This review appeared in The Hindu Sunday Magazine on April 4.
Apparent divide, actual bridges
Blurb: The stereotypes imposed upon Goa and its people by Hindi cinema,
charter tourism, and fanatical Indianisers are all dispelled by Maria Aurora
Couto's treatment. A review by Ranjit Hoskote.
MARIA AURORA COUTO’s Goa: A Daughter’s Story is an extraordinary narrative
that weaves together autobiography and collective history, bringing to light
a rich social and cultural tapestry little known outside its locus. Couto
takes, as her demanding subject, the complex story of the Goan identity as a
product of the colonial encounter between the Indic and Iberian cultures,
launched by this circumstance on a trajectory distinct from his neighbours
in British-ruled India.
Goa and its people have long had to suffer the foolish stereotypes imposed
upon them by Hindi cinema, charter tourism, and fanatical Indianisers: the
pernicious myths of the easy-going Goan drunkard, Goa as a kingdom of sun
and sand, Goan culture as a European aberration in an Indian environment,
are all dispelled by Couto’s treatment, which is distinguished by an
elegance and sensitivity, a felicity of touch that masks the labour of
archival research and fieldwork.
Couto’s inquiry leads her into the records of the Portuguese colonial
administration, the reminiscences of the fast-vanishing generation of
mandarins, scholars and activists who grew up in colonial Goa. She
re-creates vividly for us the lives of thinkers inspired by the drama that
was the European Enlightenment. She imparts a flesh-and-blood reality to the
generic bugaboo of “conversion”, attesting to the strategic, yet traumatic,
choices made by communities faced with the Hobsonian inquisitor’s choice
between preservation of religious identity and loss of social and economic
prestige.
The title of Couto’s book holds its key gesture: the author speaks as the
inheritor of various legacies, heirloom dilemmas, family tragedies, and
sources of hope and regeneration. It is both a meditation on the
persistences and lacunae of collective memory, and also a compelling account
of the development of a private self through the momentous passage from
colonialism to the post-colonial period.
As her father’s daughter, Couto paints a moving portrait of her father, a
man devoted to the refinement of sensibility, but at odds with conventional
society; she memorialises the graceful, vanished milieu of cultivated
intellectuals and gifted artists in Goa and Dharwar, where she grew up
during the 1950s.
As the daughter of a particular community, whose way of life was forever
altered by the arrival of the Portuguese in 1510 A.D., Couto reflects on the
Saraswat Brahmins of Goa, descendants of Kashmiri scholar-priests who became
influential landowners and mandarins, and were locked into a complicated
sequence of negotiations with the Portuguese colonialists.
By contrast to the simple-minded tale of ruthless conquistadors thrusting
sword and cross upon hapless locals, Couto unfolds an intricate fabric of
social and religious transactions, demonstrating how concessions alternated
with impositions, force was succeeded by relative tolerance; and if
conversion to Catholicism was used as a basis to divide Hindu families by
the colonial administration, through differentials of property transfer,
those who remained unconverted and marginalised staged a comeback through
the espousal of trade.
One lasting result of this uneven rhythm of upheaval and tranquillity was
that, between the 16th and 18th Centuries, one section of Goa’s Saraswat
Brahmin elite converted to the Catholic faith, while others crossed the
river into North and South Kanara, or sailed to Kerala, or migrated to the
Maratha territories, to preserve their religious freedom in exile.
Sharing Couto’s ethnic background as I do (her ancestors remained behind and
were baptised; my ancestors crossed the river with their gods), I am amazed
at the honesty and courage with which she has chosen to address the theme of
conversion, in a public sphere dominated by the forces of aggressive
majoritarianism. Living at the cusp of twinned religious and cultural
narratives, Couto investigates the processes of self-definition and
self-renewal, in response to the historical crises of migration, invasion,
conversion and flight.
With her, we trace the gradual assimilation of the Catholic Saraswat Brahmin
into the Portuguese language and European world-view; the Hindu Saraswat
Brahmin’s slower entry, shadowed by insecurity, into that world; the
changing positions of the Portuguese as the notion of divinely sanctioned
kingship yielded before a humanist conception of the body politic. And so we
come to an appreciation of the distinctive character of Goan culture, in
which the major divides are also the most enduring bridges.
In conversation with Couto, Dr. Xencora Camotim (the name is a Lusitanian
version of Shankar Kamat), an erudite Margao advocate now resident in
Lisbon, offers what the author calls a “profound, humane and existential”
judgment of this vexed history. “Two hundred years of tragic drama: we
should not simplify the choices made by our ancestors, yours and mine, under
the exigencies of the time,” says Dr. Camotim. “And you ask me how Hindus
survived then? Did not Catholics survive the Moors in Spain? Each such
interaction between cultures, empires, conflicting powers, has to be seen in
the right historical perspective. Why is there religious persecution in
India now, when there are no colonisers around?”
Couto’s powers of description appeal to the senses: she evokes the
breathtaking landscape of green paddy fields touching the blue of sky and
river; the mango and jackfruit trees, heavy with fruit in summer; the deep
maroon tiled floors; the laterite pillars and sloping monsoonal roofs. But
she never loses sight of the tense interactions between individuals and
classes, from which the fabric of history is woven: her book traces the
transactions between scholar-landowner elite and subaltern peasant, between
colonial administrators and local grandees, bigot and reformer, inquisitor
and convert.
She never dismisses the violence and confusion attendant upon the colonial
encounter; at the same time, she sets it within the context of the Buddhist,
Jaina and Brahminical pasts, the Mauryan, Kadamba, Vijayanagara and Bahmani
ascendancies. This has the effect of relating Goa to South Asia’s
macro-level processes, without leaving it isolated as a dazzling but
inexplicable pendant.
Couto graphs the entry of Goa into the Indian Union through a dramatic
personal account. Having grown up in Dharwar, she found herself cast as both
insider and outsider to her ancestral homeland in September 1962, when she
accompanied her husband, Alban Couto, then a young and idealistic Indian
Administrative Service (IAS) officer, into a Goa newly “liberated” from
Portuguese rule.
She relives a fraught situation in which Goans and Indians regarded one
another with mutual suspicion; a time when realities, long dreamt of,
arrived bearing the menacing edge of weaponry, when the dreams of local
nationalists were shattered by the cynical arrogance of a liberating power
that was often as imperial in its instincts as the regime it had deposed.
Nehru’s use of armed intervention summoned forth criticism at home and
overseas, not least from the wily Salazar, long-lived dictator of Portugal,
who argued that, since Goa was a province of Portugal and its residents
Portuguese citizens, India had invaded a sovereign nation. Indeed, Couto
shows how Goan nationalism, cut adrift by Congress’s refusal to intervene in
non-British-ruled India, was informed by its own distinctive dynamic. This
evolved from the hopes raised by the revolutionary formation of the
Portuguese republic in 1910, and the thwarting of those hopes by Salazar’s
1930 Acto Colonial. The Goan liberation struggle originated within this
Iberian context, although it was acted out, as elsewhere in colonial South
Asia, both in Gandhian and violent avatars.
Indeed, Couto’s major contribution in this book is to show how both bigotry
and reform rose from the Portuguese colonial system, as the poison and the
nectar did from the Cosmic Ocean. Her book is to be cherished for its
account of what might be called a Lusophone modernity in India: as very few
people realise, the Enlightenment arrived and established itself in Goa, via
Portuguese and French sources, well before it did in British-influenced
India. Couto’s is a work of clarification in the most affirmative sense:
instead of merely dismantling stereotypes and debunking myth-mongers, she
dwells in rich and significant detail on the submerged history, the
little-known threads of exchanges through which an ecumene was mobilised in
Goa.
The principal figure in this story is the Marquis de Pombal, a celebrated
European statesman who was influenced by the philosophes of the
Enlightenment, and served as Prime Minister to Dom Jose I of Portugal. He
inaugurated a humanist modernity throughout the Portuguese empire; his Law
of Equality (1761) and Instructions (1774) gave the rights of citizenship
and representation to all subjects, including Goans. He upheld customary
usages and institutions in Goa, reduced anti-Hindu discrimination, promoted
education and tolerance, and abolished the colour bar. As a fruit of the
Pombaline vision, Goa is today the only State in India to have a uniform
civil code, which ensures women equal rights of succession, property and
inheritance. Couto’s book originates in the need to explain an identity that
eludes the Procrustean dogmas of language, region, even religion.
But it moves on subtly, from this private need, to suggest a model of how
the fixity of identity can be rejected, in favour of a mobile position. The
self can adopt or reject its inheritances by reference to civilised reason
rather than crude passion; it need not commit itself to pogroms, to
mythologies of resentment and a supposed rectifying of historical wrongs by
violent means that brutalise both self and other. So that the ambiguities of
personal and collective history, which appear at first to be daunting and
debilitating, become enabling and empowering gestures. In a singularly
important antidote to the politics of revanchism and irredentism, Maria
Aurora Couto reminds us that we must accept the complexities of our past and
treat these as enriching points of departure, not obsessive destinations of
return.
(The Hindu has also carried exclusive extracts from the book on the front
page of its Magazine section. The extracts read great. I'm not sure if it
would be a copyright infringement to reproduce them here. -- RKN)
_________________________________________________________________
BharatMatrimony.com. http://www.bharatmatrimony.com/cgi-bin/bmclicks1.cgi?72
The No 1 Indian matrimony.
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