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SAHARATIME, June 26, 2004 * Page 36: BOOKS SETTLING SCORES WITH HISTORY Couto makes selective use of history in an attempt to redeem her father's past GOA: A DAUGHTER'S STORY Maria Aurora Couto Penguin Price Rs 495; Pages 436 By M PRABHA ----------------------------- HERE'S ANOTHER book on Goa. The author calls it "a personal search", an attempt to understand the history of her community and the transformation within Goa society after the arrival of the Portuguese in AD 1510. The volume comprises 14 chapters -- excluding a substantially discursive prologue and epilogue. Her father, Dr Francisco de Figueiredo, was a teacher of Western music in the Portuguese Lyceum in Panjim in the Salazar era but had to relinquish that post to another maestro who arrived from Portugal. Thereafter, Figueiredo traded music for the study of medicine. After having qualified as a medical practitioner, her moved to Dharwar to practise among a larger clientele. He made a reentry to Goa alone when the Liberation Movement started (obviously, like Dom Moraes, he considered Goa his mother country and India a foreign power trying to grab it illegally). He died in Goa in 1959 -- his family left behind in Dharwar. Maria Couto regrets that the post-Liberation accounts of the history of music in Goa do not acknowledge her father's contribution. The book is offered, perhaps, as a gesture of atonement for that lapse. Dr Figueiredo was a romantic who fathered seven children in the true Wordsworthian style ("We Are Seven"). The writer's adoration of her dad is understandable but all his achievements scarcely elevate him to a genius. Primarily he was a proficient musicologist who composed funeral marches for the Good Friday procession which wended its way down Margao Hill to the church. A large part of the book is devoted to the etiology and methods of proselytisation adopted by the Portuguese and the salient features of their administration in their 400-year-old rule of Goa. The treatment of the theme is so conciliatory as to appear masochistic. Couto deliberately choses to ignore the facts of history as established. TB Cunha, the renowned patriot, in his *Goa's Freedom Struggle* wrote that in 1541, when there was already a surfeit of priests in Goa and only a few Christians, that the prosecution of Hindus really began. He writes, "An order of the Governor dated 30 July 1541 bade that in Ilhas all the Hindu temples be destroyed.... The Hindus were then compelled to surrender the belongings of their temples for the maintenance of monastries and churches newly built." Conversion in Salcete and Bardez were entrusted to the Jesuits and the Franciscans respectively. A law passed on 23 May 1559 forbade Hindus from holding any public office. Another law ordained that Hindus dying without a mail heir would leave their properties to female relatives who perforce must become Christians. Other sources exist which speak of the brutalities committed by the Portuguese against the Hindus in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries which all make the inhuman barbarism of Auschwitz appear innocuous. Couto also does not vivisect the immediate past of Goa in the first half of the 20th century. She ignores Antonio de Oliveira Salazar regime's banking monopoly, its decision in 1944 to derecognise the Indian rupee and then to devalue it beyond redemption and its exchange rackets. She makes no mention of the insidious smuggling of goods beyond the border, maintenance of a huge Portuguese bureaucracy (notorious for wenching, boozing and venality) which drained Goa's exchequer. She also ignores the ruthless persecution of the local populace during the liberation movement, arbitrary arrests, detentions and tortures. Couto has included several historical, cultural and political figures in her narrative. But there are glaring omissions. In the struggle for Goa's freedom, she has skipped Lambert Mascarenhas, founder editor of *Goa Today*, who was a crusading journalist, besides being a writer of proven merit. His *Sorrowing Lies My Land* is a classic depiction of Goan travails under Salazar's rule. In the Konkani language movement, she bypasses the contributions by the prominent poet R V Pandit, whose name is synonymous with that of Manohar Rai Sar Desai. She mentions Armando Menezes, but does not seem to have heard of Joseph Furtado. And while talking of the sylvan settings of Goa in the inaugural chapter, she fails to cite Ashok Mahajan's *Goan Vignettes* -- probably the most lyrical evocation in English of Goan seascape ever written. Here's a glimpse of his prowess from *Anjuna Beach*: A noon-grey sea flashes quarrels./ I stand on rugged rock, far/ Beyond the bar and sandy / Beaches of Candolim and Calangute./ Cragmartins above the spinneys of palm / Sissor wings. Pools form / Where an irregular ring / Of boulders trap the tide. / Combers through fissures there / Sprout jets of foam. Sandpipers scamper / For mollusks upon the strand / Littered with chiton and volute. But she does cover amply the mando songs at weddings, and the 'tiatr' -- a stylised form of folk theatre influenced by Italian opera. She dwells at length on the Goan contribution to Bollywood music -- "Its promiscuous charm, the slivers of Dixieland stomp, the fados and the doodles". Perhaps she could have also included the Goan passion for soccer (Dempo, Chougule, Salgaokar) the weakness for feni, and an appetite for pork (pig stys are a common sight in Goan countryside). In the end, the reader has a feeling that the author has not fully marshaled her material. The narrative displays a lack of organic unity, is diffuse and rambling. The only fresh insight she gives us is in her Mestizo-like attitude towards her colonial masters who, she thinks, were Goa's benefactors. ***