-------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Goa - 2005 Santosh Trophy Champions | | | | Support Soccer Activities at the grassroots in our villages | | Vacationing in Goa this year-end - Take back & distribute Soccer Balls | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- A WORLD-FAMOUS ARTIST AND HIS SMALL HOME REGION: F.N. SOUZA AND GOA By Maria Aurora Couto
There can be little doubt that F.N. Souza's Goan cultural tradition has been as much a source of his deepest anguish as of his best work. The landscape into which Souza was born remains much as he describes it: "A beautiful country, full of rice fields and palm trees; whitewashed churches with lofty steeples; small houses with imbricated tiles, painted in a variety of colours. Glimpses of the blue sea. Red roads curving over hills and straight across paddy fields. Morning is announced by the cock crowing; the approaching night by Angelus bells". Like most of his compatriots, Souza refers to Goa as his 'country' which implies that the region is an entity separated from the mainstream because of its history. It is, in fact, as many would no doubt argue, a small politically insignificant, culturally rich and diverse region of India. The truth is that Goan nationalism has to do with Goa, its villages, its language -- Konkani -- and its way of life. As it was in the times of the Rashtrakutas of Ellora fame, the Vijayanagar Empire, and then during the Bahamani period, the Goan has always been a part of the mainstream of Indian culture and even through the transformations effected by the conversion process, the convert held on to traditions. This Goan culture and the mainstream of Indian life such as Souza lived and derived his sustenance from in his years in Mumbai constitute the dynamic of his art. Indeed Souza's uniqueness has been his ability to absorb the special qualities of his grassroots experience in Goa into an intellectual and cultural tradition, which has shaped national life since Indian independence. Souza's autobiographical writing is peopled by a family, alternately and simultaneously devoted to drink and to the church: by vicars, choirmasters, village characters for whom the chapel, the wayside shrine and the church of the village are the very pivot of existence. All these elements are directly linked to the cultural influence of four hundred and fifty years of Portuguese rule in Goa. Indeed it is these special elements which distanced Goa from the rest of then British India -- politically, economically and culturally -- and bred in the Goan community both a distinct culture and a sense Goan identity. The arrival of Christianity in Goa is generally attributed to the Portuguese and there is a general lack of awareness of its antiquity which dates as far back to the Apostles of Christ, in particular St Thomas, and to a lesser extent, St Bartholomew. The Christianity of the Apostles had strong Judaic elements. Tradition has it that they came in search of the lost tribes of Israel, the evidence of which is in Cochin, one of the oldest pristine Jewish establishments in the world. It was therefore, Christianity that retained its original Jewish tradition. Christianity in Goa has singular elements and their influence on Souza are evident in his work. Jewish elements were reinforced by adherence of the early Christians to the Syriac branch of Christianity with Chaldean ritual governed from Antioch, and professing what the Roman Catholic church called the Nestorian heresy. These Christians were a part of the Hindu mainstream in dress, habit, speech customs, manners, traditions and way of life -- as they still are in Kerala. Christianity was a religion which was accorded its place in the Hindu pantheon. It was a religion rooted in the soil: the festivals marking the seasons, the sowing of paddy, the harvest and the gifts of coconuts and oil to village deities, the Chaldean cross which festooned the countryside -- all these were maintained. Christianity in Goa was also a religion that retained the folklore of spirits, both good and evil. The evil spirit was particularly effective in granting favours. He, it was believed, wanted to win man's soul. After the favour was granted he had to be assuaged or fobbed off by incantations by hereditary mediums or 'distikhars' (hereditary priests with powers to remove the evil eye or to exorcise evil spirits). So the village was inhabited by powers, spirits and deities, who spoke to mediums or to old women who lived in forests, on hills, and in the red and black laterite passes of the countryside. They knew secret practices in medicine and healing, the mantras to be recited over the sick, and the herbs used to treat even serious ailments -- both of mind and body. The Portuguese found a strange and errant type of Christianity -- Christians with Brahminical tufts and worshipping a strange type of Christ, iconic and pale in the Nestorian tradition. They reconverted the Christians and established the Inquisition with all its rigors and the auto-da-fe to blot out heresy, and against recent converts who clearly did not give up their traditions with the act of conversion. The tradition of the artisan and craftsman remained Hindu. Even when he became a Christian, or a forcibly converted Christian, it was he who gave his imprint and personality and his features to the Christs, St Francis Xaviers, and other Catholic saints that crown Catholic Churches and shrines in Goa. Souza is firmly in this tradition, not least because he belongs to Bardez, a district which was Christianized, as will be detailed later, by the Franciscans. Just as in his iconography, he harks back to a pre-colonial history of Indian Christianity when Thomas, the Apostle, travelled along the Malabar coast to Kerala, perhaps after pausing in Goa, Souza's vision of the seafaring exploits of the Goan is expressed as in 'Arab Dhows in Goa' (1944). Goa's identity was shaped by its ancient position in Indian history as the centre of the spice trade with graceful Arab dhows gliding across the seas and a thriving economic and cultural link which existed much before colonial enterprises disrupted a natural cultural development. Souza, has been nurtured and tortured by his divided sensibility; his forked tongue, his inarticulate rage found expression both in vibrant colour and in evocative prose, "I myself read, write and think in a language alien to me: English, a language not my mother tongue but spoken to me by my mother since my childhood. But the difficulty arose from the very start to express myself. For how can one articulate in Anglo-Saxon with a jewelled mandible that was fashioned by the ancient Konkan goldsmiths of Goa? It bewilders me to think that my inarticulation was due to England having possessed a lot of boats which had netted India into its vast Empire". Souza's work which deals with Goa is rooted in its landscape, religion and a rural way of life; buffaloes cool themselves in ponds that shimmer in the noonday sun. 'Landscape with Train' (1944) evokes the gasps of one's childhood as the train chugged past the awesome and breath taking beauty of cataracts, weaving its way in and out of succession of tunnels that cut through the Western Ghats. The sheer drop visible as one emerged into the light, the smell of vegetation and dense foliage glistening after sheets of monsoon rain and the train finally, having left British India behind, speeding towards its destination -- the beckoning palms, verdant paddy fields, clear waterways and graceful villages of Goa. He illustrates women lazing on verandahs, the dusky beautiful tribal women, their glossy hair encircled in wreaths of fragrant jasmine and abolim flowers. He paints families seated on the balcony or front porch from which vantage point news as gossip is generated and disseminated with passersby and neighbors. Mealtimes at home and the lunch break for the labourers in the field with canji served with fish and pickles. 'Goan Peasants in the Market' (1944) brings to mind the most famous market in Goa -- the Mapuça market which is set up every Friday. It is a hive, to which people from distant corners throng for their provisions -- poultry, the best produce from field and grove, fresh fish and masses of the preserved stuff, every conceivable item a household may need, gossip, friendship, coquetry and a wily bargain amid the whiff of condiments, spices and pickles. The palm trees visible make the scene distinctively Goan. Souza's brush captures the community at work, at rest and at prayer 'Church in Goa'(1948) is a typical Sunday morning scene -- a trail of villagers walking up the hill, men in white linen suits, panama hats and a walking stick which was the attire of the batcar or landlord, and the church in the distance, its sides extending into the residence of the vicar and the music school. He illustrates the pillars that hold up the tiled roof along the airy and spacious verandah where village children congregate. The church still remains an important centre for social intercourse where marriages are planned, alliances affected, prospective partners glimpsed and disputes settled. The women on his canvas pray, work and mourn. A generation ago, the mourning period in Goa was very strictly observed and the regulation black prevailed for months and years depending on the relationship to the deceased. Most moving and evocative is the traditional dress in which he represents his women seen very clearly in 'Priest with Goan Women' (1944). This costume, known as vol in Konkani and lensol in Portuguese which literally means a sheet, consisted of two sheet-like pieces of cloth worn over the sari or over yet another traditional and richly ornamented costume known as the Bazu torop or pano baju. One sheet was draped around the hips to cover the lower part of the body till the ankles, and the other tucked around the waist, and then hoisted up from the back to veil the head so that only the face appeared. This gave these widows and mothers (single women did not wear this attire) a nun-like appearance. Occupying the front section of the church, bowed in prayer, these rows of white clad devotees embodying a community truly at worship, was a familiar sight during Souza's childhood and the painting illustrates an epoch in Goan cultural history. This form of dress was abandoned by the upwardly mobile for the western dress and more recently for the sari. Souza's Goans are people of the soil: "I painted the earth and its tillers with broad strokes.... Peasants in different moods, eating and drinking, toiling in the fields, bathing in a river or lagoon, climbing palm trees, distilling liquor, assembling in church, praying or in procession with priests and acolytes carrying the monstrance, relics and images; ailing and dying, mourning or merrymaking in market places and feasting at weddings." The language of the people -- Konkani -- was officially banned for two centuries. However, they could not erase it from the tongues of people. The language has been imbued with vitality and humour because along with religion -- and this may be either Catholicism or Hinduism -- it is the bedrock of life of village communities and the Goan way of life. Goans joined seminaries in large numbers and many became priests. Through sermons, hymns and primary education centres run by the church, they institutionalized the use of Konkani which is also Souza's mother tongue. The fact that he speaks little Portuguese and that his father was the headmaster of an English school illustrates important distinctions within the Catholic community in Goa. Souza was born in Saligao, his mother’s village -- in the Konknakyana, a poem written in the eighteenth century, the village is called Salgun -- situated in the Bardez district, an area christianized by the Franciscans. The various orders, the Dominican, Jesuit, Fransciscan, and Augustinian among them, evangelized different sections of Goa and there is a marked difference between say, the Catholics of Bardez and those of Salcete. The district where Maria Souza the artist's first wife was born was Jesuit territory. Maria was born in Margao, in the area called Borda. She used to recall the special atmosphere of her upbringing -- streets of palatial houses, elegant living, a rigid caste system underlying a rigourous catholic belief. That the Jesuits did a thorough job of conversion is illustrated by the fact that the people of Salcete are the most evidently intense in their adherence to an inherited European cultural influence and above all to a distinctive Goan identity. There is considerable difference, therefore, in the milieu and tradition within which Maria nee Figueiredo, and her husband were raised; Maria's being the more feudal culture of Salcete. However, as individuals, both of them balked at authority, hypocrisy, the exploitations within their society, and the repression implicit in orthodox religion. Souza's environment, nevertheless, was more open, generous hearted, informal and adventurous. The Franciscans have left behind in Bardez a tolerant, relaxed form of Catholicism, more in tune with indigenous religious practice, less intellectual and meditative than mystical, pragmatic and rooted in good works. In his youth, the English language, for instance, was far more prevalent in Bardez than in Salcete. Since the English language opened up limitless possibilities of employment, many more people migrated from Bardez to Bombay, to Aden and Abadan and British East Africa whereas the people from Salcete -- aloof and with a superior sense of themselves partly because of a larger number among them were from the landed gentry and partly as a result of inflexible Europeanization by the Jesuits -- either went to the Portuguese colonies in Africa or to Portugal. This accounts to some extent for the fact that Souza, who spent his childhood in Bardez, came from a Konkani- and English-speaking family. While some of these facts can be attributed to the Franciscan method of conversion, mention must also be made here of the caste structure. The upper castes among the converts were the first and indeed the only ones to give up Konkani for Portuguese, adopt the Western style of dress and a highly formal European style of living. The beautiful Maria liked to stress this distinction and the fact that she was a rebel within her feudal paternal home. A spirited woman of great character to the last, she applauded with unquestioning loyalty the quality of the artist despite the many betrayals of her by the man. The Portuguese who sailed to India were men of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. For them, resurgence of religion was the primary attribute of culture. To the missionary or priest an ability to use the language of his flock was undoubtedly fundamental. But he called all the arts to his aid in attracting and holding the interest of his audience, and in strengthening the faith of those whom he had converted. While the Hindu songs of Goa were put under the ban of the Inquisition, Western music was taught in the Parish schools and in the seminaries. Many churches had music schools which resulted in masses sung in every parish accompanied by organ and musical instruments. To sight-read music was almost as basic as the 3 Rs. This art filtered down to create a village community highly skilled in music. Souza's father was undoubtedly a product of this tradition. Music as a form of prayer and as an accompaniment to every ceremonial and informal activity was intrinsic to the village home into which Souza was born, which is why his early work encodes religious symbolism revealing a seminal presence in his consciousness. >From birth to death -- in every ritual, conventional activity or acts of entertainment, such as the teatro-tiatr and street theatre, known as khel, which is one of the forms of revelry during Carnival preceding Lent -- music played a central role. It is no surprise then that Souza was presented with a violin when he was a little boy. Aware of this musical heritage he reminisces, "One Sunday, I was surprised to hear a bunch of urchins and peasants who formed the local church choir, singing Handel's Largo during Mass. After the service, I asked the choirmaster, an old withered man of about seventy, if he knew who had composed the beautiful Largo. Silly of me, of course, to ask such a sophisticated question of an aged yokel, but I was curious to know how he had got the score, which he had carefully copied out by hand. He said plainly; 'It was written by my fore father'". Such has been the strength of these traditional schools that for many decades Goans have provided most of the interpreters and players of Western music in India and of popular Hindi film music. Goa, it is often said, is haunted by the cross: little white crosses dotting the countryside, candles flickering in the distance, steeples shimmering in the morning sun. Souza writes: "The Roman Catholic Church had a tremendous influence over me, not its dogmas but its grand architecture and the splendour of its services. The priest dressed in richly embroidered vestments.... The wooden saints painted with gold and bright colours staring vacantly out of their niches. The smell of incense. And the enormous crucifix with the impaled image of a Man supposed to be the Son of God, scourged and dripping with the matted hair tangled in plaited thorns." The first twelve years of an artist's life are the seedbed of his creative life. In the case of Souza this influence may be summarized as being rural Catholic life as experienced in daily companionship with his grandmother. Her influence with the vitality of folklore, gave him a sense of the animistic and spirit ridden atmosphere of fields and home. The ritual symbols of the Cross, monstrance, ciborium, on a platform that resembles the Judaic Ark of the Covenant -- but with surfaces which are distinctly Goan -- are frequently found in Souza's paintings and represent the passion and dread of a heretic creed seeking legitimacy and acceptance. Colour, sound and drama which accompanied the Christianization of Goa, informs Goan social, cultural and religious life. Indian tradition is equally rich in spectacle, music and a form of worship which merges the meditative with a joyous spirit. Souza, no doubt absorbed from birth the joy, fanfare, grandeur and awe of processions of priests followed by lay brotherhoods in capes of various colours, women and children dressed as vestal virgins and angels, accompanied by an enthusiastic band of musicians -- made up of farmers, carpenters, tailors, teachers. They take place with clockwork regularity all the year round. Children look forward to litanies sung as a novena for favours received or demanded, preceding feasts and other auspicious occasions at wayside crosses. A regular feature is the journey of Saibinim, the Virgin Mary through village homes. The statue of the Virgin is carried from chapel to a home where it rests overnight being moved into the next home through the whole vaddo until it is returned to the chapel in time for the novena preceding the feast. Specially beloved of children is the splutter and thunder of fireworks which are an intrinsic part of this form of worship as also the distribution of special sweets which conforms with individual ritual. The Crucifixion, the Deposition, the Supper at Emmaus which is symbolic of the leap of faith, the Pieta -- each a representation of Christ's agony on the Cross -- seared as they must be into the artist's very being, are the recurring themes of Souza's work. Even insects, enormous dark figures lurking amid the rafters and high ceilings of ancient Cathedrals stare transfixed out of his canvas: vampirish yet human, they communicate pain and predatory rage. The Passion of Christ must have come alive in a childhood with the dramatizations of the Agony -- called the Santos Passos which literally means Holy Steps -- in elaborate processions through the streets with life sized statues held aloft. Their expressions of inexhaustible suffering, pierced and bloodied, could not have but communicated fearsome fantasies to an imaginative child. During Lent the vibrant world of colour disappears, the child Souza used to wake to forty days of denial, watched adults mortifying themselves with fasts, the Church and the altars at home in deep purple and black that shrouded ornament and statuary; women in black, children in spotless white; music a lament. Souza's work reveals an abiding bond to a community at worship in communion with the land. So close a kinship is ancestral, pre-colonial and rooted in the institution of the village unit (called ‘gaunkari’ in Konkani and ‘communidade’ in Portuguese). Christian worship in Goa is an extension of community life and incorporates traditions and manners transcending the strict limits of orthodox belief. Hence, his Christ has many faces which range from anguish to mockery, fun and entertainment. The Crucifixion is Christ dying for mankind and man mocked by and mocking life's relentless, brutal, inevitability. His Sebastian is alternately the saint; he is Souza himself, or the human condition. The Virgin Mary sits within a pantheon of the mother as Goddess beloved of Indian tradition. Souza's Christ departs radically from Western iconography: he is denied dignity and divinity in order to illuminate the artist’s own tortured obsessions with the mystery of life and faith. The most popular form of community worship is the 'ladainha', the litany of praises to Mary and this could well be explained by the traditional pre-Aryan worship of Santerimai, who connotes peace, fertility and protection. It is recorded that the first group conversion case, as early as 1526, at Daugim offered the site of their temple for a church to be built to the Mother of God. The Madre de Deus Church later won much religious fame and its statue is now honoured in Saligao, Souza’s village, in a church named the Mae de Deus. A lonely child, surrounded by the reality of prayer as a way of life, he was pulled into primal intimations through his grandmother's stories of tortured saints and her daily activities not least the prayers and cures for childhood ailments attributed to evil eye. Indeed, like most rural societies Goa is rich in indigenous cures made up of medicinal plants, onion juice, country liquor, hot poultice and cold compress soaked in reeking concoctions and considered magical cure-all from birth to death. The patient often suffers much pain as for instance the practice of branding the limb for recovery from jaundice. Such practice always accompanied by prayers, the burning of candles and incense and it is quite likely that the artist, who contracted small pox, was himself subjected to such experience. His mother's vow that he would join the priesthood should he be cured appears to have created a deadweight of responsibility on a child's consciousness. A dream world was born: phantasmagoria of angels in paradise, the sun, moon and stars personified, vividly imagined. Souza's work communicates a fear and hatred of the practice and symbols of a religion that fascinate and revolt him in turn. He turns them over again and again as if playing with a conjurer's tools in a vain attempt to comprehend or destroy. He returns obsessively to make his Christ symbolic of suffering and mankind, dehumanized, vile and ugly, pitiable, surrounded by implacable fate and with no trace of the essence of Christianity -- the compassion and love that illuminates, for instance, the work of Roualt. Souza flagellates both himself and those he has loved and by whom he has been supported not least the Goan women in this life. Goan women are often called upon to take the major responsibility as breadwinner -- it could be caused by an errant husband lost to alcoholism. Accounts of migrants in the community led to a keen awareness of the world beyond, of frontiers of opportunity. Small wonder then that when two months after his birth Souza's father died, his mother 'fled to Bombay' leaving him in the care of his grandmother for some time, and made a living as a dressmaker and milliner. His grandmother's influence and environment shaped his consciousness of roots, his mother, and his wife Maria, were the power that gave him financial and psychological sustenance in the early years. They believed in him, sacrificed a great deal of themselves for him. Maria supported him in London working as a couturier, sought after by prestigious fashion houses. She made great headway for herself and her then unknown husband when Vogue featured, through her intervention, a piece on the artist and a design created by her. Later, she ran October Gallery, which was unique and innovative in what it sought to display. Yet, one is conscious of the singular absence of any acknowledgment of these women of faith and courage. Belatedly, in a letter to Maria dated May 14, 1984 he wrote: "I have always appreciated the way you have rooted for my art, you were involved in it almost from the time I was out of Art School and had started out on my own". For one capable of such expressive prose, his reticence about his family is intriguing and seems to suggest a paradoxical relationship with a milieu he detests yet in which he finds the impetus for some of his best work. Souza's anguish on this score is palpable: "What was I originally? I was a blooming maggot on a dung heap.... My childhood has been insipid: like an undigested bit of straw." The pastoral environment of his childhood is recollected in tranquility: "...the sight of flowers, the song of the bird, and rustle of rice, the smell of mangoes.... In the mornings I swam in a lake across the fields... luminous and flat, of an unbelievable blue descended as it were from the blues.... Sails of small fishing boats gleamed white.... Light on water, sound, movement, ripple, glitter.... Kingfishers, mynas, parrots, bluebirds sat on submerged water-bufalloes. The edge of the lake ornamented with rushes, water-lilies, lotus, coral, barnacle, and its great deep auriferous glittering bed was a playground for God's incarnations or Fisher Kings." The glow of this experience is tarnished by exposure to "Bombay with its rattling trams, omnibuses, hacks, railways, its forest of telegraph poles and tangle of telephone wires.... its haggling coolies, its dirty restaurants... blustering officials and stupid policemen.. lepers and beggars.... its Hindu colony and Muslim colony and Parsi colony, its bug-ridden Goan residential clubs, its reeking mutilating and fatal hospitals, its machines, rackets, babbits, pinions, cogs, pile drivers, dwangs, farads and din." The idyllic world of a Goan childhood is forever lost in a conflation of the dread world of Christianity, urban squalor and the dehumanization of his fellowmen. Souza moved to Bombay after the age of five, keeping in touch with his grandmother's world during long summer vacations and recovering this experience later in adult life in evocative prose and poetry : "Words & Lines" (Villiers, London. 1959) and "New Poems 1985" published by Pundole Art Gallery during his exhibition of paintings and drawings in March 1985. In Bombay, which he calls 'a polyglot city', the Goan world is eclectic, informed by an urban Christianity that mingles with a mainstream culture while trying to preserve its identity. The city has, for instance, a unique institution called 'coor/khud'. These are clubs run by village organizations situated in Dhobi Talao, Mazagaon, Byculla and Charni Road, which functioned as lodges available cheaply for those who lived on small budgets, particularly, the sea faring Goan. Feasts of the village patron saint were celebrated, the rosary said every evening and funeral rites arranged and paid for when necessary. The tired city worker found here the bonhomie and community life left behind which gave him a feeling of belonging despite the squalid reality. There are also institutions like the Catholic Gymkhana where the middle classes socialize in a bourgeois ambience which Souza derides, "...the echoes of a European existence which had many of the pretensions of Europe but few of its amenities". Rather than argue that Souza rages against the contradictions in his upbringing, I would like to suggest that therein lies his greatest strength. Souza's intellectual and artistic life evolved within an urban ethos which also embraced Europe through an English educational system, and metropolitan culture sustained by interaction with Britain. The talent nurtured from an Indo-European cultural influence already experienced in childhood, was deepened and focussed by political consciousness and an awareness of existence through which he attempts a synthesis with codes in which his personal history merges with universal concerns. Thus the critic who wrote that 'The Red Road' (1962) could have been painted anywhere in the world since it has nothing specially Indian about it, is doubtless unaware of the cultural meanings implicit in Souza's work. The red earth of Goa is the theme of many a poem, folk song and pious incantation; red mud paths dissect the vibrant green of paddy fields, the dense foliage of coconut, jackfruit, cashew, areca nut and bamboo plantations. Embedded is also a code for Souza's eroticism: 'Tambre matti', the red earth, is the name given to the red light district in Panjim, Goa's capital city. Souza's originality rests on his restless attempt to wrestle with a vision which could portray a sense of the sacred through the profane, odious, degrading reality of experience; in his passionate sincerity and faith in the individual; in his despairing reach for imponderables that he pursued to the end. The mystery of a religion profoundly felt and feared when it intruded into the idyllic world of beauty and innocence seems to have failed him in its promise of redemption. A man possessed by religious symbols, he portrays the vessels of the redemptive sacrifice of the Mass in an endless succession of still-life which do communicate the tranquility he seeks. The Latinism of Roman Catholicism which the Portuguese introduced with fire, hell and brimstone, the flagellations, all these are combined with a sort of rhythmic dance which only a combination of deep rooted traditions can bring. In his paintings of processions of the Holy Week which has the pageantry of a Hindu festival, a Carnival atmosphere, and in the figures of Christ, Souza as Sebastian, and the 'tools' of the sacerdotal 'trade', the artist has indeed made of his art a sacred rite. Souza surrenders himself and his talent to a ceaseless search for being. In this attempt, he reaches out to symbols as used in the earliest form of Christianity. Souza's despair and fury has contributed to the sharpness of line, the clarity of vision that led him to seek meaning in Indian Christianity in its most pristine form -- not a spirituality that accompanied worldly power but the good news as heard by a society already deeply implicated in worship. Souza rages against his fractured self but finds repose in a combination of the Sebastian of Latin Christianity, the sanyasi, and himself -- the Hindu artisan playing the Christian game to his own tortured image and likeness. MARIA AURORA COUTO was born in Goa and taught English Literature at the University of Delhi. She is the author of 'Goa, a Daughter's Story' (Penguin, 2003). Her other works on the perspective of religious, social and political transformation include, Graham Greene on the Frontier Politics and Religion in the Novels (Macmillan, London 1986). She has contributed to journals in India and abroad. The above essay is reproduced, with permission, from Parmal. Parmal is an annual publication of the Goa Heritage Action Group, a not-for-profit based in Goa dedicated to the preservation, protection and conservation of Goa's natural, cultural and man-made heritage. http://www.goaheritage.org Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] or Goa Heritage Action Group, Porvorim and contact GHAG, 29/30 Green Valley, Porvorim 403521 Goa India) -------------------------------------------------------------- GOANET-READER WELCOMES contributions from its readers, by way of essays, reviews, features and think-pieces. 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