The relic state: St Francis Xavier and the politics of ritual in Portuguese India

This book is a study of the complex nature of colonial and missionary power in Portuguese India. Written as a historical ethnography, it explores the evolving shape of a series of Catholic festivals that took place throughout the duration of Portuguese colonial rule in Goa (1510–1961), and for which the centrepiece was the 'incorrupt' corpse of São Francisco Xavier (1506–52), a Spanish Basque Jesuit missionary-turned-saint. Using distinct genres of source materials produced over the long du...