How Hindu Worship Was Suppressed in Portuguese 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.