Valmiki Faleiro writes: "(Teotonio De Souza) uses personal anecdotes to
good effect, as at pgs.132-133:
*On a personal note, if [laureate Umberto] Eco had a motive for
creating his blind librarian and naming him Jorge from Burgos, I too
may have one for discovering a Goan avatar of [Edgar Allan] Poe’s
hero in my native village of Moira. In a bid to make a mark as
fiction
writer, he dabbles in the pre-historic glories of the mahars,
claiming
that they have fallen from grace due to victimization by Saraswats!
He may run for shelter if I choose to reveal that one of my first
cousins, a Saraswat, was married in Church to a woman from Moira
adopted by a mahar family. He may persist in his obsession, like
someone who insisted in convincing me that Jesus was a Brahmin,
because his cousin, John the Baptist lived on honey and low castes
(read locusts).*
I don't appreciate the point that Valmiki seems to be making. Does he agree
with TS that merely because his cousin marries the adopted daughter of a
Mahar, TS gets absolved of his proclivity for toadying up to the Saraswats,
the Catholic ones at any rate? If this is what he thinks is " the Teotonio
trademark of trustworthiness" I'm not impressed.
During his recent visit to Goa at a meet organized by Goa Book Club I
questioned TS as to the reason for his bias and he came up with the lame
excuse that there were no sources and that I should take up the job of
writing the history of the Mahars. I retorted that I was a mere storyteller
and not a historian, and that historians seem to choose methodologies which
suit their biases.
Incidentally, TS is quite the typical Moidekar Bamon ganvkar: this breed is
notorious for taking potshots at people without having the courage to name
names.
Augusto
