Roland <[email protected]> wrote: > Great Augusto, > Make it a Hardtalk kind of thing. > Selma has been having it too easy. Give her a good old fashioned > metaphorical rub down. > Will look forward to it.
One lacuna seems to plague most Goan writing about its diaspora. That is, it comes across as a narration of a series of stories primarily of those who emerged as heroes (there are few, if any, heroines). The stories are presented as if Goan migration has no historical context, no reasons for it happening on such a large scale, and no push or pull factors. It almost appears as if Catholic Goans migrated en masse of their own volition and without any external pressures. (This large-scale migration had sharp consequences to the community as a whole, both outside Goa and within. Including, for instance, reducing themselves to a minority in their homeland of Goa as a whole circa 1925, intense language loss, sudden affluence and its complications, continued migration even further ashore over later generations, &c) How can we understand Goan migration to Pakistan without understanding British colonial policy in the Sind, or the "stationing" of British troops in colonial Goa during the Napoleonic wars? Or, Goan migration to Burma without setting it against the background of the Anglo-Burma wars, all of them? In the case of Goan migration to East Africa, the issues of (i) the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1878 and its relationship with the large-scale immiserisation of Goans (ii) English language education in parts of coastal Bardez (iii) and British colonial policy in Africa after Berlin, which would seem to be intricately connected with this story. Likewise, the impact of Republican Rule in Portugal (and its link with, say, the opening up of English medium education in Goa -- as seen at Parra and Saligao around 1910-1912 plus other factors which led to the launching of more English-medium schools around the mid-1940s) might also be relevant here. Selma might say that this all is beyond the scope of her book, which is primarily a set of pictorialised biographies of the achievers and winners in that region. But, without the background, these stories would be obviously less complete. To be fair, this is not a criticism of this work alone. I'm not sure why these aspects don't get covered -- whether it's the apolitical nature of the Goan community in general, or whether we think it could just cut into (and unwittingly counter) the very narrative that is sought to be built up. FN PS: If I recall right, Marshall had asked somewhere online (Facebook?) whether there were any Goan butchers in East Africa... or was that used just to make the title sound good? To reply a part of Thalmann's question on the Goa Book Club, from what I've read Goan bakers were quite prominent in the Goan community in Bombay in the 18th/19th centuries (if I got the time-frame right). This is going by the writings of Dr Teresa Albuquerque in *Goan Pioneers in Bombay*. As entrepreneurs, some very apparently very affluent and did well for themselves. -- _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ _/ _/ Frederick Noronha | http://about.me/noronhafrederick | http://goa1556.in _/ P +91-832-2409490 M 9822122436 Twitter @fn Facebook: fredericknoronha _/ Goa,1556 CC shared audio content https://archive.org/details/goa1556 _/ _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
