Paper short abstract:

By analyzing the writings of British men, but also a few women, that went to Goa between the 1870s and the 1920s I will try to explore the relationship between British colonialism and Portuguese colonialism in India, but also how orientalised discourses could be unsettled by this confrontation.

Paper long abstract:

By analyzing the writings of British men, but also a few women, that went to Goa between the 1870s and the 1920s I will try to explore the relationship between British colonialism and Portuguese colonialism in India, but also how orientalised discourses could be unsettled by this confrontation. The recognition of a wide array of manifestations of Europeaness intermingled with what was perceived as Indian, often puzzled the British gaze: they were prepared to see and accept what they identified as Indians, but they could not tolerate that those Indians were so similar to themselves, so European, too European.

For British travelers Goa was another India, a place colonized by others that, as many wrote, would better be colonized by them. The usual discourses contrasting the present decadence and the glorious past, came to prove, on the one side, that the British colonization of India could not so the same mistakes and, on the other side, that Goa would only be properly explored if it became one more territory of British India. Therefore, what was perceived as "Portuguese" was often subject to the same orientalised discourses as what was Indian. A case that will be explored is that of the catholic cult of St. Francis Xavier, often described with the same ethnographical gaze that was used to write on Hindu rituals and practices.