Conversion Historiography in South Asia: Alternative Indian Christian Counter-histories in Eighteenth Century Goa

Conversion as a historical process is discussed in South Asian post-independence historiography mostly following the demands of the political present. In the present article, I first try to trace a fragmentary and in-complete history of what I will call conversion historiography in and about South Asia, referring mostly to conversion to Christianity from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Then, I discuss a particular case of religious and cultural conversion, in which the descendants of the early converts to Christianity in Goa re-appropriated conversion histories as an analytical and historiographical tool in order to reconfigure their relation with the past and the present and thus, shore up their cultural authority. In the process, they created their own communal history and historiography that fed directly into Portuguese and Catholic Orientalism. This particular historical example should help us see to what extent the act of conversion is a self-transforming work in progress, a communicational project without teleological guarantees, capable of empowering alternative historical readings.