Paul Melo e Castro paulmeloecas...@yahoo.co.uk ------------------------------------------- Introduction
A sombra da árvore alonga-se ao pôr do Sol Sem nunca se separar dela. [The tree's shadow lengthens at sundown Without ever splitting from it.] -- Translation of the Sanskrit poet Kālidāsa by Vimala Devi THE terms used for exemplary collections of literary texts, such as anthology, chrestomathy, or the florilégio of colonial Portuguese education, generally derive from the idea of a collection of flowers, the idea of what, in a nineteenth-century literary context, Matthew Arnold called the best that has been thought and said. The principle guiding the selection of Portuguese-language Goan short stories presented here in translation is, however, somewhat different. My aim is to produce something like a chorography of this literary production, a representative mapping out of the range of authors, styles, positions and themes found within its archive. It seems to me that the short story anthology bears some comparison with another composite short story form, the short-story sequence. But where the sequence is single authored and gains coherence from some common setting or thread, the representative (as opposed to thematic) anthology appears at first to be far more eclectic. Yet just as the short-story sequence often aims to give account of a delimited community, so collections such as the present anthology attempt to provide a cross-section of stories that might vary in subject, era and worldview but which share a desire to treat some commonality. Where the short-story anthology departs from the sequence is by removing its component narratives from their original context and then re-contextualising them in a collection. In so doing the anthology proposes discernibly shared lines within literary history. Though I have tried to make a selection that is as varied as possible, inevitably the choices made reflect to a degree my own personal taste. Given that this anthology represents the autopsy of a dead literature [Footnote: The odd notable work in Portuguese -- such as Ave Cleto Afonso's O Vaticnio do Swârga (2013) -- does continue to emerge from Goa or from Goans in diaspora. The possibility of such surprises continuing to appear seems rather remote however.] I have opted here to present the texts reproduced chronologically. This linearity does have the advantage of highlighting the discontinuities within this literary tradition, if it can be so called. In these stories, which span roughly 1864 to 1987, a variety of positions towards Portuguese colonialism and the wider Indian nation, towards issues of family, caste, society, religion and language can be discerned. While all of these issues are both familiar today and staples of contemporary Goan writing in various languages, the stories presented here, whatever their quality, do display some particularities. Perhaps today, for the Anglophone Goan reader, a point of interest might be the differential cosmopolitanism of these writers, their orientation towards currents of Lusophone and continental European literature and thought alongside their familiarity with the native Goan scene and, at times, with Anglo-Indian currents. In the rest of my introduction I will attempt to provide what biographical details are currently available concerning the authors included, give some context to their stories and try to highlight some thematic lines that run throughout the anthology. Júlio Gonçalves The first stories in the anthology are by Luís Manuel Júlio Frederico Gonçalves (1846-1896), better known simply as J. Gonçalves. According to Aleixo Manuel da Costa, he was referred to by his contemporaries as the Alexandre Herculano of Goa, a reference to the father of the historical novel in Portugal and an indication of the foundational role Gonçalves was deemed to have played in the establishment of Portuguese-language Goan writing. This status is due to Gonçalves having founded the Ilustração Goana, which Devi and Seabra describe as the most influential literary magazine in the cultural and literary life of nineteenth-century Goa. The appearance of the llustração Goana can be seen as the culmination of a gradual process. The period of the Regeneration in Portugal (1851-1868), in which a great effort to modernise the country was made under the Constitutional Monarchy, saw the re-introduction of the press to Goa, improvements in Portuguese-language education and the development of a more liberal political scenario in the territory. Over the nineteenth century as a whole, a spate of publications appeared, such as A Biblioteca de Goa (1839), O Enciclopédico (1841-1842), O Compilador (1843-1847), O Gabinete Literário das Fontainhas (1846-1848), A Revista Ilustrativa (1857-1866) and O Arquivo Português Oriental (1857-1866). These literary magazines were characterised by their mix of reproduced Portuguese and Brazilian articles with prose translated from French and English. Yet they also featured an increasing proportion of original poetry, literary criticism, historiography, studies of Hinduism and articles on popular science by native Goan authors. Amongst this flurry of local creativity were to be found some of the first original Goan short stories to be written in the Portuguese language. The Ilustração Goana, of which J. Gonçalves was both owner and director, appeared between 1864 and 1866 in monthly instalments. It focussed on literary and historical themes, with some incursions into the natural sciences and counted amongst its collaborators some of the main Portuguese-speaking cultural figures of late-nineteenth-century Goa, such as Filipe Neri Xavier, José Gerson da Cunha and António Manuel Joaquim Costa Campos. J. Gonçalves was just nineteen when the first edition of the magazine was published. Given the great prestige he garnered in life through his literary activities and the foundational role accredited to him by posterity, it is not surprising that Gonçalves is one of a handful of Portuguese-language Goan writers whose life is relatively well documented. Born in Nova Goa (as Panjim was then called), Gonçalves trained as a lawyer and, amongst various other important administrative appointments, served as the director of the public library. As a man of letters he innovated both in critical and creative endeavour. His Bosquejos Literários, which appeared in the pages of the Ilustração Goana, are held to be the first serious attempts at literary criticism in the Estado da Índia. His short stories, which appeared in two series entitled Contos da Minha Terra and As Aventuras de um Simplício, represent some of the very first efforts to adapt European-style literary fiction to a Goan setting. The Brazilian critic Hélder Garmes describes the 1860s as the 'most markedly Romantic decade in Goan literary history', a fact reflected in the tones and themes of the stories translated here. Romanticism, which arose in late eighteenth-century Europe, is often considered a Euro-American affair, but here we see its concerns clearly echoed in the writing of Goa's intellectuals, though with the irony that so often features in Portuguese-language writing from the territory. In contrast to the linear Classicism that preceded it, Romanticism was a literature of sharp swings in tone, a tendency reflected in the way Gonçalves's stories veer between light and dark elements. The two stories presented here, with their sensational tales of ghosts and kidnappers, appear to be attempts to domesticate certain topoi of contemporary Portuguese and European literature, which in the Romantic period had reacted against the prepotence of Enlightenment reason by turning to the darker side of life (though these themes are treated with a certain playfulness that displays contact with subsequent trends in sensibility). The very form of the stories -- the short literary narrative -- was also a characteristic of Romanticism, which celebrated concise artistic forms. From Gonçalves onwards, the short story provided Goan writers with a mode of literary expression that suited the small public and irregular literary market of their home territory, a tradition that would subsist until the gradual demise of this literature after 1961. Perhaps where the stories of Gonçalves and his contemporaries most show the influence of Romanticism is in their turn to specifically Goan settings, figures and themes. An enduring legacy of Romanticism was the attention given to national or local identities and specificities. Nationalism arose in every country (and proto-country) in Europe. This clamour certainly seems to have found an echo in Goa in the attention paid to the specifically Goan by authors like Gonçalves. In this light, perhaps what is most interesting today is the author's careful inclusion of incidental details drawn from the Goan scene, what Garmes describes as Gonçalves's 'attachment' to the popular traditions and daily life of the colony. In 'The Ghost', from As Aventuras de Um Simplício, published in 1865 but set in the Panjim of the 1830s, we see glimpses of the Goa of that time, with its mix of religiosity and superstition, both treated with gentle irony in the story (where they compete with Simplício's cake for the lad's attention). Even the clothes worn by Simplício give us a brief view of the fashions of the time. In 'The Little Boy on the Hilltop' of 1866, from Contos da Minha Terra, its lurid theme of child snatching and its fisherfolk who rather improbably worship Neptune notwithstanding, we see some of the material culture of Goa in the cambolins and zabré of the villains. Wenceslau Proença Whilst Gonçalves's contribution to the development of the Portuguese-language Goan short story has been amply recognised by critics, the same cannot be said of Wenceslau Proença, who does not feature in Devi and Seabra's canonical anthology. The little that is known about this figure was recorded by Aleixo Manuel da Costa: Benjamim Wenceslau Proença (Calangute, ? -- 1880), an advocate by training, was president of the Câmara Municipal de Bardez and editor of A Phénix de Goa and A Aurora de Goa. The stories presented here, however, were printed in A Índia Portuguesa (1861-1950), the bitter rival of O Ultramar (1859-1941). O Ultramar and A Índia Portuguesa were far from first newspapers in Goa. That honour went to the Gazeta de Goa (1821), which was followed by many short-lived publications, such as the Echo da Lusitânia (1836-1837), O Vigilante (1838), O Observador (1839-1840) and O Correio de Nova-Goa (1844) amongst others. The appearance of this publication and O Ultramar marks the beginning of what António Maria da Cunha calls the second period of Goan journalism, during which several key early pieces of Portuguese-language Goan literature appeared. This shift in the print landscape was prompted by the introduction of private presses and characterised by a maturation of Goan journalism in both tone and content. Yet at first these newspapers focussed solely on politics and polemics, only later diversifying to broach a wider range of concerns. Like J. Gonçalves, the historical importance of Proença's stories resides in the way in which they use romantic tropes to introduce the sociological reality of Goa into local literary fiction. 'The Married Woman's Husband', which was published in A Índia Portuguesa on 16th January 1867, tells the tall tale of a convoluted hoax. At its centre are a family from Saligão whose son-in-law is a Bombaísta, an emigrant who has left to find prosperity in the big city, as common a phenomenon then as it is today. As in J. Gonçalves's stories, and in much fiction of the time in Goa and elsewhere, there is a rather conventional picture of women in Proença's writing. Female characters are depicted as figures of attraction, gossip and weakness that reflect common attitudes held at the time (as described by Fátima Gracias in her work on women in Goa over the ages). Here the family is pulled apart by emigration, with the women, fixed to the hearth, the ultimate victims. The second story 'A Spurt of Blood' bears closer critical attention than the first. Published in A Índia Portuguesa on 16th and 30th October 1868, the narrative begins with a description of a landscape 'facing towards the Indian Ocean' and, so, is explicitly set in a Goa-centric scenario. We are introduced to the family of the late Carlos António Pinto de Sá, who is described as descending from idealised stock, characterised by its nobility and virtue. Of the two stories by Proença presented here (and the same holds for Gonçalves), one features an upper-caste family and one a family of more modest origins. It is notable that the higher placed figures are depicted with far greater detail and realism. Only much later would the Goan subaltern be represented with any degree of verisimilitude. 'Uma Golfada de Sangue' is an ambiguous story. The central characters are linked to the royal family of Portugal, which has granted the deceased mother's family nobility and a family crest (albeit one featuring a bend sinister, which is expressed less euphemistically in Portuguese as a 'quebra de bastardia' that would surely indicate an unacceptable violation of pure caste descent). Just as Proença displays a certain irony towards the conventions of Romanticism when he apologises to the reader for the unattractiveness of his female character, he also displays a certain reserve towards Goa's political status. In this story, some inkling of the tense and problematic interrelationship between the native Goan gentry and the European Portuguese can be felt, perhaps for the first time within the panorama of Portuguese-language Goan fiction. It is expressed in the revolt and opprobrium provoked amongst the great and good of Calangute by the 'strangely intimate' relationship between Teixeira de Valadares, an officer in the metropolitan military detachment that has, symbolically, displaced the local bhatkars to the house of their mundkars, and his native friend Diogo Gonzaga, and the suspicions they entertain of an affair between Valadares and Angelina, the daughter of the Pinto de Sá family. The story is an odd mix of tones, like many of the stories at this time. It teeters between a belated Romanticism and new more realist currents, and ends on a curiously abrupt note. Padre Xavier, the brother of the deceased nobleman Pinto de Sá, intercedes to prevent his niece from continuing her illicit relationship with the Portuguese, an affair which has already produced an illegitimate child, a mixed race progeny with no place in local society. 'The past', Xavier rages, 'is nothing but deprivation and shame... and so without remedy! The future... that is up to me!' But there is no hint as to what shape this future might take, either personally or collectively. The only action Padre Xavier takes is enacted upon Angelina, whose wayward sexuality is confined to the home. Any change in wider orientation or attitudes remains unvoiced. Francisco João da Costa (GIP) If a contemporary readership is unlikely to be familiar with J. Gonçalves and Wenceslau Proença, Francisco João da Costa (1859-1900, better known by his nom-de-plume of GIP) still enjoys a certain repute, even amongst those with no connection to the Portuguese language. Born to a family that Sandra Lobo describes as one of Goa's most powerful Catholic Brahmin dynasties of the nineteenth century, supporters of the Regeneration, the modernisation of Goa and the full extension of constitutional rights to Portuguese India, Costa was a lawyer as well as a journalist. Like many Portuguese-language Goan writers before and after him, Costa's literary ambitions were an adjunct to his career in a liberal profession. In 1882 Costa began to contribute to the weekly O Ultramar, which was owned by his uncle, Bernardo Francisco da Costa. If Proença's 'Uma Golfada de Sangue' thematises tensions between reinóis and naturais, metropolitans and natives, Costa's work is more interested in internal conflicts. The second period of Goan journalism was characterised, after the relative decline of the descendentes, by an intense rivalry between the Catholic Brahmin and Chardó castes. If A Índia Portuguesa, owned by José Inácio de Loyola, was associated with the Partido Indiano, the party of the Chardós, O Ultramar was linked to the Partido Ultramarino and the Brahmin faction in Goa. Whilst Costa's story does not address this rivalry openly, it focuses on the internecine attitudes that made it possible. 'Jacob e Carrapinho'[footnote: I thank João F.A. Cunha for bringing this story to my attention] was published in O Ultramar on 13th October 1894 and features an inchoate version of the protagonist of Costa's longer and best known work, Jacob e Dulce, which was serialised in the same newspaper between 10th November 1894 and 1st June 1895 and later published in book form in 1896. Costa was not a dedicated short-story writer by any means (though, rather than a novel, Jacob e Dulce is perhaps best read as a series of sketches pushed forward narratively by the machinations surrounding an arranged marriage). The reason for my translating 'Jacob e Carrapinho', which is (as far as I know) Costa's only stand-alone short narrative, is the context that it provides for Costa's later work and the way in which it inaugurates a whole new satiric tone for Goan literature. Whereas Jacob e Dulce locates the petty wrangling between Jacob's and Dulce's family over their forthcoming marriage within a scenario of colonial stagnancy and cultural inadequacy (including an allegiance on the part of a series of minor characters to a now outmoded Romanticism), 'Jacob e Carrapinho' focuses on the destructive petty-mindedness and squabbling amongst the Goan elite within the context of comunidade affairs. Can we read this short text as an instance of Costa's general argument concerning the need to actualise Goa's cultural and structural elements where necessary? It is noteworthy that 'Jacob e Carrapinho' begins with an overblown comparison between top-down political repression, in the form of the 1890 Margão massacre and the triennial auctions of comunidade land, held as an example of the 'swaggering ambition and low vindictiveness' that the author saw as pervading the Goan elite and, perhaps in the longue durée, as facilitating the perpetuation of Portuguese rule in Goa long after the eclipse of Portugal's political and military power. What is unique here, in comparison to Costa's later work, is the implication that the greed of the elite hurts the larger commonweal, even if the author shows no belief in the masses as any kind of political force. For the first time in Portuguese-language fiction we see a criticism of how, in colonial Goa, the lower orders were exploited economically by the native elites, whose diction in Portuguese is now recorded with a degree of realism (especially in comparison with the stilted dialogue of Gonçalves and Proença). Though a slight tale, 'Jacob e Carrapinho' does have its significance as a document testifying to the disputatiousness and asymmetry of the society of its time. Soares Rebelo Though Joaquim Filipe Neri Soares Rebelo (1873-1922) might be considered one of the weaker writers represented here, something that sets him apart from his peers is the rich documentation of his life and work, due to the efforts of his son, Domingos José Soares Rebelo (1916-2013). Soares Rebelo was a typically mercurial figure: an advocate by profession and director of a self-published bimonthly entitled O Investigador, he wrote drama, short stories and poetry. One of the pseudonyms he used was Chaves Pato, the selfsame über-romantic that Francisco João da Costa mocks in Jacob e Dulce. The story presented here, 'As Manhas dum Bebedo' [The Sly Drunkard], which was first published in O Ultramar in October 1896 under the author's own name, does not represent any significant progress in relation to preceding texts in terms of establishing or developing themes for a specifically Goan literature. Indeed, the story of Zé Parada, drunkard and spouse-abuser, does not appear to take place in Goa, but rather in an unspecified European city. Yet, in this Goan representation of a dissolute, violent and unhappy European working class, perhaps there is a measure of distance taken in relation to industrial modernity and any clear idea of moral hierarchy in the world conceived along geographical lines. José da Silva Coelho It wasn’t until José da Silva Coelho (1889-1944) that a writer appeared who would build upon the achievement of Francisco João da Costa. Silva Coelho was born in Margão, one of fifteen children. Son of a notary public, Silva Coelho eventually assumed the same profession. In an introduction to the author's work published in the now-defunct Boletim do Instituto Menezes Bragança, Manuel de Seabra cites the description of Silva Coelho made by his brother Mário (also a poet, with a significant body of work published in the Goan press): Silva Coelho, a life-long bachelor, was apparently something of a dandy and an epicurean. After attending the Liceus of Mapuçá and Margão, he studied law at the age of 18, received his provisão (or licence to practise law) and became in his turn a notary public. He worked as assistant to his father at first, was then posted to Damão (from where he made numerous excursions to Bombay) before returning to become a notary public in Bicholim. Silva Coelho knew Konkani well and, living in a community containing few Catholics in the Novas Conquistas, frequented and was familiar with the local Hindu community. Silva Coelho's writing appeared mainly in O Heraldo, which was the first daily in Goa, founded by António Messias Gomes in 1900, and, until its transition to publishing exclusively in English in October 1983, the longest-running Portuguese-language newspaper outside of Portugal and Brazil. Following Messias Gomes's return to Goa in 1919, after a decade in Lisbon, O Heraldo was re-organised, modernised and expanded. Silva Coelho's brother-in-law, Joaquim de Araújo Mascarenhas, who was a friend and colleague of Messias Gomes, invited Silva Coelho to become a contributor. The first of Silva Coelho's satirical Contos Regionais [Regional Stories] appeared in 1922. He published some forty of these stories between 1922 and 1927. He also collated and published three dozen instalments of Indian Legends, a number of other minor series, and wrote children's stories, making Silva Coelho easily the most prolific Goan fictionist in Portuguese. Silva Coelho's Contos Regionais, from which the stories translated here are drawn, form a critical panorama of First-Republic-era Goa, a time of economic turbulence yet also of a certain social dynamism. Like the work of Francisco João da Costa, Silva Coelho's writing was something of a succès de scandale in Goa, being enormously popular amongst the reading public whilst provoking outrage amongst individuals who recognised themselves in the author's characters. The series went on to inspire a host of epigones, less talented emulators, in the local press. Despite the similarities in tone and outlook, it is difficult to say whether Silva Coelho was directly influenced by GIP. Devi and Seabra do admit this possibility, though they recognise that the intergenerational circulation of Goan fiction amongst the Portuguese-speaking public was limited, especially in the case of an author like Silva Coelho who published solely in the daily press. What does link the two authors, it would appear, is their love of the great Portuguese satiric realist Eça de Queiroz. The similarities between the two authors can, therefore, perhaps be best explained as a parallel reaction to Goan society mediated by the influence of the same literary model. Queiroz was a particular favourite of the Goan middle classes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mário da Silva Coelho, for instance, describes his brother as constantly reading and re-reading Queiroz's oeuvre. It would be fascinating to know more about how Eça's mordant portraits of a decadent fin de siècle Portugal were perceived by Goan readers, but their reaction appears to have passed unrecorded. The similarities between the author and GIP only go so far however. Unlike Francisco João da Costa, who limited his satire to the Goan Catholic bourgeoisie, Silva Coelho takes aim at a much wider range. His stories feature not only the lawyers, doctors, civil servants, councillors, primary school teachers, bhatkars and clergymen that formed the backbone of what we might term upper-caste Indo-Portuguese society but also figures drawn from the English-speaking cadres, both in Goa and Bombay, as well as characters from the lower ranks, such as ayahs, fishwives, coachmen and temple dancers amongst others. Silva Coelho is notable for setting his stories not just in the Velhas Conquistas, but also in the Novas Conquistas where he resided (though, unlike Costa, whose Jacob e Dulce takes place in a thinly disguised Margão, Coelho never set any of his stories in his home town). The five stories presented here display a cross-section of the author's favoured figures and themes. In 'The Tribulations of Mr Gilaz in Goa', of 18th February 1922, we meet Gelásio de Faria who, not cut out for a career in the Church, had left to make good in Bombay, where he found work in a chemist and anglicised his name to Mr Gilaz. Having risen to head pharmacist over the years, Mr Gilaz returns home to set up shop in his native Pomburpá. Whilst gentle fun is made of the attitudes Mr Gilaz has picked up in British India, his go-ahead practicality is contrasted with the 'Portuguese' ways of local society, represented principally in the person of his cousin Elisabet (though sounding odd to our ears today, this was not an uncommon man's name amongst the Catholic bourgeoisie of the time) and his exaggerated respect for the tortuous new Stamp Act, which he considers a 'fine piece of writing'. In the end, the barbs of Silva Coelho's satire find purchase in the way second-hand technology is simply imported wholesale into Goa and the colonial state, which far from fostering development, appears to limit itself to weaving a web of circuitous laws and extorting taxes through a variety of 'importation dispatch licences' and 'merchandise dispatch permits'. 'The Tardy Development of Sebastianinho's Ideas', of 18th March 1922, focuses on the Goan elite of the time, through the figures of bhatkar Fran-João and his son Sebastianinho. After his traditionally minded father's demise, Sebastianinho makes a tidy sum subletting comunidade fields and becomes a licensed advocate, one of the few avenues of employment open to the upper native echelons and a favourite target for Silva Coelho's satire. Sebastianinho's weakness is that the words and phrases he needs to succeed at the Bar only come to him in afterthoughts. Silva Coelho's departure from Francisco João da Costa lies in the way he treats Goan society in the round, by including figures from all walks of life. Here Sebastianinho's equivocations are contrasted with the conduct of the straightforward if unpolished fisherfolk of Piedade, a glimpse into whose lives and mores we can see in this story. 'A Bunch of Bananas for the Advocate Serapião' (5th April 1922) also centres on the advocates of Goa. Lus Cabral de Oliveira has argued that the 'advogado provisionário', or licensed advocate, was a symbolic figure in early twentieth century Goa, one that represented both the disputatious public life of the territory and the discrimination suffered by native society. Since Goa had no college of law yet needed legal representatives for the many suits perpetually under process, a compromise was achieved whereby, after an informal course in the law, advocates could be granted a licence to practice by the head of the Relação de Goa. Access to this training was fairly restricted and most advocates were Brahmins or Chardós. Whilst some amongst them were highly competent, the lack of formal training meant that many were ill-prepared to carry out their profession. Needless to say, it is mostly advocates belonging to the latter category that people the stories of Silva Coelho. In 'A Bunch of Bananas for the Advocate Serapião', we see how the protagonist Gomindes, 'an advocate of the old school, bereft of any training save his primary education and some instruction in Latin', resorts to chicanery in the absence of any flair for the law. This story, like many by Silva Coelho, focuses on the petty corruption present in Goan legal processes of the time. Serapião thinks he has made an influential friend in the figure of the newly appointed judge and uses this connection to make a reputation for himself. Unfortunately the time comes when an inappropriate saguate (as such gifts were known) of bananas, given without his knowledge by some Hindu priests he is representing to the judge, causes him to come a cropper. 'That Monserrate Chap', of 2nd May 1922, is one of Silva Coelho's most provocative stories and full of details that retain historical interest today. One of the first things we learn about Monserrate is that his family prevented him from studying in the metropole. It seems they believed that contact with the anti-clerical Portugal of the First Republic might lead their scion to godlessness, an ironic inversion of Portugal's histori cal proselytising role. Given the way in which current Goan histo riography presents the First Republic as a relatively positive era in twentieth-century Goa, this glimpse of what seems to be a dissenting local position takes on a particular resonance. Central to the story is Monserrate's gushing enthusiasm for European graduates from Coimbra University, which is born of his own frustrated ambitions. One day he meets Cipriano Cantina, an infantryman seconded to the public works brigade. Monserrate somehow mistakes him for a graduate in mathematics and, when their paths re-cross each day, greets him with exaggerated deference. In Silva Coelho's description of Cantina there is a questioning of European predominance via visible denominators of hierarchy adopted in part under Europe's sway. Cantina, we are told, is 'darker than a navvy' and unable to dance anything but a Spanish Polka, and as such falls far short of the idealised self-image of the European-cultured light-skinned Goan elite. Later in the story Monserrate encounters the European at a wedding party to which they have both been invited. Cantina is not clothed appropriately and is loitering outside the venue, too embarrassed to go in. He spies Monserrate, who is only attending in a spirit of condescension towards his tailor, dancing away inside and beckons him over. Prevailing on the forelock-tugging respect the Goan has shown him hitherto, Cantina borrows Monserrate's dinner jacket and swaps places. As the Goan waits outside, sheltering from the cold in the smelly, shabby coat he had at first assumed was a gown, Monserrate realises that Cantina is not what he had taken him for and his ardour for Europeans cools. From then on, rather than showing any immediate enthusiasm upon encountering such figures, in the context of the story those whom we might today call white Portuguese, 'he waits, prudently, for the man to draw close. After looking him over thoroughly, he dispenses a leisurely, courteous greeting'. Silva Coelho is evidently asking his readership to assume a similarly circumspect attitude. What this change in outlook might have implied in the 1920s is a question open to debate today. In 'What a Thing it is to have the Savvy of a Mana', of 4th April 1923, Silva Coelho turns to a female figure, the mana, whose social profile and dress is sketched out for the reader almost ethnographically, albeit in the author's characteristically satiric tone. Whilst the humour turns on the varying levels of access to the Portuguese-language within the Goa of the author's time, Silva Coelho's real disapproval is reserved for the 'grandees of our little land' who share certain qualities of pettiness and ignorance, yet still rise to positions of authority and influence. Whilst the lawyer licenced only for Timor (and so the lowest of the provisionários) is a recognisable historical type, to precisely which historical figures the fat grocer and the diligent, helpful barber might refer is now a case for historians of the period. The final story included here, 'How My Stories Affect People's Sense of Proportion', of 28th June 1823, which targets the dissipation and carelessness of Goan politicians, carries on to a certain extent from where 'The Savvy of a Mana' leaves off. Yet what is particularly interesting today is the story's representation of Silva Coelho's reception and audience as a fictionist. When the civil servant Esteves introduces the author to his wife, she expresses disapproval of the 'Regional Stories' Silva Coelho contributed to O Heraldo. The reason for the lady's disapproval goes to the heart of both the author's ambitions and the outrage caused by his stories. The lady explains that what discomfits her about Silva Coelho's texts is the way the principal characters always resembled people she knew and the fact that, once ridiculed in the stories, the defects of these people began to stand out until their presumption, egotism and stupidity became unbearable. In short, the lady exclaims, Silva Coelho's stories affect people's sense of proportion. Silva Coelho replies that his stories have no other objective than to identify such defects and to suggest their correction. Whether or not he achieved his goal is moot. What is certain, according to Manuel de Seabra, is that the opprobrium heaped upon Silva Coelho for his efforts soon left him, as it did his predecessor Francisco João da Costa, exhausted, unable to continue as a writer and soon to be forgotten. Though the sample of stories presented here is limited, I hope that the importance of Silva Coelho's sizeable body of work is evident. If Francisco João da Costa enjoys wide recognition nowadays as an early Goan satirist, his successor Silva Coelho deserves no less acclaim. Ananta Rau Sar Dessai There appears to have been a lengthy hiatus between José da Silva Coelho (who ceased publishing in 1931, as the Estado Novo was taking shape) and the next significant short-story writer in Portuguese, which suggests that the Salazar period in Goa was singularly inimical to the further development of Goan literary expression in that language. The Portuguese critic Manuel Ferreira, an early champion of Lusophone African writing, lived in Goa between 1948 and 1954 with his wife, the Cape-Verdean author Orlanda Amarlis. In a text from 1959 in which he reflects on his literary experiences in Goa, where, amongst other things he organised a 'Página da Cultura' in O Heraldo, Ferreira compares Goa to Cape Verde. Though the two territories possessed similarly sized populations, comparable flows of emigration, education levels and economic difficulties, and occupied vestigial and intermediate positions within the Portuguese imperial system, whilst the latter saw the great flourishing of its own literature from the 1930s onward, the same period in Goa was a time of great stagnancy. Many reasons can be put forward to explain this discrepancy: the fact that the neo-realistic Brazilian regional modernism of the time that so inspired the budding authors of Cape Verde seems to have found little echo in far-off Goa (though, it must be said, neo-realistic works such as the novel O Signo da Ira by Orlando da Costa and the collection of poetry A Terra Falou-me Assim by Mário do Carmo Vaz did eventually emerge), Goa's distinct linguistic situation -- several English (e.g. Lambert Mascarenhas) and Marathi (e.g. Laxmanrao Sardessai) writers did appear in this period -- and Goa's particular conditions in the blockade years (despite the paucity of fiction, a continual stream of depoliticised lyric poetry was forthcoming). Whatever the root causes, the simple fact is that from the inception of the Salazar dictatorship until the eve of Liberation, there simply did not seem to be a particular desire on the part of the Portuguese-speaking elite to produce literary fiction in and about Goa. However, there was someone who did produce consistently through the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Symptomatically, Ferreira makes no mention of him in his article and there seems to have been almost no discussion of his work in Goa. This writer is Ananta Rau Sar Dessai (1910 -- ?), the creator of radio theatre in Goa, according to Devi and Seabra, and the producer of more than thirty radio-plays, a handful of short stories and sundry poetry. Almost all of our knowledge today about Ananta Rau Sar Dessai is the result of Devi and Seabra's efforts. Seabra even prepared an anthology of Sar Dessai's work to be published in Lisbon by the Agência Geral do Ultramar but, unfortunately (though not atypically for Portuguese-language Goan writing), the manuscript was lost during the Carnation Revolution in 1974. Today all we have to go on are the texts preserved in A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa and those scattered through the Portuguese-language press, often published at Christmas or Diwali, when papers such as O Heraldo would produce bumper editions and were likely desperate for content. Given Sar Dessai's prolificness and the lack of vying writers, what could explain his exceedingly low profile? The fact that he was a Hindu working in a language used in public discourse mainly by Christians? The fact that he lived in Mardol in the Novas Conquistas and often wrote about his local scene, which was somewhat distant, psychologically at least, for an audience in Panjim or Margão? Or the fact that, as we shall see, he did not shy away from tackling contentious issues, an attitude which perhaps did not sit well with his potential readership? Another factor is that Sar Dessai employed a particularly idiosyncratic Portuguese. Today it adds interest to his texts, but in his time, in a language community that set great stock by grammatical accuracy and purism, it is possible that its wayward form deflected attention from the content of Sar Dessai's work. We shall never know. But even though Sar Dessai's trail in Portu guese-language print has long grown cold, a lead does exist elsewhere. According to Devi and Seabra, Sar Dessai also wrote in Marathi. Indeed, accompanying the published version of a radio-play entitled 'Z-Bomb' is a note that indicates its 1940 publication in Marathi translation in a publication entitled Lokasevala. Perhaps scholars of Marathi literature can shed some light on this enigmatic figure. The first story presented here, 'A Very Pleasant Gentleman', was initially published in O Heraldo on 25th January 1959. Its first person narrator is a doctor, one of several medical alter egos of the writer to appear in his narratives. The doctor encounters a man named Camotim, who has taken a local bailadeira, or temple dancer, as a concubine. Contrary to Portuguese-language poetry by Goan Catholic writers, in which such figures are alluringly exotic even when subject to disapproval, here their existence is presented as unremarkable. What impresses the narrator is rather the care and attention Camotim appears to lavish upon her, and the man's fine manners, European dress and polished metropolitan Portuguese accent. The story's end contradicts the innocuousness with which it begins. The doctor discovers that, after Camotim's wife refused to hand over yet more of her jewellery for the upkeep of his mistress, he assaulted her with a bottle. No other pre-1961 Portuguese-language narrative deals with intimate relations within Goan society so bleakly. And not since GIP or Silva Coelho had the equation between Europeanisation and societal improvement been so strongly questioned. Today we have scant account of how press censorship actually worked in late colonial Goa and we can only speculate that it was the location of this story in such a remote social space that made its publication possible. Alongside this story, O Heraldo published a note announcing a forthcoming book of short stories by Sar Dessai entitled O Segredo do Sobrado [The Secret of the Loft]. Unfortunately this collection never seems to have materialised. The critique of colonial Goa made in 'A Very Pleasant Gentleman' continues, though in a more specific yet oblique manner, in 'The Christmas Present', published in O Heraldo on 27th and 29th September 1961. This short story strikes a comic tone and the alter ego is a rather clownish figure, more interested in bumptious literary posturing and flirting with nurses than upholding his Hippocratic Oath. Yet it is possible to see the implementation of these features as techniques of irony and camouflage that allow the contentious attitudes of the author to pass relatively unremarked. Here, perhaps, Sar Dessai represents the closest Portuguese-language Goan literature gets to the sort of discourses found in the coevally emergent Lusophone African literatures. The story concerns a man who arrives at a hospital with his heavily pregnant wife. He does not have the money to pay for her treatment nor, as a nominal homeowner, does he qualify for a certificate granting him state support. To the narrator, the man appears 'half-mad', more preoccupied with the Christmas present he is unable to buy for his wife than her immediate predicament (thereby establishing an interesting intertextual connection with the canonical O. Henry story of the same name). It is this odd behaviour that allows the man to voice inconvenient truths, such as that the state provides inadequate medical care and that even educated people cannot find suitable employment (which also applies to the doctor narrator, who seems to be employed as a sort of doorman). Finally, the man's wife gives birth to triplets, adding another set of children to the family they already have and which he cannot afford to support. Seemingly unhinged, the man harangues the narrator, asking insistently, 'What is the opposite of lunatic asylum?' The narrator is left at a loss for words, so the man continues: 'No. Asylums are where the mad become lucid -- just like I am. This place, places like this, where feats of lucid people like me becoming mad are achieved, what do you call a place like this? Huh... huh... This place, this anti-asylum, is called a hospital. So hospitals are places where the healthy become sick and the lucid go mad.' One way of reading this story is to see his question not as referring uniquely to the institutional setting but to the constrained psychosocial space of the late colonial period in which both the narrator and the protagonist are enclosed. In this condemnation of the socio-economic condition of Goa, Sar Dessai comes close to becoming an overtly anti-colonial Portuguese-language writer in Estado Novo era Goa. The end of Portuguese rule had a contradictory effect on Sar Dessai's writing. On the one hand, his work was published more regularly (though these texts were often old stories). The new writing that did appear subsequently displays a clear pan-Indian nationalist bent (as does Sar Dessai's forays into poetry). Yet no commentary or reference to his work was forthcoming in Goa, even after publication of Devi and Seabra's A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa, suggesting that this increased prominence was motivated by the moribund Portuguese-language press's need for content rather than a newfound appreciation of Sar Dessai's talent. Even though Seabra's anthology of Sar Dessai's writing was lost, A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa of 1971 does include some texts that were not published in the Goan press. One of these was 'My Sister is a Rich Man', which was broadcast in the 1960s but set (and perhaps written) in the 1950s. It is again a comic tale, but with Sar Dessai's characteristically dark undertone. Soman Ladié is a living legend in the vicinity of the doctor narrator's practice, notorious for his catchphrase 'My sister is a rich man' which he repeats endlessly in Hindi. The doctor finds himself called upon to treat Ladié for his alcoholism, to little effect. As the doctor comments, Ladié's affliction 'was not the type to be cured, for his alcoholism was only twelve years younger than he was'. The denouement of the story comes when Ladié's sister adopts an heir, and leaves Ladié to drink himself to death. His idiosyncratic language, raw provocative themes, and the great ambiguity with which he treats his subjects, make Sar Dessai one of the more interesting Goan writers to have worked in Portuguese. In A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa, Devi and Seabra provide a list of Sar Dessai's stories, which include narratives such as 'The Best Tale', 'Omnipotent' (which Devi and Seabra describe as one of the strangest short stories they have ever read, though they did not include it in their anthology), 'A Highly Infected Woman' and 'Doctor Panduronga'. Today we can only wonder what lay behind such titles. It seems that quite a few of these stories were published in A Luta [The Struggle], a Left-leaning paper of irregular publication that appeared post-1961. It was not archived at Panjim's Central Library, a great loss to Portuguese-language Goan literature as several of the best post-1961 writers aired their work within its pages. Telo de Mascarenhas Telo de Mascarenhas (1899-1979) left Goa to study in Portugal in 1920. He graduated in 1930 from the University of Coimbra, where he had studied law under Salazar, a university lecturer before assuming command of the government following the military coup of 1928. During his student years, Mascarenhas participated in a series of cultural initiatives led by Catholic Goan students, which were characterised by a championing of what they saw as a specifically Indian cultural inheritance, largely based upon Hindu tradition. He founded the Centro Nacionalista Hindu in Lisbon in 1926 and, in 1927, together with the poet Adeodato Barreto and various other Goan intellectuals resident in Portugal, started the Índia Nova periodical. As the Estado Novo established itself as the new status quo, Mascarenhas (who worked in the Portuguese judicial system in the Algarve and then the Alentejo through the 1930s and 40s) became a committed Indian nationalist. After the Independence of British India, he returned to the subcontinent in 1948 in order to fight for Goa's decolonisation and its integration into the Indian Union. After a brief spell in Goa, Mascarenhas was forced into exile in Bombay between 1950 and 1958. When he returned to Goa in 1959 he was arrested and deported first to Portugal, where he was imprisoned initially in Aljube and then in Caxias. He remained in jail until 1970, when his freedom was exchanged for the release of Padre Chico Monteiro, who had been placed under house arrest by the Indian authorities in Goa for refusing either to surrender his Portuguese passport or leave the territory. One of Mascarenhas's last initiatives upon returning to Goa was to found the Crculo de Amizade Indo-Portuguesa [Indo-Portuguese Friendship Society], a clever manipulation of semantics in which the joint adjective no longer refers to Goa but to the two cultures and nations between which Mascarenhas had so personally mediated. Mascarenhas was a prolific journalist, translator (of Tagore into Portuguese, most notably) and poet. Once definitively settled in Goa, Mascarenhas published two volumes of poetry: Poemas de Desespero e Consolação [Poems of Despair and Consolation] (1971) and Ciclo Goês [Goan Cycle] (1973). In 1975 his autobiography appeared in English as When the Mango-Trees Blossomed. In it Mascarenhas claims to have written a novel and a novella during his incarceration in Portugal. The novel Jogos Malabares [Malabar Games], which he had to hide from the prison authorities, appears to have been lost. The novella, entitled Sinfonia Goesa [Goan Symphony] and written in 1962, which he describes as 'based on my youthful memories of the land of my birth', also never saw the light of day in complete form. Three fragments of this work, however, were published as 'Sunday Reading' in the newspaper O Heraldo in 1975. Since these fragments, set in pre-1961 Goa, work as stand-alone stories, a sample has been included here. The remaining story, 'Rosália', has already appeared in English, in Lus de Santa Rita Vás's Modern Goan Short Stories of 1971. 'Advocates and Solicitors', which was published on 25th October 1975, picks up what appears to be a consistent thread running through coeval Portuguese-language Goan literature: the lack of prospects for the local elite in an economically stagnant late-colonial Goa. Carlos Manoel, son of the central bhatkar family, and his friend José Gregório swap gripes about the limitations placed on their respective careers. The liberal professions represented the only real career path in Goa for such people, as Carlos Manoel and José Gregório. Yet, as both Goa-born and Goa-trained, they suffer what today we might term institutional discrimination. Carlos Manoel is a 'provisionário' (the licensed advocate with which we are familiar from Silva Coelho's stories) and José Gregório has studied at Escola Médico-Cirúrgica de Goa. Both express their frustration at being discriminated against in favour of Europeans or those trained in Europe. Underpinning each man's frustration is the general malaise of a subordinated Goa. 'The Buried Treasure' (2nd November 1975) reveals more of the background to Sinfonia Goesa. It is set in Benaulim, a coastal village not far from the port of Mormugão where the author was born. It centres on a bhatkar family to which Carlos Manoel belongs. The decline of the batecarato over the course of the twentieth century is one of the main themes of the later Goan writers in Portuguese (who almost always belonged to that class). The patriarch of the family, which is on the wane financially but still rich in tradition, is Lus Bernardo. He is described as being lost in dreams of unearthing the eponymous hidden treasure. This cache, we are told, had been buried during the Rane incursions of the nineteenth century. In this story these hidden riches seem, paradoxically, to be both the symbol of an impossible desire for a lost grandeur and, in Lus Bernardo's insistence on a link between his clan and the Ranes, a re-positioning of such Catholic families with regards to Goan nationalist mythology. The two narratives, whilst decrying colonial conditions, display a mistrust of ambitious lower-caste figures. In 'Advocates and Solicitors' the object of this suspicion is Belmiro, a solicitor who manipulates the judicial process for his own enrichment, who wishes to put the bhatkars in the shade and who uses his own limited education and position to lord it over those below him. In 'The Buried Treasure' it is the raibari, or marriage broker, who comes to Lus Bernardo with a proposal for his daughter's hand from a lower-caste man who has made his fortune in Africa. The offer is haughtily dismissed. It is clear that Sinfonia Goesa, had it appeared in full, would have illustrated the practical conditions of discrimination and mismanagement that edged members of the Indo-Portuguese elite towards an Indian nationalist position. Yet is there also in Telo de Mascarenhas's texts some wishful thinking that Goan decolonisation would restore the position of the elite? Whether or not this supposition is true, the fact is that history did not move in that direction. Vimala Devi In A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa, co-written by Devi with her husband Manuel de Seabra, the authors argue that the most important works in Portuguese-language Goan literature were published in Lisbon, which had a distorting effect on the development of the literary scene in the territory. While this assertion might hold true for the novel and for poetry, it is less true in the realm of the short story, which had in Goa an immediate existence in print and the broadcast media, though this very immediacy might have abated the lasting impact of such production. This anomaly notwithstanding, it is true that the first significant Goan short-story sequence was published in Lisbon: Monção by Vimala Devi. Vimala Devi is the pseudonym of Teresa da Piedade de Almeida Baptista (b. 1932). She adopted this pen name to show how, despite her integration into European culture, she had maintained what she saw as a resolutely Luso-Indian personality. Though this self-exoticising manoeuvre might appear puzzling today, now hegemonic notions of identity have shifted dramatically in Goa, in dictatorship-era Portugal this avowal of Indianness was a bold gesture. After moving to Lisbon in 1958, Devi published two key creative works on Goan themes: Súria in 1962, a collection of poems that the English critic Clive Willis has placed amongst the best written in Portuguese in the twentieth century, and Monção in 1963. The stories that comprise this collection depict pre-1961 Goa (between the end of the First Republic and the eve of the Indian military action) and its complex social dynamic, which saw the increasing stagnation of the productive economy, the relative decline of the bhatkar class and an increasing frustration on the part of the non-elite echelons of the population. Monção is more than an aleatory collection of stories. Rather the various narratives it contains form an artistic whole and are consequently best read in their own context. Taken in toto, Monção, represents Goa as a society that is deeply divided along various lines, into rival families, castes and religious communities, but which is also culturally constituted by these separations, which form a cohesive and paradoxically collective frame of reference. For the purposes of the present collection I have chosen seven stories that reflect some of the key themes in Devi's work and which interlink with the other stories selected. Unavoidably, alas, these stories lose a certain resonance as a consequence of their removal from the intricate context of Monção. The first two stories, 'Nâttak' and 'Tyâtr', both revolve around theatrical productions associated with the two main religious communities of Goa. The first, which is also the story that opens Monção, plunges the Portuguese reader into what is perhaps the most culturally different setting in the collection. It takes place in and around a performance of the eponymous Hindu popular theatre, a form that often featured classic tales from the Sanskrit tradition. In Devi, as in subsequent writers such as Maria Elsa da Rocha and, to an extent, Epitácio Pais, can be found a particular sensitivity to questions of gender within wider social formations. In 'Nâttak' we see how the actor Tukaram feels constrained in Goa's colonial, provincial society, disadvantaged by his Hindu origins and held back by a lack of local opportunities. The story closes with the actor seemingly making the decision to break away from his current life, to try his luck in Bombay like the sons of his dead father's friend Naraina. No such option is open to Durgá, the daughter of the temple dancer Zayú, who was a former consort of Tukaram's father, a fact that throws Tukaram's own relation to the girl into question. For Durgá her acquaintance with Tukaram represents a special episode in her empty life, one moment of seemingly human intimacy. When Tukaram leaves, abandoning Durgá to her fate, she is left gazing out into the darkness, waiting for a morning that might never come. The second story, 'Tyâtr', is set during a performance of Christian popular theatre. Its title is a Konkani derivation of the Portuguese word teatro. Tiatr, as it is more commonly spelt now, takes the form of a revue and specialises in a carnivalesque criticism of local society and its mores. In this story, however, it is not so much on stage that the social order is challenged but in the audience. Bhatkar Dias and his wife, from Orlim, who appear in several other stories in Monção, arrive late to the show and expect a seat to have been reserved for them at the front. One hasn't. The crowd, who are their mundkars, emboldened by mass and a certain anonymity, block Dias's way and challenge his authority as he attempts to insist on traditional deference. Finally Dias singles out the organiser of the event and imposes his will. As in several other stories in Monção, 'Tyâtr' is a story of pride and decline, everyday resistance and the tenacity of decaying social structures. Given the social shifts in Goa following World War II, the implication here is that Dias's victory in this skirmish is but a minor last triumph of a war lost in advance. If 'Nâttak' and 'Tyâtr' represent the Hindu and Catholic communities in parallel, the separation between the two communities is confronted directly in 'The Cure', which thematises the illicit romance between a lower-caste Catholic woman named Rosú and a Hindu from the same village called Caxinata. In this simple yet powerful story, which at the outset gestures towards the traditional world of Goan superstition found in J. Gonçalves, the couple find a simple contentment together when alone and away from society. Their happiness, the reader cannot help but feel, is doomed to be fleeting. The story 'Job's Children' focuses on the constricted lives of those at the bottom of Goan society, their entrapment within tradition and superstitious beliefs, yet also their courage, integrity and class solidarity across creeds; an important correction, perhaps, to a vision of Goa too often expounded, particularly in colonial-era discourses, as hermetically split between Catholics and Hindus. The story touches on the social tension between upper and lower classes, not expressed as outright revolt but discernible in everyday forms of verbal and psychological resistance, the importance of which Partha Chatterjee has highlighted, in a subcontinental context of entrenched hierarchies. As in ‘Tyâtr’ the hypotaxis of women's lives to men's in traditional Goan society is sensitively depicted. Although in 'Job's Children' the subordination of women does not take the overtly oppressive or exploitative form it does in other stories, the last scene, in which Carminha stands alone upon the quay, 'frozen like a statue of resignation', leaves the reader in no doubt as to who, in the end, will bear the brunt of the adverse situation the old fisherman's illness will inevitably cause. The next three stories, 'Dhruva', 'Fidelity' and 'The Return', form a small cycle within the general sequence of stories in Monção revolving around a young Hindu doctor named Chandracanta. In the first story, Chandracanta has recently married. The narrative is told from the viewpoint of his wife, Dhruva, and attempts to convey both her bewilderment, helplessness and uncertainty as she is wrenched from her family at a young age and obliged to join another household and her pleasure at the fulfilment of a duty which, within the societal constraints placed upon women, represents her making her way in the world. 'Dhruva' ends with the possibility of understanding and even love burgeoning between the young couple, but also with the appearance of a cloud upon the horizon: Chandracanta has decided, with the reluctant agreement of his father and traditionalist grandfather, to study medicine in Portugal, a move that entails years of separation between Chandracanta and his wife, his family and his society. The second narrative, 'Fidelity', finds Chandracanta in Portugal's capital. Whereas 'Dhruva' is set within the open, multi-generational family home, 'Fidelity' takes place in an anonymous rooming house in Lisbon. The story recounts an encounter between Chandracanta and his lover Lusa, a European classmate at medical school. As Luísa gets dressed and the couple talk, a subtle power struggle takes place in which Lusa belittles Chandracanta's culture, background and ties to home in an attempt to convince him to throw in his lot with her plans to practise medicine in Mozambique, metonymic perhaps of the Estado Novo's colonial turn to Africa. The young woman's attempt to perform the assimilating function usually the preserve of men in Lusotropical ideology fails. Chandracanta spurns her advances, conscious of the consequences his abandonment of his wife and family would bring. The tale ends with his resounding if highly problematic assertion that 'that is the way we are in the East. The man might betray but the husband is always faithful'. Chandracanta's duties at this point seem to win out over his desires. Devi's Monção has undergone two editions: the original in 1963 and a second in 2003. In the latter edition, Devi added three stories that she had written after the publication of Monção with a view to a second collection that never materialised. In the 2003 edition, we encounter Chandracanta for a third time in a story called 'The Return'. This narrative, which brings the young Hindu's story full circle, takes place after his return to Goa. Back home, Chandracanta finds it difficult to slip back into his former life after so many years in Europe and feels cut off from the 'millennial' ways of his forefathers. He experiences severe cultural dislocation and clashes with his father and his grandfather over what he sees as their rigid traditions and what they regard as his wilful flouting of convention. Dhruva, who had at the close of her eponymous story appeared as his pole star, now seems like an automaton with whom a human relationship based on communication and equality is impossible. In despair the young man goes out walking after dinner and encounters Sirvodcar, his Marathi teacher when he was a boy. Whilst Sirvodcar speaks out against Chandracanta, and those young Goans who refuse to work to improve Goa, preferring to make their lives abroad, the story ends with the young doctor's decision that his only escape was 'to return to the twentieth century'. Though the implications of this thought for Chandracanta remain unclear, 'The Return' was almost certainly the last story Devi wrote on a Goan theme and reflects perhaps a valedictory statement concerning her homeland. After Súria and Monção and the co-authored A Literatura Indo- Portuguesa, two creative works that are landmarks in Portuguese-language Goan literature and a monograph/anthology that remains an essential reference for scholars, Devi wrote no more about Goa. After moving from Lisbon to Barcelona, where she resides today, she has written eight books of poetry in Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan and Esperanto. In 2008 a second collection of short stories set in Europe appeared, entitled A Cidade e os Dias [The City and the Days]. Epitácio Pais Epitácio Pais (1928-2009) of Batim, a village located off the highway between Panjim and Margão, and a primary school teacher in his working life, was a discreet but important presence in Portuguese-language Goan writing. As with so much in this literary field, it is through the offices of Vimala Devi and Manuel de Seabra that what little we have of Pais's writing has survived. After his inclusion in their A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa, Seabra edited and introduced a collection of Pais's stories that was published in Lisbon in 1973 under the title Os Javalis de Codval [The Boars of Codval]. Pais began writing before 1961, publishing a couple of stories in O Heraldo and Diario da Noite. But it is only after the ouster of the Portuguese that he began to write consistently and with a sense of purpose. Some of this post-Liberation work seems to have been broadcast over All-India Radio in its Renascença programme, though unfortunately not all of it seems to have survived. There is, for instance, mention of a story called 'Os Dravidianos' [The Dravidians] from 1982. In his introduction to this collection, Seabra ventures to compare Pais to Russian writers such as Turgenev and Korolenko. This similarity strikes Seabra particularly in the way that Pais inscribes his characters within a hostile landscape, a comparison that holds especially true in Pais's description of the Novas Conquistas, where several of his stories are set. It seems to me that, in his physical prose -- direct to the point of brutality -- and in his vision of traditional values eroding under the pressure of economic development and social change, another point of comparison is the sort of mid-twentieth-century American short-story writing that so influenced Pais's generation of Portuguese and Lusophone African writers. The narratives 'A Story about Mines' and 'Another Story about Mines' revolve around the noxious effects of the extractive industries on the Goan landscape and psyche. The temporal location of the stories is not precise and, unfortunately, it is unlikely we will ever know when these stories were written. At least the first story appears to be set pre-1961, when Portuguese policemen were monitoring the Goan border. This chronological emplacement serves as a reminder that the transformation of Goa through mining began after World War II, even if it reached a new intensity under the Indian administration. Running through both stories is the sense that the balance of power in Goa is shifting away from its traditional configuration. The protagonist, Caetano, is a Catholic from the city. He relies on helpers whom he disdains, the mouro Issuf in the first tale and Jerry, a Catholic of possibly lower-caste, in the second. Across the two narratives, Caetano pits his wits against the recently arisen class of Hindu mine owners and comes off the worse, defeated by their wiles and his personal flaws. If the first story does end on a positive note, the second concludes with the idea that Caetano, and possibly his ilk, have definitively lost out to the 'sharks of the mining world'. Even more so than in Monção, where this tactic is used to great effect, the characters in Pais's fiction crop up again and again, now appearing centre stage in one story, now receding into the backdrop in another. Whether Pais originally planned to publish his stories collectively is unknown. What is true is that he carefully sets his stories in a common fictional time-space. Caetano, the main figure in the mining tales, is described in passing as a 'sucker' by a character in 'The Mask', throwing the directly expressed attitudes of this character into relief. This tale, set against a background of physical and moral disintegration, is a simple but effective one. Like so much Goan fiction of the post-1961 period 'The Mask' thematises relations between Christians and Hindus, though here the central friendship between Gervásio and Zoideva, defined by masculine camaraderie amidst careless misunderstanding, is perhaps the least fraught aspect of the narrative. The story 'On the Train' features a key theme running through Pais's fiction, namely alcoholism. It recounts the tale of a family emigrating from Goa to Bombay by train. As the tragic story unfolds a scene is painted of unequal relationships between social levels and especially genders. The ironic description of the wife left to cope alone with a brood of children as a 'four-handed goddess' is an example in Pais of a post-1961 trend for nativist metaphors that will reach its apogee with Maria Elsa da Rocha. In the figure of the drunkard husband, and his memories (whether true or not) is the suggestion of a problematic transition from staid colonial society to an accelerating market-driven reality that pervades all Pais's stories. In 'On the Train', Seabra writes, the psychological tension is built up to such a degree that as the train climbs up into the Western Ghats at the story's close, and the departing Goan passengers break into a mandó to 'defy the dull clatter of the wheels' and to mark their departure from their native land, the reader is left with a profound sense of emotional emptiness. 'Munu', a sequel to the story 'Xanti' that featured in the Ferry Crossing anthology of 1998, is perhaps Epitácio Pais's most doleful tale. If the latter concentrates on a young Curumbina and an arranged marriage that contrasts painfully with the upper-caste union of Devi's Dhruva, 'Munu' picks up the story of her younger brother. Set around ten years after 1961, by my calculations, the eponymous Munu, as a Mull Goenkar of some kind, has been given a grant to study agronomy at University. He leaves Goa and studies at an unnamed institution in an unspecified region. After an emotional catastrophe occasioned by the revelation of his caste origins, Munu returns to his native village, where he meets a gallery of figures from his past. The rural landscape the young man re-encounters is described as a site of decay and degeneration, as agricultural spaces often are in Pais, who sees the technological advances of the 1960s as presenting incomplete solutions to fundamental social problems. Ultimately, to the young Curumbim returning to his native village, his native society, with its attitudes, mores, praxes and injustices, appears immutable, its characteristics as deeply rooted as his own attitude to himself. At the story's close, where the land becomes the only entity to show compassion to the young man, we see a vision of how, though discrimination by caste might have been banned formally by the Indian Constitution, its influence is infinitely more difficult to eradicate from the spirits of men. José Pereira (1931-2015), who considered Pais to be ‘one of the finest writers in the long tradition of Goan literature in Portuguese’, wondered whether his ‘misfortune to appear at the end of that history might have arrested his development’. It’s an imponderable, of course. But what is true, however, is that though it affected his reception, the end of Portuguese rule, the great sea changes in Goa and the dying away of the territory’s Portuguese literary tradition seem to have been as much a spur to his creativity as an obstruction. Recently an unpublished, unnamed novel, which I am in the process of editing with Hélder Garmes under the title Preia-Mar [High Tide] and a dozen uncollected stories have come to light. Together with Pais’s fascinating, ambiguous ‘Um Português em Baga’, published in the anthology Onde o Moruoni Canta [Where the Moruoni Sings], these texts show Pais still concerned with the winners and losers of Goan society as it moved into its second decade of Indian administration. Laxmanrao Sardessai To some it might come as a surprise to find the name of Laxmanrao Sardessai (1904-1986) in an anthology of Portuguese-language Goan writing, given that the author is best known for his work in Marathi (in which he composed over 700 short stories, mostly set in Goa, and gained renown as a regional writer) and in Konkani (to which he turned late in life but with great élan). But, like the poet RV Pandit, Sardessai was comfortable moving between Goa's autochthonous, or locally arising, languages and Portuguese. Equally like Pandit, Sardessai became a frequent contributor of poems to Goa's Portuguese language press in the 1960s, mostly to A Vida of Margão, but also to O Heraldo. Sardessai's poems were often political in nature, representing an intervention at a poetic level in the debate surrounding the 1967 Opinion Poll. Sardessai also produced a handful of short stories in Portuguese during this period. Sardessai's relation to language in this period was complex. At times it is unclear in which language Sardessai originally composed his works. Indeed, given the way in which content and form seem to morph in the passage between one language and another, categories such as 'original' and 'translation' seem to lose meaning in favour of a more protean concept of transcreation. There is, in Sardessai's chiastic, to-and-fro, movement between tongues, a fascinating and (to my knowledge) untapped field of research for any scholar with the linguistic wherewithal to pursue such a study. Whereas Sardessai's pre-1961 Marathi output was staunchly anti-colonial, in the post-1961 period the author came to embrace as a medium of literary expression, a language that, according to the critic Prakash Thali, had decisively shaped his youthful personality. A firebrand proponent of statehood for Goa and the enshrinement of Konkani as its official language, Sardessai seems to have viewed Portuguese as another facet of Goa's heritage, a factor distinguishing it from Maharashtra and the rest of India. The language might also have represented a bridge between Sardessai and a Portuguese-speaking Catholic audience who occupied a political position compatible to his own and to whom, in the 1960s, he was attempting to reach out. The first story by Sardessai in Portuguese that I have been able to find is 'The Africa Boat', which was published on 30th April 1964 in O Heraldo and subsequently included, in a slightly censored form, in Devi and Seabra's A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa of 1972. This version is a slightly shorter, simpler one than the Marathi version that appeared in English translation in Ferry Crossing in 1998. The difference between the two versions is a striking example of the difficulty we confront in establishing hierarchical relations between Sardessai's work in his various languages. The names of the characters and some of the plot change between the two stories, though the general import remains unaffected. Both stories revolve around a central relationship between an imprisoned Hindu freedom fighter (in Devi and Seabra's slightly censored version the reason for his incarceration is not revealed) and his Mozambican guard in Aguada jail. The same idealism is present: fellow feeling wins out over political categories and imperatives. It is not unfair to consider that such idealism was easier to entertain in a time when the author no longer faced the threat of imprisonment for his nationalist views, though, given that Sardessai had been jailed twice for offering satyagraha, we might think twice before dismissing his idealism out of hand. 'The Africa Boat' ends with the characters of the story transcending the divisions between them imposed by colonial rule, though throughout the story Sardessai does not avoid a series of racialised epithets and metaphors. Nonetheless, the positive thematising of miscegenation between Indian and African that the story contains is unique in Portuguese-language Goan literature, though perhaps its liberal view is conditioned by the comfortable gulf in class, caste and religion that separates the inmate from the guard's wife. The other stories by Sardessai are interesting insofar as they represent the transferral into Portuguese of a sensibility and themes more prominent in the bhasha literatures of Goa, in particular their telluric, or rustic, concerns. 'The Legacy of Love', which appeared in A Vida on 23rd October 1965, begins with the visit of an elderly Brahmin to a Hindu bhatkar. The Brahmin requests, is granted and subsequently transforms a patch of land near Colém in interior Goa into a leafy orchard. Similarly to many of Sardessai's Marathi stories, this conto has a parable-like quality and urges the cultivation and preservation of the land with an almost mystical environmentalist consciousness. It extols dedication and steadfastness in hereditary and allotted tasks, perhaps in response to the great industrial and political changes that threatened the fixed landscape that undergirded such attitudes. At the story's end, the Brahmin's body turns into smoke as his life is transformed into an exemplar. 'The Gold Coin', a Portuguese re-telling of one of Sardessai's best-known Marathi stories, published in A Vida on 4th September 1966, affords the Portuguese-speaking reader a glimpse into the intimacy of a Hindu family circa 1910. Narain Rao, the impoverished aristocrat, is seeking a match for his daughter and sets out to visit Purxottam-bab, the rich patriarch of the Quencró family. Purxottam-bab, however, has left for Manguexa and subsequent events in his house lead the virtuous Narain Rao to sacrifice his ancestral gold coin to protect his family's honour. As in 'The Legacy of Love', 'The Gold Coin' reveals some of the codes of politesse that regulated visits between eminent Hindu families and displays all the affection for the 'dying, age-old joint family system' that Thali discerns in the author's early stories. The social traditions, family ties and religious convictions embodied in the Rao family's mohar, or gold coin, are a rare instance within Portuguese-language literature. Some stories by Silva Coelho or Ananta Rau Sar Dessai treat this universe, albeit coolly, ironically or critically, without the reverence and faith of Laxmanrao, whose nostalgic story of genteel poverty and rewarded nobility ends on an idealistically upbeat note. The final story, 'Tani', was published in the Boletim do Instituto Menezes Bragança in 1977. It is the last story in Portuguese by Sardessai that I have been able to locate. Given that the bulk of Sardessai's work in Portuguese was written by the late 1960s, it seems likely that 'Tani' is a reprint of a story previously aired elsewhere. 'Tani' presents a departure from 'The Legacy of Love' and 'The Gold Coin'. It is much more modern in tone and style, reminiscent in its personal relationships and class dynamics of the stories of Vimala Devi and Maria Elsa da Rocha. The central friendship is not between two men, as in the previous narratives presented here, but between two women. They are Caki-bai, the wife of the bhatkar Govinda Shenoi, and the eponymous Tani, a humble wood-gatherer. It is a relationship across caste and class, in which the vitality of the earthy Tani is contrasted with the listlessness of the etiolated, anguished bhatkarina. Furthermore, in contrast to the noble Brahmanism of the previous stories, a certain spontaneous nonconformity on Tani's part is juxtaposed with Caki-bai's self-damaging adherence to convention. Unlike the idealistic positivity of Sardessai's previous stories, 'Tani' ends on a tragic note, though in an equally exemplary fashion. Despite the shifts and contradictions we can see in Sardessai's stories, this narrow peek into his vast, multi-lingual and seemingly non-sequential output, confirms what Devi and Seabra describe as his 'cast-iron faith in the ultimate excellence of man'. Maria Elsa da Rocha Perhaps more than that of any other Portuguese-language short story writer, the work of Maria Elsa da Rocha (1924-2005) focussed on the lives of Goan women. Of a prominent Brahmin family from Aldoná, Rocha completed the seventh year of Liceu, as well as the Curso Normal and the Curso Superior de Farmácia. For more than thirty years she worked as a primary school teacher, a profession which took her all over Goa and even to Damão. She eventually retired as headmistress of the Escola Primária Massano de Amorim in Panjim. Many of her stories either have an autobiographical edge, being set around her ancestral home or within the school system, or seem to have been inspired by the sorts of figures and tales she would have encountered in her everyday life. Rocha is a fascinating writer, showing a deep and wide-ranging fellow-feeling towards the various groups within Goa that could be termed subaltern, in the broad sense of suffering structural discrimination based on class, gender, religion etc., yet also displaying a staunch conservatism that at times sits oddly with this attitude. Rocha began to publish her stories in A Vida after the end of Portuguese rule, also broadcasting some via the Renascença programme of All-India Radio. The stories here are either taken from this newspaper or the collection Vivências Partilhadas [Shared Experiences], which was published in 2005 by Third Millennium. The first story presented here, 'Rucmá, The Little Woman from Salém', is a tale of two halves. In the opening part Rucmá loses her husband and we see the precariousness of existence for women at the very bottom of Goan society. The concluding half takes place after Rucmá finds shelter at the Casa Grande[footnote: The 'great house', or ghor batt, where the bhatkars resided.], a recurrent setting in Rocha's stories, drawn from the author's own background. Here Rucmá moves out of the spotlight as the thoughts and reflections of Dona Virgnia, the matriarch known as 'Ocol bai', and her son take centre stage and reveal the mindset of certain members of the Catholic, Portuguese-speaking elite. We see these figures as poised between their anxiety at the prospect of an Indian takeover, their frustrations with the colonial present, and their own jumbled ambitions on the eve, as we come to realise, of India's military intervention in Goa. After its simple though dramatic start, 'Rucmá' reveals itself to be an ambiguous story, much more ambiguous than the nationalist poetry Rocha wrote after the end of Portuguese rule. Does 'Rucmá' show, through the eponymous character, that the masses of Goa had lives that were relatively untouched by colonialism at heart, as opposed to the elite, who had an intimate and conflicting relationship with its metropolitan representatives? Does it bear a conservative message, predicting that the sea change promised by Indian rule would not ultimately benefit those at the foot of society, who were better off, in the author's view, under the patrician benevolence of the bhatkars? Or does the narrative reflect the last echo of the muted petitions of the Goan elite for self-rule for the territory under their stewardship, a possibility that crumbled on the day 'Rucmá' ends? What connection is there between the reaction to Operation Vijay by the various inhabitants of the Casa Grande and the joyous children in the streets who collect the leaflets in Konkani announcing Liberation that have been dropped by the Indian military helicopters? Whatever conclusion the reader draws, 'Rucmá' is undoubtedly redolent of the many tensions that characterised late-colonial Goan society, a society that comes to a symbolic end with the death of Dona Virgnia. 'Shiva at Play' is, it seems, a sequel to 'Rucmá', as it features the same Casa Grande. It was initially published on 23rd June 1963 in A Vida, making it one of the few stories from Vivências Partilhadas that can be accurately dated and suggesting that 'Rucmá' may have been written fairly soon after Operation Vijay. Told with the sympathetic attitude to keyed-up moods and frustrated emotions so common in Rocha's stories, 'Shiva at Play' is set in the immediate post-1961 world of Goa, where liberators in chilli-coloured berets have replaced what one of the characters calls soldiers. The marriage of the central couple, Suriá and Vatsol, is made possible by the failure of Vatsol's brother Sauló and his gang's planned raid on their bhatkar's house, which was motivated by their newfound conviction that the Casa Grande's estate no longer belongs to its traditional owners. Is this failure down to divine intervention, moreover intervention by a deity in which the inhabitants of the Casa Grande no longer believe? As in Agostinho Fernandes's coeval novel Bodki, published in Portugal in 1962, the difference between chance and the supernatural is impossible to call. The story ends with a wedding and the restoration of social equilibrium, a scene of harmony on Earth and above it. Sauló is appointed mocadão, or foreman of the estate, by the family of the Casa Grande. The excessive pride he shows in his new position and its accoutrements suggests a merely materialist basis to his planned revolt and stands in contrast to the benevolent generosity his mother and sister remember the bhatkars showing in times gone by. Perhaps what we have here is wishful thinking, an impossible desire that a more egalitarian Goa will emerge post-1961 without fundamentally changing the social order of the territory. Rocha's stories are typified by what we might call a poetics of intimacy (a poetics that Erik Van Achter has also identified as characteristic of the Portuguese short story). We find this in the way Rucmá recounts her tale to the lady of the Casa Grande (and in so doing, to us, the readers). Such an interpersonal narrative tactic is also found in the story 'Damn Castes!', which revolves around a central friendship between Lucy, the inhabitant of the 'Mosmican' house (so called because her family had lived in Mozambique) and Viraj, a young woman from Sawantwadi who had moved to Goa to teach Marathi at the local school. Several of Rocha's stories feature similar figures symbolic of Goa's changing post-1961 social landscape. If there is 'forced democracy' between the houses of the neighbourhood, the personal relationship between these two women, of different religions, origins and languages, is simple and harmonious. However, it is Viraj's involvement with Chand, a higher-caste colleague that leads to the story's tragic outcome. If unfulfilled longing and emotional suffering are recurrent themes in Rocha's work, 'Damn Castes!' shows further the fragile position of women who dare to step outside the moral conventions of society, even one in the throes of such a deep transformation as Goa. Rocha's longest story, and the one in which her empathy with the disadvantaged Goan woman reaches its deepest expression, is 'The Bitter Sap', which was first published in two instalments in A Vida, on 15th and 16th September 1962. The main character is Marthá, a young girl caught between her burgeoning sexuality, her constrained social conditions and her dreams of a rosier future, which is symbolised by the recurrent image of 'a fine room lined with chairs, well-dressed people all around [...], a new aroma in the air and coloured bunting tumbling from the ceiling'. Her mother, a widow whose tarvotti husband drowned at sea, has struggled all her life to carve out a future for her daughter. Now their hopes for Marthá's happiness rest on her marriage to Gabrú, a young man who had a similarly difficult childhood and is now returning wealthy from Dubai to find a bride. 'The Bitter Sap' deals with themes of female subjectivity, gender relations and class hierarchies, all told against a sensitively depicted Goan village backdrop -- of colourful weddings, overpriced onions, sewing teachers raised in British India, and irritable parish priests -- and in a vibrant Goan Portuguese stretched out over a frame of Konkani, which pokes through at key moments. As in all of Rocha's work there is a particular sensitivity to the physical environment at work, an often synaesthetic apprehension of the hot May days that provide an objective correlative for the characters' burning hopes and smouldering frustrations as they shuttle between their everyday life and the 'unsignposted highway' of their inner world of fears and projections. At the story's close, the beginning of the monsoon, so often a symbolic resource to Goan short stories in Portuguese, permits a happy outcome for all involved. The final story is 'Êtê Êtê Morhà', first published in A Vida on Mother's Day 1964. If Marthá is a girl on the cusp of womanhood, Fatiminha seems to be an early representative of a new breed in Goa: the teenager. If at times Rocha seems torn between class allegiance and the most deep-seated sympathy for the suffering of the needy, here, in this simple but witty tale, she frontally criticises a certain hypocrisy and cultural inconstancy on the part of the upper-castes, and opens her representation of Goa out onto a future with characteristics as much, if not more, determined by the global flows of late capitalism than colonial inheritance or national dictates. In the intergenerational conflict at the story's centre, there is a universally recognisable bickering between the mother Dona Laura and her adolescent daughter, yet one that reflects the profound changes pervading Goa in the 1960s. The vignette ends with the daughter attacking her mother's attitudes with the suggestion that her conservatism only goes as far as imposing the standards of whoever is in power (symbolised in the diegetic present -- the fictional time in which the story itself is told -- by Dona Laura attending the Mahila Mandal, unusual for a well-to-do Catholic). How can her mother scold Fatiminha for acting like a 'Portuguese girl' when Dona Laura had once tried to prevent her infant daughter learning songs in Konkani? The girl's account of her house visit suggests an alternative intergenerational connection is established between the rebellious daughter and the seemingly free-spirited grandmother, with whom she shares a dislike of humbug and a taste for whisky. Fatiminha, were she alive today, would be in her sixth decade at least, old enough to offer a tot of Scotch to her own granddaughter... 'Êtê Êtê Morhà' is a fitting tale to close with here, for in the positions of the rebellious, clear-thinking Fatiminha, her conservative mother and her grandmother are aspects of the narrative positions found throughout Maria Elsa da Rocha's stories. Walfrido Antão Walfrido Antão (1936-2002) was a prolific cronista in the Portuguese-language Goan press, becoming particularly active as this tradition breathed its last. The crónica is a journalistic form common in Iberia and Latin America, and can be roughly defined as a literary text combining elements of the short story, the memoir and the opinion editorial. Born in Arossim, a small village in Mormugao taluka, Antão contributed several hundred such articles to O Heraldo and Diário da Noite from the late 1950s until the demise of these publications. Antão's stories, like the rest of his journalistic output, seem influenced by what we could loosely term existentialist concerns, such as alienation, freedom, absurdity, authenticity and self-determination. Indeed, anecdote holds that Antão was an acquaintance of Sartre's in Paris at the height of Existentialism's influence and prestige. Yet Antão's treatment of existential themes is always mediated by his engagement with Goan actuality, his concerns about the dissolution of Goan identity and the destruction of the Goan landscape. The extent to which the author himself was touched by existential despair, which here could be conceptualised as a loss of hope concerning the signification and transformation of life, is open to debate. His texts certainly seem delicately balanced between positive and negative elements. The first story presented here, 'Melodia Interrompida' [Interrupted Melody], first appeared in O Heraldo on 31st March 1968. It presents a common narrative knot in Antão's short stories: a moment of personal and interpersonal crisis where the protagonist is plagued by memories and experiences the subsidence of his identity. João is a Goan of common origins who has married in haste and is now repenting at leisure. He has come to believe that his life is absurd, a fraud as he describes it. If on the one hand, the story thematises the sort of mid-life dilemma that could occur in a variety of cultures, the background of marriage traditions that put family prosperity over individual realisation gives the narrative a local twist. In 'Interrupted Melody', João takes the step that seems beyond Chandracanta in Vimala Devi's story, that of abandoning his wife to a life of loneliness while he returns to another 'self' fashioned during his time abroad. A note announcing a coming collection entitled Quando As Chuvas Vieram [When the Rains Came] accompanied 'Interrupted Melody' when it was first published. Though this collection is announced once more in Devi and Seabra's A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa, there is no indication that it was ever released. Perhaps Antão focussed his energies on his journalistic work. The story 'Yesterday's Heroes', which appeared in O Heraldo on 10th May 1970 is the story of Maria Lusa, balanced between her memories of girlhood in the late 1950s and her marriage to Henry D'Lima in the following decade. As with 'Interrupted Melody' the story revolves around a moment of crisis in which Maria Lusa's sense of self and the image of the person she has become stand at odds. 'Yesterday's Heroes' is a story of youthful innocence and adult disillusion, told against a backdrop of class difference between the nouveau-riche husband and the girl from the Liceu. Here appears what would become a recurrent critique in Antão's writing, one aimed above all at the emergent sections of Goan society distanced from the narrative voice and its linguistic identity -- a critique of runaway capitalism and what from the author's point of view appears to be cultural subordination, a major part being what the author sees as excessive attachment to Anglo-American cultural models. Like the character João in 'Interrupted Melody', Maria Lusa casts off her shackles and refuses to accept life as a doll to be exhibited by her husband on Sundays at mass. The story begins with a quote from the Portuguese-American author José Rodrigues Miguéis, a vow of faith in the power of the imagination. What transpires in the story however is a clear rejection of bourgeois conformity and an expression of desire for a more authentic existence, one characterised by a key word in Antão's stories -- communication. Yet, as so often in Portuguese-language Goan authors, there is no clear vision of an alternative model of behaviour. The story 'Identity Card or Proposition '76', which was published in O Heraldo on 21st August 1976, revolves around similar preoccupations. The focus here is on what, from the standpoint of certain Portuguese-speaking Goans, appeared to be the decline of a specifically Goan identity, symbolised here by the recasting of Portuguese names and references in Anglophone moulds (the way Fernandes becomes 'Ferns' here and the pronunciation of Lima as 'Laima' in the preceding story are particular examples). Antão's stories do not have the conventional structure of short stories. Rather they are third-person fictionalisations of themes treated in different styles in other crónicas. Here the relationship is between José, a lower-caste man who has made his way in the world at the cost of a certain sense of identity and, Angélie, a partner of higher caste. 'Identity Card' closes, contrary to 'Interrupted Melody' and 'Yesterday's Heroes', with a scene of peace and the reconciliation of the central couple, though the gnomic assertion in the final line leaves the story open to various interpretations. The last story I present here is 'This Time of Such Indifference or the Apathy of a Whole People', published in O Heraldo on 5th August 1978. The epigraph the story carried contains allusions to Jorge de Sena, the liberal Portuguese intellectual, and to Herbert Marcuse, two frames of reference that represent Antão's intellectual inspirations, his anguished espousal of tangled ideas of revolt and communication. In the figure of Mogabai, whose Konkani original Antão claims to be translating, we see a picture of gender exploitation and environmental despoliation. In the story the narratorial voice rails against the polluted water of Sancoale, Velção, and the river Candepar, a tributary of the Mandovi that flows down, rather ironically, from the Dudsagor Falls (literally the 'ocean of milk'). Amidst references to the political situation of the time, namely the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party government, associated here with 'saffron' or right-wing Hinduism, Antão makes allusion to 'new American colonies'. This is a reference to post-1961 industrial development that Antão saw as despoiling the Goan environment while benefitting for the most part outside interests.[footnote: Editorial note: Antão's reference is to the fertilizer plant, promoted by Indian big capital and corporate America. Antão backed the environmental movement.] It is more a poeticised broadside against the prevailing scheme of things than a fully realised short story. By this point, Antão seems to have moved on from his plans for a short-story collection, to a form that allowed him to intervene as quickly as possible in the Goan everyday, even if only for a reduced number of readers. Today, it is in the context of Antão's vast production of crónicas that his occasional foray into more short-story-like texts merits consideration. Eduardo de Sousa If Maria Elsa da Rocha's position is internally divided and ambiguous, the views of Eduardo de Sousa (1909-2004) concerning post-1961 Goa could not be clearer. Born in Aldoná, he was the author of several works in Portuguese before Liberation, including a grammar for primary school children (1935) and some Cartas Sem Destino [Letters with no Destination] (1948), which, ironically, appear to have been lost. In 1961 he published the short play O Juiz Patusco [The Carousing Judge]. After the end of colonial rule, Sousa dedicated himself more to creative writing, eventually publishing a semi-autobiographical work entitled Nas Margens do Mandovi [On the Banks of the Mandovi] (1977) and Contos que o Vento Levou [Stories Scattered by the Wind] (1985). In some ways Sousa's biography, which he took care to document in annexes to each of his works, typifies the classic trajectory of a member of the former Indo-Portuguese elite. Born into a bhatkar family of the ninth vangodd, or clan, of Saligão, Sousa studied at the Liceu Afonso de Albuquerque and read pharmacy at the Escola Medico-Cirúrgica before taking up a position as a primary school teacher. In his youth Sousa completed various subsidiary courses at Liceu level: Marathi in 1936, Political Economy, Administrative Law and Statistics in 1943 and Political Organisation and Administration of the Portuguese Nation in 1945. Yet Sousa appears not to have become the perfectly integrated cadre of the colonial apparatus that this curriculum vitae implies. In his autobiography Sousa describes the dozen or so disciplinary proceedings he underwent and claims that he was considered 'a dangerous element with anti-national ideas' by the colonial authorities. In 1958 he was appointed as a teacher at the Liceu de Goa. In a complicated turn of events, Sousa appears to have been imprisoned at the very end of colonial rule. After Operation Vijay he served as an interpreter for the Indian Army. Whatever 'anti-national ideas' Sousa may have held concerning Portuguese rule, they did not chime with the post-1961 dispensation, as the stories presented here demonstrate. Like so many of his peers, Sousa aired his work on the Renascença programme of All-India Radio, Panjim. Unlike most other contemporary Goan writers in Portuguese, who gave little serious thought to producing books, he collected and published his stories as Contos que o Vento Levou, which includes detailed documentation concerning the dates and times of initial transmission. The first story presented here, 'The End of the World', was broadcast on 10th June 1977. It is the only tale in Sousa's collection told in the first person, though the mix of high-register literary language and low colloquialisms, literary allusions and snide digs contained characterises the author's narrative voice. 'The End of the World', as the title indicates, has an eschatological theme, dramatising the final destiny of humankind, though the evaluation it makes is purely temporal, passing judgement on the state of contemporary politics in Goa. The narrator, at home after spending the morning at mass in Candolim, rushes back to church to confess his sins before the final reckoning. The psycho-spatial division of the story, the way a split between an 'us' and a 'them' is modelled, bears some attention. We are told that the narrator and his co-parishioners are able to confess without much ado, though the reader is not privy to their individual wrongdoings. The parishioners of a neighbouring village, however, have been forced to seek out the vicar of Candolim for their confessions, though why they should do so remains unexplained. The secrets that we overhear during the course of the story are therefore the misdeeds of 'others', a motley collection of figures who seem to represent the emergent classes which have displaced the author's like in the post-colonial period. The end of the story suggests that, for the narrator, not even the Day of Judgement would bring true justice to such an unruly polity as Goa, even as its representation allows one final jab at the territory's political scene. The story 'Blossom But No Fruit' returns to that idée fixe of Goan literature in Portuguese, the question of caste. This story, which was broadcast on 11th January 1973 (and published in amended form in O Heraldo on 30th September 1977), illustrates one of the weaknesses (or, seen another way, preferences) of Sousa as a writer: the proliferation of embedded narratives apparently derived from anecdotes, urban legends or tall tales. The culmination of the story is the agreement between Dr Barros and his mundkar Pedro over the intercaste marriage of their children. There is a certain unwonted ambiguity here: Renato, as we learn at the beginning of the story, was adopted and so is not Dr Barros's son by blood. Does this fact make possible what at face value is a certain liberal attitude? In any case, it is noticeable that themes of adoption and illegitimacy, the complication of simple lineal descent, recur with frequency, albeit with different embodiments, in the final stages of Portuguese-language Goan literature. When Dr Barros condescends to embrace his mundkar and soon to be co-father-in-law Pedro, and so tramples upon the principles he held as an inveterate aristocrat, it is because he considers their children 'fruitless blossoms that befit our times'. The title of the story, 'Fruitless Flowers', references a collection of poetry by the 19th century Portuguese Romantic poet Almeida Garrett. Does this link indicate an alignment with the poet's views concerning the fragility of love or is this allusion intended more ironically? Eduardo de Sousa is not, relatively speaking, a major writer in the tradition of Portuguese-language Goan writing, but he is not without interest. His work, which encapsulates a set of attitudes at odds with the increasingly dominant ideological positions of the author's time, has if nothing else a documentary importance and forms a thought-provoking point of comparison for the emergent English and Konkani-language literatures of its time. Augusto do Rosário Rodrigues As we approach the end of the history of Goan writing in Portuguese (asymptotically, at least, as Portuguese will never entirely disappear from Goa), it becomes more and more difficult to gather biographical and bibliographical details, given that a new generation of discussants, chroniclers and critics did not arise to document this late production. Of Augusto do Rosário Rodrigues I know only that he was born in 1910, the single fact about this writer that Devi and Seabra record, and he appears to have passed away in 1999. He certainly contributed stories and poems to the Portuguese language press and perhaps to All-India Radio. The poetry is mainly on nationalist themes (with titles such as 'The Lamp of Democracy' and 'Nehru') or historical topics (such as the poems 'Xavier' or 'Golden Goa' with its proleptic vision anticipating the end of Portuguese rule). Relatively few of Rosário Rodrigues's stories appeared in the main Portu guese-language newspapers of Goa. Thankfully, in 1987, the author put out a collection of his tales, which he entitled Contos Regionais [Regional Tales], a sly wink back, perhaps, to Silva Coelho and his world and an oblique acknowledgement that the Goa in which the book was released had shifted decisively on its axis. The first story presented here, 'Risen from the Ranks', appeared in O Heraldo on 17th August 1982, one of the few to appear in that publication, and later collected in Contos Regionais. In a review of the collection published in the sadly defunct Boletim do Instituto Menezes Bragança, Bailón de Sá characterises Rosário Rodrigues's work as being marked by a sort of 'inverse exoticism'. Certainly the author's descriptions of the minutiae of a bygone Goa take on a colourful sheen today, with distance in time and mentality replacing geographical remoteness in the production of an exotic effect. Yet Rosário Rodrigues's stories also at times have a satiric edge like those of Silva Coelho, though if the latter had an immediate political agenda -- castigat ridendo mores (literally, Latin for 'laughing corrects morals') of his contemporary society -- Rosário Rodrigues aims no further than a wry look at Goa's past. 'Risen from the Ranks' is the tale of Vtor Laurente Silveira, an ordinary soldier of humble origins who rises to be a captain in the army in 1908, before retiring to join the bourgeoisie of Panjim in what Rosário Rodrigues cheekily rebaptises the Bairro Alto dos Piratas (as opposed to Pilotos, changing the attribution of the Altinho from pilots to pirates). It is a simple yet subtle story that interrogates colonial relations of class and colour and what it meant to be a Goan pre-1961. Along the way, the author satirises both local confusion and Portuguese provinciality, with the treatment of each theme hitting a variety of targets. When the protagonist Silveira joins the army and is unable to distinguish whether the martinet metropolitan drill sergeant is saying 'três' (three) or 'treze' (thirteen), and receives a kick to the backside for his misunderstanding, the 'Luso-Goan' officer comforts him by saying 'Arê babá, té paclé burro pita sur, te soglé botaté',[footnote: 'You know son, those whites are donkeys who booze too much; they're all potatoes' (Konk.).] adding that Laurente will soon pick up the accent as 'Arê amim udentiche italiano'[footnote: 'We're the Italians of the East, you know' (Konk.).]. The representation of the descendente speaking Konkani (which is done with radically different intent in Jacob e Dulce), here resuscitates a vanished historical figure and perhaps disturbs constructions of Goan identity in the context of the Opinion Poll coincident with the appearance of these Contos Regionais. Later, once Silveira has got the hang of 'Portuguese' and is more or less literate, he finds himself called upon to write a letter. He has no idea where to put commas and so consults a 'European second sergeant, a distinguished guitar player and fado lyricist, in short, the regimental authority on belles-lettres' who merely shrugs and replies: 'You folks here in Goa get really het up about that grammar. Us, back home, we just get down to brass tacks then put a full stop'. In a story set in Silva Coelho's world, it's an exchange Silva Coelho himself could have written, and speaks volumes about a certain structure of feeling held by Lusophone Goans in relation to the former colonial tongue, which many wielded more knowledgeably than the ordinary metropolitans who found their way to the territory, yet which local Portuguese-speakers often seem to have felt a certain reserve in using. The second story is 'The Scion of the Cabral Family'. In it Rodrigues takes two stock characters from the history of Portuguese-language Goan fiction, and perhaps Goan writing and society more widely: the village priest and the village doctor. The latter is called Cantalcio Mergulhão, a handle representative of Rosário Rodrigues's almost Dickensian taste for outlandish character names. These two figures, at the tail end of their lives, are depicted ministering to an old aristocrat as he reaches the close of his. The story revolves around the literary trope of the great house in decline, a staple of universal literature and also extremely common in Portuguese-language writing. Rodrigues establishes a contrast between the young Pulquério do Esprito Santo Cabral, the imperious dandy whose wealth 'allowed him his heart's desires', and the senescent figure Cabral strikes in the diegetic present. This diminishment is mirrored by the decline of his house, whose balcão was once abustle with vodlo batcar's dependents but now stands as 'just a roost for the chickens of the neighbourhood'. At the story's close we learn that Pulquério's exploitative past as the Barão do Tambdi Mati has cost him dear, and that his son, Bemvindo, might be the inheritor of his wealth and position but not of his blood. Here the technical fragility of caste identity is thematised -- who can truly guarantee that he comes from an unbroken line of official descent? -- and the passing of a world which depended upon such distinctions is depicted via the tropes of illegitimacy and the decline of the Casa Grande, undermined by decadence and sterility. In the end, it is the maid, Ana Maria, the lowest of the household, who is left smiling. Can such plots be said to condense a prevailing set of thoughts and anxieties as the former Indo-Portuguese elite dissolved? Of all the authors presented here, Rosário Rodrigues is perhaps the most important to have been given no recognition whatsoever amongst the small cadre of Portuguese speakers interested today in Lusophone Goan writing. As historical fiction, the author's work takes on a special allure in the context of the times in which they were written, his Portuguese language being a linguistic correlate for a world that has largely been supplanted and, in detail, forgotten. Lengthening Shadows The title of this collection is taken from the epigraph of Vimala Devi's Monção, two lines from a Portuguese translation of the Sanskrit poet Kalidasa, which reads: A sombra da árvore alonga-se ao pôr do Sol/Sem nunca se separar dela [the tree's shadow lengthens at sundown/without ever splitting from it]. Partly this choice is homage to Devi and Manuel de Seabra, who have done more than anyone to preserve and transmit Goa's Lusophone literary heritage. Partly this title serves as a stimulus to ponder just how far the shadow of Portuguese-language literature has crept from the trunk of contemporary Goan reality and consider whether some attachment persists between the mindset, concerns and style of the writers who appear here in English translation and the contemporary Goan literary scene. The answer to this question exceeds the purview of this introduction. The reader will have to make up his or her own mind. ### Dr Paul Melo e Castro is at the University of Leeds http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/profile/20043/538/paul_melo_e_castro This introduction forms part of the two-volume collection of short stories written by Goans in the Portuguese language. Titled 'Lengthening Shadows', the set is available internationally via mail order from goa1...@gmail.com