The wages of fundamentalism-
Lessons from PortugalBy A.J. Philip
When the invitation was from The Little Magazine, I could not say no. That is how I found myself attending a literary evening at New
Delhi's India International Centre early this month. Portuguese
authors Urbano Tavares Rodrigues and Clara Pinto Correia were in conversation with Indian authors Nirmal Verma, Keki N. Daruwalla, Mrinal Pande, M. Mukundan and Upamanyu Chatterjee.My acquaintance with Portuguese writing is limited to Jose Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. I found his The Gospel According to Jesus Christ compelling reading. Explains Saramago: "My Gospel tries to fill the blank spaces between the various episodes of Jesus's life as narrated in the other gospels - with some interpretations of my own." A fine interlacing of sombre realism, grotesque fantasy and wry humour, it is threaded with unveiled challenges and is designed to provoke. Christians may have problems when his narrative focuses on a naive Jesus who, entirely susceptible to human desires, chooses to cohabit with Mary Magdalene. But then Saramago is not a theologian but a writer, who enjoys the
freedom to write what he feels. When his book first appeared in 1991, it did not create the kind of storm Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses caused.To come back to the literary evening, Urbano is one of the topmost writers of Portugal today. A self-confessed atheist, he has been in the forefront of the democratic movement in his country having had a stint in the jail for his non-conformist views. While he was in jail, the only book he had access to was the Bible. "There is no better book to read, when you are in jail" said Urbano. Unlike him, Clara goes to the church once in a while, more to accompany "my friends and relations" than for any spiritual reasons. She, perhaps, symbolises the confusion Christians in the West face today. Churches no longer
attract the younger generations, who are in search of
alternatives. "Buddhism is now a growing religion in Portugal," said Clara.The discussions centred around the hold of Christianity on the
Portuguese people. This was not surprising because, for most Indians, the Portuguese are known for their missionary zeal and crusades. But what struck me most was a comment Urbano made while discussing the state of Portuguese writing. He said, though Portugal was in Europe, it was a poor country as its per capita income was far below that of Germany and the Netherlands. This did not conform to the image of
Portugal as a colonial power that the Indians have etched in their
memory. At one time, its network of dominion stretched three quarters of the way around the world, from Brazil in the west to the Spice Islands and Japan in the Far East. How could they achieve this? And why did they descend to a state where a leading writer has to begin his observations with the comment that Portugal is a poor country?Portugal is a small country of moderate fertility. In the 15th
century, its population numbered about 1 million and its chief
products and exports consisted of wine and sugar. They could have minded their own business and carried on. Instead, they jumped the traces of rationality and turned their land into a platform for empire.The Portuguese achievement testifies to their enterprise and
toughness; to their religious faith and enthusiasm; to their ability
to mobilise and exploit the latest knowledge and techniques. They
were pragmatists, not chauvinists. To make up for the lack of human resources, they imported slaves. They married women of all races as they had no room for Portuguese women on the long voyages. Their one emotional outlay was piety. They took priests and friars with them on every vessel, for their own safety and salvation (the power of prayer and sacrament); for the propagation of the faith among infidels and pagans; and as slave to their own conscience. These men of God legitimised and sanctified greed.However, their religious commitment entailed a serious commercial disadvantage. They could not reconcile themselves to doing business with men of other faiths. For the Portuguese, the Muslims were infidels and enemies of the true faith. No brutality was too much. All Muslim shipping was fair game; all Muslim kingdoms were defined as foes. "On his second voyage of 1502, Vasco da Gama capped a victory over a Muslim flotilla before Calicut by cutting off the ears, noses and hands of some eight hundred "Moors" and sending them ashore to the local ruler with the facetious suggestion that he made curry of them. And one of his captains, his maternal uncle Vincente Sodre (whose name deserves to be remembered ad opprobrium), flogged
the chief Muslim merchant at Cannanore until he fainted, then stuffed his mouth with excrement and covered it with a slab of pork to make sure he ate the filth."Small wonder that when better traders and adversaries surfaced on the scene, the Portuguese lost their pride of place. Portugal's day had come and gone but pride thrived on reverses and they clung to what they could. Thus the Portuguese held Goa until 1961, long after it had lost wealth and commercial importance, when a far stronger Indian government marched in and took it over, without provocation or pretext. No self-respecting independent country could live with such a colonial boil on its flank.
Long back, Portuguese power had shriveled; one historian speaks of "the inherently brittle superstructure of their maritime
dominance". And he might have added, the sandy infrastructure. Soon only the great memories remained, enshrined in the poetry of Luis da Camoens (The Lusiads), who sang of invisible tracks through "oceans none had sailed before." All pride. As the English governor of Bombay observed in 1737: "The Crown of Portugal hath long maintained the possession of its territories in India at a certain annual expense, not inconsiderable, purely as it seems from a point of Honour and Religion."Now the question: How did Portugal decline and fall? When the
Portuguese conquered the South Atlantic, they were in the van of
navigational technique. A readiness to learn from foreign savants,
many of them Jewish, had brought knowledge that translated directly into application; and when in 1492, the Spanish decided to compel their Jews to profess Christianity or leave, many found refuge in Portugal, then more relaxed in its anti-Jewish sentiments. But in 1497, pressure from the Roman Catholic Church and Spain led the Portguese crown to abandon this tolerance. Some seventy thousand Jews were forced into a bogus but nevertheless sacramentally valid
baptism. In 1506, Lisbon saw its first pogrom, which left two
thousand "converted" Jews dead. (Spain had been doing as much for two hundred years.) From then on, the intellectual and scientific life of Portugal descended into an abyss of bigotry, fanaticism and purity of blood. (The Portuguese "old Christians" eventually came to call themselves puritanos.The descent was gradual. The Portuguese Inquisition was stalled only in the 1540s and burned its first heretic in 1543; but it did not
become grimily unrelenting until the 1580s, after the union of the
Portuguese and Spanish crowns in the person of Philip II. In the
meantime, the crypto-Jews, including Abraham Zacut and other
astronomers, found life in Portugal dangerous enough to leave in
droves. They took with them money, commercial know-how, connections, knowledge and - even more serious - those immeasurable qualities of curiosity and dissent that are the leaven of thought.That was a loss, but in matters of intolerance, the persecutor's
greatest loss is self-inflicted. It is this process of self-
diminution that gives persecution its durability, that makes it, not
the event of the moment, or of the reign, but of lifetimes and
centuries. By 1513, Portugal wanted for astronomers; by the 1520s, scientific leadership had gone. The country tried to create a new Christian astronomical and mathematical tradition but failed, not least because good astronomers found themselves suspected of Judaism.The Portuguese did their best to close themselves off from foreign and heretical influences. Education was controlled by the church, which maintained a medieval curriculum focused on grammar, rhetoric, and scholastic argument. Featured were exhibitionism and hair-splitting. The only science at the higher level was to be found in the one faculty of medicine at Coimbra. Even there, few instructors were ready to abandon Galen for Harvey or teach the yet more dangerous ideas of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, all banned by the Jesuits as late as 1746.
No more Portuguese students went to study abroad, and the import of books was strenuously controlled by inspectors sent by the Holy Office to meet incoming ships and visit bookshops and libraries. An index of prohibited works was first prepared in 1547; successive expansions culminated in the huge list of 1624 - the better to save Portuguese souls.
Within the Kingdom and overseas, a triple censorial barrier begrudged imprimaturs and discouraged originality. Such printing presses as were allowed (in Goa, none in Brazil) were in the hands of clerics, generally Jesuits, who limited their publications to dictionaries and religious matter. From Brazil and Angola, even these safe materials had to be sent to Portugal for prior censorship.
Small wonder that the life of science and speculation decayed.
Portuguese diplomats and agents abroad came back with the message that the rest of the world was moving on while Portugal stood still. They understood what few Portuguese could or would see: that the pursuit of Christian uniformity was stupid; that the Holy Office of the Inquisition was a national disaster; that the church was swallowing the wealth of country; that the government's failure to promote agriculture and industry had reduced Portugal to the role of "the best and most profitable colony of England."Portuguese intellectual shortcomings soon became a byword : thus Diogo do Couto, referring in 1603 to "the meanness and lack of curiosity of this our Portuguese nation"; and Francis Parry, the
English envoy at Lisbon in 1670, observing that "the people are so little curious that no man knows more than what is merely necessary for him." The 18th century English visitor Mary Brearley remarked that "the bulk of the people were disinclined to independence of thought and, in all but a few instances, too much averse from intellectual activity to question what they had learned."Through this self-imposed closure, the Portuguese lost competence even in those areas they had once dominated. "From being leaders in the van of navigational theory and practice, (they) dropped to being stragglers in the rear." By the end of the 17th century, several of the pilots in the carreira da India (the Indian trade) were foreigners. By 1600, even more by 1700, Portugal had become a backward, weak country. The crypto-Jewish scientists, mathematicians and physicians of yesteryear were fled, no dissenters appeared to take their place. And by the 21st century, Portugal is the sick man of Europe. Readers who would like to know more about the phenomenon
are advised to read The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David
Landes, which I have quoted extensively in this column.Why did I bring up this subject? We in India have a lot to learn from Portugal's experience. Until a few years ago, Gujarat was one of the richest states in India. Business thrived in the state. The quantum of foreign direct investment was the highest in the state. Many industries had shifted their bases from Mumbai to Ahmedabad. Gujarat also received huge remittances from abroad. The Gujaratis are among the richest non-resident Indians. When earthquake struck Gujarat, it received huge assistance from all over the world. The Gujaratis took pride in proclaiming that they would make up for the loss in a record time. There was every reason to believe them. After all, business is in the blood of the Gujaratis.
But all this was before Godhra. There is no doubt that whoever had enacted Godhra deserved punishment. It is a different matter that those guilty of Godhra have not yet been punished while hundreds of innocent Muslims were killed in the pogrom that followed. Business has come to a standstill in Gujarat. A friend of mine who visited Ahmedabad was told by hoteliers and shopkeepers that since Godhra, there has been drastic fall in their turnover. The friend, who heads a research institution in New Delhi, concluded that the businessmen would turn against the BJP in the elections little realising that the communal campaign unleashed by Modi had a greater impact on the voters.
If the present trend continues, Gujarat will lose its pre-eminence in
business. There are more things to worry the citizen than the fall in
business share. The rise of fundamentalism in Gujarat is a matter of real concern. There are many Togadias who claim that the Gujarat verdict is a verdict for Hindutva and that sooner than later India would be declared a Hindu Rashtra. The election campaign in Gujarat was also on religious lines. Even the Congress was forced to start its campaign from a religious place. It feared giving nominations to Muslims. The Congress gave the leadership in the state to a person who had his political baptism in the RSS.The ruling BJP says the Gujarat experiment will be replicated in the other states going to the polls in 2003. In Gujarat, there is a law minister who is himself an accused in a murder case. At the Centre, there is a minister who is hell bent upon rewriting history to suit the interests of the proponents of Hindutva. The situation has come to such a pass that leaders of the Sangh Parivar can say anything against the minorities and the so-called secularists and get away with it. While a VHP leader who threatens minorities and secularists with "death warrants" is the toast of the ruling party, a humble Kashmiri journalist is in the jail for possessing documents downloaded from the Net. Even when the military intelligence personnel give him a clean chit, the police won't let him go because he does not belong to the Sangh Parivar.
All this is reminiscent of the Portuguese experience. Like Portugal, India was at one time in the van of navigation but the Hindu religious order banning the crossing of the seas put an end to Indian navigation. Similarly, Indian doctors could not learn anatomy when the Hindu religious leaders proscribed touching the dead body. By disallowing diffusion of knowledge, India became a byword for superstition. India is bound to go the Portuguese way if fundamentalism is not kept in check in Gujarat and in the rest of the country.
(The writer can be reached at [email protected])