The ruins of the Tertiary Carmelite church and convent stand at Chimbel, off the Ribandar–Chimbel road: a Baroque-era façade, no roof, vegetation in the nave. The archive can tell us when the walls rose and when they emptied. Goanology has a different task. It asks what words had to stop meaning for Chimbel to happen, and what Chimbel had to stop meaning to become asylum, old-age home and ruin.
By anasemia I mean the hollowing of a word’s inherited meaning so that it can carry a new one, while some trace of the old meaning remains as residue. Chimbel is an anasemic machine. Three hollowings built it, a fourth unmade it, and a fifth, by nature, is still under way.
1. “Carmelite” hollowed: from European order to Goan refuge
In the seventeenth century, “Carmelite” in Goa meant a European Discalced friar. The Old Goa house of Nossa Senhora do Carmo was part of the Teresian reform and was linked to the story of Denis and Redemptus, the Carmelite proto-martyrs of the Discalced Order who died in Aceh in 1638 and were beatified in 1900. Carmelite meant European, contemplative and elite.
That house ended in the early eighteenth century. A royal decree of 1707 ordered the Old Goa convent handed to the Portuguese Oratorians of Philip Neri, and by 1709 the Carmelites had left.
The Chimbel story begins in the vacuum. Goan priests of non-Brahmin background, among them João Baptista Falcão, José da Apresentação and Francisco Xavier dos Anjos, built a retreat (hospício) at Chimbel between 1747 and 1749, dedicated to Our Lady of Mount Carmel. The Archbishop, the Franciscan Lourenço de Santa Maria, approved their statutes on 12 December 1750. That date is the formal birth of the first indigenous Carmelite congregation in Asia.
What was hollowed here was Europe inside Carmelite. The word kept its Teresian rule, its barefoot discipline and its contemplative form, but lost its whiteness. A Goan body could now wear it. Rome’s own approval was slow: one early account says the rule was not confirmed by the Pope until 1790. Chimbel lived for decades on local episcopal authority, which is itself an anasemic fact. A congregation can exist in practice before the centre admits it exists in law.
Residue: the church still says Carmo, but Carmo no longer means Old Goa. It means Chimbel.
2. Caste hollowed: from Bamonn–Chardó rivalry to a Tertiary home
Conversion did not abolish caste in Goa. It baptised it. Bamonn ceased to mean a Hindu priestly caste and came to mean Christian Bamonn, with the privilege of access to priesthood largely intact. The Goan Oratory of St. Joseph Vaz, the first indigenous congregation, drew its members from the Brahmin communities and did not admit others.
Here another word had to be emptied. Priestly learning was supposed to be the qualification. In practice, to exclude non-Brahmin candidates, learning had to be hollowed into birth: if you were born outside the Bamonn fold, you could not be learned enough. (In my reading, the largest group excluded was the Chardó, the Christian Kshatriya-descended community. The sources I have checked say only “non-Brahmin,” so this is my emphasis and not their wording.)
Chimbel answered with a reverse anasemia, using the word Tertiary. A Third Order ordinarily means the lay branch attached to friars and nuns. The Chimbel Tertiaries took that marginal name and turned it into something like a centre: an order of priests, Goan, non-Brahmin, formed by study and rule rather than by caste. Historians have called it one of two indigenous priestly orders welcoming Goan vocations, and the first to refuse to pander to race and caste preference. The convent trained its own members in philosophy and theology. Knowledge was not birth; it was study, and the study was at Chimbel.
A second hollowing took place inside the excluded caste. Among Christians of Kshatriya descent, status once rhymed with the sword, the estate and the sandal of the landlord. To take the Discalced habit was to stop meaning landlord and to start meaning barefoot. It is an interpretation, not a documented motive, but the symbolism is hard to avoid. The Oratorians kept the shoes of Brahmin learning. The Carmelites took off the shoes of caste pride.
3. Schism hollowed: from heresy to a jurisdictional quarrel
Between 1815 and 1819 the congregation lived through the Cisma de Chimbel. The Archbishop, Dom Manuel de São Galdino (also spelt Gualdino), declared the Tertiary Carmelites schismatic. Scholars see this as a prelude to the larger Schism of Goa later in the century.
The usual meaning of schism is a break from the Church, close to heresy. At Chimbel it appears to have meant something narrower and more worldly. The trouble reportedly began in a quarrel between the Archbishop and a friar, António da Conceição, who was apparently lobbying for the Padroado missions in Bengal to be transferred to the Tertiary Carmelites. Accusation, imprisonment of the congregation’s leader and a long fight over obedience followed. That is a jurisdictional conflict: who may direct Goan priests and where. It is not a theological one.
The word obedience was hollowed from both sides. The Archbishop turned schism into a tool of discipline. The Chimbel friars, for their part, turned obedience into negotiation: they were obedient to the Church, they argued, without being absorbed into one prelate’s jurisdiction. Whether they used the language of royal patronage and of their own rule, as I have previously assumed, needs the archival record to confirm.
Residue: the Chimbel schism left a precedent. In Goa, schism could mean not heresy, but a claim by Goan clergy to a room of their own inside the Church.
4. Convent hollowed into asylum: from prayer to welfare to ruin
The suppression of religious orders in Portugal in 1834, applied in Goa in 1835, ended the congregation. It had been reduced to about twenty friars and three lay brothers. Eleven took refuge at Our Lady of Pilar, near Goa Velha, the former retreat of the Franciscan Observants. There the order’s last survivor, Cirilo da Anunciação, died in 1887.
The terms of the Pilar refuge are an anasemic text in themselves. The Carmelites were allowed to stay together, but on condition that they accept no new members and not appear outside the monastery in the brown habit. The community was tolerated; the habit was taken. A garment that had meant a Goan order’s existence was forbidden to mean anything in public.
Meanwhile the Chimbel convent passed to the Santa Casa da Misericórdia. It became a home (recolhimento) for destitute women and girls and, in the 1930s, the Misericórdia’s Asilo dos Alienados, Goa’s first mental-health institution. Later it served as an old-age home before being abandoned.
What was hollowed here was choice. The Carmelite chose enclosure. The destitute woman, the orphan girl and the person judged insane did not. The cells that once held contemplation held confinement, and the same walls now meant the opposite. The chapel built for Mass became the chapel of an asylum.
Chimbel’s fate may be read as a repeated one. It was built for those shut out of one door, and it was used afterwards for people shut out of others.
It is therefore fitting that the conservation campaign, led by Fernando Velho and many others, has aimed not only at saving stones but at reversing the hollowing: persuading the public to see in this ruin not an asylum but a memory of non-Brahmin priestly self-assertion. The Government of Goa has now notified the site as a heritage structure, following the Conservation Committee’s resolution. Meanwhile the monsoon fills the cells and roots split the façade. Nature, too, hollows out what the state emptied, and fills it with other life.
What Chimbel teaches
Three lessons from Chimbel have guided my other Goanology notes (on Hindutopia, Eklavya, Godi media and kakistocracy).
1. To resist, hollow the oppressor’s word and fill it with your own body. The Chimbel priests hollowed Carmelite of whiteness and filled it with Goan bare feet. Their present-day counterparts are citizens who hollow a word like doubtful voter of its suspicion, and fill it with a name on the electoral roll.
2. To oppress, the powerful hollow the resister’s word and fill it with confinement. Schism was hollowed into rebellion; a convent was hollowed into an asylum. In my argument today, the same logic turns vote into doubt and media into Godi. These contemporary parallels are argument, not archive, and they should be argued from their own evidence.
3. Residue returns. The ruin still says that here a group of Goan priests proved priesthood was rule and study, not birth; that a Tertiary house could be a centre rather than a margin; and that Goa could build its own order without Europe.
If you stand in Gaulembhat today, you see a façade without a roof. It looks like a church, but there is no Mass. It looks like a ruin, but it still teaches. It teaches that caste did not die at conversion; that it was baptised, then hollowed again by Chimbel into resistance, then by the state into confinement. The Goanology task is to keep hollowing caste until Bamonn, Chardó and Sudir stop meaning birth and mean only what they were in the communidade: gaonkar, people of one village on shared land.
