“O meu passado é tudo quanto não consegui ser,” said Vamona Navelcar to me at our first meeting almost two decades ago, and then, with his characteristically mischievous smile, the great artist translated the line from Fernando Pessoa’s *Book of Disquiet* for my benefit: “my past is everything that I have failed to be.”
>From our vantage, of course, after Navelcar passed away in hospital yesterday at the age of 92, we cannot fail to recognize the historic achievements he piled up on his remarkable life journey from idyllic Pomburpa on the Mandovi riverbank to the Escola de Belas Artes in Lisbon in 1955, then Mozambique as well as Portugal again, before returning to root anew in his ancestral home in 1982. To begin with, there’s his tremendous body of work – albeit uncatalogued and haphazardly scattered – which demands reckoning alongside the most significant oeuvres of our times, with equal value to Goa (and thus India), Mozambique (so, more broadly, Africa) and Portugal (which means Europe and the West). The fact that appropriate recognition failed to occur during his lifetime, for an artist who very much knew his worth, is our lasting shame and collective cultural failure. Beyond the treasure trove of paintings, sketches and drawings, however, we are eternally indebted for the kind of man Navelcar chose to be, and the unforgettable inspiration of his way of being. This diminutive, soft-spoken, and outwardly serene gentleman was actually, in his own words to me, “a volcano on the inside.” He was an indomitable force, of an exceedingly rare moral calibre. It showed in his art, which often returned to the theme of his homeland’s desecration by its own people, whom he aptly depicted as monsters. And it shone incandescent in his life’s most crucial moments: in Lisbon, when he lost his scholarship rather than denounce the end of colonialism in Goa; in Mozambique, where he was imprisoned in a jungle prison camp alongside the students he loved with the purest of hearts; and throughout his last decades in India, where he disdainfully refused to kowtow to political vicissitudes, or back down to majoritarian cultural policing. These choices made Navelcar an outlier, and perpetual outsider, which - it has to be acknowledged – the artist relished, and used to fuel his creative foment. With puckish glee, he’d remind you about being unjustly overlooked, even – with great humorous effect – at ceremonies when he was actually the chief guest. I recall his doing so at the grand debut of the Adil Shah palace into the public domain as an art and culture centre in 2011, when he predicted sardonically that neither artists like him, nor the public, would ever get the space. Years later, after the spectacular galleries were indeed hijacked by irresponsible officials, he took pains to remind me he had been right. The US-based Goan academic R Benedito Ferrão pointed out in his perceptive 2013 essay *A Suitcase Full of Continents: Vamona Navelcar as Performance Artist*, that these kinds of quixotic actions and attitudes allowed the artist to flourish in his most cherished role: the raconteur, dealing expertly from “the imbricated stories of nations, peoples, and himself [and] juggling absurdity and purposefulness as the twinned but often indiscernible facets of postcolonial societies in flux.” By that juncture, it is some consolation to note that Goa’s emergent generation of artists and intellectuals had finally come around to become enamoured by Navelcar. His artwork now found many champions, and was displayed at the Serendipity Arts Festival 2017 as well as *Goa/Portugal/Mozambique: The Many Lives of Vamona Navelcar*, an utterly charming and heartfelt exhibition in the same year, at the Fundação Oriente premises in Fontainhas. In the lovely catalogue published alongside, Goa College of Art professor Vishvesh Kandolkar recounted that in his own first meeting with Navelcar in 2015, the artist gifted him a copy of Fernando Pessoa’s poems in the original Portuguese (which the younger man had recently commenced studying). He says, “it was an implied message from this fellow-Goan, hinting that Pessoa is also a part of Goa’s history, and therefore learning about the Portuguese poet would only enrich my understanding of our past.” Kandolkar contends that, “Pessoa is not just a muse and an inspiration to Navelcar. Rather, their lives bear remarkable similarities.” He lists some: aspirational departure from the homeland, seeking fortune in Africa, the purposeful utilization of pseudonymity, compulsive creativity even on scraps of paper and discarded newsprint, and huge unexplored archives that will be assessed posthumously. This is an appealing analogy, and does probably underlie some of Navelcar’s intense fascination for the Portuguese poet who became globally acclaimed only many years after his death. But could the same thing happen for Vamonbab, who certainly deserves it in every way? That would require a major paradigm shift. As Kandolkar indicates, the “post-‘Liberation’ state” remains reluctant “to embrace Navelcar because to do so would undermine their nationalist politics, which is contrary to what the artist and his art represents in embracing multiplicity.” Thus, right until his death, he was “a living bridge between histories, states, and empires. This is the poetry of his art. And his downfall.” It was certainly true when written, but that sorrowful conclusion is by no means the final word. This is because the inimitable, irresistible artist has departed, but his artworks endure, with all their intact power to pierce and persuade future generations. That legacy means we should not waste any time on misplaced pieties, or melancholia by rote. Instead, here’s one of Vamonbab’s favourite passages from Pessoa’s *Book of Disquiet*, that says it all on his behalf: “The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”
