Preserving Purity: Cultural Exchange and Contamination in Late Seventeenth Century Portuguese India

This essay examines several measures taken to regulate Hindu marriages and bailadeiras in order to control cultural exchanges between Catholics and non-Christians in the late seventeenth century. Despite such regulations, Catholics continually interacted with Hindus making the exchange and the adoption of certain practices inevitable. This was true in the case of baptism celebrations, which as the last part of this essay will demonstrate, assimilated certain so-called «Hindu» elements. Ultimately, however, policies dealing with such interactions were highly inconsistent, in part because of the tenuous colonial position of the Portuguese in India in this period