English
College and Church of the Holy Name of Jesus
Vasai Fort (Baçaim/Baçaím/Bassaim/Bassein), Maharashtra, India
Religious Architecture
The Jesuits’ presence in Vasai dates to 1549, when Father Belchior Gonçalves arrived in the city with the task of distributing the royal contribution to the Franciscan Recollect Missionaries. The latter, due to their strict observance of monastic rules, could not touch money. There is a report to the effect that in December 1549 the captain of Vasai, Jorge Cabral, granted the Jesuits a property so they could establish themselves in the city. In 1552, Francis Xavier sent Father Master Belchior dos Anjos and Brother Manoel Teixeira to Vasai. The founding of the original structures which in 1560 gained college status must therefore have taken place between 1552 and 1555. The college, church and other components were probably built on a continual basis between 1549 and 1636, i.e., over nearly a century. The invocation of the church and college to the Mother of God was changed in 1568 to the Holy Name of Jesus. The Jesuit complex mainly comprised the college, arranged around a two-storey cloister with arcades resting on columns, and the Society’s church to the east. This building had a single nave and chapel, both barrel-vaulted. Only the sanctuary has survived, though the bases of the nave’s covering can still be recognised (it had already fallen in or been demolished by the time of our first modern description of the church, by Cunha Rivara in 1859). Flanking the chancel was a tower, vestiges of which still remain. The dormitories, classrooms and other spaces of the college, now in ruins, formed a square with one arm extending toward the city’s wall or, more likely, to the river and consequent vistas, because it was built before the wall. In front of the church’s façade was a square or plaza which separated the church from the complex’s secondary sector, a shelter for orphans and the unprotected located to the north and also arranged around a patio. The shelter had a chapel dedicated to our Lady of Help. Its sanctuary faced the college so that the priests could directly attend. The Jesuit gateway joined the two sectors and closed the square to the north. According to the 17th century chronicle by Francisco de Sousa, SJ, most work on the college was done during the period when Father Francisco Cabral was rector, i.e., before 1570, when he was already in Japan. But documentation published to date attests that in 1597 some work was done on the college, namely a staircase near the sacristy and a clothing store, while work continued on a kitchen. A retable was also made for the altar of the Eleven Thousand Virgins. The church was damaged during the Morro de Chaul conflict in 1594 and restored in 1597. But as usual we do not know what work the document refers to, like the others published by J. Wicki. The door accessing the college’s gateway has a date marked over the lintel, 1636, which must indicate the completion of work on the complex. The church’s extraordinary façade, one of the most notable monuments of Catholic architecture in India, corresponds to an architectural plan synthesising and recomposing the two most important Jesuit façades in India: Saint Paul’s and Bom Jesus in Goa. We believe that Saint Paul’s in Goa originally had a façade whose form was a high-standing rectangle and semicircular gable with round oculus that corresponded to the vault which began to be built over the central nave (it was a three-nave church) but was taken down after 1581 due to a lack of stability. In other words, the Vasai façade reproduces, at least partly (because the church has only one nave), what Saint Paul’s must have looked like. The entrance properly speaking and the other façade elements derive from Saint Paul’s and Bom Jesus and constitute a variation based on their respective themes. The theme of arched main door flanked by two pairs of composite columns on plinths with one more pilaster on either side, holding up a straight entablature over which a large rectangular window opens, comes from the Jesuits’ mother church. This theme is also present in Bom Jesus. The Vasai architect borrowed from the latter church ideas for finishing the façades, such as the oculi, which are barely indicated in places where in Goa there are true window bays. Also, the entrance’s decorative language recalls the third order of the façade of Bom Jeus and many its internal and external details: it originates in treatises, engravings and liturgical furnishings of Flemish origin. But the presence of other Italianate forms, specifically the friezes with Iranian roses or lotus flowers, the corbels and triglyph-corbels, the plant decoration on the frames and the flanking ‘wings’, made the rich design of the entrance as complex as what we see in the group of four orders on the façade of Bom Jesus and in the Society’s churches in Margao, Diu and Macau. They all correspond, with different manifestations, to the eloquent architecture of Jesuit façades at the turn of the 16th/17th century. Contrary to what usually occurred with Jesuit colleges, the one in Vasai was supported not by royal power but by the city’s own noblewomen. Most of the funds needed to enlarge the house came from Isabel de Aguiar, originally from Hormuz, a widow and owner of three villages in the Província do Norte. These villages were donated to the Vasai college in 1564. The sepulchre of Isabel de Aguiar (d. 1591) was located in the church’s chancel. Another woman, Filipa da Fonseca (d. 1625), was also a college benefactress and merited a sepulchre in the same place. The Vasai women who helped the college were spouses of the city’s Brothers of Misericórdia and it is therefore not surprising that the latter institution’s church had an entrance and architectural layout with single high deep nave similar to those at the Jesuit church. When the Italian Gemelli Careri passed through Vasai in the late 17th century he described the existence of three altars (naturally those of the chancel and side altars) and mentioned that along with the triumphal arch they were lined with gold.