Sitting in the hushed silence of the British Library with nothing but the
glare of ugly fluorescent lights to intrude on me, the white pages of the
Goa Trade Reports seem to be mocking me. These are trade reports going back
to 1900, which the British had so meticulously compiled to keep an eye on
Goa and safeguard their major investment in the West of India Guaranteed
Portuguese Railway Company managing what they dubbed, the Mormugao Railway.
Not only was Goa plagued by a huge trade deficit but it was a deficit almost
cruelly ironic.
In 1908 for instance, while Goa had a measly export of 21 lakhs, it had a
staggering import of 61 lakhs. In a dominion which could not boast of
anything more substantive than exports of dried fish, betel nuts, manure,
mangoes and manganese, it arrogantly imported disproportionally large
quantities of hats, tobacco, perfumes, butter and wines. And in a year in
which Goa imported just Rs 68,049 worth of industrial machinery, it
nonetheless imported Rs. 1.2 lakhs worth of hats.
Whoever was wearing these hats, I can be assured my great-grandmother, the
fair of face, green-eyed, Catarina Dias, was not one of them. Around this
time, she was collecting the last vestiges of a moribund life in the
ramshackle village of Shiroda and preparing to leave. Shiroda had been hit
by plague, devastating the region and making life unbearable. Goa had a
unique topography which allowed migrations from the hinterlands to flourish
in the coastal regions with its plenitude of fish and dignified coconut
trees. My great-grandfather had perished young, perhaps in the plague or
perhaps afflicted by any number of calamities which befell 19th century
Goans. What made the widowed Catarina, set off into a densely forested area,
cross the serpentine Zuari river and head for the desolate village of Nuvem,
on the outskirts of Margao is not known. Nuvem's topography is similar to
that of Shiroda, both abound in coconut trees and the possibility of
continuing in traditional occupations may have played a role in this
migration. Here she erected a thatched dwelling with the help of her two
sons.
This thatched and often cramped dwelling eventually became a mud-walled
house which as luck and love would have it, neighbours my mother's house. My
mother's father, Conceicao Miguel Gomes, was an Afrik'kar. The family owned
a parcel of land in an area which was otherwise the abode of mund'kars, and
as a result, they had been bestowed with the title of bhat'kars. When my
grandfather retired, there was no revenue to speak of. The bits of jewellery
which had accompanied my grandmother on her wedding day had long since found
their way to pawn-brokers. A few years into retirement, he was dead. A
thumping from the heart striking at his emaciated chest and he was gone.
My mother maintains to this day that it was financial stress. His youngest
son was academically brilliant; the first man in the village to do his
Bachelors of Science. I know my uncle is brilliant for I often marvel at the
conversations that spill from this man, born into a village where silence
reigned past seven in the night, where the Church priest was the epitome of
a well-educated man and the bus prassa, a few kilometers away in Margao was
the final frontier of their existence. The financial incapacity of this
family meant my uncle's dreams of bringing his academic brilliance to
fruition were stymied. The realities in the villages of Goa, though much
romanticised by European journalists like Emile Marini as "so beloved by the
Goans who live there, and for which Goan emigrants abroad sigh with
nostalgia", ran afoul of this hyperbole. Goa's renowned historian Damodar
Kosambi likened it to the "idiocy of village life," marred by malnutrition,
hookworm, apathy, quarrels, violence, litigation and delinquency.
End of part 1
Part II
The history of Goa written by those who wore those imported hats, is quite different from the history of Goa as lived by my parents in the villages. Their history belongs to the cooks, clerks and tailors that made their way to Africa and set up a Saint Francis Xavier's Goan Tailors' Society in Mombasa as early as 1905. It is written on the pages of passports, people made to go to the Gulf, to live in hot, arid deserts where water arrived in biscuit tins, carried by over-burdened donkeys; so browned by dirt, it had to be strained three times through a muslin cloth before it could be drunk.
My father left Goa in 1967 for the Arabian Gulf. To understand why my father left, one has to understand the desultory, isolation of the village. For all the things that could occupy a young man's life during the day - fishing in the lake or thatching the roof - there was always the eerie silence of the night. The empty, hollow sense that nothing could germinate in the village which could take one beyond its boundary. Nothing in those dung-floored houses could lead to success. There are those who will argue for the quiet eloquence of rural Goa; the peace, the tranquillity, the self-sustaining village life in which one seeks solitude. That is not what young men with blood coursing through their veins and arrogance flaring in their aquiline noses seek. They seek adventure, dream dreams larger than themselves and seek mythical fortunes. Only their instinct tells them these fortunes are not as mythical as everyone says. They see a life beyond their own hemmed-in horizons.
The stories of Goans who left the shores are as integral in piecing together our collective identity as those that stayed behind. What drove these Goans to journey into the interiors of Africa, the arid deserts of the Gulf and the bitter cold of England? What were their lives like in these foreign countries? Did the Goan in them survive at all? Did they cling to the motherland only in memory or did they refuse to sever the umbilical cord, drawing an almost spiritual strength from the culture, language and religion it had engendered and which ultimately favoured their survival in the Diaspora.
More than two years ago, I sought to travel back in time, talking to people who are the custodians of our Diaspora history, gently gathering their stories and unravelling them through the nip of my pen. This gestation period has finally given birth to my book, Into the Diaspora Wilderness, set for release at the Goan Festival UK, 25th July, 2010.
Some were reticent to talk; painful memories of wars, bombings, drownings, incarcerations and expulsions were like fog clouding the mind. It all happened so long ago, they said, but the gaping scars had not yet healed; the anger and pain still enflamed. There was the expulsion of Goans from Malawi, a tiny land-locked country in East Africa. The people implicated in this episode have never before told their side of the story but have opened up for the first time in this book. I was lucky enough to talk to Emma Gama-Pinto. How did she meet Pio? What really happened the day he was shot?
Lesser known heroes with epic tales to tell, abound in the book. Joe Fernandes was caught onboard the MV Dara when it was bombed off the coast of Dubai in 1961. An unsung hero who gave up his life-jacket and dived into the Indian Ocean. Remedios Anthony, encouraged by the acerbic Krishna Menon was instrumental in setting up the Goa League in London, which lobbied for the Liberation of Goa. The famed artist F N Souza kept close company with Menon in London, and his then wife, the attractive Maria cooked sorpotel for all those Goans who attended the League's first meeting. Anthony was ailing in health and passed away before I completed the book.
Other spectators, left letters and interviews, now resting in the yellowed pages of files in archives. Claude Bremner, the British Consul based in Goa during World War II, kept almost a diary-like correspondence on Goa, as did his successor, M R A Baig, who gave his own reason as to why so many Goans became "denationalized" and migrated. From the first time, we read about Goans, reflected not in the eyes of the Portuguese but that other Imperial power-house, the British. What did they think of us, as we worked alongside them on the creaking decks of British India ships, on the desolate, remote plains of East Africa and in the deserts of the Arabian Gulf?
Wilderness, deprivation, constraints of colonialism and racism were close and constant encounters for Goans in the Diaspora. Yet, austerity fortified the Goan. And the opportunity of chance willed him to go on. 8 pages of rare photographs provide a visual of our history in the book. It is my ardent hope that one day, it finds a place at a Diaspora museum in Goa.
Thursday, July 15, 2010 at 6:27AM 