THURSDAY, JUNE 27, 2024
Jason Keith Fernandes
One of the ways in which I justify spending long hours watching television is that I am in fact engaged in research, inquiring into the ways in which the world thinks. I was able to offer myself hard evidence of this justification some days ago whilst watching Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story. This drama series is a prequel to the Bridgerton a wildly popular drama series that itself draws from the popular novels by Julia Quinn. The tension that animates the plot of Queen Charlotte is that Queen Charlotte, who marries King George III of England, is black, a fact that is realised only when she arrives on the shores of England for her marriage with King George III. To resolve this complication, the royal court dispenses titles to various persons of colour. This act of desperation then gives rise to what is called the ‘Great Experiment’ an attempt to desegregate Bridgerton society and introduce racial equality. It must be pointed out that the world of Bridgerton is one of fantasy. It never existed and it is only built on the slimmest of historical details. In this case, the fact that Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was rumoured to be of black ancestry. It is also a fact that the British empire, both that was presided over by King George III and later by British monarchs was terribly racist and segregationist. Indeed, some scholars will argue that it was the British empire’s inability to integrate their subject elites into the British empire as citizens of the British empire, and leave them simply as second-class citizens, that resulted in the anti-colonial nationalism that marked their colonies like India. The world of Bridgerton may have been a fantasy in the British empire, but there were other places, other European empires, particularly the Spanish and Portuguese empires, where the integration of local elites into the structure of the empire did in fact take place. This integration was not without its problems and tensions, but it is a fact that non-white persons who were already elites in their native societies were recognised by the Portuguese empire. Where these elites converted to Catholicism, their ability to rise into the imperial hierarchy was even higher. There are a few notable examples. When the King of Kongo converted to Christianity, for a time the King of Portugal and the King of Kongo would refer to each other as brothers. We also have several examples to offer from Goa. Historical records indicate the knighting of a Crisna Sinai in Lisbon by D João III in 1538. The Braganza family of Chandor is reported to get its surname because the royal dynasty of Portugal, in an act that in those days would have been seen as an act of incorporation, granted its name to the noble family of that area. Subsequently, elite Goan groups, notably through the treatises Aureola dos Indios e Nobiliarchia Bracmana (1702) and Promptuario das difiniçoes indicas (1713), would, as Ângela Barreto Xavier demonstrates in her work, translate their traditional and hereditary noble status into noble status within the Portuguese imperial nomenclature. The fact that they were able to do so is because the discourse in the Portuguese world was already disposed to such an understanding. Indeed, as I have pointed out elsewhere, even today the fact that one is brahmin or chardo is understood among some social groups in Portugal as being indicative of being of noble stock. Under the constitutional monarchy a number of the Goan elite, both Catholic and Hindu were incorporated into the Portuguese nobility. The Dempos and the Deshprabhus of Pernem are good examples of local, non-Catholic, elite who were incorporated into the Portuguese nobility. In so many ways then, the story of Bridgerton while fantastical in the United Kingdom is not so in the Iberian world, and most certainly not in Goa. Local elites were formally recognised as on par with the metropolitan elites, and intermarriages did happen, as evidenced also by so many Goans, both Catholic and Hindu. None of this is to say that the incorporation was easy, or without opposition and that this resulted in a perfect non-racialised society. On the contrary, racism is a feature of contemporary Portuguese society, as it is in Goan society. However, the formal, or what some scholars will call discursive, possibility for recognition allowed for imperial polity that was markedly different from that of the British empire. This fact then raises the question. What accounts for the difference? Two factors. First, the Portuguese expansion operated in the early modern period well before the entrenchment of scientific racism which was hegemonic when the British empire was at its zenith. The second factor, I would argue is that the difference lies in the fact that the Portuguese king was an avowedly Catholic prince who upheld a Catholic moral and political order. To explain this statement, we need to take recourse to Jean-Frédéric Schaub’s discussion of the purity of blood statutes enacted in early modern Spain and Portugal in his chapter entitled “Racialization Within Universalist Societies. Is it Possible to Identify Various Historical Cases of the same Antimony” (pp. 135-156) in the book Citizenship and Empire in Europe 200-1900: The Antonine Constitution after 1800 Years (2016). The purity of blood statutes were enacted to block Catholics, whose ancestors may have been Jews or Muslims, from accessing various offices of the kingdom and empire. Schaub tells us that “it was then that certain men of letters denounced the blood purity status. The application of these rules, they argued, rested on the postulate that the sacrament of baptism was null and void and that grace was ineffective” (135). This is to say, the legal system of the Portuguese and Spanish kingdoms recognised that once one was baptised, one became a new person, and all earlier identities were washed away. To raise racialised arguments against a person who was now Catholic, or who was descended from Catholics, was to challenge the operation of the sacrament of baptism. In other words, spiritual conversion had material and legal effects. Schaub continues to argue that “these blood purity statutes were …built upon a theory that was, from the perspective of Roman Catholic dogma, heresy” (136). This conflict with Catholic dogma ensured, Schaub argues, that these statutes were very often subverted in practice, allowing for social mobility for those held hostage by social conventions. As I watched Queen Charlotte I reflected on the fact that in real life England under the court of King George III (reigned 1760 – 1820) was far removed from Catholicism, the link having been severed by King Henry VIII in the early 1500s. The split from Rome ensured that the Anglican faith was now only aesthetically similar to Catholicism, but effectively tied to terrestrial and national politics, sundered as it was from Catholic universalism. Portugal’s long association with Catholicism ensured, however, that even under the constitutional monarchy and later the Estado Novo, the possibilities for integration were retained even though imperfectly. (Jason Keith Fernandes is a researcher at the Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA), Lisbon)
