Book review by my our literary editor, Manohar Shetty

‘Goa—A Daughter’s Story’ by Maria Aurora Couto; Viking Penguin, N Delhi; Price: Rs 495; Pages: 436

MARIA AURORA Couto, who has taught English Literature all her life, turns to history and theology to map an elaborate canvas of 450 years of Portuguese rule in Goa and its repercussions on the present. The near-compulsive paeans to the Saraswat Brahmin community and the often numbing repetitions aside, this is a monumental work of sensitive, if on occasion selective, scholarship, backed by industrious research. Couto, with an encompassing eye, examines the forced conversions and the notorious Order of the Inquisition, the depredations against the Hindu community and the native language of Goa, Konkani, the alleviations offered by the reforms of Marquez de Pombal and the fostering of liberal laws in the late 19th century and then the slide back into despair and smouldering silence under the 46-year reign of the despot Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.

‘Goa—A Daughter’s Story’ by Maria Aurora Couto

Of particular importance is Couto’s emphasis on the draconian and malevolent Edict of 1736 through which the Portuguese tried to curb the converts’ adherence to old rituals and customs by replacing Hindu rites and symbols with Christian ones, and substituting Hindu feasts with Catholic liturgical ceremonies and feasts commemorating Christian saints. Already bent over double, the Edict brought the Hindu community down to its knees and forced the Christians to adopt this ‘new religion’.

Couto also does well to remind us that the conquest of Goa in 1510 by Afonso de Albuquerque came about in collusion with powerful Hindu chieftains after they appealed to him to defend their trade against the dominant Muslim forces of Adil Shah. That the Portuguese stayed on for another four-and-a-half centuries was not part of the plan. Of such vagaries is history made.

Couto’s sources are many and diverse. Recoveries from old newspapers and letters, family memorabilia, drawing room conversations, paintings and music score sheets are often turned into lucid discoveries. As in all small communities, there is a tendency to elevate the fair and good to the realms of brilliance and greatness. The book abounds with ‘great’ writers and administrators and ‘brilliant’ civil servants. The poetaster ManoharRai SarDessai is thus magnanimously labelled as ‘a great poet’ whose ‘poetic vision expresses the cultural breadth and depth of Goan experience’. (Such malarkey from an Eng Lit teacher!) And Remo is proclaimed as ‘the idol of millions for three decades’ (Really?). But to use Couto’s favourite and somewhat imperious phrase, ‘be that as it may’, the book examines a Goa far beyond the stereotypes of feni and Rave parties and is both an intelligent and heartfelt eulogy on a tolerant and pluralistic society. While it sings aves to the resilience, cunning and courage of the beleaguered Hindu community who in the end, defied the Portuguese onslaught, and kept their gods and traditions alive, it also chants bhajans to the Catholics, who refused, at least in an atavistic sense, to sell their Hindu souls.

But the preoccupation with the ‘refinement’ and ‘decorum’ of the Saraswat Brahmins papers over their more unseemly side. Many of them—both Hindus and Christians—were outright stooges of the Portuguese. The author, in this passage, hints at a darker side, but does not go much further: ‘…the social graces, as against financial power, acquired by my community led to delusions of power, and, worse, a sense of superiority.’

Given this sensibility, it is significant that in all the pages devoted to the liberation struggle no mention is made of the militant freedom fighters of the Azad Gomantak Dal, some of whom, like Prabhakar V Sinari, are very much alive today. As a corollary to this, there is no word on the sadistic mestico Agente Casimiro Monteiro of the dreaded PIDE (the Portuguese secret service) who tortured and maimed several freedom fighters in Goa, and gained lasting notoriety in Portugal after he assassinated General Humberto Delgado, then a palpable challenge and threat to Salazar’s dictatorship.

Despite the polished prose, and the rousing hosannas from every quarter, the book is not an easy read. In the main this is because Dotor Couto the academic far overshadows Dona Aurora the memoirist. While the author is touchingly transparent on the life of her father, Chico, a gifted musician who died prematurely of alcoholism, there is not much else, apart from her husband and her mother, an exemplary woman who single-handedly brought up Aurora and her six siblings. But the inclusion of intimate autobiographical material may well be perceived as a cynical ruse to hike the sales of the book. For here in Goa many Goans have bought the book with the vicarious anticipation of seeing their own names or of those known to them in print. I get the uneasy feeling that, having checked that out, many will skim through or skip the rest.

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