*Dom Moraes apparently wrote the review below (needs to be verified)... FN*
*Goan exile: in search of an identity* Somebody recently sent me a slim paperback called "A Kind of Absence: Life in the Shadow of History". The author has a very melodious name. João da Veiga Coutinho, and the blurb tells me that he was born in Margão, but now lives in Philadelphia. He would seem to be a fairly elderly person, and to have traveled widely in the course of his career. The book is very difficult to describe. On the surface it is a collection of essays and fragmentary prose pieces, but they do not seem to be particularly connected in terms of chronology. What connects them is that they are all to do with the theme of exile. The theme interests me. Wherever I have lived I have felt an exile, and this would worry me less if I knew from where. The book is about a specific kind of exile: the exile of Goans from their homeland. The author seems obsessive about the great numbers of Goans who have traveled, and in many cases settled, in other countries, and he seems to find this a unique phenomenon. I don’t think it is at all. I have spent the last few months traveling through India in search of a book, and in every state I have visited there is a long history of people who have gone abroad to better their fortunes in one way or another. Two Asian countries, the two largest, China and India, are like this. They have continually been overpopulated, in the sense that they have always had populations too large to be sustained by the resources and available technologies of the time. So people left their birthplaces, at first to look for a life somewhere else in the country, then, as travel became possible, to look for it overseas. Wherever one goes in the world today one sees Chinese faces, or some indications of Chinese blood; in many places one sees Indians. Where in India they come from is irrelevant. The numbers that have left Punjab probably equal the numbers that have left Kerala. That Goa has a monopoly on exiles is simply not true. The Indian subcontinent has been left by millions of people over the last two centuries. But Mr. Coutinho also inquires into the components of an exile, particularly a Goan exile, and he seems to take himself as an example. He says that his childhood memories of Goa are sharp. He recollects the kinds of plants he saw, or smelt, or touched. But he tells us that he now cannot describe them, since throughout his schooldays, presumably under the Portuguese, he was forbidden to use the Konkani words which to him were the natural names for various kinds of flora and fauna. Some part of this book is well conceived, but it is also confused, and it uses too many words to describe what, when it comes down to it, are relatively simple ideas. However, it is a book deeply committed to itself, and some part of it is very well written. There are several ways to look at Goan history, most of which Mr. Coutinho refutes. What he cannot refute comes down to the simple fact that Goa is a small place, and that for much of its history it was situated on islands, like Bombay before the British. It was therefore more or less cut off from the more important events on the mainland, or they affected it at a second hand. Any event that affected Goa directly, like the Portuguese invasion and occupation, naturally had a more powerful effect on the people that it might have done on the mainland. This produced some curious results. Goan Hindus submitted to conversion but retained their original casts, almost like Talismans. Goan Christianity had other unique features, amongst them the fact that it was practised with slight local differences from village to village, as Hinduism had been. The territory drifted rudderless for four centuries under Portuguese rule, and during this time many people left it for unmysterious reasons, like the need for employment. In 1961 the mainland once more directly affected Goa, this time by the Indian occupation or liberation or whatever one wants to call it. This has had some fortunate effects and some which are far from fortunate. A great influx of people from the mainland has caused the state to lose the identity it acquired through four centuries of colonisation, the only real identity it had ever had. It has not yet acquired a wholly Indian identity. If and when it does, it will be like any other small Indian state, allowing for local idiosyncrasies. The whole reason for Mr. Coutinho’s quixotic quest will disappear. Many people have commented on the fact that Goans have a strong sense of their homeland, which is why so many of them return to it. These remarks have been prompted by the decisions of the two famous and sophisticated Goans to live in the state they were born. Mario Miranda went back to his ancestral house at Loutolim, Frank Simões built a beautiful villa at Candolim. Many other Goans have returned home with less publicity, and of course many other people non-Goans have chosen to live there of late, because it is a pleasant place to live. All over India and the world there are Punjabis who want to retire to Punjab, Keralites who want to go home. It is a very Indian trait to want to end your life where you started it. In fact, the modern Indian urban population is still close to its rural roots. People still want to identify with the village of their ancestors. It is worth note the memories of village life that called Miranda and Simões back to Goa, and which seem to inspire Mr. Coutinho in his search for the identity of the Goan exile. But judging from what I saw when I was in Goa last November, soon even the villages may have vanished. *Panjim, Goa* February 14, 1999 The above review appeared in the February 14, 1999 edition of The Herald, Goa. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Goa-Research-Net" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/goa-research-net/CAMCR53%2BV2oXM4XKjo4L%2By0BZwyE5Fei4PLoWA7q8HntRoeRo2Q%40mail.gmail.com.
