Becoming Portuguese: Colonialism wrapped in gender, race, religion and caste
R. Benedito Ferrao
12ch...@gmail.com
The Identity Malaise
My father had invited his Portuguese teacher to dinner just
before she was to return to her native Portugal. Looking back
on her trip, the tale she found the most compelling to tell
was one wherein she had become ill, having fallen victim to
that age old oriental condition -- the bane of European
existence: the infernal heat.
She was admitted to a local hospital for a short stay and
during a check-up, the nurse on duty looked over her chart,
only to quickly look back at the white woman lying in bed,
and then back at the chart. "You have a Goan name!" remarked
the nurse with much amusement. Taken aback, the Portuguese
teacher was quick to retaliate: "No! It is you that has a
Portuguese name." The nurse was unconvinced, her departing
expression one of concern that her patient had certainly
suffered quite a bit from heat exposure.
In this moment between the 500th anniversary of Goa's
colonization and the 50th anniversary of Goa's liberation,
it should be easy to decide who must come away victorious in
this argument between the Goan nurse and her Portuguese
patient. The intriguing impasse between these two
postcolonial characters serves as a metaphor of what history
has wrought: the legibility of Portuguese identity because of
its colonial relationship with Goa. To put it bluntly,
Portuguese identity exists because of Goa.
Consider that the teacher does not have to realize her
"Portugueseness" until discomfited by the Goan nurse's
comment. It is in the deep offense felt at being challenged
and displaced by the "other," that the teacher -- Portuguese
and white -- must use the force of colonial history to correct
the situation.
500 Years, or Not So Long Ago
In 1510, the Portuguese commander Afonso de Albuquerque
defeated Adil Shah, the Muslim ruler of Goa, and was quick to
enact his Politica dos Casmentos, or Marriage Policy. Its
purpose was to encourage mixed marriages and create a new
progeny -- a new race of "white" children upon which
would be founded Portuguese rule in the East.
However, this construction of whiteness could never be the
same as European whiteness, for it would be the product of
mixture. Nevertheless, it was still the instantiation of a
new whiteness in Goa -- its purpose being to create a source
of racialized identity within the colony.
In so doing, it also provided the possibility of remaking
whiteness in the colonizing centre. Iberia -- Spain and
Portugal -- itself the former enclave of the Moors, cannot
forego a history of being marked -- culturally and/or
racially, even after the conquerors' exit. Portugal's
colonization of the other can therefore be cast as an attempt
to re-make its own image. Goa provided this opportunity in
being ruled by a Muslim, who for the Portuguese bore little
distinction from being a Moor himself.
Yet, the Portuguese conception of whiteness for the purpose
of creating a colonial identity in Goa requires a suspension
of disbelief that it could be anything else but a pure form
of new whiteness. If this newly established identity is meant
to function as a continuance of Portuguese identity in the
colonial sphere, the miscegenated culture of Iberia, coloured
by its recent Moorish past, is matched by the miscegeny of
the newly formed Goan "white" identity.
To rename this miscegenated identity as an authentic
reflection of Portuguese identity, remakes Goan and
Portuguese identity -- it is the re-casting of a global
Portuguese identity in a new world order. Portugal's colonial
authority allows it to redeem its past defeat by the Moors
and to reinvent itself through new ideas of whiteness.
The gray area of mestico culture and raciality is still
bounded by difference, however, for native identity is
inescapable in miscegeny. Albuquerque encouraged his men to
marry Muslim women among other native women. The Muslim
women, widows of murdered soldiers, were particularly desired
for their lighter complexions as Albuquerque notes in a
letter to his king.
These marriages may have provided the basis for a socially
engineered white identity in the colonial fold, but it also
served to convert these women to Catholicism and further
emasculate the defeated natives, particularly the surviving
Muslim men.
Evidently, it was never the purpose of the Portuguese to
regard the colonized as their equals. The racialization of
the power differential was all the more important in that the
natives would always outnumber the colonizer. Despite
Politica dos Casmentos, native identities remained in place
and miscegenated identity functioned to reiterate whiteness
for the Portuguese themselves. Even as the new whiteness
helped recast their identity, it also made the Portuguese
more white in comparison.
Goan Portuguese society was deeply sectioned by
place of birth and racial mixing, not much
differently from the caste system of native Goa.
Distinctions peculiar to society of the time were
based on such peculiarities as whether members were
born in Portugal: reinois for example, or India:
casticas, or if they were of mixed race: mesticas
if Eurasian and mulatas if part black; in turn,
these groups of women occupied a strata apart from
and higher than women of purely Indian origin.
Race-making in the new colony was not predicated on any
illusion of erasing difference but, rather, to support
colonial hierarchy.
Finally, the racial project also recast class
identities. Albuquerque's crew consisted of several
men who in Portugal were of working class
backgrounds. Their marriages in Goa allowed these
men the ability to establish themselves
financially. Albuquerque's Politica dos Casamentos
proved profitable to these once lower class men,
for their marriages were richly rewarded. Their
commonplace whiteness in Portugal thus remade in
Goa, and supported by their newfound wealth, gave
these men a racialized attachment to class and
privilege in the colony, which they would never
have had in Portugal.
Liberation?
As Goa approaches the 50th anniversary of its liberation so
soon after the 500th anniversary of its colonization by
Portugal, public opinion as evidenced by articles and letters
in local papers has vacillated between pride over Goan
identity as influenced by its Europeanization and dismay over
the current state of affairs which affords the glorious
Portuguese past a nostalgic benignity in comparison.
Often, these reflections note that the conquest brought
Christianity to Goa, for which Catholic Goans should be
grateful. These considerations refuse to contend with the
blunt trauma of the centuries long Inquisition and the
divisions, even within Goan families, caused by forced
conversion. It is as much a part of Catholic, Portuguese, and
Goan history that these traumas are encoded in such
contemporary Hindu religious practices as the celebratory
return of the idols to the places of worship from which they
had to be secreted away during the repressive regime.
It is also important to recall that both Vasco da
Gama and Albuquerque encountered Nestorian
Christians on the Indian coast which indicates that
knowledge of the religion pre-existed European
contact. In the 500 years of the history of the
Catholic Church in Goa, that faith has always been
a syncretic one, displaying uniquely Indian
characteristics.
It is no coincidence that Portugal chose to commemorate its
conquests rather than Goa's liberation by launching Sagres, a
ship that in circumnavigating the globe arrived Goa in
November 2010. Reminiscent of Albuquerque's voyage and past
colonial glory, for indeed the present leaves Portugal little
to be celebratory about, the traversing of the seas
rearticulates Portuguese identity -- one that would not have
existed without its conquest of Goa and its other colonies.
The argument between the Goan nurse and the Portuguese
patient offers a way of thinking of postcolonial identity as
a practice of argumentative engagement. The Portuguese
patient would have hardly thought of her name in an active
and participatory way had she not been challenged by the Goan
nurse.
Yet, in making legible Portuguese identity, Goa's own
identity has also seen its own changes. The anniversary of
Goa's liberation prompts a re-examination of colonialism not
simply as reciprocity, but as a challenge to take on history
from other perspectives -- gender and race, religion and
caste, and overall, from an indigenous point of view -- one
that recognizes Goa's contribution to the making of the
modern world. It is as much a challenge for the Portuguese as
it is for Goans.
--
R. Benedito Ferrao researches Goan identity in literature and
resides in Northern California and South London.
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