The End of Suppression and What Survived It

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.