In translating and
compiling the 45 stories in the double volume Lengthening Shadows, editor Paul Melo e Castro showcases the legacy
of the Portuguese short story from erstwhile Goa Portuguesa. Between 1510 and 1961, Goa was the capital of
Luso-Asia and the Estado da Índia
Portuguesa. For Melo e Castro,
the anthology functions as “the autopsy of a dead literature,” focused as it is
on a corpus that spans the period between 1864 and 1987 (8). Annexed by India
in 1961, the change in Goa’s political identity led to a diminished literary
output in Portuguese. The edited volumes thus recall Goa’s literary heritage by
tying together Portuguese-language cultural production with Goa’s Portuguese
identity. In this, the books are a testament, but their very publication evidences
a cultural continuity that cannot be relegated to a bygone era.
Melo e Castro is a lecturer
in Portuguese at the University of Leeds, whose scholarly work has
centered on translating and analyzing
Portuguese Indian fiction in an array of publications. In addition to his
introduction and the translated short stories themselves, Lengthening Shadows also contains an afterword by Augusto Pinto, a
cultural and social commentator, and Associate Professor of English
at Goa’s S. S. Dempo College of Commerce and Economics. While the former hones
in on the aesthetics of the stories and their moment, the latter considers their
sociocultural backdrop.
Though previous
collections have compiled Goan Portuguese literature or included Portuguese
short stories in translation alongside other works of fiction from Goa, this is
the first English language anthology to be published in Goa that is solely
dedicated to the Goan short story in Portuguese. Harking back to the
publication history of the genre, Melo e Castro acknowledges his debt to Vimala
Devi and Manuel de Seabra by titling the anthology with a reference to “the
epigraph of … Monção,” Devi’s 1963
short story collection, which borrows from the Sanskrit poet Kālidāsa (54).
“Partly this choice is homage to Devi and Manuel de Seabra, who have done more
than anyone to preserve and transmit Goa’s Lusophone literary heritage,” Melo e
Castro comments (54). Though Devi and de Sabra’s anthological labors are the antecedent
for Lengthening Shadows, what Melo e
Castro adds is a series of biographical notes about the many writers. These index
their personal histories, literary styles, and the periods in which they wrote.
In addition to
chronicling publication dates and venues, Melo e Castro also offers formalistic
analysis. For instance, in reflecting upon the oeuvre of Luís Manuel Júlio
Frederico Gonçalves (1846-1896), Melo e Castro places the writer’s output
within the period of Romanticism, the Goan iteration of which occurred in the
1860s, he argues, in contrast with its late eighteenth century European
counterpart (10). In exploring Gonçalves’ writing as a product of this literary
tradition, not least because the short story “was also a characteristic of
Romanticism,” Melo e Castro underscores how Gonçalves and his peers “turn[ed]
to Goan settings … An enduring legacy of Romanticism was the attention given to
national and local identities…” (10). Signaling the rise of nationalism during
this period in Europe, even as Melo e Castro politically links metropole and colony,
he highlights the need to expand literary understandings of genre and period.
In turn, this advises comprehending the manifestation of European cultures
beyond the borders of the continent.
In “The Good Old Bad
Days,” Pinto’s afterword to the collection opens with a personal reminiscence:
“You could see, hear and smell Goa
Portuguesa even as late as 1970. That was the year my parents, along with
my nine-year-old self, returned from Kenya to live in our ‘ancestral house’ [in
Goa]” (178). Where Melo e Castro surveys Goa’s connections to and differences
from Europe in the collected stories, Pinto reveals the region’s other colonial
networks and ruminates on its internal ecologies and their effect on Goan
literature. As a metacriticism, Pinto says of Lengthening Shadows that it “can be read as a social exposé
although … all of the writers are middle or upper-middle class. And most are
male, [except] Maria Elsa da Rocha and Vimala Devi ... Also, [excepting]
Anantha Rau Sar Dessai and Laxmanrao Sardesai … the [other] writers are
Catholic” (183-184).
Pinto explains that these
lacunae apart, the collection offers “a better mirror of society than other
Indian languages or even English … [since Portuguese] could connect the
educated classes from all strata as everyone was obliged to study it at least
till the primary level” (185). To illustrate how the translated stories speak
to the kaleidoscopic Goan experience, Pinto refers to the satire employed by Goan
writers in the past two centuries. These authors “[ridiculed] the old
aristocracy” even as they turned their critical gaze upon “the returning Bomboikars and Africanders [– Goans] who
brought back wealth from the booming British colonies” (181). Though there
existed the appearance of tolerance between those of different castes and
classes, Pinto is quick to mention that the stories bear out the “formalised
rules of behaviour” that undergirded the tacit social contract (181).
A version appears in the Journal of Lusophone Studies 2.1 (2017).
