Augusto Pinto: Afterword
pinto...@gmail.com
[From the Afterword to Paul Melo e Castro's *Lengthening
Shadows*, a two-volume set of translations of Portuguese
short stories written by Goans.]
You could see, hear and smell Goa Portuguesa even
as late as 1970. That was the year my parents,
along with my nine-year-old self, returned from
Kenya to live in our 'ancestral house' in the Goan
village of Sangolda.
At night those sights, sounds and smells became more
pronounced. At home the quality of the light would change
depending on whether you used the simple kerosene lamps
improvised from old medicine bottles that flickered an
orangish flame; or you were rich enough to own a petromax
lamp which you had to pump every now and then to increase the
glow. Or better still you had one of those sophisticated
Aladdin lamps with the long elegant glass chimneys. Of course
in the towns electricity made everything different; but the
difference was most pronounced when one could afford neither
kerosene nor candle, but made do with a little oil in a pontti.
In the air, the whiff of smoke from those lamps mingled with
that of burning firewood in the kitchen, and the aroma of the
food cooking there. And there was also the pleasant odour of
that age-old natural disinfectant -- cowdung paste -- which
would be plastered on the floor of our houses to constitute
its flooring.
Also at night the sounds of nature could be heard distinctly:
from the staccato non-stop chirping of crickets, to the
whooey howls of the jackals in the fields whom we listened to
till we nodded off to sleep, until we woke up to the
twittering of the birds and the crowing of the cocks early in
the morning. Then, we'd encounter the sows and their piglets
crying 'oink oink', hurrying us up in the ubiquitous pig
toilets of those times.
All these sights, sounds and smells which sound romantic now
but were a nuisance then, were to disappear, at first
gradually and later rapidly, as villages were electrified and
all the modern conveniences which the West was familiar with,
from fans to fridges to fast food, started becoming
commonplaces of middle class life over the years.
From the late 1980s onwards, change continued at a
bewildering pace with trees and hills being cut
down to make way for concrete jungles, first in the
towns and beach belt parts of Bardez, Ilhas and
Salcete (the Portuguese Old Conquests) but later
on, thanks to the tourism and real estate booms,
even in comparatively remote New Conquest areas of
Pernem and Canacona.
Indiscriminate mining had begun by this time to wreak havoc.
The agrarian economy declined and Goa rapidly transformed
itself into a modern service-oriented one and mining,
tourism, the bureaucracy and remittances from emigrants
became the mainstays of Goa's economy. All these changes
affected the Goan's way of life immensely.
Imperceptibly in the meanwhile, Goa Portuguesa became history
and the quaint artefacts of the times like the grinding
stones and pestles and the bullock carts and the palanquins
from the houses of old that produced those once familiar
sights and sensations, got consigned to the museums or,
worse, the garbage heaps of Goa, when they weren't eaten by
termites or consumed by rust.
*
But what about the people and the society of Goa Portuguesa?
What sort of lives did our parents and grandparents and
great- grand-parents live? Were they happy and contented or
otherwise?
Myths, some diametrically opposed, abound about
this Goa of old. There are those who look at
Portuguese rule, beginning with the Inquisition, as
one of undiluted horror and misery, one where civil
liberties (especially for Hindus) were curtailed
and one where Goans lived a life of fear from a
police state, until the action of the Indian Army
in 1961 regained paradise for us.
Others think the Goa that is gone was already a
Garden of Eden, at least in the sense that it was a
more innocent place. These nostalgics yearn for the
days when Goa had a very ordered if unequal
society, and not the chaos and tumult that is the
present. That yearned-after Goa was definitely
greener and had a lot less of the big concrete
boxes on the hillside style of architecture that
exemplifies the word 'Modern'. It was also
protected from all sorts of predators (or so these
nostalgics thought) and everyone admitted that
although the air was pure and the land was
beautiful, it was poor and undeveloped.
What's the truth? And is there a single truth? Probably not,
for there probably never was any one single past, but a range
of different pasts which were not black and white or even
grey, but a kaleidoscope of colours living in the memories of
the people.
Till now we've had to depend upon unreliable stories from
grandmothers or long-winded history books to learn about
those times. However Literature can help us rediscover that
past, for among its powers is the ability to allow us to
eavesdrop on the conversations of the past and to gaze at the
word pictures it creates.
*Lengthening Shadows* lends credence to this assertion. The
Portuguese stories that Paul Melo e Castro has assiduously
collected and translated in *Lengthening Shadows* certainly
give a glimpse of the lives of the elite who spoke
Portuguese; but they also allude to the lot of those who did
not use that language.
Of course, like all literature, these stories can be looked
at from many perspectives: aesthetic, psychological,
ideological... But for a Goan reading the stories in
*Lengthening Shadows*, the temptation to lose oneself into
mulling over the lives of one's forebears of some fifty to a
hundred and fifty years ago is very strong. Certainly I gave
in to it, knowing for a fact that the Goa of my youth has
changed so drastically that today seems like a different
world altogether. Obviously, life before that was stranger
still.
*
By the time these stories were written Goa had lost its
importance as an important outpost of the Portuguese maritime
empire -- capital of the Estado Da Índia which administered
places like Mozambique, Macau and Timor. In the meanwhile,
Portugal had plunged into turmoil after Brazil became
independent.
In Goa for the most part, the Catholic Bamon
(Brahmin) and Chardó (Kshatriya) caste elites ruled
the political roost to the extent the Portuguese
allowed this; although powerful Hindu business
interests manipulated financial life behind the
scenes. The Catholic monopoly over political
influence continued till the First Portuguese
Republic, which was ushered in after 1910,
separated State and Church and bestowed equal
citizenship rights upon the Hindus of Goa, until
Antonio de Oliveira Salazar's dictatorship turned
all Goans into second class citizens through the
Acto Colonial of 1930, an Act which was only
repealed in 1950.
*
As a Goan these stories brought back a flood of memories, but
they also surprised me in some ways. Let me recount a few
random aspects of Goa Portuguesa in *Lengthening Shadows*
that caught my attention.
Although I was aware that in those times the upper classes
were a very pompous lot, as could well be expected from a
socially sterile, economically depressed, caste-based
society, the amusement that was generated at their expense by
authors who came from that very same class was priceless.
Satire was the genre that seemed particularly suited to their
genius and writers like GIP and José da Silva Coelho took
great delight in ridiculing the old aristocracy, although the
returning Bomboikars and Africanders who brought back wealth
from the booming British colonies also had their airs
deflated, even as the common folk were being ribbed. Although
it is clear that different castes and classes lived in
tolerance and harmony, there was a tension in their
relationships and social interaction followed certain
formalised rules of behaviour, which can be discerned in many
of the stories.
Many have the impression that there was less crime in the Goa
of old. Was Goa a crime-free place then? Not true. The
stories of the mid-nineteenth century of Júlio Gonçalves
indicate that those times could be fraught with dangers posed
by all sorts of rascals, petty thieves, kidnappers and even
murderers, as do stories of more than a hundred years later.
Was it a less corrupt place? Perhaps, compared with
the times we live in where corruption has taken
deep roots it was not so bad; but there was a lot
of nepotism and petty corruption as the casual
remarks in various stories testify. However in an
age of scarce cash, the bribes would probably come
in kind as the bunch of bananas in a José da Silva
Coelho story humorously suggests.
What made things probably different is that in the good old
bad days the common people were so poor, there wasn't much to
steal besides their copper vessels and chickens and any food
in the house, for otherwise desperate husbands might even
have been willing to rob their wives, as a story such as 'The
Married Woman's Husband' indicates.
And since the population of Goa was small, the countryfolk
managed to survive with their limited resources by toiling in
their fields or by depending on nature's bounty. But the
trend of migrating to greener pastures on board ships or to
colonies abroad, particularly among the more ambitious and
literate Goans, had already begun.
In more recent times the people have fortunately begun to see
more wealth thanks perhaps to soaring land prices and
opportunities in areas like tourism. And the population of
Goa has increased in leaps and bounds after Liberation as
Indians from other states have come to fill in the employment
vacuum left by Goan emigrants -- an in-migration that has
been accelerated by rapid, often chaotic economic
development. But along with this the crime rates have
correspondingly and sadly increased.
One myth that fellow Indians sometimes believe in, and which
especially annoys some Catholic Goans, is that they are the
offspring of alliances between the white Portuguese and the
brown Goans as their Portuguese names might suggest. While
there was such a population known as Mestis (from the
Portuguese Mestiços), by and large the upper-caste and
upper-class Goan had a particular horror of miscegenation.
This can be seen in the Wenceslau Proença story 'A Spurt of
Blood' where a Portuguese officer's dalliance with a
nondescript spinster from an aristocratic family is firmly
stopped, although not before a child is born to her, only to
be adopted by a poor Goan family.
Incidentally many Goans once tweaked these problematic names
to their advantage to claim Anglo-Indian status and
consequent privileges during British times. However racism
was rampant as Augusto do Rosário Rodrigues suggests in
'Risen from the Ranks', although the Portuguese were willing
to mingle socially and sexually with their colonised peoples,
unlike the British ladies and gentlemen of colonial India who
were expected to be more stiff-upper lipped or at least more
discreet. Caste of course, as Melo e Castro points out, was
the idée fixe of the Goan and indeed Indian nation and still is.
The status of women has changed quite dramatically since
those times especially for Hindus. Those were times when to
be a respectable bride, she had to be married before she
attained puberty: if that happened today it would make their
husbands guilty of statutory rape! Few girls were educated.
But things were only just a bit better among the Catholics,
who like the Hindus were cursed with the problems of securing
a dowry for their daughters.
Those who could not make it in the marriage market due to the
lack of a suitable groom of the right caste or due to
insufficient dowry, were at best forced to live a second
class life in their parents' home. Some became concubines and
prostitution was commonplace. Many stories allude to temple
dancers. Among the Hindu community it seems that quite a few
rich families were ruined by the infatuation of men with such
women who were locally called kolvonts, a corruption of the
word kalavants meaning artistes.
Some Portuguese laws and administrative procedures such as
the codification of uses and customs, the Common Civil Code
of 1867 and the Decree of 1880, which established women as
inheritors on par with the male may have resulted in the
betterment of some women's status in society. This is
evidenced by the story 'My Sister is a Rich Man' by Ananta
Rau Sar Dessai, where a Hindu woman who had independent means
decides to adopt a son and put her foot down and stop funding
her brother's drinking habit.
Goans, especially Catholic Goans, have always protested that
they have been unfairly stereotyped as sots by the Bollywood
film industry. They argue, probably correctly, that the
percentage of alcoholics in Goa is as high, or as low, as in
any other place in the rest of India. But this book attests
that alcoholism has been a problem in Goa for a long long
time among all communities including Hindus.
Over the last few years mining has been castigated for the
environmental depredations and corruption it has wrought upon
Goa. But the corruption of this industry was evident at least
as far back as the 1940s as Epitácio Pais's stories foretell.
It is clear that *Lengthening Shadows* can be read as a
social exposé although it may have limitations in that all of
the writers are middle or upper-middle class. And most are
male, although Maria Elsa da Rocha and Vimala Devi make up in
quality what the anthology lacks in numbers. Also, with the
exceptions of Anantha Rau Sar Dessai and Laxmanrao Sardessai
(more known for his Marathi stories having reputedly written
some 700 of them) the writers are Catholic.
It was the First Portuguese Republic from 1910 till 1926 that
gave at least the Hindu elite an equal standing in society.
It seems the voice of the Hindus belonging to the lower
castes and classes had few outlets throughout this period.
And yet between and through the crevices of what these elite,
male and mainly Catholic authorial voices have to say, one
can also discern the world of women and the subaltern.
All said and done if the people of those times could come
back and see the changes that have taken place, they would be
shocked, pleasantly or otherwise depending upon their
outlook.
*
The stories in *Lengthening Shadows* are written by different
authors, yet to me the anthology is more than the sum of the
individual pieces. It reads like a compendium of the lives
and mores of Goa Portuguesa in the last century or so of its
existence. It also represents a range of writing styles from
the Romanticism of the early writers to the Existentialism of
Walfrido Antão.
And although readers of the original Portuguese might
quibble, the translated stories feel like originals and would
read even better still if the footnotes in the text were
confined to a glossary at the end, or even better to a wiki
page or website.
How does Portuguese compare to the other languages of Goa?
Konkani, the language of the land was neglected by
the elite; and in some eras was ferociously
suppressed by the Portuguese. However to be fair to
the Portuguese some Christian missionaries under
their watch like the English Jesuit Thomas Stevens
did pioneering work in the language. Also the
Portuguese civil servant Joaquim Heliodoro da Cunha
Rivara (1808-1879) in 1858 made the revolutionary
proposal that primary education in Goa be imparted
in Konkani, a proposal which was assiduously
opposed by the elite of Goa who weren't especially
interested in allowing the lower castes a chance to
become educated. In fact Cunha Rivara's thought as
well as his writings on the Konkani language can be
seen as the forerunner to the work of both Msgr.
Sebastião Rodolfo Dalgado and Waman Raghunath
Shennoi Varde Valaulikar aka Shenoi Goenbab,
fountainheads of modern Konkani language and
literature respectively. But the brutal fact
remains that Konkani literature remained in a
nascent stage until fairly recent times.
Still, journals were published since the nineteenth century
mainly from Bombay, and mainly in the Roman script used by
Catholics, and the first regular Konkani periodical
*Udentichem Salluk* (Lotus of the Orient) started in 1889.
Its editor was Eduardo José Bruno de Souza who also wrote the
first Konkani novel *Kristanv Ghorabo* (A Christian Family)
published posthumously in 1911. It is fair to assume there
was a fairly large output of short stories too, but these do
not seem to have been collected or studied so far.
Similarly Marathi which was the literary language of the
Hindus at that time has an archive of at least 20 weeklies or
monthlies published between 1870 and 1910 and many more after
that. Most were extant for perhaps a year or two, and each of
these probably is a lode worth examining. However like
Konkani, this too is little studied.
Comparison is left to those works which have either been
written in English or translated into English from the local
languages. Although these translations have begun to appear
only fairly recently, not too many stories have been
translated. At first glance it seems that the pieces in
*Lengthening Shadows*are more insightful in their depictions
of colonial society and also more sophisticated in form,
perhaps because the models for their art came from the best
of European and American stories in Portuguese translation.
So how did Portuguese become a better mirror of society than
other Indian languages or even English? One reason could be
that it could connect the educated classes from all strata as
everyone was obliged to study it at least till the primary
level.
Secondly compared to the Portuguese writers, those who wrote
in English lived in other parts of India and could only view
Goan society from a distance; worse was the case of the ones
based in Africa and other parts of the diaspora who did not
have a sharp enough understanding of the caste-based life of
Goa to write about its society confidently enough. Their
insights regarding the colonies where they lived most of
their lives are more enlightening though.
Modern Goan Konkani and Marathi stories which have
begun appearing in English translation are fairly
recent and tend to be centred on the milieux of the
society in which their authors grew up. For
instance the stories of Pundalik Naik, doyen of
modern Konkani literature, dwell upon the lives of
the subaltern Hindu classes (the Bahujan Samaj)
with an insider's knowledge which Portuguese
language writers do not have.
Other modern Konkani writers like the late Chandrakant Keni
and Damodar Mauzo do write about Catholics, but then they are
not as much concerned with the colonial experience as for
instance Maria Elsa da Rocha. She is very empathetic to her
Hindu characters, although her prime achievement was to
record the woes and fears of the bhatkar classes before and
just after Liberation.
To conclude, I envy Paul Melo e Castro. He comes
from thousands of miles away to our backyards in
Goa and digs out these gems that the Goa-Portuguese
encounter had left for us. He cannot be thanked
enough for what he has done although the question
may arise as to why someone from the West will come
researching material which our own scholars have
studiedly ignored. In doing so he has indicated the
need for similar work to be done in Konkani and
Marathi before the old journals crumble to dust.
--
Augusto Pinto is a Goa-based critic and translator, book
reviewer and associate professor.
*Lengthening Shadows* is available via mail-order from
goa1...@gmail.com at Rs 400 within India (postfree) or Euro
12 overseas (inclusive of postage).
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