EnglishReligious Architecture
Vasai Fort (Baçaim/Baçaím/Bassaim/Bassein), Maharashtra, India
Religious Architecture
Within Vasai’s walled perimeter the ruins of five convent complexes and their respective churches remain (Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans, Hospitallers and Jesuits), as well as two other churches: Saint Joseph’s Parish Church east of the perimeter and, up against the original fort in the centre of town, what is most likely the old Misericórdia Church. Vasai was the most important Portuguese city in India after Goa and on a par with Kochi. It should therefore come as no surprise that the religious architecture built there over the two centuries it was dominated by the clergy and Portuguese and Catholic landowners, from the 1530s to the 1730s, is quite varied. The 1618 catastrophe may have well have caused significant damage to the city’s houses of worship. Yet despite the accounts and the text by Manuel de Faria e Sousa, documentation published to date regarding the Jesuit and Franciscan facilities and the parish church mention no major work carried out during that period. In Vasai there was no dominant parish church or convent type, although most buildings, as occurred throughout Catholic India, had a single nave covered by a barrel- vaulted ceiling or more frequently a tile roof, and a chancel covered by a coffered vault. The Jesuits’ church was certainly vaulted and it is probable that the Franciscans’ was as well, all the more so because it was a very sophisticated church with intercommunicating side chapels, which was rare in India. The Jesuit and Franciscan churches had chambers for the Blessed Sacrament behind the chancel, with which they communicated through an elevated arch. This typological feature is more common in Portuguese architecture than one might think. Not one single front façade flanked by towers was built in Vasai, though this is not surprising, as that type only became common in the late 17th century and in the beginning only in Goa, nearly a hundred years after the first convent church with façade towers was built, that of the Augustinians at Monte Santo in Old Goa. Note that in the illustration of Vasai attached to António Bocarro’s report from about 1635, Pedro Barreto Resende drew towers on the façade of the Augustinians’ church in the city, the only one he portrayed that way. But the church whose ruins we seen today has no façade towers and there is no evidence it ever had any. In Vasai, the tower appears next to the chancel, except for the parish church, which has a frontal narthex body under a tower: such is the case of the Jesuits, Franciscans and Dominicans. Vasai’s best convent cloisters have two floors with continuous arcades borne by columns, to judge by the better preserved Jesuit and Franciscan structures. The Dominican convent was the city’s biggest. It was begun in 1564 and is nowadays in a very advanced state of deterioration. Note that the Dominican church in Daman was also bigger than the others in the settlement and that Old Goa’s Dominican complex was the city’s biggest until the late 16th century, when the Augustinians built their huge complex at Monte Santo. The ruins of Vasai’s Dominican convent are situated by the city’s main square, onto which the Town Hall, the Residence of the Northern General and the Misericórdia charity institution looked. Noteworthy is the arched loggia that can still be seen on top of a very high building part, perhaps the convent’s dormitory.