My name is Cielo G. Festino. I teach literatures in English at Universidade Paulista, Brazil. I am also a member of the thematic project "Thinking Goa. A Singular Library in the Portuguese Language" (USP/FAPESP).
Goan writing in Portuguese has had a long and chequered history and at present is all but unknown... more Goan writing in Portuguese has had a long and chequered history and at present is all but unknown in the region that inspired it, and by the descendants of those who produced it. This collection, originally published as a special edition of the reputed literary magazine Muse India, gathers translations of short stories, poems and extracts of novels and sets them alongside critical articles that aim to open up this body of writing for a contemporary Anglophone reader in Goa and further afield. Though often (but not exclusively) produced from a position of social advantage, and predominantly by Catholics, this branch of Goan literature contains many viewpoints on the history, identity and society of a territory that, while colonised by Portugal for hundreds of years, has always negotiated its place in the world in a wider Indian context. In this house of writing there are indeed many mansions.
InterDISCIPLINARY Journal of Portuguese Diaspora Studies, Jul 2, 2018
Ben Antao is a journalist and fiction writer living in Toronto, Canada. His latest novel is Power... more Ben Antao is a journalist and fiction writer living in Toronto, Canada. His latest novel is Power and Politics (2015), published by CinnamonTeal of Margao, Goa. In this interview, he talks about his childhood in Goa, his education, both in Goa and Mumbai, his life as a journalist in Goa and Mumbai and his life and career in Canada as journalist, teacher and writer.
The aim of this paper is to bring an analysis of oviyos, folkloric songs that Indian women from t... more The aim of this paper is to bring an analysis of oviyos, folkloric songs that Indian women from the Hindu community of Goa, former Portuguese colony in India used to sing while working at the grinding stone. These songs, a sample of Goan folklore, were collected by Heta Pandit in the book Grinding Stories. Songs from Goa (2018), based on her field work with singers Subhadra Arjun Gaus, Saraswati, Dutta Sawant and Sarojini Bhiva Gaonkar. The songs, sung in a dialect of Marathi-Konkani, were transcribed into English. These elaborate songs are of psychological and social significance as they provide a release from a sometimes harsh reality, at the same time they are an invaluable cultural document. They have been analyzed from the perspective of Goan folklore as discussed by Phaldesai (2011), the meaning of folkloric narratives (Dundes, 2007) and a reflection on the genre oviyos (Jassal, 2012).
InterDISCIPLINARY Journal of Portuguese Diaspora Studies, 2018
The main aim of this article is to reflect upon the identity of Goan literature in terms of liter... more The main aim of this article is to reflect upon the identity of Goan literature in terms of literary production at home and abroad, i.e., the narratives of authors who live, write and publish in Goa and of migrants abroad who have made Goa a main theme of their work. We define migrant writers as those who have migrated from Goa to other parts of the world or who were born away from Goa but have maintained close ties with the land of their forefathers. We define their literary production as ‘migration literature.
This article analyses the English-language short story “Mand Goes to Church” by the Goan writer S... more This article analyses the English-language short story “Mand Goes to Church” by the Goan writer Selma Carvalho in counterpoint with the Portuguese-language novel Casa Grande e Outras Recordacoes de um Velho Goes [The Great House and Other Memories of an Old Goan] by another Goan writer, Leopoldo da Rocha, and argues that the Indo-Portuguese great house, the casa grande, serves in each as a symbolic space for the conflict-ridden encounter between Portuguese and Indian cultures in Goa during the Portuguese regime in India (1510-1961).
Resumo: O objetivo deste artigo é discutir a rede de narrativas literárias anticoloniais, em part... more Resumo: O objetivo deste artigo é discutir a rede de narrativas literárias anticoloniais, em particular, contos e poemas, de escritores indianos, goeses e portugueses que apareceram no jornal de esquerda goês, Free Goa, publicado em Bombaim [Mumbai] nas décadas de 1950 e 1960, em um momento em que os Freedom Fighters de Goa procuravam o apoio da Índia para alcançar a sua independência da dominação colonial portuguesa. Seguindo Jean Paul Sartre (1949) e Benôit Denis (2000), afirmamos que essas obras literárias podem ser lidas como literatura engajada, já que em estilos literários elaborados ou simples e direitos encorajam os goeses a buscar inspiração na Independência da Índia de dominação britânica (1947), assim como libertar-se do regime salazarista.Palavras-chave: rede literária; Free Goa; contos; poemas; literatura engajada: The aim of this paper is to consider the web of anticolonial literary narratives, short stories and poems, by Indian, Goan and Portuguese writers which appea...
The aim of this paper is to analyze in counterpoint a selection of short stories from Monsoon and... more The aim of this paper is to analyze in counterpoint a selection of short stories from Monsoon and poems from Surya, both collections written by Vimala Devi, in light of theories concerning the intersection of trauma, narrative, and the postcolonial. This approach permits an understanding of effects produced by colonialism such as dispossession, forced migration, diaspora, segregation, racism, and political violence (Craps and Buelens 3). My analysis is carried out from a culture-bound perspective (3), which considers each case of colonial and postcolonial trauma not only as having its own singularities, but also as producing effects on the colonized cultures at both a personal (Caruth) and collective level (Rothberg). Also, we consider some of the singularities of the colonial situation in Goa (Santos). For the contrastive analysis between poems and short stories, in terms of the condition of the Goan elite and subaltern (Fernandes, "Recovering"; Citizenship), we consider Devi´s rendition of the pastoral (Alpers) as well as her use of some elements of Portuguese Neo-Realism (Lourenço; Gama). The article is divided into the following sections: "The End of an Era, " about the trauma caused by the end of Portuguese presence in Goa; "Some Other Kind of Living, " about the way in which Goans had to adapt to the new circumstances; "What Went Wrong?" on the condition of the Goan subalterns; and the last section, "Devi´s Answer to Trauma, " about Devi´s way of dealing with the painful divisions at the heart of Goan society.
This article considers the literary network of anti-colonial literary narratives, short stories, ... more This article considers the literary network of anti-colonial literary narratives, short stories, and poems, by Indian, Goan, and Portuguese writers which appeared in the 1950s and 1960s in the left-wing Goan journal Free Goa, published in Bombay (now Mumbai) at a time when Goa’s freedom fighters were seeking India’s support in order to attain their independence from Portuguese colonial domination. Following Jean-Paul Sartre (1949) and Benoît Denis (2000), we claim that these literary works can be read as engaged literature since in elaborate or straightforward literary styles they urge Goans to look for inspiration in India’s independence from British domination (1947) and to free themselves from the Salazarist regime.
Goa, India, is a multicultural community with a broad archive of literary narratives in Konkani, ... more Goa, India, is a multicultural community with a broad archive of literary narratives in Konkani, Marathi, English and Portuguese. While Konkani in its Devanagari version, and not in the Roman script, has been Goa’s official language since 1987, there are many other narratives in Marathi, the neighbor state of Maharashtra, in Portuguese, legacy of the Portuguese presence in Goa since 1510 to 1961, and English, result of the British colonization of India until 1947. This situation already reveals that there is a relationship among these languages and cultures that at times is highly conflictive at a political, cultural and historical level. In turn, they are not separate units but are profoundly interrelated in the sense that histories told in one language are complemented or contested when narrated in the other languages of Goa. One way to relate them in a meaningful dialogue is through a common metaphor that, at one level, will help us expand our knowledge of the points in common an...
O objetivo deste artigo e discutir a singularidade literaria de Love and Longing in Bombay (1997)... more O objetivo deste artigo e discutir a singularidade literaria de Love and Longing in Bombay (1997), do escritor indiano Vikram Chandra, levando em conta a maneira como o autor relaciona os generos literarios da tradicao inglesa com a cultura hindu atraves do conceito de darshana, ou visao de mundo
RESUMO: Este artigo traz uma discussao da centralidade do genero conto na literatura indiana hoje... more RESUMO: Este artigo traz uma discussao da centralidade do genero conto na literatura indiana hoje no seu trânsito entre as diferentes linguas do subcontinente: as linguas vernaculas, o ingles vernaculo e o ingles da diaspora. Para melhor entender essas narrativas, em um primeiro momento e feita uma contextualizacao dessa tradicao literaria para melhor apreciar as manifestacoes do genero. Logo, o artigo traz uma breve historiografia do genero na India, levando em conta que ele e o resultado da relacao entre a tradicao indiana pre-colonial e a tradicao inglesa, apos tres seculos de colonizacao. Por ultimo, a discussao foca-se em alguns aspectos formais do genero nas linguas regionais desde que muitas vezes, por nao se encaixar no paradigma esperado, lhes e negado valor literario e exposicao internacional. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: conto – literatura indiana – linguas vernaculas ABSTRACT: This article discusses the relevance of the genre “short story” in the Indian literary tradition, taking int...
The aim of this paper is to analyze the life narratives “Where have All the Songs and Rituals Gon... more The aim of this paper is to analyze the life narratives “Where have All the Songs and Rituals Gone?” (2019) by Mozinha Fernandes and “A Velip Writes Back” (2019) by Priyanka Velip, members of the Adivasi community of Goa, who consider themselves as the first inhabitants of this Indian state. These narratives have been published in the blog “Hanv Konn. Who am I? Researching the Self ” organized by the late professor from the University of Goa, Alito Siqueira, whose aim is to give voice to this marginalized and silenced community. The analysis will be done in terms of the concepts of Postmemory (Hirsch, 1996, 1997, 2008), Trauma (Ginzburg, 2008; Balaev, 2008), Narrative (Bruner, 2002; Coracini, 2007), and Life-narratives (Smith & Watson, 2010).
The aim of this article is to make a critical reading of thenovella The Home and the World (1915)... more The aim of this article is to make a critical reading of thenovella The Home and the World (1915), by RabindranathTagore, focusing on the emancipation of Bengal and the newrole of women at the beginning of the twentieth century duringthe Swadeshi movement: the boycott to English goods to backup Indian industry after the arbitrary division of Bengal byLord Curzon (1905). This discussion is based on Tagore’s book onNationalism (1917) as well as Walter Benjamin’s considerationson allegory (1928).
O objetivo deste artigo é considerar o processo de criação literária, conforme recriado pelo escr... more O objetivo deste artigo é considerar o processo de criação literária, conforme recriado pelo escritor Rohinton Mistry, em seu conto “Swimming lessons”. O deslocamento da personagem principal da Índia para o Canadá lhe permite transformar suas memórias do lar em tema de ficção e assim cruzar fronteiras culturais. Desta maneira, a literatura torna-se um espaço de reflexão no qual a personagem pode considerar a sua situação na diáspora.
Goan writing in Portuguese has had a long and chequered history and at present is all but unknown... more Goan writing in Portuguese has had a long and chequered history and at present is all but unknown in the region that inspired it, and by the descendants of those who produced it. This collection, originally published as a special edition of the reputed literary magazine Muse India, gathers translations of short stories, poems and extracts of novels and sets them alongside critical articles that aim to open up this body of writing for a contemporary Anglophone reader in Goa and further afield. Though often (but not exclusively) produced from a position of social advantage, and predominantly by Catholics, this branch of Goan literature contains many viewpoints on the history, identity and society of a territory that, while colonised by Portugal for hundreds of years, has always negotiated its place in the world in a wider Indian context. In this house of writing there are indeed many mansions.
InterDISCIPLINARY Journal of Portuguese Diaspora Studies, Jul 2, 2018
Ben Antao is a journalist and fiction writer living in Toronto, Canada. His latest novel is Power... more Ben Antao is a journalist and fiction writer living in Toronto, Canada. His latest novel is Power and Politics (2015), published by CinnamonTeal of Margao, Goa. In this interview, he talks about his childhood in Goa, his education, both in Goa and Mumbai, his life as a journalist in Goa and Mumbai and his life and career in Canada as journalist, teacher and writer.
The aim of this paper is to bring an analysis of oviyos, folkloric songs that Indian women from t... more The aim of this paper is to bring an analysis of oviyos, folkloric songs that Indian women from the Hindu community of Goa, former Portuguese colony in India used to sing while working at the grinding stone. These songs, a sample of Goan folklore, were collected by Heta Pandit in the book Grinding Stories. Songs from Goa (2018), based on her field work with singers Subhadra Arjun Gaus, Saraswati, Dutta Sawant and Sarojini Bhiva Gaonkar. The songs, sung in a dialect of Marathi-Konkani, were transcribed into English. These elaborate songs are of psychological and social significance as they provide a release from a sometimes harsh reality, at the same time they are an invaluable cultural document. They have been analyzed from the perspective of Goan folklore as discussed by Phaldesai (2011), the meaning of folkloric narratives (Dundes, 2007) and a reflection on the genre oviyos (Jassal, 2012).
InterDISCIPLINARY Journal of Portuguese Diaspora Studies, 2018
The main aim of this article is to reflect upon the identity of Goan literature in terms of liter... more The main aim of this article is to reflect upon the identity of Goan literature in terms of literary production at home and abroad, i.e., the narratives of authors who live, write and publish in Goa and of migrants abroad who have made Goa a main theme of their work. We define migrant writers as those who have migrated from Goa to other parts of the world or who were born away from Goa but have maintained close ties with the land of their forefathers. We define their literary production as ‘migration literature.
This article analyses the English-language short story “Mand Goes to Church” by the Goan writer S... more This article analyses the English-language short story “Mand Goes to Church” by the Goan writer Selma Carvalho in counterpoint with the Portuguese-language novel Casa Grande e Outras Recordacoes de um Velho Goes [The Great House and Other Memories of an Old Goan] by another Goan writer, Leopoldo da Rocha, and argues that the Indo-Portuguese great house, the casa grande, serves in each as a symbolic space for the conflict-ridden encounter between Portuguese and Indian cultures in Goa during the Portuguese regime in India (1510-1961).
Resumo: O objetivo deste artigo é discutir a rede de narrativas literárias anticoloniais, em part... more Resumo: O objetivo deste artigo é discutir a rede de narrativas literárias anticoloniais, em particular, contos e poemas, de escritores indianos, goeses e portugueses que apareceram no jornal de esquerda goês, Free Goa, publicado em Bombaim [Mumbai] nas décadas de 1950 e 1960, em um momento em que os Freedom Fighters de Goa procuravam o apoio da Índia para alcançar a sua independência da dominação colonial portuguesa. Seguindo Jean Paul Sartre (1949) e Benôit Denis (2000), afirmamos que essas obras literárias podem ser lidas como literatura engajada, já que em estilos literários elaborados ou simples e direitos encorajam os goeses a buscar inspiração na Independência da Índia de dominação britânica (1947), assim como libertar-se do regime salazarista.Palavras-chave: rede literária; Free Goa; contos; poemas; literatura engajada: The aim of this paper is to consider the web of anticolonial literary narratives, short stories and poems, by Indian, Goan and Portuguese writers which appea...
The aim of this paper is to analyze in counterpoint a selection of short stories from Monsoon and... more The aim of this paper is to analyze in counterpoint a selection of short stories from Monsoon and poems from Surya, both collections written by Vimala Devi, in light of theories concerning the intersection of trauma, narrative, and the postcolonial. This approach permits an understanding of effects produced by colonialism such as dispossession, forced migration, diaspora, segregation, racism, and political violence (Craps and Buelens 3). My analysis is carried out from a culture-bound perspective (3), which considers each case of colonial and postcolonial trauma not only as having its own singularities, but also as producing effects on the colonized cultures at both a personal (Caruth) and collective level (Rothberg). Also, we consider some of the singularities of the colonial situation in Goa (Santos). For the contrastive analysis between poems and short stories, in terms of the condition of the Goan elite and subaltern (Fernandes, "Recovering"; Citizenship), we consider Devi´s rendition of the pastoral (Alpers) as well as her use of some elements of Portuguese Neo-Realism (Lourenço; Gama). The article is divided into the following sections: "The End of an Era, " about the trauma caused by the end of Portuguese presence in Goa; "Some Other Kind of Living, " about the way in which Goans had to adapt to the new circumstances; "What Went Wrong?" on the condition of the Goan subalterns; and the last section, "Devi´s Answer to Trauma, " about Devi´s way of dealing with the painful divisions at the heart of Goan society.
This article considers the literary network of anti-colonial literary narratives, short stories, ... more This article considers the literary network of anti-colonial literary narratives, short stories, and poems, by Indian, Goan, and Portuguese writers which appeared in the 1950s and 1960s in the left-wing Goan journal Free Goa, published in Bombay (now Mumbai) at a time when Goa’s freedom fighters were seeking India’s support in order to attain their independence from Portuguese colonial domination. Following Jean-Paul Sartre (1949) and Benoît Denis (2000), we claim that these literary works can be read as engaged literature since in elaborate or straightforward literary styles they urge Goans to look for inspiration in India’s independence from British domination (1947) and to free themselves from the Salazarist regime.
Goa, India, is a multicultural community with a broad archive of literary narratives in Konkani, ... more Goa, India, is a multicultural community with a broad archive of literary narratives in Konkani, Marathi, English and Portuguese. While Konkani in its Devanagari version, and not in the Roman script, has been Goa’s official language since 1987, there are many other narratives in Marathi, the neighbor state of Maharashtra, in Portuguese, legacy of the Portuguese presence in Goa since 1510 to 1961, and English, result of the British colonization of India until 1947. This situation already reveals that there is a relationship among these languages and cultures that at times is highly conflictive at a political, cultural and historical level. In turn, they are not separate units but are profoundly interrelated in the sense that histories told in one language are complemented or contested when narrated in the other languages of Goa. One way to relate them in a meaningful dialogue is through a common metaphor that, at one level, will help us expand our knowledge of the points in common an...
O objetivo deste artigo e discutir a singularidade literaria de Love and Longing in Bombay (1997)... more O objetivo deste artigo e discutir a singularidade literaria de Love and Longing in Bombay (1997), do escritor indiano Vikram Chandra, levando em conta a maneira como o autor relaciona os generos literarios da tradicao inglesa com a cultura hindu atraves do conceito de darshana, ou visao de mundo
RESUMO: Este artigo traz uma discussao da centralidade do genero conto na literatura indiana hoje... more RESUMO: Este artigo traz uma discussao da centralidade do genero conto na literatura indiana hoje no seu trânsito entre as diferentes linguas do subcontinente: as linguas vernaculas, o ingles vernaculo e o ingles da diaspora. Para melhor entender essas narrativas, em um primeiro momento e feita uma contextualizacao dessa tradicao literaria para melhor apreciar as manifestacoes do genero. Logo, o artigo traz uma breve historiografia do genero na India, levando em conta que ele e o resultado da relacao entre a tradicao indiana pre-colonial e a tradicao inglesa, apos tres seculos de colonizacao. Por ultimo, a discussao foca-se em alguns aspectos formais do genero nas linguas regionais desde que muitas vezes, por nao se encaixar no paradigma esperado, lhes e negado valor literario e exposicao internacional. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: conto – literatura indiana – linguas vernaculas ABSTRACT: This article discusses the relevance of the genre “short story” in the Indian literary tradition, taking int...
The aim of this paper is to analyze the life narratives “Where have All the Songs and Rituals Gon... more The aim of this paper is to analyze the life narratives “Where have All the Songs and Rituals Gone?” (2019) by Mozinha Fernandes and “A Velip Writes Back” (2019) by Priyanka Velip, members of the Adivasi community of Goa, who consider themselves as the first inhabitants of this Indian state. These narratives have been published in the blog “Hanv Konn. Who am I? Researching the Self ” organized by the late professor from the University of Goa, Alito Siqueira, whose aim is to give voice to this marginalized and silenced community. The analysis will be done in terms of the concepts of Postmemory (Hirsch, 1996, 1997, 2008), Trauma (Ginzburg, 2008; Balaev, 2008), Narrative (Bruner, 2002; Coracini, 2007), and Life-narratives (Smith & Watson, 2010).
The aim of this article is to make a critical reading of thenovella The Home and the World (1915)... more The aim of this article is to make a critical reading of thenovella The Home and the World (1915), by RabindranathTagore, focusing on the emancipation of Bengal and the newrole of women at the beginning of the twentieth century duringthe Swadeshi movement: the boycott to English goods to backup Indian industry after the arbitrary division of Bengal byLord Curzon (1905). This discussion is based on Tagore’s book onNationalism (1917) as well as Walter Benjamin’s considerationson allegory (1928).
O objetivo deste artigo é considerar o processo de criação literária, conforme recriado pelo escr... more O objetivo deste artigo é considerar o processo de criação literária, conforme recriado pelo escritor Rohinton Mistry, em seu conto “Swimming lessons”. O deslocamento da personagem principal da Índia para o Canadá lhe permite transformar suas memórias do lar em tema de ficção e assim cruzar fronteiras culturais. Desta maneira, a literatura torna-se um espaço de reflexão no qual a personagem pode considerar a sua situação na diáspora.
Uploads