TENSING RODRIGUES
Continuing the series on a different missionary model, we move next to José Vaz; but once again, this was a mission with a difference. Vaz did not go to Sri Lanka to spread the Christian faith; but rather, to serve the spiritual needs of the Christians in north western Sri Lanka who were left without religious services after the Portuguese were overthrown by the Dutch, and were persecuted by the Dutch Calvinists. They were left without a mass till the Buddhist king of Kandy offered protection to Vaz and his flock.
Interestingly the first Catholic mass in Sri Lanka after the departure of the Portuguese was celebrated in the compound of Sri Dalada Maligawa, the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, a Buddhist shrine in Kandy. At this point it may be in order to clarify that the population on the north western coast of Sri Lanka consisted mainly of poor Tamil fishermen, brethren of the Parava fishermen among whom Nobili and Gonçalo Fernandes (1541-1619) began their mission; and among whom Francis Xavier also worked for a short time, before he left for Far East; unlike the people of the Sri Lankan highlands who were mainly Sinhalese Buddhists. It was the north western coast of Sri Lanka that changed hands from the Portuguese to the Dutch; naturally it was here that the Christians were settled.
When I visited Negombo, I mistook them for Goan Christians – same dress; till I heard them speak! As in Goa, the devotion to St Anthony is very popular here too.
My first encounter with the José Vaz saga was when I was a school student. My cousin was then a novice in De Nobili College, Pune. On one of his vacations, he brought me a Marathi book titled ‘Lankechi Hak’ (The Cry of Lanka). Years later, when I visited Kandy, I made it a point to visit the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic where the first mass by José Vaz was celebrated.
“In 1688, thirty years after the loss of Sri Lanka to the Dutch, Fernão de Queiroz, a Jesuit in Goa, added final touches to his bulky manuscript ‘Spiritual and Temporal Conquest of Ceylon’ and then died. Consequently, by neglect or on purpose, the book was not published until the early 19th century and the manuscript probably had a limited circulation outside the Goan administrative and clerical milieu.” writes Zupanov. [Zupanov, 2006: ‘Goan Brahmans in the Land of Promise: Missionaries, Spies and Gentiles in the 17th-18th century Sri Lanka’, in ‘Re-exploring the Links: History and Constructed Histories Between Portugal and Sri Lanka’, ed. Jorge Flores, 2006, pp. 171-210.]
João Ribeiro who spent 18 years in Sri Lanka, and saw it slip through Portuguese hands all the way until the fall of Jaffna in 1658, says “This finest piece of land, which the Creator has placed upon this earth should have been made into the capital of the Estado da Índia and the centerpiece in the political, military, and colonial policy in Asia. Of all maritime outposts from ‘Sofala to Japan’, it was Sri Lanka that was worth holding on to.” A gem of wisdom from a Portuguese political and economic strategist.
There was, however, in Goa a small group of pious clerics, known as Oratorians (also called Milagristas, Padres Bragmanes, etc.) who took Queiroz’s exhortation seriously. The hagiographic literature that grew around the history of the Congregação do Oratório de Santa Cruz dos Milagres and around the biography of one of its members who founded the mission in Sri Lanka, José Vaz, continues to cultivate and polish a smooth and monumental image of both the institution and of the heroic father-figure missionary. Thus, what Oratorians endeavoured and achieved in the late 17th century, all the way until the suppression of all religious orders in Goa in 1835 was a continuation of the strategies and techniques used by other religious orders under the Portuguese royal padroado. The Society of Jesus, before it fell out of favour, and the famous method called accommodation is said to have provided the closest model for the founders of the Oratorian Congregation, most of whom did have close ties to the Jesuits and were educated in their institutions in Goa.
By recruiting its members exclusively from the Catholic Brahman families in Goa, this Congregation was from the inception, both a caste institution and a “new” religious order in Goa. Unable to achieve “spiritual” promotion, by joining one of the already established religious orders, these highly educated Brahman priests found their own way to break away from the conceptual prison in which they were locked by the Portuguese colonial and ecclesiastical administration. Openly discriminated on the local ecclesiastical scene on the basis of their “heathen” heritage and their “tropical” psychological makeup, the “native” priests were in fact recruited from especially Brahmans. Nevertheless they were usually relegated to the subaltern posts without benefices and honours. Even if religious orders did at times recruit or proclaim to recruit “natives”, these cases were extremely rare. The foundation of the Congregation of the Oratory of the Cross of Miracles was an ingenious way for the Catholic Brahman priests to position themselves higher up, as the occasion permitted, within the local hierarchical structure. This is not to affirm that individuals did not count and that all their choices and actions were geared towards one and single goal. On the contrary, the identity politics involved in this enterprise required individual heroes ready to undertake risky spiritual and political adventures, to endure losses and to learn how to orient
the gains.
It was Vaz who imprinted his own aspirations and desires into the shaping of this first religious order of the “native” priests in Goa. He joined the three founding fathers – Pascoal da Costa Jeremias, Custódio Leitão, and Bernardo de Coutinho – on September 25. Vaz was already an experienced missionary who had just returned from the Canara where he worked for three years as Vicar Forane (Vigário da Vara) and earned a reputation of an energetic and saintly person. It is probably under his domineering personality that the order decisively turned towards missionary work in Ceylon, but also among the “native Christians” in Goa where they were called to “reform their customs”.
There is a hagiographic version of the events that made Vaz choose Sri Lanka for the privileged mission territory; he heard in the early eighties, before he went to Canara in 1681, about the “pitiful state of those abandoned Christian people” from F. de Sardinha, Conego da Sè de Goa, who went to China and stopped in the city of Colombo. Ever since, Vaz “burnt” with desire to help those abandoned Christians and in 1686, he left without much preparation and with very few things (a breviary and the ‘aparelhos da Missa’) for Sri Lanka. The lack of enthusiasm for his mission, even among his co-religionist, is interpreted by Rego as another sign of providential foresight available only to the chosen.
At the time, and even with a few centuries of hindsight, his move must have looked as heading for a certain failure. The Dutch had closed off the island from all Portuguese influence, precisely fearing the entry of Catholic priests whom they saw as the fifth column of the Estado da Índia. On the other hand, for Vaz, Sri Lanka was a Promised Land, the belief he probably shared with Pedro de Basto and Fernão Queiroz. It was in his missionary role that he tried to efface, consciously or unconsciously, the stigma of heathen past attached to all “cristãos da terra”. By becoming missionaries in a heathen land, in the setting of a primitive church and away from the Portuguese colonial and ecclesiastical administration, something Jesuits desperately tried to recreate in the Madurai Mission across the Gulf of Manar, Vaz and his followers would finally manage to reconnect the past and the future of the Catholic brahman community.
