Colonial and Post-Colonial Goan Literature in Portuguese

Woven Palms

Paul Michael Melo e Castro

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786833921
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud

This collection of essays brings together established scholars of Lusophone Goan literature from India, Brazil, Portugal and Great Britain. For the first time in English, this volume traces the key narrative works, authors and themes of this small but significant territory. Goa, a Portuguese colony between 1510 and 1961, was the site of a particular and particularly intense meeting of West and East. The problematic yet productive encounter between Europe and India that has characterised Goa's history is a major theme in its literature, which affords important insights and material for post-colonial thought. Goan literature in Portuguese is the only significant Indian literature to have been written in a European language other than English and, as such, provides both a challenging point of comparison with anglophone Indian literature and a space to examine post-colonial theory often implicitly embedded in a British Indian colonial experience.

Introduction

The Cartography of Goan Literature in Portuguese: One Language in a Multilingual Social Landscape

PAUL MELO E CASTRO

In India: A Million Mutinies Now, a book as much lauded for its style as censured for its polemics, V. S. Naipaul writes:

[t]he Portuguese had created in Goa something of a New-World emptiness, like the Spaniards in Mexico. They had created in India something not of India, a simplicity, something where the Indian past had been abolished. And after 450 years all they had left behind in this emptiness and simplicity was their religion, their language (without a literature), their names, a Latin-like colonial population, and this cult, from their cathedral, of the Image of the Infant Jesus. (1990, p. 142)

One aim of the essays in this volume is to probe the many ways in which this assertion, redolent of stereotypes about Goa peddled both in India and in Europe, is simply erroneous. Rather than any emptiness, Goa presents a highly complex mix of autochthonous and Portuguese elements, pre-Gama inheritances and British influences, and a population separated yet also conjoined by differences of caste and religion only characterisable as simple from an exterior position of ignorance or bias. In no way was the Indian past abolished, though perhaps calling it Indian in a national, as opposed to ethnic or civilisational, sense might be anachronistic. Instead Goa was and is a product of manifold influences on the ground from both East and West and a global history connected to the seaways of the Indian Ocean and beyond. As regards the other characteristics Naipaul seized upon: Portuguese-derived names and the Catholicism they indicate are commonplace in Goa today though among a steadily decreasing percentage of its inhabitants. The Portuguese language he believed to be general plays a relatively small role in the life of the territory at present, though the vast yet fragile written archive in that tongue is a rich resource that could be better known and utilised. To disclose some of it to an English-speaking audience constitutes a further objective here.

The status of the Portuguese language speaks volumes about the break in Goan history in 1961. If Portuguese is now a distant third language in schools and used only in a scattering of homes, such a reduced role is a post-colonial development. Lobo describes Portuguese as the only European tongue, under colonialism, to have become a vernacular among the Indian population (Lobo, 2014, p. 68), indeed some see its use as having penetrated more deeply into society than English during the Raj (Noronha, 2014, p. 19), an idea testified by its influence on the Konkani of Catholics whose families would never have been functionally Lusophone (cf. Sardessai, 2010, p. 256). Nevertheless, Portuguese never attained what Dilip Loundó calls a ‘self-reproducing linguistic structure’ (2011, p. 16; translation mine). Quickly disestablished after 1961, with the officialisation of Konkani in the nagari script in 1987 and the expansion in the use of India’s associate official language, English, Portuguese faded rapidly from public discourse.

This discontinuation of Portuguese has meant that Goan writing in that tongue has been little researched either in Goa, where few people have the language skills to do so, or in the Lusophone world, where the immediate focus has been the countries and territories that retained Portuguese as an official language. Today the situation appears to non-Portuguese speakers to be that Goan writing in Portuguese is limited to ‘a few turgid, unwieldy novels and some vacuous quasi-mythological poetry’ (Shetty, 1998, p. xvii). Given the hearsay upon which such an opinion must necessarily be based, there is a need to map out accurately and honestly the extent and import of Goan writing in Portuguese via means accessible to a modern Goan/Indian readership. One avenue is the translation of primary texts. Another way is the mobilisation of Portuguese-language writing to think through the cultural history and social development of Goa and Portuguese colonialism within the dynamics of the Indian subcontinent, to demonstrate its importance as a source of material with which to reflect on the roots of the present.

Yet scholars and readers in/of India are not the only audience that Goan writing in Portuguese might interest. For scholars of post-colonial Portuguese-language writing, the Goan archive presents significant particularities, many of which can help denaturalise, reframe or extend debates in the field. As Portuguese did not survive decolonisation as a hegemonic language, it did not become, as in Africa, a unifying tongue of post-colonial nation building. Instead it was left a minority concern, a sort of dwindling bhasha in families where it had been adopted as an intimate medium of communication, or for those whose educational and working life had been conducted exclusively in Portuguese until that point. Some of the peculiarity of post-1961 Goan literature can be attributed to this situation. This status as an outlying and sui generis example of what Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd term a minority discourse (1990) warns against the generalisations occasioned by the language’s hegemonic status elsewhere.

Unlike Lusophone Africa, yet similarly to Portugal’s other Asian enclaves – though the contrasts between Goa and Macau and Timor-Leste are perhaps greater than their likenesses – Goa’s decolonisation did not result in the immediate constitution of a new nation state. Rather Goa was absorbed into greater India, which meant that the traditions and institutions deriving from its colonial past, such as language, were largely overlaid and displaced by those of British India. One hegemonic construction gave way to another divergent vision of history and society, though it would be overly simple to conceptualise this shift as a rack focus between Goa Dourada, or Goa as a Europeanised outpost of Portugal, and Goa Indica, a pimple from which the colonial pus, to extend a metaphorical description of the Estado da Índia attributed to Jawarharlal Nehru, had finally been squeezed, leaving its fundamentally Indian culture to blend unblemished back into the face of Mother India. According to Rosa Maria Perez (2011, p. 31) these two discourses, first binarised in academic discourse by Caroline Ifeka (1984), actually coexist in different ways among the various stakeholders in Goa’s identity. Goan literature, with the dialogism inherent to this form, becomes a privileged site for mapping out these fractious connections. If, as Rochelle Pinto has argued, Goa (like Portugal in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) has had to measure itself by its deviation from the Imperial British Indian model (2007, p. 1), this disparity only grew with the engrossment of the former Estado da Índia to the so-called ‘Indian Union’. The essays contained here provide a discontinuous cartography of Goan attitudes to colonial rule and the possibility of escaping its bounds, European intellectual currents and changing autochthonous traditions, from the late nineteenth century to the post-1961 period.

Though 1961 impelled a dramatic shift in Goa, it should not be taken, however, that a familiarity with the English language and the institutions of India was previously absent. An irony of history is that as Portuguese citizens Goans played a prominent role in the British Empire. As shown by José da Silva Coelho in the 1920s (analysed here by Luís Cabral de Oliveira), from the nineteenth century English was a prominent language of education in Goa. Although language was tacitly encouraged by the Portuguese regime as an enabler of migration, and so of remittances, the role of English dismayed some senior Portuguese figures, such as the Patriarch of the East Indies, Dom José da Costa Nunes who, upon arriving in Goa in 1940, found himself having to resort to English to address school children (Bègue, 2007, p. 99). An examination of the Goan scene brings home the post-colonial fact that no society can be reduced to a single position on colonialism, language, decolonisation or hierarchy, whatever hegemonies are in operation. As Orlando Ribeiro puts it, in a rather Orientalist simile, ‘like some Hindu gods, who have three faces and six arms, the truth about Goa is… various and movable’ (1999, p. 134; translation mine). The works and writers analysed here provide ample testament to this fact.

The publication of this volume in English is meant, then, to reach both an audience interested in Goan writing in any language and a contemporary Lusitanist community whose centre of research is the Atlantic space where Portuguese is at its most dominant. For the latter, the sui generis colonisation and decolonisation of Goa, not to mention its current status as the phantom limb of Lusophony, provides a literary space wherein the key categories and terms of post-colonial theory – the ways in which ‘colonialism produced hierarchised states of being, staying, expressing feelings and thoughts, making political statements, defining identities, generating relationships’ (Bastos, 2007, p. 130) – can be compared, challenged and relativised. Again contrary to other Lusophone literary systems, Portuguese-language writing in Goa sits alongside three other major bodies of writing in Konkani, Marathi and English. Even when, as here, the focus is on Portuguese-language writing, the ultimate approach to Goan writing must be comparativist, albeit a comparativism challenging any traditional notion of the field as juxtaposing national traditions.

Helena Carvalhão Buescu has taken lusophone literatura-mundo to form ‘different observation points in Portuguese, according to the historical-symbolic, geographical and cultural dimensions that are illuminated’ (2014, p. 47; translation mine). For her this corpus should be ‘understood as the simultaneous experience of the shared and the distinct: an archive of possible similarities but also of differences and infinite variations’ (2014, p. 47; translation mine). Here I add the simple point that including literary production from Goa (and other Asian spaces where Portuguese has been used) enhances the ‘sphericity’ of this experiential world and allows us to view key issues in the round, even as Goa’s multilingual, intra-imperial literary history provides a compelling reminder of the critical need to transcend linguistic blocs calqued on colonial world divisions.

Though several articles here open out onto the comparative questions I have adumbrated above, the focus here will be on Portuguese-language works little discussed in English. Spanning literary production from the late nineteenth century through to the 1970s, this volume presents a detailed yet wide-ranging conspectus of the most notable Portuguese-language writers from Goa. In the first essay Hélder Garmes and I argue that, contrary to previous terminology, the most fitting term to describe Goan writing in Portuguese is exactly that. This shift away from the term Indo-Portuguese literature, as used for example in Vimala Devi and Manuel Seabra’s A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa (1971), the keystone upon which all contemporary research on this archive is built, has certain effects: to distance Portuguese-language Goan writing from any perceived alignment with colonial ideology (with which this body of writing rarely joined in any simple manner) and promote a comparative approach that reads this archive vis-à-vis both Goan and Indian literature in other languages and the other literatures of the Portuguese-language literary macrosystem. The term Goan literature in Portuguese underscores the fact that this writing engages with Goa’s intellectual, literary and socio-economic history and reiterates its potential as a key resource to think about how Goan society was envisioned in Goa with regard to long-standing images of the territory produced at home and abroad. Discussing Goan literature in comparison to ‘Indian literature in English’, and deciding that in Portuguese it is characterised by a series of ‘literary manifestations’, Garmes and I provide brief analyses of a number of key Goan novels: Os Brahmanes (1866) by Francisco Luís Gomes, Os Maharatas by Leopoldo Dias (1894), Jacob e Dulce (1896) by Francisco João Costa (better known as GIP), A Neta do Cozinheiro (1904) by Constantino José de Brito, Bodki (1962) by Agostinho Fernandes and O Signo da Ira (1963) by Orlando da Costa – as well as a discussion of feuilletons appearing in Goa’s press. In essence, the argument made is that to understand these texts the reader must engage with Goa’s socio-cultural context – and vice versa.

The second article, by Everton Machado, focuses on Os Brahmanes (1866) by Francisco Luís Gomes (1829–1869). Here Machado considers Gomes’s novel, which takes place not in Goa but British India, to be the first modern work of fiction to denounce the systematic abuses of colonialism in South Asia, suggesting the phasing out of European domination and endorsing racial intermixture. As such, Machado’s analysis opens up new perspectives on what ought to be considered a foundational narrative in Portuguese-language post-colonial literature. There is much of interest here for Anglophone scholars, as the novel’s representation of the notorious 1857 Indian Rebellion from an unfamiliar coign of vantage exemplifies. Ultimately, Machado argues, Gomes’s novel is deeply ambiguous: if anti-colonial on many levels, in accordance with the author’s liberal values, it also operates within a certain colonial discourse, showing traces of Orientalism and even a Lusotropicalist bent avant la lettre. Indeed, in a manner that resists any anachronistic reading through twentieth-century Indian nationalism, one might say that Os Brahmanes presents the solution to the wrongs of colonialism as even more thorough colonisation. To put it another way: for the elite Catholic Gomes – of the Chardó caste to boot, with all that this identity entailed as regards the inner jockeying for power in Goa’s nineteenth century – affirming the proselytising, putatively absorbent Portuguese model of colonial rule, which technically put such individuals on an equal footing with metropolitans, the best solution to the problems of India would be the Goanisation of the subcontinent.

In the third article, Sandra Ataíde Lobo looks at Francisco João da Costa (1859–1900), known as GIP, under which name he authored Jacob e Dulce (serialised between 1894 and 1895, put out in book form in 1896), the second major work of Goan fiction in Portuguese. Lobo extends current debates on what she describes as the most translated and debated work of Goan fiction by contributing elements towards the author’s intellectual biography, illuminating lesser-known details that crucially shaped his attitudes and positions in the heated debates of his day. Of particular interest is Lobo’s argument that the relationship between creature and creator is not one of mere pseudonymy, but that GIP might be best understood, after Pessoa, as a semi-heteronym. She argues for a complex divergence and confluence of biographical elements between the two figures that any critical reckoning must take into account; GIP is not simply Costa disguised, just as Costa is not merely GIP unmasked.

The final section of Lobo’s essay deals with GIPs journalistic writings on a series of prominent themes in Jacob e Dulce, namely his views on luxury and language. His interventions on luxury concern the increasing adoption of a costly European lifestyle by the Catholic elite to which Costa belonged, and represent a discussion that continues to date as to how Goa should cut its cultural coat according to its socio-economic cloth, a metaphor far from innocent here given the crucial symbolic role played by modes of dress. Importantly here, as Lobo argues, Costa posited no hard-and-fast binary between Europe and Asia, but rather saw a cline between the two determined on the native Goan side by caste and class. His ideas on language concern the relationship between Konkani and Portuguese, the indigenous tongue of the elites and the medium incompletely adopted from a subordinated colonial power, still an important means of access to critical debates on modernity and progress. Given that in today’s Goa, where Konkani is official but English hegemonic, strife continues over the medium of instruction for schooling, this grounded insight into the language debates of previous eras shows the historical roots of the issue.

The fourth article, by K. David Jackson, gives an overview of Goan poetry in Portuguese. Ranging from 1893 to 1973, and touching on Adeodato Barreto, Nascimento Mendonça, Mariano Gracias and Clara de Meneses, to cite but a few names, Jackson outlines key themes including responses to Goa’s landscape, customs, folklore, and colonial history. He stresses the influence of poets and movements from Brazil and Portugal, which demonstrates the circulation of ideas throughout the Portuguese-speaking world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The chapter concludes with a bibliography for scholars wishing to investigate further Goan poetry in Portuguese or equip their research facilities with the means for others to do so.

In the fifth article, Luís Cabral de Oliveira looks at the prolific short-story writer José da Silva Coelho, whose brief narratives present a panorama of Goan life under the First Republic (1910– 26), though from a discernibly slanted social perspective. The short but crucial period in Goa’s history preceding the advent of Salazar’s New State has not been sufficiently studied in Goan historiography. Here literary criticism helps flag up historical issues urgently in need of discussion and documentation. It is telling – about Goa’s later development, its current disconnect from aspects of its past, and the unevenness and asymmetry in contemporary relations with the Portuguese-speaking world – that a short-story writer of a prolificacy unmatched in the other territories of the Portuguese empire at the time is almost entirely unknown today both in Goa and in Lusophone circles.

Here Cabral focuses on the advogado provisionário, or licensed advocate, in Silva Coelho’s Contos Regionais (1923–9). On the premise that literature provides rich cultural representations of lived legal systems, Cabral argues that Silva Coelho’s principal concerns distinguishable in his advocate characters were: class relations within the Catholic community and across Goa more widely, the defects and marginalisation of colonial Goan society, which created the need for such ad hoc legal agents, and the establishment and demonstration of social and financial capital in a situation of limited local autonomy. In Cabral’s view, Silva Coelho’s mocking depiction of advocates outside Goa’s native Catholic elite is intended to undermine their claims to social mobility, indicating anxiety over the territory’s plight torn between deep change and stagnation, a paradoxical situation that continued until the end of Portuguese rule.

The next three articles focus on Vimala Devi (b. 1932), arguably both the most representative Goan writer in Portuguese and the one whose protean literary trajectory has led furthest from her native land. Together with her husband Manuel de Seabra, Devi was responsible for the preservation of key elements of the Portuguese-language archive between the end of Portuguese rule in Goa and the re-startin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editors' Foreword
• Notes on Contributors
• 1: Introduction: The Cartography of Goan Literature in Portuguese: One Language in a Multilingual Social Landscape: Paul Melo e Castro
• 2: The Story of Goan Literature in Portuguese: A Question of Terminology: Hélder Garmes and Paul Melo e Castro
• 3: Against British Rule and Indian Castes: The First Portuguese-language Goan Novel, Os Brahmanes (1866) by Francisco Luís Gomes: Everton V. Machado
• 4: The Lives and Times of GIP and Francisco João da Costa: Sandra Ataíde Lobo
• 5: Echoes of Portuguese India in Goan Poets, 1893-1973: K. David Jackson
• 6: In the Land of 'Advogadomania': The Representation of the Goan Provisionário in José da Silva Coelho's Contos Regionais: Luís Pedroso de Lima Cabral de Oliveira
• 7: 'The Voice of Two Worlds': Lusotropicalism in the Context and Reception of Vimala Devi's Súria: Duarte Drumond Braga
• 8: Women without Men in Vimala Devi's Monção: Cielo G. Festino
• 9: Women's Worlds in Women's Words: Poetry and Memory in Vimala Devi and Eunice de Souza: Joana Passos
• 10: Science over Superstition? The Representation of the Social World of the Novas Conquistas in Bodki (1962) by Agostinho Fernandes: Eufemiano Miranda and Paul Melo e Castro
• 11: Sem Flores Nem Coroas: Reflections on the Play by Orlando da Costa: M. Filomena de Brito Gomes Rodrigues
• 12: The Dregs Populating the Village of Santana: Rural Goa in Three Stories by Epitácio Pais: Paul Melo e Castro
• 13: Writing from within the Father's House and beyond: Goan Women Writing in Different Historical Spaces: Edith Noronha Melo Furtado
• Notes
• Bibliography