There
is a palpable sense of something ominous to come as the artist packs up
everything of significance “with the help of Sheriff,” his man-servant
(Ketteringham 2013: 164). In this striking moment in the biography Vamona Navelcar: An Artist of Three
Continents, Anne Ketteringham chronicles that her subject “collected all
his belongings including nine hundred and fifty drawings and sketches, sixty
oil paintings, prizes that he had won as well as diplomas and placed them in a
suitcase ready to leave Mozambique” (ibid). The stage is set for another exit –
a recurrent theme in Vamona Ananta Sinai Navelcar’s life. “He no longer wished
to stay in Mozambique after the torment [and] indignity of imprisonment...” (ibid).
The route from Maputo was circuitous, and included Beira, Dar-es-Salaam, and
Nairobi (Ketteringham 2013: 165) – a veritable cartography of empire past. Finally,
after Frankfurt and Barcelona, Navelcar “arrived in Lisbon in early February
1976” (ibid). The convoluted itinerary had been the result of political
instability in the aftermath of Mozambique’s independence, which had made “more
direct routes” unavailable (ibid). Disembarking in the cold, Navelcar was to
find that even Portugal, like its former African dominion, was in distress;
“political and social upheaval had great consequences for the general public,
... the country ... as well as Vamona himself,” Ketteringham observes (ibid).
And then, against this backdrop of postcolonial anguish, it happens. A prop
goes missing and the artist is left near-naked on stage. The suitcase, the one
full of his life’s work, is lost.
The loss of the suitcase, I
would like to suggest, is Navelcar’s most poignant work of art. Ketteringham’s
comprehensive biography uncovers not only an artist’s life, but one replete
with performative imagery that does not occur on Navelcar’s canvas alone. An
artist of diverse skills, one whose oeuvre encompasses painting, line drawing,
sketching, and more, Navelcar’s work has been internationally exhibited and
collected but, peculiarly, little known in India itself. Heretofore, he has
never been thought of as a performance artist, either. Navelcar’s is not a routine
that harbours guile: “Vamona was distraught ... This tragedy hit [him] hard...,”
Ketteringham records (171-172). The suitcase was never recovered despite
repeated trips to the airport to enquire about it, and “after one week [Navelcar]
gave up” (Ketteringham 2013: 171). At the risk of belittling this event, one
completely lacking in contrivance, what I mean to argue by recasting the loss
of the suitcase as an artistic act, is that Navelcar’s very life, in its historical
and geographical entanglements, cannot be separated from the artistic labour it
has inspired. All of it constitutes Navelcar’s artistry. Therefore, this “act”
of losing the entirety of one’s artistic corpus during the ostensibly mundane affair
of travelling, in being both performative and a lived experience, at once re-enacts
and bears witness to the seemingly grandiose postcolonial themes of
displacement, loss, and exile in their inescapably quotidian nature. What the
“performance” of loss reveals to be most ironic in this juxtaposition of the
tragic and the farcical, the extraordinary and the mundane, is the inability to
tell the difference.
The suitcase, meant to
function like a frame that would hold “all his work..., but more importantly
all his
Deriving his notion of the
mutability in spatiality from cultural geography, Sarmento sees “the material,
symbolic and functional coexist[ing], creating mixed, hybrid and fluid
atmospheres” (2011: 1). As useful as Sarmento’s articulation of the need “to
understand how heritage” should not be “seen ... as a single story, but as
plural versions” (ibid) is, I do not want to propose that Navelcar’s
performance simply participates in a utopic multiculturalism that harmoniously
blends together the different cultural influences he has been exposed to and has
participated in. Rather, Navelcar’s life in Goa, Portugal, and Mozambique, in
all its exigencies, is evidenced in his art as an interstitial practice - the
kind of association Homi Bhabha denotes in The
Location of Culture as “the relation of cultures ... [or] part of a complex
process of ‘minoritarian’ modernity, not simply a polarity of majority and
minority, the center and the periphery” (2004: xx).
As an example of such
complexity, take Ketteringham’s wonderment at a piece
done in 1980 whilst Vamona was still in Portugal,
not long before he decided to return to Goa. The painting titled ‘African
Figure’ is a portrait of a person with African features, a brown neck, but with
a white face. Why is this I ask myself! My interpretation is that the troubles
Africa had were brought back to Portugal, in [Navelcar’s] own mind at least.
Vamona was teaching and had a very good standard of living compared to local
people in Mozambique. He had a good social status as a professor ..., a servant,
... a lovely house ... and all the social trimmings that went with his
position. Suddenly, he is back in Portugal with nothing, ... with no job or
social standing ... Communism was never far away, threatening to bring society
down to the lowest common denominator... (2013: 179)
What Ketteringham makes apparent
here are overlapping strands that are simultaneously cultural, personal, and
political. The concerns acknowledged are middling, even – “not simply ... the
center and the periphery.” They are replete with the commonplaceness of middle
class life, but still evocative of a panoply of elements beyond the daily
grind, that encompass political economies and postcolonial volatility.
 |
| "African Figure" (1980) by Vamona Navelcar. Image courtesy of Anne Ketteringham. |
Nonetheless, Ketteringham’s observation
of why Navelcar would paint his “African Figure” with black features, a brown
neck, and a white face, cannot only assume the personal in Navelcar’s experience
in Africa. What he, the brown artist, had ferried over in his transit to
Portugal was more than just a personal matter. The “racial” palette Navelcar
employs in “African Figure” speaks to the plurality of Portuguese
post/coloniality, not solely in eliciting multiculturalism, but also in
attesting to Sarmento’s conception of transnational processes that cannot be
relegated to any one geographic domain. It was Portugal’s involvement in East
Africa that had instigated the anti-colonial struggle there, one that Navelcar
contributed to through his art which was sometimes used in political posters
(Ketteringham 2013: 106).
This was, indeed, the reason
why Navelcar felt so betrayed when he was imprisoned, along with his students,
by the newly independent state whose fight for freedom he had supported. The
capriciousness of the fledgling postcolonial government, eager to make its
power felt, is pertinently captured in the Mozambican film Virgem Margarida (Azevedo 2012). Set in 1975, it fictionalizes
actual proceedings that saw the rounding up of prostitutes for “re-education”
in camps in remotes parts of the country, not unlike the one that Navelcar was
sent to in Imala. The imprisoning of students, artists, prostitutes, and others
deemed morally questionable and, somehow, enemies of the state, confirms
Achille Mbembe’s insight in his book On
the Postcolony that “all through the history of modern societies, ... the
monopoly of legitimate violence was one key to state-building” (2001: 89).
Of course, what Mbembe points
to here is the ludicrousness of the so-called legitimacy of violence. In naming
violence as a hallmark of the modern practice of state-building, Mbembe also
equates former colonies and colonizers, both of which grapple with the
condition of post-imperial governmentality. Like the Mozambican freedom
struggle and its postcolonially repressive governance, the political disenfranchisement
in metropolitan Portugal itself had transpired in the umbra of the colonial era
Estado Novo. That regime came to an
end with the Carnation Revolution of 1974. The lost suitcase is again an apt
metaphor here. In its misplacement, Navelcar performs an itinerary between
political causes and influences that have many origins and transits, but no
discernible destination.
Navelcar’s chagrin at arriving
in a post-Estado Novo Lisbon, a city
he had known as a student in the 1950s and 60s, is educed by Ketteringham as
the artist’s apprehension that “Communism was never far away...” What this
marks, despite the fate he had befallen, is Navelcar’s privilege. Born in Goa
to a Hindu Brahmin family that “considered arts and artists to be beneath their
status” (Ketteringham 2013: 18), Navelcar’s opportunity to pursue his talents
came directly from the Estado Novo
itself. The then Governor General of Goa, Paulo Bénard Guedes, commissioned a
portrait of the prime minister of Portugal from Navelcar and, without the
knowledge of the artist, sent it to Dr. António de Oliveira Salazar
(Ketteringham 2013: 29). Thereupon, Guedes triumphantly informed Navelcar that
“[a] scholarship sanctioned by ... Dr. Salazar has been granted to you” (ibid).
Because the conferral of the scholarship occurred in the period following the
end of the British Empire in India, it would not be amiss to think of the
Portuguese dictator’s largesse as being propagandist in character. Later on, other
political events that took place in Portugal, with the impending liberation of
Goa in the backdrop, and the need for employment, caused Navelcar to seek work
in Luso-Africa. Until his internment at the Imala rehabilitation camp, Navelcar
had a comfortable domestic situation, as Ketteringham comments, even though he
was stationed in far-off Nampula as an instructor at a school that proved to be
a racially charged workplace because of its white Portuguese director
(Ketteringham 2013: 86-87).
Navelcar’s migrations, not dissimilar
to that of his suitcase on his return journey, demarcate a Luso-specific trend.
While some research has been done on the
roots of Goan migration within the period of “Portuguese
By allowing the loss of his
suitcase to take centre stage, what I have sought to do is render Navelcar as a
different kind of artist than he is generally thought of. Ketteringham’s book
raises the curtain on a life in many acts and on diverse stages, but with
transitions of the personal, political, and the post/colonial to connect them.
Navelcar executes that most memorable performance of the loss of his suitcase
to cross in and out of the imbricated stories of nations, peoples, and himself,
juggling absurdity and purposefulness as the twinned but often indiscernible
facets of postcolonial societies in flux.
Addressing the role of the
story-teller in “colonised societies” (1996: 126), Helen Gilbert and Joanne
Tompkins write in Post-colonial Drama
that these players are “[a]ware of the audience and of [their] own position as
entertainer[s], [and so] the story-teller revises history in/through every
performance by making the past ‘speak’ to the present” (1996: 127). If the loss
of the suitcase was Navelcar’s allegorical commentary on the lack of
self-possession in the postcolonial nations of Mozambique and Portugal, then his
viewpoint is revised for the contemporary moment when he communicates from the
vantage of his past perspective to the Goa he presently resides in. In a recent
painting titled “Cry my Beloved Goa,” Navelcar depicts his homeland as “the
sacred Cow ... being eaten alive and tormented by 40 crows” who represent Members
of the Legislative Assembly – Goa’s government (Ketteringham 2013: 228). No
stranger to the theatrics of states, and so frequently finding himself at what
appeared to be the final curtain, Navelcar’s continued artistry even now that
he is in his eighties, proves that encores are always in the making and that
some baggage will always be in the process of being unpacked.
 |
| "Cry my Beloved Goa" (2011) by Vamona Navelcar. Image courtesy of Anne Ketteringham. |
Bibliography
Azevedo,
Licinio. 2012, Virgem Margarida,
Lisbon, Marfilmes.
Gilbert,
Helen, and Joanne Tompkins. 1996, Post-colonial
Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics, London, Routledge.
Bhabha,
Homi K. 2004. The Location of Culture,
London, Routledge Classics.
Ketteringham,
Anne. 2013, Vamona Navelcar: An Artist of
Three Continents, Pune, Reality PLC and Village Sanctuary Arts.
Mascarenhas-Keyes,
Stella. 2011, Colonialism, Migration and
the International Catholic Goan Community, Saligao, Goa 1556.
Mbembe,
Achille. 2001, On the Postcolony, Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Sarmento,
João. 2011, Fortifications,
Post-colonialism and Power: Ruins and Imperial Legacies, Surrey, Ashgate,
2011.
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This article appears online in the July - August 2013 issue of Muse India dedicated to Goan literature. For more on the artist, visit the Facebook page dedicated to Vamona Ananta Sinai Navelcar.
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