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to religiously significant places. From the Christian side, a visit to the two most obvious sites of the Holy Land and Rome was hardly possible, except for a handful of priests to Rome. Certainly there were minor pilgrimages to the tombs of holy men. St Francis Xavier, the Apostle of the East, is the best known of these, and even today his birthday is celebrated in Old Goa with great eclat. The regular expositions of his miraculously preserved body also encouraged this cult. Parts of it were even abstracted, either openly or surreptitiously, so that a lucky few had their own personal relics of the saint. Yet surely it is significant that the crowd at his birthday celebrations includes many Hindus, and indeed some of no particular religion at all. He has become in effect a generic holy man. In many other areas also Indian Ocean Christianity, despite the intolerance of Counter-Reformation Catholicism as seen especially in the work of the Inquisition, in many areas continued to include pre-Christian customs and beliefs. Conversion was a two-way process, with much retained from previous religious practice. In many social areas Hindus who had converted to Christianity retained their old customs. Various food prohibitions and notions of pollution continued to be influential. Sometimes Indian Christians seem almost to merge in with Hindus, in an eminently tolerant way. The best example, and the most studied, is the continuance of caste notions in families who have been Christian for centuries. Christianity in India, then, owed as much to its local environment as it did to the norms of Rome.

Hindu pilgrimage certainly occurred, but exclusively by land, so that we will pass this by except to point out that their places of pilgrimage are usually aquatic, being located on the sea shore or rivers. Buddhist pilgrims from East Asia mostly travelled by sea to visit the holy sites in north India associated with the Buddha. We have no hard evidence of Japanese Buddhists reaching India in this period, and indeed the journey would have been an arduous one. One pious Japanese Buddhist worked out, presumably to explain why he never went, that to travel from Japan to India would take 1,000 days at eight miles a day, or 1,600 at five miles a day. He had to make do with a stone that he found on the coast of Japan: 'Thinking that the water poured upon the sacred remains of Buddha flows into the ocean, I feel especially familiar with this stone found on the seashore.'27 We can assume that some followers of the path in Burma and Sri Lanka made visits to north India. Certainly there was travel for religious reasons between these two Buddhist countries. It has been claimed that when Buddhism in Sri Lanka was under attack from the Portuguese in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Arakan played a vital role in preserving Theravada Buddhism until tolerance returned to Sri Lanka.28

By default, then, the greatest pilgrimage in our period was that of Muslims to the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina; indeed to do this is to fulfil one of the central requirement of Islam. In the early modern period some 15,000 from India undertook this pious obligation each year, out of a total of up to 200,000.29

The hajj had a multitude of significances. First of all, it was a pious obligation. However, small-scale economic activity was generated by the peddling of the pilgrims as they made their way to the Red Sea. Most of them supported themselves by trading, using their goods as needed to buy passage, food and accommodation, in a way analogous to the modern travellers' cheque. At the actual time of the hajj, a period of a few days in Mecca, the town was host to a massive market in a great variety of goods. Many were secular, but some were infused with religious significance. Burial shrouds soaked in water from the sacred well of Zamzam, bits from the brooms used to sweep out the Kaba, pieces of the ornate cloth covering of the Kaba, these and many other items found a ready market.

There was also a political dimension to the hajj. Control of the Holy Cities