A
writer of history and a prison-reformer leave behind legacies to contemplate
even as they are no more.
It is true that I knew neither, not the
Scribe nor the Nun, except through the legacies they left behind. Both worked
with or within structures. For the Scribe, an architectural historian,
buildings were culture writ in stone. And for the Nun, the walls of a prison were
not what defined its inmates.
Born in 1941 in Arusha, Kenya, the Nun
was an educator whose service brought her to Goa, the land of her peoples. Though
a participant in causes around India, she is probably best remembered for her
work at the storied Aguada Central Jail. They called her the Angel of the
Prisoners. Tying together a desire to improve the natural environment with a
passion for prison reform, in 2000 the Nun involved the prisoners in an
anti-plastic bag drive. The People’s Movement for Civic Action, a group that
campaigned against the use of plastic bags, were recruited by the Nun to train
prisoners in the skill of recycling newspapers into paper bags. Unenthusiastic
at first, due to the low wages associated with such work and not least because
of their situation, the prisoners came around when the Nun explained that this
training might potentially increase their employability upon their release. But
the Nun did more than this by advocating for a reduction in sentences: each set
of a thousand bags crafted by a prisoner would lead to his prison-time being
shortened by two days. Prison authorities noted that other reforms that the Nun
instituted at the jail, such as music and literacy classes, as well as
mediation practice, promoted a calming effect. Inmates were less stressed at
court hearings, for instance.
While the Nun’s work took place within,
for the Scribe the importance of structures derived from their interplay with
history. Born in 1952 of Portuguese origin, in addition to writing about Goan
architecture, the Scribe also spent time in Goa. In his scholarship of Goan
architecture, and in particular that of churches, the Scribe saw in Goan
structures of the late colonial period that they could not merely be understood
as having imbibed the style of the metropole. Even as it notes that Goan
architecture might participate in the use of European aesthetics, the Scribe’s
book, Whitewash, Red Stone (2011),
sees Goan architecture as being of its own ilk – not a European copy, but
uniquely Goan. In establishing stylistic norms, these structures demonstrated
institutional power, and that of their elite, in their own local milieu. This
counters easy assumptions of the lack of agency in colonial contexts while
simultaneously demonstrating the complexity of native hierarchies of authority that
did not rely solely on the imprimatur of the coloniser. Structures for the
Scribe, then, were not only about edifices, but also how they functioned as
metaphors of institutionality.
At the nexus of how the Scribe and the
Nun saw structures was in the ability of architecture to render meaning. Evidence
of European design outside of Europe need not mean that a Goan church is simply
mimicking a foreign style. Rather, the Scribe would have us see such a
manifestation of aesthetics as being not only about power, but also the
creation of European stylistic culture beyond the limits of geography. In other
words, the making of European style can occur outside Europe itself, but its
uses are definitively local and germane to the settings of their creation. For
the Nun, on the other hand, a structure cannot define its occupants even as it
constrains their freedom. The prisoner is no less human based on his or her
incarceration. In being invested in prisoner reform, the Nun was, even if
indirectly, being critical of the function of prisons which seek only to
criminalise and never to rehabilitate. The Nun’s work not only extended to the education
of the average inmate, but also advocacy on behalf of those serving life
sentences. She saw more for them than the structural confinement of their jail
cells.
Paulo
Varela Gomes, the Scribe, died at
the end of April after battling cancer. Reverend
Sister Mary Jane Pinto, the Nun, breathed her
last on the twentieth of the same month. The Scribe and the Nun may be no more,
but their work on and in Goan structures is a legacy that allows for future
possibilities in how we think about architecture and meaning making, of space
and confinement, and style and power. May they rest in peace.
From The Goan.
