Augusto Pinto: Afterword pinto...@gmail.com [From the Afterword to Paul Melo e Castro's *Lengthening Shadows*, a two-volume set of translations of Portuguese short stories written by Goans.]
You could see, hear and smell Goa Portuguesa even as late as 1970. That was the year my parents, along with my nine-year-old self, returned from Kenya to live in our 'ancestral house' in the Goan village of Sangolda. At night those sights, sounds and smells became more pronounced. At home the quality of the light would change depending on whether you used the simple kerosene lamps improvised from old medicine bottles that flickered an orangish flame; or you were rich enough to own a petromax lamp which you had to pump every now and then to increase the glow. Or better still you had one of those sophisticated Aladdin lamps with the long elegant glass chimneys. Of course in the towns electricity made everything different; but the difference was most pronounced when one could afford neither kerosene nor candle, but made do with a little oil in a pontti. In the air, the whiff of smoke from those lamps mingled with that of burning firewood in the kitchen, and the aroma of the food cooking there. And there was also the pleasant odour of that age-old natural disinfectant -- cowdung paste -- which would be plastered on the floor of our houses to constitute its flooring. Also at night the sounds of nature could be heard distinctly: from the staccato non-stop chirping of crickets, to the whooey howls of the jackals in the fields whom we listened to till we nodded off to sleep, until we woke up to the twittering of the birds and the crowing of the cocks early in the morning. Then, we'd encounter the sows and their piglets crying 'oink oink', hurrying us up in the ubiquitous pig toilets of those times. All these sights, sounds and smells which sound romantic now but were a nuisance then, were to disappear, at first gradually and later rapidly, as villages were electrified and all the modern conveniences which the West was familiar with, from fans to fridges to fast food, started becoming commonplaces of middle class life over the years. From the late 1980s onwards, change continued at a bewildering pace with trees and hills being cut down to make way for concrete jungles, first in the towns and beach belt parts of Bardez, Ilhas and Salcete (the Portuguese Old Conquests) but later on, thanks to the tourism and real estate booms, even in comparatively remote New Conquest areas of Pernem and Canacona. Indiscriminate mining had begun by this time to wreak havoc. The agrarian economy declined and Goa rapidly transformed itself into a modern service-oriented one and mining, tourism, the bureaucracy and remittances from emigrants became the mainstays of Goa's economy. All these changes affected the Goan's way of life immensely. Imperceptibly in the meanwhile, Goa Portuguesa became history and the quaint artefacts of the times like the grinding stones and pestles and the bullock carts and the palanquins from the houses of old that produced those once familiar sights and sensations, got consigned to the museums or, worse, the garbage heaps of Goa, when they weren't eaten by termites or consumed by rust. * But what about the people and the society of Goa Portuguesa? What sort of lives did our parents and grandparents and great- grand-parents live? Were they happy and contented or otherwise? Myths, some diametrically opposed, abound about this Goa of old. There are those who look at Portuguese rule, beginning with the Inquisition, as one of undiluted horror and misery, one where civil liberties (especially for Hindus) were curtailed and one where Goans lived a life of fear from a police state, until the action of the Indian Army in 1961 regained paradise for us. Others think the Goa that is gone was already a Garden of Eden, at least in the sense that it was a more innocent place. These nostalgics yearn for the days when Goa had a very ordered if unequal society, and not the chaos and tumult that is the present. That yearned-after Goa was definitely greener and had a lot less of the big concrete boxes on the hillside style of architecture that exemplifies the word 'Modern'. It was also protected from all sorts of predators (or so these nostalgics thought) and everyone admitted that although the air was pure and the land was beautiful, it was poor and undeveloped. What's the truth? And is there a single truth? Probably not, for there probably never was any one single past, but a range of different pasts which were not black and white or even grey, but a kaleidoscope of colours living in the memories of the people. Till now we've had to depend upon unreliable stories from grandmothers or long-winded history books to learn about those times. However Literature can help us rediscover that past, for among its powers is the ability to allow us to eavesdrop on the conversations of the past and to gaze at the word pictures it creates. *Lengthening Shadows* lends credence to this assertion. The Portuguese stories that Paul Melo e Castro has assiduously collected and translated in *Lengthening Shadows* certainly give a glimpse of the lives of the elite who spoke Portuguese; but they also allude to the lot of those who did not use that language. Of course, like all literature, these stories can be looked at from many perspectives: aesthetic, psychological, ideological... But for a Goan reading the stories in *Lengthening Shadows*, the temptation to lose oneself into mulling over the lives of one's forebears of some fifty to a hundred and fifty years ago is very strong. Certainly I gave in to it, knowing for a fact that the Goa of my youth has changed so drastically that today seems like a different world altogether. Obviously, life before that was stranger still. * By the time these stories were written Goa had lost its importance as an important outpost of the Portuguese maritime empire -- capital of the Estado Da Índia which administered places like Mozambique, Macau and Timor. In the meanwhile, Portugal had plunged into turmoil after Brazil became independent. In Goa for the most part, the Catholic Bamon (Brahmin) and Chardó (Kshatriya) caste elites ruled the political roost to the extent the Portuguese allowed this; although powerful Hindu business interests manipulated financial life behind the scenes. The Catholic monopoly over political influence continued till the First Portuguese Republic, which was ushered in after 1910, separated State and Church and bestowed equal citizenship rights upon the Hindus of Goa, until Antonio de Oliveira Salazar's dictatorship turned all Goans into second class citizens through the Acto Colonial of 1930, an Act which was only repealed in 1950. * As a Goan these stories brought back a flood of memories, but they also surprised me in some ways. Let me recount a few random aspects of Goa Portuguesa in *Lengthening Shadows* that caught my attention. Although I was aware that in those times the upper classes were a very pompous lot, as could well be expected from a socially sterile, economically depressed, caste-based society, the amusement that was generated at their expense by authors who came from that very same class was priceless. Satire was the genre that seemed particularly suited to their genius and writers like GIP and José da Silva Coelho took great delight in ridiculing the old aristocracy, although the returning Bomboikars and Africanders who brought back wealth from the booming British colonies also had their airs deflated, even as the common folk were being ribbed. Although it is clear that different castes and classes lived in tolerance and harmony, there was a tension in their relationships and social interaction followed certain formalised rules of behaviour, which can be discerned in many of the stories. Many have the impression that there was less crime in the Goa of old. Was Goa a crime-free place then? Not true. The stories of the mid-nineteenth century of Júlio Gonçalves indicate that those times could be fraught with dangers posed by all sorts of rascals, petty thieves, kidnappers and even murderers, as do stories of more than a hundred years later. Was it a less corrupt place? Perhaps, compared with the times we live in where corruption has taken deep roots it was not so bad; but there was a lot of nepotism and petty corruption as the casual remarks in various stories testify. However in an age of scarce cash, the bribes would probably come in kind as the bunch of bananas in a José da Silva Coelho story humorously suggests. What made things probably different is that in the good old bad days the common people were so poor, there wasn't much to steal besides their copper vessels and chickens and any food in the house, for otherwise desperate husbands might even have been willing to rob their wives, as a story such as 'The Married Woman's Husband' indicates. And since the population of Goa was small, the countryfolk managed to survive with their limited resources by toiling in their fields or by depending on nature's bounty. But the trend of migrating to greener pastures on board ships or to colonies abroad, particularly among the more ambitious and literate Goans, had already begun. In more recent times the people have fortunately begun to see more wealth thanks perhaps to soaring land prices and opportunities in areas like tourism. And the population of Goa has increased in leaps and bounds after Liberation as Indians from other states have come to fill in the employment vacuum left by Goan emigrants -- an in-migration that has been accelerated by rapid, often chaotic economic development. But along with this the crime rates have correspondingly and sadly increased. One myth that fellow Indians sometimes believe in, and which especially annoys some Catholic Goans, is that they are the offspring of alliances between the white Portuguese and the brown Goans as their Portuguese names might suggest. While there was such a population known as Mestis (from the Portuguese Mestiços), by and large the upper-caste and upper-class Goan had a particular horror of miscegenation. This can be seen in the Wenceslau Proença story 'A Spurt of Blood' where a Portuguese officer's dalliance with a nondescript spinster from an aristocratic family is firmly stopped, although not before a child is born to her, only to be adopted by a poor Goan family. Incidentally many Goans once tweaked these problematic names to their advantage to claim Anglo-Indian status and consequent privileges during British times. However racism was rampant as Augusto do Rosário Rodrigues suggests in 'Risen from the Ranks', although the Portuguese were willing to mingle socially and sexually with their colonised peoples, unlike the British ladies and gentlemen of colonial India who were expected to be more stiff-upper lipped or at least more discreet. Caste of course, as Melo e Castro points out, was the idée fixe of the Goan and indeed Indian nation and still is. The status of women has changed quite dramatically since those times especially for Hindus. Those were times when to be a respectable bride, she had to be married before she attained puberty: if that happened today it would make their husbands guilty of statutory rape! Few girls were educated. But things were only just a bit better among the Catholics, who like the Hindus were cursed with the problems of securing a dowry for their daughters. Those who could not make it in the marriage market due to the lack of a suitable groom of the right caste or due to insufficient dowry, were at best forced to live a second class life in their parents' home. Some became concubines and prostitution was commonplace. Many stories allude to temple dancers. Among the Hindu community it seems that quite a few rich families were ruined by the infatuation of men with such women who were locally called kolvonts, a corruption of the word kalavants meaning artistes. Some Portuguese laws and administrative procedures such as the codification of uses and customs, the Common Civil Code of 1867 and the Decree of 1880, which established women as inheritors on par with the male may have resulted in the betterment of some women's status in society. This is evidenced by the story 'My Sister is a Rich Man' by Ananta Rau Sar Dessai, where a Hindu woman who had independent means decides to adopt a son and put her foot down and stop funding her brother's drinking habit. Goans, especially Catholic Goans, have always protested that they have been unfairly stereotyped as sots by the Bollywood film industry. They argue, probably correctly, that the percentage of alcoholics in Goa is as high, or as low, as in any other place in the rest of India. But this book attests that alcoholism has been a problem in Goa for a long long time among all communities including Hindus. Over the last few years mining has been castigated for the environmental depredations and corruption it has wrought upon Goa. But the corruption of this industry was evident at least as far back as the 1940s as Epitácio Pais's stories foretell. It is clear that *Lengthening Shadows* can be read as a social exposé although it may have limitations in that all of the writers are middle or upper-middle class. And most are male, although Maria Elsa da Rocha and Vimala Devi make up in quality what the anthology lacks in numbers. Also, with the exceptions of Anantha Rau Sar Dessai and Laxmanrao Sardessai (more known for his Marathi stories having reputedly written some 700 of them) the writers are Catholic. It was the First Portuguese Republic from 1910 till 1926 that gave at least the Hindu elite an equal standing in society. It seems the voice of the Hindus belonging to the lower castes and classes had few outlets throughout this period. And yet between and through the crevices of what these elite, male and mainly Catholic authorial voices have to say, one can also discern the world of women and the subaltern. All said and done if the people of those times could come back and see the changes that have taken place, they would be shocked, pleasantly or otherwise depending upon their outlook. * The stories in *Lengthening Shadows* are written by different authors, yet to me the anthology is more than the sum of the individual pieces. It reads like a compendium of the lives and mores of Goa Portuguesa in the last century or so of its existence. It also represents a range of writing styles from the Romanticism of the early writers to the Existentialism of Walfrido Antão. And although readers of the original Portuguese might quibble, the translated stories feel like originals and would read even better still if the footnotes in the text were confined to a glossary at the end, or even better to a wiki page or website. How does Portuguese compare to the other languages of Goa? Konkani, the language of the land was neglected by the elite; and in some eras was ferociously suppressed by the Portuguese. However to be fair to the Portuguese some Christian missionaries under their watch like the English Jesuit Thomas Stevens did pioneering work in the language. Also the Portuguese civil servant Joaquim Heliodoro da Cunha Rivara (1808-1879) in 1858 made the revolutionary proposal that primary education in Goa be imparted in Konkani, a proposal which was assiduously opposed by the elite of Goa who weren't especially interested in allowing the lower castes a chance to become educated. In fact Cunha Rivara's thought as well as his writings on the Konkani language can be seen as the forerunner to the work of both Msgr. Sebastião Rodolfo Dalgado and Waman Raghunath Shennoi Varde Valaulikar aka Shenoi Goenbab, fountainheads of modern Konkani language and literature respectively. But the brutal fact remains that Konkani literature remained in a nascent stage until fairly recent times. Still, journals were published since the nineteenth century mainly from Bombay, and mainly in the Roman script used by Catholics, and the first regular Konkani periodical *Udentichem Salluk* (Lotus of the Orient) started in 1889. Its editor was Eduardo José Bruno de Souza who also wrote the first Konkani novel *Kristanv Ghorabo* (A Christian Family) published posthumously in 1911. It is fair to assume there was a fairly large output of short stories too, but these do not seem to have been collected or studied so far. Similarly Marathi which was the literary language of the Hindus at that time has an archive of at least 20 weeklies or monthlies published between 1870 and 1910 and many more after that. Most were extant for perhaps a year or two, and each of these probably is a lode worth examining. However like Konkani, this too is little studied. Comparison is left to those works which have either been written in English or translated into English from the local languages. Although these translations have begun to appear only fairly recently, not too many stories have been translated. At first glance it seems that the pieces in *Lengthening Shadows*are more insightful in their depictions of colonial society and also more sophisticated in form, perhaps because the models for their art came from the best of European and American stories in Portuguese translation. So how did Portuguese become a better mirror of society than other Indian languages or even English? One reason could be that it could connect the educated classes from all strata as everyone was obliged to study it at least till the primary level. Secondly compared to the Portuguese writers, those who wrote in English lived in other parts of India and could only view Goan society from a distance; worse was the case of the ones based in Africa and other parts of the diaspora who did not have a sharp enough understanding of the caste-based life of Goa to write about its society confidently enough. Their insights regarding the colonies where they lived most of their lives are more enlightening though. Modern Goan Konkani and Marathi stories which have begun appearing in English translation are fairly recent and tend to be centred on the milieux of the society in which their authors grew up. For instance the stories of Pundalik Naik, doyen of modern Konkani literature, dwell upon the lives of the subaltern Hindu classes (the Bahujan Samaj) with an insider's knowledge which Portuguese language writers do not have. Other modern Konkani writers like the late Chandrakant Keni and Damodar Mauzo do write about Catholics, but then they are not as much concerned with the colonial experience as for instance Maria Elsa da Rocha. She is very empathetic to her Hindu characters, although her prime achievement was to record the woes and fears of the bhatkar classes before and just after Liberation. To conclude, I envy Paul Melo e Castro. He comes from thousands of miles away to our backyards in Goa and digs out these gems that the Goa-Portuguese encounter had left for us. He cannot be thanked enough for what he has done although the question may arise as to why someone from the West will come researching material which our own scholars have studiedly ignored. In doing so he has indicated the need for similar work to be done in Konkani and Marathi before the old journals crumble to dust. -- Augusto Pinto is a Goa-based critic and translator, book reviewer and associate professor. *Lengthening Shadows* is available via mail-order from goa1...@gmail.com at Rs 400 within India (postfree) or Euro 12 overseas (inclusive of postage). -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-. Goanet annual year-end meet in Goa: if you're reading this, you're eligible to join us! Dec 28, 2015 @ 11 am Fundacao Oriente, Panjim Confirm your participation with a short email to goa...@goanet.org -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.