Goa in the eighteenth century was a complex colonial space divided on lines based on religion, race, caste, and class. To navigate and control this complexity and maintain a separation between ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’, Christian and so-called ‘gentiles’, namely ‘Hindus’, the Portuguese imperial polity enforced strict restrictions aimed at controlling the movement and settlement of non-Christians. as well as their use of the public space. This talk will highlight this complexity and demonstrate how the Portuguese imperial polity in India managed the diversity of their colonial territory by attempting to enforce lines of segregation and strictly control (or outright ban) the public display of ‘gentile’ religious symbols and the celebration of important life-cycle events. Concomitantly, it will reveal how the local population sought to resist these policies, recover sites of worship, and petitioned for the ‘freedom’ to publicly celebrate weddings, funerals, and other rituals with full ceremonial rights. Importantly, it will also draw parallels with other colonial contexts in Asia, namely eighteenth-century Java, where the freedom of movement and the settlement of non-European populations such as the Chinese were also strictly controlled, but, as in the case of Goa, often relaxed in the face of economic exigencies. In doing so, it will underscore the limits of colonial hegemony in eighteenth-century Asia, and the extent to which key spaces of power were complex and consistently negotiated sites of interaction, resistance, and dominance.