The Goa Inquisition Suppresses Hindu Worship in Goa

Portuguese rule in Goa turned actively hostile to Hindu worship within decades of the colony's conquest in 1510, and the pace of destruction sharpened once the Goa Inquisition tribunal opened in 1561. Contemporary Portuguese royal correspondence records that by 1566 around one hundred and sixty Hindu temples on Goa island itself had been demolished, and Franciscan missionaries went on to destroy roughly three hundred more across the neighboring district of Bardez between 1566 and 1567, with comparable losses recorded separately in Salcete. A 1569 royal letter preserved in the Portuguese archives states that every Hindu temple in the colony had been burned and razed to the ground. Laws passed in the same decade, 1566 to 1576, went beyond destruction to forbid the repair or reconstruction of any temple and banned the public performance of Hindu ceremonies, including weddings, with confiscated religious images divided between the accuser who reported them and the church. Hindu children whose fathers had died were handed to Jesuit missionaries to be raised as Christians, converts gained inheritance rights their unconverted relatives did not have, and an 1684 decree went as far as banning the Konkani language itself in favor of Portuguese, punishable by imprisonment, since language and religious identity were treated as inseparable targets of the same policy.

Hindu worship in Goa did not end with the temple demolitions, it relocated. Deities carried out of the reach of Portuguese authority were re-enshrined in new temples built just across the colonial border in territory still under Hindu or Muslim rule, several of which remain active pilgrimage sites today and preserve the images and lineages of the original Goan temples in exile. Enforcement also loosened well before the tribunal itself disappeared: the Inquisition was suspended once, from 1774 to 1778, and operated under increasingly relaxed conditions through the later eighteenth century as Portuguese colonial policy shifted, before being permanently abolished in 1812 under British and liberal pressure on the Portuguese crown. Most of the tribunal's own case records were destroyed by Portuguese officials after abolition, which is why historians can describe the scale of the temple destruction with more confidence than the number of people the tribunal itself prosecuted. The episode is remembered today as one of the most sustained colonial era campaigns against Hindu religious practice anywhere in South Asia, distinguished less by any single atrocity than by its duration, its combination of legal, economic and religious pressure, and the fact that it targeted converts as well as practicing Hindus, treating suspected crypto-Hindu observance among baptized Goan Catholics as a continuing offense.