I met Tony D'Souza at the UK launch of his first novel, "Whiteman". He did tell me about "The Konkans" and of his Goan links via his visits there.
Title: Q & A: Tony D'Souza: How his own ethnicity shaped his latest novel Source: The Courier-Journal Louisville, KY, USA. 2 April 2008. Metro Section. Photograph of Tony D'Souza and full text, 707 words, http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008804020303 Q: Your new novel, "The Konkans," is about a minority group of Indian Catholics that are sometimes called "the Jews of India." What is most interesting about this group, for people who have never heard of them? A: The most interesting thing about them is that they're Catholics in India. They're descended through the Portuguese colonial period in India and no one's really heard of them. But they're well-known in India because they have access to education, they have a bit more money than the other ethnic groups there, so they are very visible compared to their small population. Dinesh D'Souza is the most famous one over here and he's a really conservative Republican commentator. But they're all over, and they've been written about before; Salman Rushdie wrote about them in "The Moor's Last Sigh." But for me, the most important thing about the book was talking about the Goan Inquisition and maybe getting that to a broader audience of people who've never heard of it -- which I think I did, because I'm getting quite a bit of negative response from Catholic scholars and things like that. Q: When did you first learn about the Goan Inquisition, that conflict that's part of your own history, since you are half Konkan? A: Oh, not until my mid-20s. I was the first one in my family to get a traditional, Western education and I think because of that, I was the first one who had any ability to look into our family's history and question the past. I had been to Goa and I had seen all the Catholic cathedrals, but I wanted to know what the Portuguese had done there, why my name was Portuguese, why my family name was Catholic even though they were from India. It finally led me to the Inquisition, but it sure did take awhile. Q: In "The Konkans," identity is complicated. The narrator's white mother seems to feel at home in India, while her Indian husband subscribes to mainstream American values about professional and material success. What are the questions that fascinate you most about cultural identity? A: Well, that was one of the key things, that the white woman is way more interested in India than the Indian man is, and that's a cultural thing that happens, again and again. It's easy for us to romanticize those places, but for a lot of the people there, India is not that romantic. It's a place that many people do want to escape. The stuff that has been translated into American culture from India, so often, it's just yoga and curry and saris and Bollywood. And a lot of stuff, like the mass poverty, gets overlooked. So one of the most important things in this book was writing about what I call "the real India," and not just the India that people want to see. I don't think it's fair to take what you want and deny the rest of it. Photograph of Tony D'Souza and full text, 707 words, http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008804020303