what else. I don't know which is worse: those hippies or our modern Indian politicians. The Portuguese wouldn't have allowed either."



Donna Georgina sipped her tea defiantly: "Mr. Salazar would have known what to do with those hippies. He wouldn't have let them behave the way they did. "



The old lady took me around the house. She showed me the great ballroom where they held the last ball in 1936 and the sunken cloister where she grew all the essential ingredients for her kitchen- chillies and asparagus, coconut and lemon grass, tea rose, papaya and balsam.



"Despite the hippies and the politicians you seem at least to have maintained your house," I said looking around at the succession of perfectly preserved colonial Portuguese rooms surrounding us.



"Thanks to hard work," said Donna Georgina. "Hard labour I might call it. I'm currently fighting twenty-five law suits in an effort to keep the family property intact. That's right: twenty-five of them. Then there are the monkeys: big monkeys who jump on the roof and try to tear it apart. And as for preparing for the Monsoon rains: it’s worse than a wedding. The amount of work: checking the drains, making sure nothing leaks... But let me tell you this: it is my duty so to do. It is my duty to my ancestors, to myself and to society."



We ended up in front of the ancient oratoria: a cupboard-like object which opened up like a tabernacle to reveal ranks of devotional images, crucifixes, icons and flickering candles. There every day, twice a day, the household met up to say a decade of the rosary. On the wall beside it, Donna Georgina had hung a pen and ink drawing of the Holy Family.



"I drew it myself," she explained, seeing where I was looking. "The baby is Jesus and the lamb that he is feeding symbolises Humanity. The old lady is St. Anne, Jesus’ grandmamma. All the ancient families of Goa have St. Anne as their patron saint."



Donna Georgina paused, leaving the last phrase hanging in the air:



"It's entirely through St. Anne's intercession and God's protection that this house is standing and that I am still alive. People always ask me: 'Living alone you must have someone to look after you. Who is it?' To which I reply: 'God Almighty, Jesus Christ and St. Anne.'



"And young man. Let me tell you this. Between them they are doing a very good job."

http://www.travelintelligence.com/travel...%E2%80%99s

Note the back and forth between the British scumbag and the old Galilaean whore, they never ask the sons of the soil i.e the Hindus who were tortured and forcibly converted for centuries what their feelings were about the glories of Portuguese occupation. No just Galilaean scumbags fattened by colonial loot.



Any Galilaean who longs for Christian Portuguese occupation can fuck off to Portugal and take their cult of the carpenter "messiah" with them.



The history of Portuguese occupied Goa is one of blood and tears and resistance of the Hindus exemplified by the Cuncolim revolt.