Herald, 23 April 2008 MARIA AURORA COUTO
----- Bragança Pereira’s book is about a heterogeneous, interdependent society exposed to all kinds of cultural influences—Portuguese, Christian, from the Indian mainland and Europe—which adapted in varying degrees, yet retained many of its local traditions. The English translation will be released at the Black Box, Panjim, on 25 April at 5.30 pm by Dr. Jose Pereira. ------ Ethnography is at its best when experienced and written from inside the culture that is being researched. Antonio Bernardo de Bragança Pereira, succeeded to a great extent in meeting this rare criteria in his portrayal of Goan culture, its splendour, its endearing tolerance and appreciation of the pluralisms of its society, comprehending every apparent inconsistency and peculiarity. Bragança Pereira’s Ethnography of Goa Daman and Diu is an endeavour to describe the essential way of life of the people of Goa - home, family, society, worship, governance, economic and social - and how human beings are in harmony and not in conflict with the environment. He describes Goan existence with rigour, and brings in different views, some in conflict, leaving the reader to judge. But with an impassioned vision, he reflects on how and why cultures survive the imperatives and challenges of existence. No work of this nature has appeared in Goa or in other erstwhile Portuguese colonies. The cultural life of Goa, the manners and customs of Goans and the structure of their society provoke issues and questions which are of more than localized interest and significance. Descriptive accounts by travellers, missionaries and traders before the nineteenth century tended to dismiss the special features of Goan society as aberrations that did not conform to established patterns that were in vogue in the vast subcontinent of British India. To them, the Portuguese colony presented a sorry spectacle. The East India Gazetteer of 1828, was dismissive and pejorative in its description of Goa. Bragança Pereira’s work dispels the ignorance and prejudices in erstwhile accounts of Goan society. He did not seek models within Portuguese scholarship at a time when the methodology of anthropology was complicit with the imperial state. His work follows the tradition of drawing from British, French and German scholarship, as is evident from the references he cites which are drawn from national and international sources in various languages. As a juiz de relação (judge in the court of appeals) in Goa, with jurisdiction which extended to Macau and Timor, he maintained his independent spirit during the period of Salazar’s dictatorship. In his capacity as president of the Permanent Commission on Archaeology he conducted a great deal of research from 1931 to1951, edited and published magisterial volumes of the Archivo Portugues Oriental. He was like Luis de Menezes Bragança and Tristão de Bragança Cunha, a scion of the Menezes Bragança family of Chandor, who grew to be great intellectuals and public figures of the time. Their vision and independent spirit in the field of historiography and political activism is considered exceptional. Ethnography of Goa, Daman and Diu first appeared as a long essay in a collection of essays, India Portuguesa, published in 1923 on various aspects of the colony—education, medicine, the communidades, journalism—commissioned by the government during the brief years of the republic in Portugal. The second, enlarged, two-volume edition of Ethnography was published in 1940, a decade after Salazar’s dictatorship had been established. Vol 2 which has been translated needs to be read widely to dispel strange notions that prevail about Goa and its people today. He writes about a society that survived colonialism, recapturing a past lost in the mists of time through delineating geography, climate, river systems, food and hygiene, furniture, culinary arts, medicine and indeed a way of life which survived and evolved through the period of Portuguese colonialism, sometimes in confrontation and sometimes in collusion. Bragança Pereira’s book is about a heterogeneous, interdependent society exposed to all kinds of cultural influences—Portuguese, Christian, from the Indian mainland and Europe—which adapted in varying degrees, yet retained many of its local traditions. He follows the classical pattern of detailing customs and rituals of the castes of Goa prevailing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before the Liberation of Goa. The author has also provided some details of prohibitions imposed on the converts in order to alienate them from their original Hindu culture The work is rooted in the author’s empathy with the response to challenges that confronted Goan society in the early twentieth century after Salazar enacted the Acto Colonial, the Colonial Act, in 1934. This work also offers an approach to issues arising from a comparative study of British and Portuguese colonization. One such issue is in the treatment of caste. The British documented and published gazetteers, codified and legislated to come to some understanding of an ancient people and civilization, and accepted that caste was embedded in religion. Indeed caste was institutionalized through the state. The Portuguese, on the other hand, set out to leave their imprint through Christianization, and dealt with caste by severely denting, consciously or otherwise, the pollution basis of caste. The revolutionary influence remained in Goa pervading all levels of administration and governance. The Code Napoleon, the Social Code of Goa, introduced a common civil law of property and inheritance irrespective of caste, religion or tradition. It remains in operation to this day, though often contradicted in social practice, and is advocated as a model legislation for the rest of India. The infusion of liberal ideas from Europe as opposed to those from Britain, which engaged the rest of the country, created a situation more exceptional than peculiar in Goa. It strengthened the fluidity and shifting boundaries of caste. Another important influence that distinguished Goan society was the management of technology and its reclamation of saline land from the sea, its transformation into one of the most productive paddy fields, and incorporating the development of pisciculture and horticulture, all of which are described in loving and eloquent detail by Antonio Bernardo Bragança Pereira. This resulted in a responsive and responsible social organization. It is this feature of Goan society that prompted D.D. Kosambi, to modify the Marxist interpretation of history. The transcendence of a non-material and almost spiritual transformation by social organization is a marked feature of the history and economy of Goa, and is reflected, for instance, in the effulgence and vitality of craftsmanship in jewellery, so graphically reproduced in the Ethnography which has a profusion of evocative line drawings and photographs. Ethnography of Goa, Daman and Diu is of a significance and relevance that transcends the limitations of its time and place. In making this book available to a larger readership, the publishers perform a dual role—of bringing this scholarly work to a new generation of readers and in a language that will be accessible to a wider readership. Its publication is a tribute to Antonio Bernardo Bragança Pereira’s passionate attachment to Goa, his pride in being a Goan, his monastic lifestyle devoted to scholarship, and his deeply humanist insight and vision of a culture that makes the Goan universe a microcosm of the Indian subcontinent and of humanity. -- Question everything -- Karl Marx