Why the Mangalorean can't sing as well as the Goan and other stray observations...
Ivan Arthur ivan.art...@gmail.com There! I have raised a lot of Manggy hackles. Haven't I? And while I dodge the rotten eggs and choice Kannada invective from at least some of you, including my own siblings, I look forward to some scholarly insights from others reading this. This was in fact, a question, discretely whispered in my ear by an East Indian priest who directed our choir. While I couldn't but agree with him, based on empirical local evidence of musical talent, I did not then have a ready answer. I put the question to my father, who should have bristled at that suggestion, being a musician and a Mangalorean to boot. In his youth, in the 1930s and 40s, he led a string trio in Mangalore with violinist Theodore Melville, who later ran a music academy in Balmatta. Dad laughed and said, "Ask your mother to sing and you will know." My mother loved singing. She sang with fervour, each subsequent phrase of the song slipping a semitone lower till, what began in C would end unashamedly in B flat or somewhere there. But it was not just my mother. She was about the best singer in her family. The others transformed a simple pop song into unrecognizable recitatives that Kiri te Kanawa would envy. It was different when my father's Protestant family came over. They would sing hymns from the Sankey and Moody hymnal and they would do it in glorious four-part harmony. I have attended the Methodist services that my paternal uncles and aunts would attend and I marvelled at the resonant harmony of the congregational singing. Quite unlike the Maiden Mothers and Soul of My Saviours sung in our Catholic churches. Oh yes, we had sacred 'jam sessions', as I call them now, when Tony Mascarenhas and his siblings, Frank, Joachim and Martha visited us on weekends and sang traditional Christian hymns in disciplined vertical harmony; occasionally slipping into classic Konkani songs, such as Doriyacha lahrari and Tambde Rosa, again sung almost as if they were from Sankey and Moody. So then, we did have Mangalorean Catholics in our family who could sing. I have attended traditional Mangalorean Catholic and Protestant weddings in Byculla, Mumbai in the late fifties. And I noted the difference between the two. At Catholic weddings, after that hearty feast of viands, which included that favourite sorpotel, all eaten on banana leaves on the floor, the guests would struggle up to their feet and sing the Laudate. In fifty different flats and sharps simultaneously to sound like some twelve tone row composition. The Protestants after a less meaty meal, sans spirits, would bring out their piano accordions, violins and guitars and sing a disciplined line of songs. During teenage and adolescence, I attended a number of birthday, baptism and engagement parties of East Indians, Goans and Mangaloreans in our parish in Amboli, a suburb of Mumbai. While my palate sang hallelujahs at the East Indian and Mangalorean table, my ear rejoiced in the Goan celebration of song. Most of the Goan home parties would begin with a ladain, the litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary in song. They were almost always sung in triadic harmony, which they referred to as seconds. The voices were rough and throaty but you wouldn't hear a note out of place. There would at most times be a couple of rebecs scratching out an obligato accompaniment to the tune. So then, I need to ask the question differently, perhaps: Why does the Goan Catholic sing better than the Mangalorean Catholic? The Mangalorean Protestant has to be viewed separately. The Goan of yesteryears got solfeggio with their three R's in school. Music was part of their basic education and so became part of their culture and perhaps part of their genetic make-up, engendering generations of musicians who performed all over the world, and are the acknowledged influencers of the Bollywood musical. The Mangalorean Protestant (please correct me if I am wrong) perhaps got his music from the Basel Mission [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_Mission] institutions that taught them to sing their hymns from off the five lines of a score to sing in church or even for their occasional performances of the sacred oratorios. Can I hear some Catholic voices rise up to speak about the Jeppu Seminary Band? Or individual song writers like Albert Pinto, whose songs such as Rosaline mujhe mogache and Chowpatty re sanjche velari became all-time hits. And maybe some grand old aunt will sing the St. Agnes School Anthem composed by a good Catholic nun. Do you remember the words? For God is all our strength. In Him we do and dare. To fight against the wrong To cherish and revere. So humbly let us stand. United heart and hand, And pray that God may bless and keep St. Agnes School. And then that rather unlikely composition for a convent: There's no magic in the moonlight If you ain't got no gal of your own. Seems so tragic in the moonlight If you roam round the town all alone. No fun at a table laid for one. That's no home sweet home. Oh you'll never, never know what love is. If you ain't got no gal of your own. Does anyone remember all the verses of these two songs of nearly a hundred years ago? It would be good fun if you could share that with us. Maybe the younger among us could check with their parents and aunts. Come on, my Mangalorean friends. Demolish the proposition I started with. For our enlightenment, for a hearty Mangalorean Catholic hurray or at least, for some amusement. Cheers and all the best. * * * First circulated online by the author.