Past imperfect, future indefinite
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Here is a narrative about home, the village and the world in which its author, MARIA AURORA COUTO, crosses the boundaries between history and memory, truth and imagination to evoke personal and community experience. It is as much an appraisal of Goa's past as it is an examination of its present and a vision of its future. Exclusive extracts from Goa: A Daughter's Story, which is to be released shortly.
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Prologue
I WAS born in my father's maternal grandfather's house. The father of this grandfather, born in 1800, was a respected member of the Portuguese bureaucracy. Land holdings and proximity to power among the elite in this part of Goa created a society altogether more urban, and a style of architecture which flaunted the status and influence of its owners. The elegance of ornate pillars, doorways and ceilings framed in filigreed woodwork was relieved by the natural beauty of two courtyards along whose walls I recall a betel leaf creeper, lichen and fern where I often found refuge from the tensions within. I have mixed feelings about this house for reasons that are a complex blend of childhood joy and trauma. Affection and rejection accompany my every thought; indeed adult sensibility is wounded anew each time I drive past or enter it. Since my father appears to have turned away from the grand family narrative to inscribe his own tragedy, this book is an attempt to read his story within the story of Goa.
My sense of Goa and feeling of oneness with the soil now springs entirely from within the walls, from my walks along the river, and the wildness around the house of my husband for reasons which have little to do with those of the biblical Ruth. Deep country peace, church bells and temple bells, family celebrations that clock into the agricultural calendar, an inter religious sharing of community spirit and worship, these are relived each day, precious in memory when I lived away from Goa, and now cherished all the more when the existence of such a community life is under threat.
Not merely by globalization, industrialization or tourism which are currents that we strive against. The threat comes from the more insidious forces at play in our society. Goan society, once traumatized by colonialism survived with traditional resilience and spirit and forged a unique identity. It is nevertheless a precarious identity which could easily become the victim of electioneering vote banks that promote and provoke divisions and sub divisions of caste and creed.
My questioning began several decades ago, provoked by perceptions of Goa and Goan Christianity rather than doubts that troubled my sense of self. I grew up feeling well grounded within India, as a Goan, and as a practising Catholic. There was no conflict within me except when I found myself back in Goa in 1962 and faced insecurities within my community. These were insecurities which had been heightened by the Portuguese campaign about Christianity being under threat, and the perception that the new Government would be by and for Hindus. Nehru's effort and that of the civilian Government was to dispel these fears. However, now that I come to answer the questions I have asked of myself since that time, the poignance of the reality of today is overwhelming. It is a time, to paraphrase Albert Camus, when crime puts on the apparel of innocence through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, and innocence is being called upon to justify itself.
My search for understanding of the past took me to Lisbon where the most illuminating discussion was with the advocate Xencora Camotim — the name is a Portuguese version of Shankar Kamat — who is popularly known as Priti Camotim. I was ushered into a book lined office, deep leather comfort, the high ceilings and ornate doorways of old Lisbon. The septuagenarian was tall, with aquiline good looks, and a charm backed by erudition.
He had steeled himself for a conversation in English and was delighted when I broke into Portuguese and Konkani. I am relieved, he said almost clapping with delight, we are both flies in the same bottle, and he looked at me with a half smile. I told him that my major worry was the interpretation of the Inquisition, which had more to do with colonialism and power than with Christianity as religion, and yet, in our postcolonial times, Christianity and Empire are treated as one.
We discuss the role of caste in the process of conversion. These are realities which cannot be wished away, nor can the fact that the early Jesuits, as did the later Robert Nobili, owe their success to a strategy which worked through existing social structures of caste and group action. In the process, caste became a more obdurate divisive force than ever before. It was a way of retaining a hold on tradition ...
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The Persistence of Memory
CONTRADICTION and paradox best describe the extraordinary experience of my life in Goa in those first years after Liberation. I was Maria, wife of the first development commissioner of Goa, although in the initial months, Alban was also officiating as the secretary to the first civilian governor of Goa. And I was Aurora, Chico's daughter. My father Dr. Francisco de Figueiredo was only ever known as Chico, within the family, among his friends and acquaintances. Aurora, the daughter coming home, wrestled with Maria, now wife of an officer in the new dispensation.
In the comfort of a chauffeur driven official car on my way to Panjim, a town I had visited just once as a fourteen-year-old, my mind's eye drew me back: cross country walks, mountain tunnels, crowded trains and frontiers of old; Margão and its surrounding villages Benaulim and Raia; the affectionate embrace of extended family. These were the first threads of an intricate texture of experience which was to follow. I could not share much of this with Alban whose disciplined self contained all emotion to face the challenges of his professional life.
My family had moved in 1945 to Dharwar, ninety kilometres south-east of Goa, then in the Bombay Presidency and later in the state of Karnataka; it was an inexpensive town to live in where the laws of prohibition prevailed. Its altitude and moderate rainfall made it an ideal place in terms of health; its schools and colleges drew people from neighbouring districts. Karnatak College with a library inherited from the great Deccan College, Pune, was staffed by renowned academics who belonged to the British Education Service.
In distant Dharwar my father had communicated by his very presence the ethos of which I had now come to be a part. However, my life in Dharwar and later in Bihar had set me apart with accretions and dimensions of experience far removed from the Goa of my childhood. So here I was enveloped by, and also looking into from the outside, a way of life which my parents had abandoned because circumstances and character were leading to the waste of my father's great talent, his fine mind and warm heart and were destroying our family. It was a way of life that could have been creative. Margão, where my father and I were born, embodied the moveable feast of my childhood. The city was silent now though, with only a few remnants of its past gaiety. Still, my heart leapt as memories of my father and my childhood came flooding back. I recalled Margão's Jardim Municipal, once alive with music and friendship, the incomparable Largo da Igreja, a square flanked by elegant houses and the great white Church of the Holy Spirit where I was baptized. It was in this church that my parents and grandparents were married. From its interior had flowed music and warm welcome, my father always present in a pervasive air of festivity. Now, it wore a deserted look, not quite of abandonment. I remembered evening walks as a child when I was led to the church square around the piazza cross, where my father, as he waved and hushed the group of musicians in the Banda Central do Senhor Agostinho Carvalho, a group of musicians with whom he was closely involved and with whom he kept in close contact from distant Dharwar. He appeared as God to my child's fascinated gaze.
I recalled pai at every step; his slim, linen suited figure, the tone of his voice, his anger, his humour. I also remember how I used to quail at his bouts of violent anger, directed more at himself, perhaps, than the society and times that had thwarted and ultimately destroyed him. Every thing around me emphasized my father's absence: streets, coffee shops, bars, food and wine, music and language, style and conversation, newspapers, the fish market. This was his world. I was now living in an environment which recreated his exhilarating presence at every turn. As ever, memory speaks through music. Larger than life, he accompanied each step of my journey with moods to match — allegro, penseroso, adagio, furioso: his exuberance alternated with expressions of harshness and nervous fury at life's intransigent thwarting of his will. Fear and laughter, joy and despair, twin poles bridged by his children, a safe passage ensured by my mother's calm, unquestioning love, and her stoic faith which sustained us ... .
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Conversion: The Onslaught
MY family has been Christian for several centuries, living peacefully in a society in which various forms of religious worship are an inextricable dimension if not the very foundation of most lives. I have never thought of myself as a convert, nor did my parents, grandparents and members of their community. My naivete was shaken some years ago, much before the fear and insecurity that stalks our streets today. The air is now so infected that the very term `convert' vibrates with unpleasant meanings, fear and anger. Perhaps as an educated woman and a teacher at that, I should have begun to question how I came to be a Christian. I did not because the society into which I was born in Goa, the society in which I lived as a student in Dharwar and as an adult in Patna and Delhi accepted me and my religion without making me feel self-conscious about it. Nor did I feel threatened. Never did I imagine then that I would one day feel compelled to define and defend my identity as a Christian.
It was in London in 1982 at a seminar on Indian writing in English, where some of our most renowned writers were present, that I first heard Indian Muslims being referred to as Mughals, Indian sensibility defined as Hindu sensibility, and knowledge of Sanskrit declared as essential to the study of Indian literature and culture. When I stood up to describe myself as an Indian Christian with no knowledge of Sanskrit but with a sensibility born of complex cultural influences, and when others rose to protest about the term Mughals, about the Sanskritization and Brahminization of Indian identity, chaos followed. At lunch time I was told that a few months of reading would help me discover my roots! The presumption of the remark left me stunned. That was my first awakening. The language of post-colonial discourse in defining identity for post-colonial societies attempted, quite rightly, to cleanse the colonized mind. However, these theories and descriptions narrowed the framework of culture in ways that marginalized, if not entirely disregarded, the existence of plural identities even within rural societies ...
Paradox surrounds my own quest for the past. A policy of coercive conversion was adopted soon after the Portuguese colonized Goa, especially through the Inquisition; its consequences restructured Goan society and disrupted an organic — though caste ridden — whole. And yet a religion which came with pomp, power and aggression gave birth to a faith that is intense and enduring. Which is the reason perhaps why I am not disturbed by questions such as the one posed to me by the Goan writer Orlando Costa, who no longer practices any religion and now lives in Lisbon: `I want to know who was the first bloody Costa to convert and why.'
It is important to locate the human aspect that is often lost in the statistics of baptisms, temples, lands, souls, laws and taboos, flight and exile.
History and memory have to be recovered by both the Hindu and Christian communities. All our ancestors began a new life: some in exile, others in a new religion, yet others living precariously on the edge of power, until the imperatives of survival for the colonizer eased the life of the colonized. The Goan was reborn with his searing experience as a subliminal bond, nurtured through an upheaval shared by all. It is this bond that I have tried to understand and explain each time I have been told in recent times by friends from other parts of India that Goa should be a model for the country in these troubled times when versions of the past are being invented to suit political ends ...
The strength of this harmony has never truly been appreciated outside Goa. Few people are aware of the plural nature of our society. When Goa is projected either for tourist purposes or in academic debate, its Christian ethos is the main theme. In fact, it is assumed that the territory is almost entirely Christian. However, even the 1940 Census lists only 40 per cent of the total population of 6,24,177 as Christian. The rest were Hindus and a very small number were Muslims. (The Muslim presence was always small and was further reduced by the carnage following Albuquerque's victory over Adil Shah.)
Much heart-searching, often on the verge of tears, has gone into the writing of this chapter. Many questions have been asked by my friends about the need and wisdom of delving into a troubled past when the present is equally troubled. My answer after much reflection, going through the dark night of the soul and living through the reality of my parents and family is: Truth must prevail. Conversion with state power was effected with extreme pressure and inducements, not with violence against the human person but with violation of freedom and violence against the symbols that continued to draw the converted population back to their old faith.
However, political conclusions for modern times cannot be drawn from a statement of historical record. Acknowledgement of the trauma from which was born the faith that endures should not give license to those who deny the manifestations of a plural culture.
Today's crusaders should celebrate the strength and variety of religious expressions within India rather than divide peaceful communities in order to rise to political power. Indeed, my questioning of the past has strengthened my understanding of the rich and varied culture I have inherited.
It leads me to reiterate the power and beauty of faith embedded in an ancient spiritual and cultural tradition, and to realize that the shared pain of our ancestors sustained the community to create a society that lives in communal harmony today, notwithstanding the ominous portents that threaten to disrupt it ....
Maria Aurora Couto, an author, has taught English literature in India and contributed to periodicals in India and England. She lives in Aldona, a village in north Goa.
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