Goa’s Bom Jesus as Visual Culture: The Basilica’s Architecture, Image, History and Identity

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Vishvesh Prabhakar Kandolkar

Goa’s Bom Jesus as Visual Culture

The Basilica’s Architecture, Image, History and Identity

Vishvesh Prabhakar Kandolkar

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English

Routledge India
27 November 2024

History of architecture; Regional studies; Cultural studies; Anthropology; Civil engineering, surveying & building

This book chronicles the visual history of the Basilica of Bom Jesus, one of the longest-surviving churches from Goa’s Portuguese colonial era. In the sixteenth century, this baroque church in Old Goa was constructed to house the sacred relics of St. Francis Xavier and is emblematic of Goa Dourada or Golden Goa.

Despite their early modern origins, monuments like the Basilica continue to influence visual culture that pertains to Goa. Accordingly, this book uncovers the traces of architectural images of Goa’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-century monuments and conducts a genealogical study of how uses of religious architecture shift over time. Thus, even as the Basilica originally functioned to portray or recall a grand empire by evoking the notion of Goa Dourada, its iconicity has been employed in marking Goa’s difference from the rest of India thereafter. By employing an analysis of historical texts, illustrations, photography, film, and pageantry, this volume demonstrates how the image of the Basilica has been employed to create a discourse on Goan identity. In fact, right from the colonial period, when Goa was heralded as the Rome of the East, to the post-Portuguese period, when Goa became an idyllic destination for leisure tourism, architectural images of Bom Jesus have been central in shaping Goa’s identity.

Goa’s Bom Jesus as Visual Culture will be useful to students and educators in the fields of architecture, history, anthropology, sociology, history of architecture, and colonial/postcolonial studies. Finally, the long history of a single monument that the book documents highlights how Goans have been shaping their unique culture. At the same time as Goans imbibed Portuguese and other European influences, they also domesticated and remade such colonial heritage in South Asian fashion and, in turn, contributed to global aesthetics.

By: Vishvesh Prabhakar Kandolkar
Imprint: Routledge India
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9781032488608
ISBN 10: 1032488603
Pages: 170
Publication Date: 27 November 2024
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Vishvesh Prabhakar Kandolkar is Associate Professor at the Goa College of Architecture, India. His research on Goa’s architectural history focuses on early modern church design as well as the evolution of Indo-Portuguese aesthetics from the colonial to the postcolonial period. His writing has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, the Oxford Journal of Hindu Studies, eTropic, the Journal of Human Values, and Economic and Political Weekly.