http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/Farewell-the-last-great-Goan-polymath/articleshow/46081674.cms
India lost one of its greatest and most unique scholars when the brightest star in Goa's living intellectual firmament, Dr Jose Pereira, died in New York this week. The 84-year-old had been struggling with Parkinson's disease for some years, his passing marks the end of an era of grand intellectual accomplishments by a series of polymathic Goan geniuses who defined, delineated, and expertly-situated their beloved home culture, and left a monumental impact on the world. Born in 1931 in Bombay to a family from Curtorim, Goa, Pereira belonged to that generation of Goans who committed themselves to the modern Indian project. By nature a classicist, with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge about the roots of civilization and culture, the young prodigy set aside great love for art to pursue a doctorate in deep study of Indology and Sanskrit. But he also mastered Greek and Latin, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, and many other languages in a quest to understand the world that led to countless scholarly articles, and dozens of books on architecture, history, literature, music, theology, and language. Pereira's scholarship was taut and rigorous, his analytical methods yielded no compromise. It is for this reason that his many books, and large body of work on Goa, is without peer—seminal texts like 'Song of Goa: Crown of Mando', 'Baroque Goa', 'Konkani: A Language', and 'Literary Konkani: A Brief History' coolly and carefully lay out the case for Goa's distinct cultural identity, often shored up with stunningly original research and insights far in advance of his contemporaries. Our intellectually-impoverished era has no equivalent to the extraordinary, multifaceted likes of Pereira. But Goa did produce men like him in the past —like Saligao-born artist Francis Newton Souza, who was himself a noteworthy scholar of art history and world religion, with a penchant towards the profane, like Pereira displayed towards the sacred. The two were contemporaries, and what youngsters today call 'frenemies': close to each other for periods, distant at other times. But, both admitted towards the ends of their lives that the shared intellectual intimacy was mutually beneficial. One cultural forebear is Francisco Luis Gomes, who was also spectacularly polyglot (he knew Latin, Konkani, English, Marathi, Italian and Spanish, and wrote his books and essays in Portuguese and French). Born in 1829 in Navelim, Gomes was a brilliant medical doctor, historian, economist, and politician, and also one of the great orators of his time, who represented Goa in the Portuguese Parliament in Lisbon. He wrote one of the first Indian novels, 'Os Brahmanes', in 1866, and argued persuasively for India's independence a full generation before Swami Vivekananda. But the most strikingly apt comparison is with professor D D Kosambi, another brilliant Goan scholar who blazed trails in multiple disciplines, whose work must be reckoned with for many generations to come. Like Pereira, he had an underlying passion for Sanskrit literature and ancient Indian history, even as he undertook visionary work with mind-boggling range: mathematics, statistics, genetics, numismatics, alternative energy theory, and radical political science. Pereira and Kosambi were adamantine scholars, with rare focus on original fieldwork. Their writings on Goa are thus inestimably valuable—Kosambi's assertions about Gaunkari: "this remarkable form of profit-sharing almost unique form of pioneer enterprise", and Pereira's: "first among non-Westerners, Goans adopted Western political institutions, like the parliamentary republic, independent nationhood, anti-colonial insurgence, and political party". Kosambi and Pereira retained deep love for their homeland. In the middle of a scholarly book of research, the former wrote about Goa, "The land itself is one of the most beautiful sights in the world"; while Pereira wistfully remembered his beloved mando as pure poetry, "a file of men dressed in purely Western outfits and a file of women in Indian costumes holding ostrich fans gently swaying back and forth to a melancholic tune". On the walls and ceiling of a side room in the St Joaquim chapel in Borda is perhaps the greatest example of painstaking fresco buono (painting on wet plaster) rendered anywhere in the world in the 20th century. Pereira's greatest artwork, 'Celebration of Food', is a marvelous compendium of Goa's fruits, flowers, vegetables and fish. On one wall is a soaring old cowshed, direct visual quotation from a Sanskrit epic written by Somadeva over 100 years ago. The fresco is easily one of the most significant public artworks in India, but like Pereira himself it lies hidden and almost entirely ignored by the citizens of Goa.
