ON WHY GOANS MOURN THEIR RECENT PAST (AND PRESENT)... AND OTHER RELATED ISSUES
Rochelle Pinto, BETWEEN EMPIRES, Print and Politics in Goa. Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2007. 299 pp REVIEWED BY Paulo Varela Gomes [email protected] 'Between Empires. Print and Politics in Goa' is one of the more important books I have ever read about Goa. First of all it is important because of the relevance of the material it discusses: texts of all sorts printed in Goa and in Bombay (by Goans): historiography essays, newspapers, novels, theatre plays, memoirs and reports. Rochelle Pinto read this material at libraries and archives in Goa, Lisboa, Bombay, Delhi, London and wove around it a complex and rich analysis of Goan politics and culture from the time of the bourgeois liberal revolution in Portugal (1821-1834) to the end of the century (in fact the book should have seen sub-titled 'Print and Politics in Goa in the 19th century'). Also, the book discusses its material in a manner that confirms the triumph of a new approach to history and cultural studies in colonial matters that not only avoids old and obvious political agendas, but is at ease with past struggles and stands simultaneously far from old colonial and new post-colonial ideological fixations. In this context, 'Between Empires' is, to a large extent, the result of a conclusion Rochelle Pinto arrived at after getting rid of the preconceptions and the methods of the Anglo-Saxon oriented academia that she was trained with during her graduation and doctorate in Delhi and London: this conclusion is that the history of Goa in the 19th century (and beyond) cannot be understood under the theories of colonialism and nationalism born out of the experience and the historiography of the British Empire. This idea is not, of course, Rochelle Pinto's only, nor is it restricted to the case of Goa. Historians and social scientists of Latin American countries have been thinking along the same lines: the methods and ideas of research used for, say, Bengal, are not applicable to Goa, Brazil or Argentina without careful consideration. A third reason why 'Between Empires' is a very important book resides in its footnotes, so to speak: they are well done, professional. This is no minor issue in a panorama of shoddy academic publication with sources and references misquoted or even not quoted at all, stale ideas and references given as original, constant repetition of things one zillion times published. Finally, but importantly, the relevance of the book comes from the fact that it helps us to understand why we perceive Goa the way we do today, as the book traces the origins of most of the stories and beliefs that constitute the nebulous narrative mesh that we call Goan identity. The book goes to the root of this because its object of interest is the 19th century and practically everything that we, the late moderns, call 'the past' is, in fact, a 19th century construct. Modern history was invented in the 19th century. Modern historiographic narratives about the past were written by 19th century men. Most of these men shared a revolutionary, anti-clerical, liberal perspective inherited from the French revolution and its aftermath and they saw most past cultures as retrograde. Therefore they scrutinised what preceded them -- and their own times -- in search of signs of progress, over-valuing these signs and tending to ignore or scorn signs of permanence. The historical narratives they passed on to us are the result of these progressive, modern choices: some areas of the past were left in greater obscurity than others. To a great extent, therefore, we still see our past through a 19th century lens. In the case of Goa, Rochelle Pinto's book shows us that we still see 19th century's Goan culture and society through a 19th century lens. The first line of the book is: "If there is a single dominant perspective through which Goa's Catholic elite viewed their nineteenth century, it was as a condition to be mourned". In fact, some of the Portuguese and Goan elites of the 19th century perceived their own times as times of decadence -- a vision that we inherited. 'Between Empires' shows that Goan elite's cultural links with Portuguese cultivated and political milieus were so straight that we can actually say that they constituted one single dominant elite. They shared the same conceptions and the same myths: Goans, like some of the more important and famous Portuguese writers and journalists of the 19th century, looked upon their collective destiny with sadness and discomfort as they compared it to what they perceived as happening abroad: Europe in the case of Portugal, British India as seen from Goa. Looking at their past, Portuguese and Goan elites saw a time of glory and splendour: the 16th century, the epoch of 'Discoveries', of military and cultural might. Then, they saw a subsequent time of religious fanaticism, of abandonment of the centre-stage of history, of economic decadence: the 17th, the 18th and the 19th centuries. This latter time they erased from their history and their stories -- and gave us, their late modern heirs, the vision of their 19th century as a decadent present with a glowing, distant past. This was motivated by a kind of short-circuit of perception: since at least the mid-17th century, in the context of the long and bitter war fought between the Iberian and the Northern European powers for world supremacy, the British -- and in general the Northern European published opinion -- perceived all things Portuguese in a derogatory way. Sharing with them a common contempt for aristocratic society and the church hierarchy, the cultivated elites in Portugal and Spain inherited and integrated this self-deprecating view during the late 18th and the 19th centuries, the time of the liberal and industrial revolutions... and so did the Goan elite, as shown by Rochelle Pinto. "The nineteenth century in Goa," in the words of Pinto, "was isolated from the preceding centuries and recast (...) only as a comparative point to British India" (p. 50). For Goa, it was a century between Empires, one, the Portuguese, perceived as laying dormant in the past, the other, the British, as the empire of modernity. The book traces the course of its careful analysis of the printed testimonies of these ideological constructs through nine chapters corresponding to nine different types of sources and nine diverse approaches: the first chapter ("Borrowing a Past: history, culture, nation") discusses the several ways in which Goan intellectuals lived their history and their historiography and wrote the history of Goa that we would inherit. The second and third chapters ("Governance without Governmentality" and "Education and its Languages") deal with the politics and the policies of Portuguese India -- and here we are reminded (with surprise) that it was under the aegis of Portuguese authorities that English was introduced into Goan education in detriment of both Konkani and Portuguese because the Goan elite perceived English as the medium for progress and Portuguese and Konkani as the media of either decadence or tradition. Chapters 4 and 5 ("The Unhappy Period of Revolution" and "The Truth about Pamphlets", an aptly ironic title if ever there was one) are about the press and its avatars in the extremely agitated political struggles of 19th century Goa and of the Goan communities in Bombay. The realm of literature is dealt with in chapters 6 and 7 ("Divergent Literary Histories" and "The Province of the Novel"). The comparison between the famous novels 'Os Brahamanes' by Francisco Luis Gomes (1866) and 'Jacob e Dulce' by Francisco João da Costa, who signed Gip (1896), which constitutes the chore of chapter 7, will remain in the reader's memory for Pinto's deductive capacity. The social disenchantment that the author detects for us in 'Jacob e Dulce' paves the way for the final chapter, "The domain of Konkani", in which the book kind of leaves the stories of Empire and loss, of decadence and regret, in favour of the print produced by what the author calls the "non-elite modernity": the Goan migrant, Konkani-speaking communities living in Bombay, distanced from both the Portuguese narratives prevalent in Goa, and the Portuguese versus British comparison which was nothing but an anguished reiteration of the narrative of the decadence of Portugal and Goa. In this last chapter, and in the too short conclusive chapter entitled "Against Exceptionalism", Rochelle Pinto semi-unconsciously hints at the possibility of another book, one about these non-elites that according to her did not share the history, the stories and the self-perceptions of the Catholic elite. The material she has used for this hypothesis of a book is however scarce. Her forte is the story that the Catholic elite told itself -- the story that we have shared since then, especially about the 19th century as the time during which this elite thought that it was in a "condition to be mourned" as compared to the elites in British India. I must confess that, as someone interested in architecture, I already knew that Goa's 19th century was nothing of the sort. But before reading Rochelle Pinto I didn't know that I knew it. She articulated in words what I felt but did not dare express with certainty. In fact, the material culture of Goa in the 19th century, especially architecture, does not tell a story of inferiority. Just take the famous houses of Goa -- which are mostly from the 19th century in the form they kept until today. They show material wealth, class and caste pride, vibrant cultural assertiveness. In the villages and little towns of Portugal of the same epoch there is nothing that can be compared to the hundreds and hundreds of houses of great architectural quality spread all over the territory of Goa. To judge by her 19th and early 20th century houses, Goa was richer, its agricultural and commercial middle and upper classes prouder than the Portuguese. A careful study of the architecture of these middle and upper classes in British India has yet to be conducted. But judging by first impressions, only in Kerala can we find a domestic 19th century architectural culture comparable to Goa's. Everything is not perfect in 'Between Empires'. Rochelle Pinto is a young academic and she could not always resist the trappings of academic fashion. Take this paragraph in the last chapter (p. 264). Pinto refers to the 'monistic metaphysical formulations' (I think I know what this is but I'm not sure) of two authors whose names do not need concern us here, and then proceeds to offer us the following lines: "The ability to find these only in pre-colonial moments, or in zones that were outside Portuguese territories or in contemporary practices that re-enact the disruption of such unities seems to ignore the substantive reordering of these unities and their repositioning within constructs of modernity." Now, was this really necessary? Couldn't this have been said in the old traditional no-nonsense English academic parlance in vogue before North-American universities became fu-cô? (as I and some friends jokingly say referring, obviously, to the French philosopher Foucault and to the childish North-American enchantment with complicated theoretical wording supposedly French in inspiration). Fortunately, Rochelle Pinto does not fall for this often. Neither does she often practice the other fu-co thing, the theoretical name-dropping also fashionable in American academia -- where you quote so many theories that are supposed to integrate or clarify your facts that all of sudden there is no room for the facts themselves. "Between Empires" is generally way above this. It is a very fine book by a very fine scholar. A ground breaking book as far as Goan studies are concerned. We will be hearing more about Rochelle Pinto. -- Paulo Varela Gomes is an architectural historian who heads the Portuguese Fundacao Oriente in Goa First published in Parmal, 7(2008), pp. 144-147
