Presenting the ERC-funded ID-SCAPES research project
Sidh Losa Mendiratta, Giuseppe Resta, Tiago Cruz

The cultural heritage associated with India and Bangladesh’s Christian minorities remains understudied and its historical significance is often contested. Many of the countries’ medieval and early modern churches were built primarily for communities of newly converted Christians that came from different regions and ethnolinguistic backgrounds and therefore carried corresponding identities. As of 2011, Christians represent 2% of India and Bangladesh’s population, or about 28,3 million adherents, and about a third identify themselves as Dalits (former untouchables), being “twice a minority” (Sahgal et al. 2021). However, many in India and Bangladesh still perceive Christian religious architecture as a “foreign element and a legacy of the European colonial presence” (Friedrichs 2018). This has not advanced the cause for its study and conservation. This (mis)perception has become stronger during the last two decades, as hegemonic policies in South Asia have negatively impacted the cultural heritage of religious minorities, leading to the erasure or effacement of heritage sites.

In late 2023, the European Research Council approved funding for the ID-SCAPES project (www.idscapes.com), which aims to study and document the early modern religious architecture of Christian minorities in India and Bangladesh. These religious sites are often multi-layered and disputed heritage, and some buildings have suffered from increasing neglect, erasure and even effacement during recent decades. Taking into consideration the risks arising from these processes and the progressive erasure of cultural heritage, ID-SCAPES aims to produce a Social History of the Built Environment of India and Bangladesh’s churches and sacral landscapes (built before ca. 1800), including both functioning and ruined buildings. Challenging the European-centric historiographical framework that has been commonly employed for these themes, and through extensive fieldwork and the analysis of visual and written documents that remain unexplored, the project promotes a new methodological approach that embraces the buildings’ complex histories.

A majority of the churches in India and Bangladesh founded during the medieval and early modern periods are associated with six ethno-linguistic communities: East Indians, Goans, Mangaloreans, Keralites, Tamils and Bengalis. These contexts originated distinct regional architectural expressions. However, most scholarly work has addressed the design of these churches against the background of European artistic tendencies – such as mannerism or baroque – while local contexts and traditions have remained overlooked. These European-centric discourses often ascribed the “exotic” and local nuances of church architecture to varying levels of fusion or hybridity between West and East, based on a simplistic dichotomy of imagined “western” and “eastern” identities, harmoniously entering into a unifying imperial (Christian) project. One approach to connecting religious architecture, “indigenous” agency and identity was attempted by Paulo Varela Gomes (2007, 2011) on Goan and East Indian communities.

Influenced by the concept of Ethnoscapes introduced by Arjun Appadurai (1990), the project advances the new concept of Identityscapes to look at churches as dynamic environments where groups and individuals both build and perform identities (Harris 2005).The Ethnoscapes concept can be applied to this body of heritage by looking at the cultural encounters and negotiations arising from the flux of people and group identities generated by early modern missionary and conversion activities in South Asia, and by recognizing how these fluxes led to a fundamental tension between universalism and cultural specificity in the creation of, and changes to, certain spaces and identities. This tension is one of globalization’s “contradictory results” (Appadurai 2016), whereby its interconnectedness leads many people to open “the horizons of [their] imagination,” but simultaneously pushes “others to close down, to shrink, and to exclude” (Appadurai 2016).

The theoretical frameworks associated with postcolonial studies generated new paradigms, where the hegemony of the colonizer and the subalternity of the colonized established a monolith to examine “narratives of architectural history” (Arnold, Ergut, and Turan Özkaya 2006, xviii). However, the “indigenous” clergy and the Christians of India, with their complex identities, affiliations and agencies, disrupted the traditional “binary distinction between colonizer and colonized” (Gomes 2010, 50). As suggested by Gomes, a new approach is necessary to understand their cultural heritage: one that uncovers how local factors and agencies influenced religious architecture and landscapes (Gomes 2010, 2011). Gomes’ concept of the “Goan church” in opposition to the “Indo-Portuguese church” umbrella term, provides valuable insight that can be tested in the religious architecture of other Christian Ethnolinguistic Communities.

ID-SCAPES employs both archival research and fieldwork, keeping a “preservation by record” posture that is generally preferable when there is a sense of urgency in documenting these sites, given that many of the structures have been disappearing in the last decades. This involves typical challenges associated with research practices in Digital Humanities in the interpretation and reconstitution of church architecture.

The project’s timeframe extends to 2029, and it is expected to establish synergies with the ESIND COST Action on Europe’s Representations of India: Texts, Images, and Encounters. The ID-SCAPES research team is based at the Faculty of Architecture in Porto, Portugal. It is coordinated by Sidh Losa Mendiratta and includes Claudia Duarte, Giuseppe Resta, and Tiago Trindade Cruz. Giuseppe Resta and Tiago Trindade Cruz are also active members of the ESIND COST Action.

References

• Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Theory, Culture & Society 7 (2-3): 295-310. https://doi.org/10.1177/026327690007002017.
• —. 2016. “Flows of Globalization” Vienna Humanities Festival. https://youtu.be/paGfRUTBTAM?si=E5HNQ_52OjYrYqbN.
• Arnold, Dana, Elvan Altan Ergut, and Belgin Turan Özkaya, eds. 2006. Rethinking architectural historiography. London: Routledge.
• Friedrichs, Jörg. 2018. “Outlandish Christendom: The Catholic Church in India and China.” Journal of Church and State 60 (4): 681-704. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcs/csx082.
• Gomes, Paulo Varela. 2007. “‘Bombay Portuguese’: ser ou não ser Português em Bombaim no Século XIX.” Revista de História Das Ideias (28): 567-608.
• —. 2010. “As igrejas dos católicos de Goa.” Ler História (58): 47-60.
• —. 2011. Whitewash, Red Stone. A History of Church Architecture in Goa. New Delhi: Yoda Press.
• Harris, Dianne. 2005. “Social History: Identity, Performance, Politics, and Architectural Histories.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 64 (4): 421-423. https://doi.org/10.2307/25068193.
• Sahgal, Neha, Jonathan Evans, Ariana Monique Salazar, Kelsey Jo Starr, and Manolo Corichi. 2021. Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation. Pew Research Center (Washington, DC).