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R Benedito Ferrão
R Benedito Ferrão : Thinking Goa
Postcolonially
Countryside and rice paddies, South of Goa. Photo by Adam Jones
adamjones.freeservers.com
A Small Place of Different Worlds
There are multiple languages, dialects, scripts, religions, castes, races,
colonisers, and diasporas to contend with in considering the different
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worlds of Goa. Among other languages, literature by Goans appears in
Marathi, Portuguese, English, and the state’s official language of
Devanagari-scripted Konkani. However, Konkani is also written in the
Roman script, and even in Perso-Arabic, Kannada, and Malayalam along
the Konkan coast, evidencing cultural and linguistic connections to other
regions. And as a challenge to the idea that conversion meant that Hindus
alone were made Catholic by the Portuguese, history reminds that in 1510
Afonso de Albuquerque rounded up the widows of Adil Shah’s soldiers, and
had the Muslim women christened so he could marry them to the men of
“his fleet … These baptized brides were to become the first recipients of
Portuguese culture in Goa” (Sinha 2001: 20). This Early Modern miscegeny
aside, Indo-Portuguese interraciality was not commonplace (de Souza
2007: 236, 239-242) and, as Margaret Mascarenhas’ novel Skin proffers,
the presence of African slaves in colonial Goa expands interracial
possibilities in the enclave beyond the white-Asian binary. Then, there are
the diasporas, which extend the Goan presence into once Portuguese
colonies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; into former British India and,
from there, into other erstwhile colonies such as East Africa and thereafter
the Commonwealth nations; and, in recent history, the Middle East to
cover but a few areas from where stories of and by Goans are told outside
their homeland. Yes, there are all these different worlds that constitute
India’s tiniest state; even within this, the question persists of whether Goa
can really be thought of as “postcolonial” if its decolonisation in 1961 was
the result of an Indian takeover that subsumed Goan self-emancipation.
The concept of Goan identity as being historically ambivalent, preceding
colonisation even, is reflected in Goa: A Daughter’s Story, when Maria
Aurora Couto says that “[i]t is difficult to put a finger on [its] exact nature”
(2004: 300). Conspicuously, Couto’s book contextualizes Goan history from
her heteropatriarchal positionality as a member of an elite Catholic
Brahmin family. Insomuch as this is the case, the author does recall her
father’s pluralistic view that “the Portuguese only added a dimension to
what is essentially Goan” and that, to her,
Goa is a seamless whole created by succeeding waves of
settlers who came upon the haunting beauty of red earth crisscrossed by rivers, bordered by the Arabian Sea, a land fertile
and salubrious, where they camped, traded, planted, built, and
where each left an imprint to enrich its intrinsic beauty and
character ... [C]ultures from across the ghats and beyond the
seas have clearly contributed to ... a society that is
cosmopolitan in its rootedness. (2004: 74)
While it should account more for those indigenous groups that are Goa’s
First Peoples – the Dhangars, Velips, Gawdas, and Kunbis – Couto’s
description merges the fixity of land with identity in flux. It interprets
otherness and multiplicity as being integral to Goanness. This portrayal
also makes apparent the palimpsests between homeland and diaspora in
the ethos of Goan identity, as Goa is presented both as a region of origin
and reception. In this, there is nothing unique about the Goan condition,
for several other lands and peoples with a history of colonisation and
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displacement have seen similar influences. Where Goa does stand out is in
having one of the longest colonial histories in the world; therein, its status
as a previously Portuguese dominion offers an epistemological terrain that
diverges from usual postcolonial thought, as I will discuss.
In African Independence from Francophone and Anglophone Voices, Clara
Tsabedze appeals for “[f]urther comparative studies focussing on the
development of literature in those countries that have followed different
paths to independence, for example the lusophone nations of Africa
(Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Cape Verde, and Sao Tomé)” (1994:
146). What Tsabedze alludes to in calling for more complexity in the study
of the literary traditions of Luso-Africa, and especially in reference to
decolonisation, is the necessity to move away from the overdependence on
Anglo-centrism in postcolonial thought. Where Goa invigorates the field is
not only because of Portuguese colonialism but, through that avenue, its
connection with Africa, for instance.
Through the incorporation of literatures and histories of geographies
beyond national borders, Tsabedze’s proposition is amplified by allowing for
more cross-pollinated perspectives on post/coloniality. As an example,
Mascarenhas’ novel Skin enmeshes its Goan characters, several of whom
are interracial, in multiple diasporic, colonial, and postcolonial
multiculturalisms, thus dislocating Goan subjectivity from any sense of
homogenous national belonging. Skin explores racialized and gendered
dominance as the contiguities of imperial and native patriarchies through
the generational repetition of physical traits, such as green eyes and
missing nipples, which mark the bodies of women as an archive of
historical violence. The novel envisages a different relationship between
Asia, Africa, and Europe through religious and cultural historiography by
enveloping the legend of Kimpa Vita, or Dona Beatrice, a seventeenth and
eighteenth century Angolan/Kongolese prophetess (Mascarenhas 2001:
11). In Mascarenhas’ novel it is a descendant of Dona Beatrice’s who is
enslaved and brought to Goa by the Portuguese, continuing on the
traditions of the past in the new land (95-96). The novel’s treatment of
African Goan identity allows for a trans-cartographic and transhistorical
perspective on race through religion, all the while centring the lives of
women.
Though unconnected by cartography, colonial policies, population
movements, and the stories of these phenomena furnish the connective
tissue between colonies, as well as colonies and the metropole.
Undoubtedly, British colonisation also connects South Asia and Africa, but
not only does Goa provide a vantage point from which an Afro-Asiatic
post/colonial nexus might be gauged, but also associations between
colonialisms because Goa occupied a liminal position between the
Portuguese and British empires. Between Empires is, incidentally, the title
of Rochelle Pinto’s book where she argues of the subjectivity of
predominantly elite Catholics that “[t]here were at least two spheres of
interaction through which [these] Goans were inserted into a racialized
colonial discourse: one of these, obviously, is the presence of the colonial
state in Goa, and the other, the circulation of Goans through other
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Portuguese colonies” (2007: 17). That “[a]s with the Church, the Goan
elite used print to protest against racial discrimination at home,” jarred
with how “they produced descriptive and ethnographic accounts to insert
themselves into a favourable position in racial hierarchies in Africa” (ibid).
In addition to demonstrating the use of textuality in constructing Goan
identities between the homeland and the diaspora in the nineteenth
century, Pinto importantly denotes how
[t]he predominantly upper caste Catholic Goan intelligentsia
was accustomed to a fair degree of mobility within Portugal
and its colonies. Accustomed to holding office in various
colonies, ... and to the workings of [institutionalized] power...,
the Goan elite was probably accustomed to seeing themselves
as prominent, if not equal, citizens of the expansive cultural
milieu that constituted the Portuguese empire. (2007: 16)
In effect, what Pinto demarcates here is a major distinction between British
and Portuguese colonisations and their management of colonial subjects.
While Goans could hold political office in the Portuguese metropolitan
centre, the relationship between the British Empire at large and British
India was not characterised by equivalent practices of non-racialized
mobility and representative government.
Dissimilarities of this nature then require of literary criticism that it takes
approaches which bear in mind that not all post/colonialisms reflect
similarly in their resultant literatures. Compare the nuance Pinto supplies
in her assessment of the Goan elite in a global colonial context to Anand
Patil’s criticism of Os Brahamanes, or The Brahmins, published in 1866.
Reputedly the first novel by a Goan writer, “it was published in Portuguese
in Lisbon” (Patil 1995: 87). Patil describes the author Francisco Louis
Gomes as “an experienced journalist, biographer, and politician, who joined
the opposition party in the Portuguese parliament” (1995: 89). Setting his
novel in British India, Gomes uses the 1857 “Sepoy Mutiny” as backdrop,
but “fails to interpret the 1857 Uprising in the nationalist spirit,” Patil
charges (1995: 94). “His choice of the Irish planter Robert Davis...,” Patil
holds, “[was] meant to please the colonizers...” (91). The colonisers Patil
has in mind are revealed when he notes that “[i]n the nineteenth century,
the British looked down upon the Irish peasant as a ‘white negro’” (ibid).
How curious that Patil should believe that a book in Portuguese was meant
for readership by the English! Besides, the Davis character is not only
Irish, but also Catholic, making it far more likely that Gomes chose the
British Indian locations and the Irish Catholic character to serve an
allegorical purpose for his Portuguese readership, a matter which I shall
return to later.
Through his novel, Patil maintains, “Gomes speaks as a Goan and a
Portuguese. He boasts of his ‘universal standpoint’ and pleads for
humanism ... This dilemma is caused by his two nationalities” (ibid). Patil
is too quick in ascribing to the novelist the semblance of “an adopted child
[who] tried to make European culture his own” (1995: 90). He rightly
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discerns the orientalist bent of Os Brahamanes (1995: 91), and Gomes’
position as being “representative of ‘native intellectuals’” (89) – or what
Ann Stoler labels as “colonial agents” or “subaltern compatriots” (1995: 8).
Nonetheless, following Pinto’s observations of the nineteenth century, Patil
is remiss in believing of the period Gomes lived in, and of a person of his
societal standing, that Goa and Portugal operated then or for the
politician/intellectual as two nations – an impression replete with British
Indian colonial ideology as seen, for instance, with Partition and the
creation in 1947 of Pakistan and India.
Nevertheless, such comparison is not an argument for a retroactive
recuperation of the values of one system of coloniality over another; if
anything, it is not impossible to see how Portuguese colonial practices of
representational government underscored the privileges of the native elite
and employed them collusively within structures of imperial power. The
theme of “the relations of hierarchy among the different European
colonialisms” is taken up by Boaventura de Sousa Santos in his essay
‘Between Prospero and Caliban’ where he observes that British colonialism
should be seen as “the norm ... in relation to which the contours of
Portuguese colonialism get defined as a subaltern colonialism” (2002: 11).
Certainly, the British did supersede their other European counterparts in
the global sway they held in the imperial arena. Yet, de Sousa Santos, in
using the language of subaltern studies, does so to eclipse the subaltern
colonised themselves while attempting to reduce Portugal to the status of
“an ‘informal colony’ of England” (ibid).
Even in its eventual subjugated position, what has to be taken into
consideration is that Portuguese colonisation continued to benefit from its
associations with the British Empire, and not least through such colonial
subjects as Goans who were a living bridge between Portuguese and
British India, as well as between the Indies and colonised Africa. Selma
Carvalho finds that Goans “enjoyed their status as a distinct nationality in
[British] East Africa ... based on them being Portuguese nationals and
Catholics” (2010: 97). As its power waned, Portugal was able to hold on to
some semblance of its former imperial self through the Goan diaspora in
Africa for, as Carvalho opines, the Portuguese were “ever vigilant not to
give the slightest credence to the notion that Goans and Indians were
connected” (2010: 98). In upholding the difference of Goans versus
Indians in East Africa, British colonial law benefitted by creating a labour
pool of civil servants (Carvalho 2010: 96). These selected Goans were
meant to be exemplary, a model minority in comparison to the Indians
they were set apart from and, more pointedly, native Africans. Though in
genesis a British policy, it also reified Portugal’s power to create and
recreate colonial identities and, in so doing, colluded with such imperial
design.
What the preceding distinguishes is the interdependence of colonial
systems along with the imbrication of colonial subjects in the perpetuation
of hegemony. Still, this does not mean that resistance does not occur. Patil
believes that Os Brahamanes “[imitates] the colonizers’ generic repertory
to preserve that hegemony” (1995: 87-88), which undermines the
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possibility that the novel could have been resistant to colonial practices in
any form. Why then might Gomes, for all the flaws Patil picks out in his
novel, choose an Irish Catholic character but to potentially communicate to
his Portuguese readership the similar minoritization between Goans in the
Portuguese realm and the Irish in Britain? Patil eschews a consideration of
this probable indication, instead citing Gomes’ reliance on European
literary traditions and its “stalwarts,” among whom he names Alexandre
Dumas (90).
Again, Patil misses another conceivable way to view Goan literature from a
postcolonial lens other than the Anglo-centric one he privileges. Even
though gesturing at European literature, Patil never veers far from thinking
of that canon as being either shaped by British literary tropes or geared
toward audiences of that provenance; he also monolithically reads Europe
as white. Dumas, the French writer, was not only half-black – his mother
had been a slave – but one of his most famous novels has a Goan
connection. Pinto records that “José Custodio de Faria ... became a
prominent hypnotist in France ... and is said to have inspired the persona
of Abbé Faria, the prisoner in the Chateau d’If in Alexandre Dumas’ The
Count of Monte Cristo” (2007: 17).
Rather unconvincingly, Patil identifies Gomes’ “inferiority complex” as being
“born of his choice of the Portuguese language” (90). Indeed, as Jamaica
Kincaid asks so provocatively in A Small Place of the limits of colonial
language and the ability of the colonised to express themselves in it: “For
isn’t it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is
the language of the criminal who committed the crime?” (1988: 31).
Counterpose Kincaid’s striking sentiment against Salman Rushdie’s claim
that “[f]or some Indian critics, English-language Indian writing will never
be more than a post-colonial anomaly, the bastard child of Empire ...
[F]orever inauthentic” (2002: 148). Not only does Rushdie seek to
challenge claims of authenticity by postulating that English be considered
Indian, but also that English has been subverted, hybridized, bastardized,
and forever changed because of its colonial associations. It is arguable that
this is even more so with the Portuguese language which was shared
between metropole and colonies, such as Goa, which had no national
distinction despite geographic distance. Brazilian Portuguese serves as a
particularly apt example in proving how colonisation dramatically changes
language.
It is undeniable that language has long been a source of consternation for
how Goan identity and its literary traditions are indexed. The writer and
translator Vidya Pai asserts that “[t]he oppressive linguistic policies of the
Portuguese rulers in the sixteenth century ensured that Konkani
disappeared from the public sphere in Goa ... A language thus
marginalized by history’s tide could hardly boast of any creative literature
of note” (2013: 55-56). Pai then avers that “[i]t was only after Goa was
liberated in 1961, after the Sahitya Akademi recognized Konkani as an
independent Indian language and it was included in the eight schedule of
the Constitution, that creative writing received impetus…” (56). Though Pai
chronicles the recognition of Konkani as Goa’s state language, she fails to
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say that only a single script – Devanagari – was officially acknowledged,
despite a history to the contrary. Further, Pai posits the decolonisation of
Goa as the pivotal moment that effects the flowering of a heretofore
colonially repressed literary tradition; nowhere is the irony expressed that
the postcolonial state had exerted its own suppression of a multiplicity of
linguistic expressions by refusing to officially recognize them.
Discounting all literature prior to 1961 as Pai does partakes of the
postcolonial state’s vision of a limited ambit of Goa, Goan identity, and the
literary traditions of Goa’s worlds by cathecting them to the Indian nationstate rather than the other trajectories that Goa has followed. In writing
about her translation of Mahableshwar Sail’s Yug Sanvaar - or Age of
Frenzy published in 2004 - Pai highlights how the Konkani writer uses
colonial era “religious conversion, the migration of communities and the
excesses of the Inquisition...” in Goa as “the three main planks on which
the novel rests” (2013: 59). The translator avouches that Sail’s novel
“called for much research into the historical and sociological accounts of
the period” and that “Yug Sanvaar testifies to Sail’s mature handling of a
turbulent period of Goan history, of interest to Konkani Hindus ... and to
Konkani Christians in search of their roots” (60). As much as the novel and
its translation may try to postcolonially recast all Goan identity as
sprouting from common roots, it can only do so by sidestepping Goa’s
Muslim heritage and its other worlds, while simultaneously upholding a
Brahmanical hierarchy of an allegedly Hindu-only Goa.
“[C]an a way be found to make what happened not have happened?”
Kincaid asks rhetorically (1988: 32). To think Goa postcolonially is to
grapple with “what happened” in all of its ambiguities and complexities. In
a conference report about his work on an anthology of Goan literature, first
published in 1983 as a special issue of the Journal of South Asian
Literature and re-released in 2010 as Pivoting on the Point of Return:
Modern Goan Literature, Peter Nazareth concludes with the evocative
statement: “It was a house with many rooms” (2013). What can be educed
from this is the function of criticism that addresses Goan literature to serve
as an analytics of the homeland and its many worlds, as well as the many
worlds in which Goans have found home. Thinking Goa postcolonially is to
see a place small enough to contain worlds of difference.
Bibliography
Carvalho, Selma. 2010, Into the Diaspora Wilderness, Saligao and Panjim,
Goa 1556 and Broadway Publishing House.
Couto, Maria Aurora. 2004, Goa: A Daughter’s Story, New Delhi, Penguin
Books India.
de Sousa Santos, Boaventura. 2002 ‘Between Prospero and Caliban:
Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Inter-identity’ in Luso-Brazilian Review
39.2, pp 9-42.
de Souza, Teotónio R. 2007 ‘Portuguese Impact upon Goa: Lusotopic,
Lusophonic, Lusophilic?’ in Creole Societies in the Portuguese Colonial
Empire (eds Philip J. Havik and Malyn Newitt) University of Bristol, Bristol,
pp 235-250.
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Kincaid, Jamaica. 1988, A Small Place, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Mascarenhas, Margaret. 2001, Skin, New Delhi, Penguin Books.
Pai, Vidya. 2013 ‘A Saga of a Frenzied Age: Mahabaleshwar Sail’s Yug
Sanvaar’ in 50 Writers, 50 Books: The Best of Indian Fiction (eds Pradeep
Sebastian and Chandra Siddan) Harper Collins Publishers India, Noida, pp
55-60.
Patil, Anand. 1995 ‘Colonial and Post/Neo-colonial Discourse in Two Goan
Novels: A Fanonian Study’ in Ariel: A Review of International English
Literature 26.4, pp 87-112.
Pinto, Rochelle. 2007, Between Empires: Print and Politics in Goa, New
Delhi, Oxford University Press.
Rushdie, Salman. 2002, Step Across this Line: Collected Nonfiction
1992-2002, New York, Random House.
Sinha, Arun. 2001, Goa Indica: A Critical Portrait of Postcolonial Goa, New
Delhi, Bibliophile South Asia and Promilla & Company Publishers.
Stoler, Ann Laura. 1995, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s
History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham, Duke
University Press.
Tsabedze, Clara. 1994, African Independence from Francophone and
Anglophone Voices: A Comparative Study of the Post-Independence Novels
by Ngugi and Sembène, New York, Peter Lang Publishing Incorporated.
Nazareth, Peter. ‘Editing an Anthology of Goan Literature.’ Confluence,6
Apr 2013. Date of access – 10 May 2013.
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