Title: Who the bleep cares about M. Boyer, tiatre and a cultural evolution?
By Selma Carvalho. Source: Goan Voice UK weekly column at http://www.goanvoice.org.uk/ Full Text: My great-grandfather was called posko-bamon, not because he was adopted nor was he a bamon, but because he was a light touch with the violin, the rebec. In the 1800s, this was an accomplishment more generally acquired by upper-castes, who had time to devote themselves to such leisurely and artistic pursuits. By the time his son, Khaitan Aguiar, the youngest of seven siblings, was born, he realised the entire family was musically gifted and that at least one of them should be given the opportunity to bring this talent to fruition. He enrolled, Khaitan, in a music school. My great-grandfather was M. Boyer's grandfather. Despite the musical inclination of his own off-spring, he could never have imagined that when one of his grandson's passed away, the Chief Minister of Goa, himself would come to pay his respects, scores of tiatrists would form the funeral procession and act as pallbearers, and that the police would be called in to cordon off the people. Boyer's own father, Sebastiao Aguiar, was also a notable personality. Not a celebrity like Boyer but he was well known in Margao for his social activism. He had moved from a fairly comfortable life from the village of Mardol to Margao. The notion of permanent settlement is relatively new to many Goans, especially to those from the hinterlands of Ponda and Sanguem. Up until the advent of the 19th century, movement of Goans from one area to another was quite common, often fleeing the ravages of a flu and cholera epidemic or the impoverishment that followed a failed crop. Perhaps it was one of these circumstances, which prompted Sebastiao to make the move to the more promising region of Margao, where he erected a thatched dwelling to house his family. Here, he established himself as a person of some merit, providing assistance in whatever capacity he could, within the small community. When Bostiao, as he was known, died people lined the streets to pay their respect, a line so long it delayed the funeral cortege from leaving the home at the scheduled time. After his father's demise, Boyer still fairly young, moved to Raia to live with his maternal uncles. My father's earliest memories are of Boyer as a young lad, putting up small plays on makeshift stages in the balcony of our ancestral house. In fact, Boyer's debut performance was a play that opened in our native village of Nuvem. No matter what accolades, he won as a tiatrist, playwright and singer, he maintained his relationship with my grandmother, his aunt, till her death. Often, he would return to our village to celebrate the Mae Dos Pobres feast. In those days, even rarer than a sighting of M.Boyer, was the appearance of a car in the village. There was no tarred road leading up to our house, so he would park it quite a distance away and walk the mucky path to our pale yellow house with its red-tiled roof. Children would gather around the car to study it closely and women would peep through their windows to catch a glimpse of the tiatrist. In the early 1900s, tiatre as an art form was held in much disdain by Goa's caste based social hegemony. It was a society deeply segregated by caste and language. Writing at the turn of the 19th century, Francisco Joao Da Costa, in his column Notas a lapis, parodied Margao society's caste pretensions and their ungainly dalliance with all things Portuguese, particularly the language. In a letter dated 1897, written to the Viscount de Taunay, Costa defended his position and charged that most of the population of Goa spoke a "Portuguese version of Konkani or a Portuguese with a Konkani construction." However difficult the phonetics of this alien language was, to the native Goan elite, speaking in Konkani was abhorrent and almost treacherous. Tiatre was an artistic genre which combined the pathos of Italian opera and the comedy of Burlesque, but because its medium of delivery was Konkani, it came to be shunned by Goa's elite as a plebeian form of entertainment. M. Boyer was not a politically motivated man. It was never his intention to project a political agenda into anything he wrote or portrayed. He did however, inadvertently, propel the aspirations of a large section of Konkani speaking Goans into the limelight. The exceptional quality of his plays meant the elite would often sneak into the tiatre-halls to catch a show. Inevitably when caste rivalries erupted in his home town of Margao or village of Raia, he was often caught in the cross-fire. He once confided to my father, that he considered himself neither a sudhir nor a chardo or bamon, but just the arbitrator for all sides concerned. He was a man ahead of his time, a constant reminder to Goan society that extraordinary talent transcends the trivialities of human prejudice and the discrimination it perpetuates. Like so much of Goan culture, tiatre too might have floundered into obscurity but for an unforeseen event in the 1960s, which salvaged it from the wreckage of economic paucity. The migration of a substantial number of Romi-lip Konkani-speaking and writing Goans, into the Gulf countries meant these Goans were now in a position to sponsor tiatrist to the Gulf. This much needed financial fillip energised the tiatre industry and it re-emerged to take its rightful place as a legitimate Goan art form. Perhaps what made M. Boyer a legendary artiste was his profound understanding of the human heart; that it is fragile and vulnerable, given to comedy and pathos, and that it needs an audience to sustain itself. Do leave your feedback at [email protected] ======================================================
