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What does it mean to say 'this is my body,' when the body in question has migrated from England to India and lived there for 40 years? And what might this migratory body look like?
The inscription beneath the altar of the Bom Jesus Basilica, a Portuguese Indian cathedral in Old Goa completed in 1605, reads 'Hi Mho Jhi Kudd' (Figure 1 - See PDF,) - Konkani for 'this is my body,' the formula of the Eucharist. In its more familiar Western guises, whether English or Latin, the words spoken by the priest supposedly induce the miracle of transubstantiation, translating the communion wafer into the flesh of Jesus. This first translation enables a second. Once the consecrated wafer has been placed in the mouth of the Christian believer, she receives the grace of God and becomes part of the spiritual body of Jesus. The transformative power of the Eucharist is thus a doubly oral one. Spoken words translate dead matter into living flesh; eating living flesh translates an individual into a member of a spiritual community. Both translations, as Marin notes in Food for Thought , entail 'the transformation of an existing thing into a produced body' (Marin, 1989, xvii).
The transformative power of the Eucharist, however, does not quite capture all the potential resonances of 'Hi Mho Jhi Kudd.' The inscription on the Bom Jesus Basilica altar also enacts a rather different form of translation, one that has little to do with the translation of a wafer into the body of Christ or an individual into a member of a larger spiritual community. As we will see, this different form again entails the transformative powers of language and eating. But unlike the transcendent movement to and away from the flesh implicit in the conventional Eucharist formula, the translation performed by 'Hi Mho Jhi Kudd' hints at an altogether more worldly, non-teleological transformation - the European body that has morphed, through its oral activity, into something Indian. There is no assurance of transcendence here, no redeeming endpoint; instead there is simply an ongoing process of fleshly transformation. This process is the story of the flesh of Thomas Stephens, also known as Tomás Estêvão, also known as Pâtri Guru. It is, additionally, a story of the...