I knew Goa through
the movies. Or, rather, the stories my father told me about them. Not having
been born in Goa, these twice removed narratives of our fabled homeland had to
make do in the absence of the films themselves and visits to Goa.
And if I heard
these tales in relay from their actual source, then this was only fitting given
the material. Believed to be inspired by French novel The Count of Monte
Cristo (1844), Bhuierantlo Munis (1977), one of my father’s
favourites, was the first Goan film to be shot in colour. In his book,
Alexandre Dumas features a character who is fashioned after and named for a
Goan priest who pioneered the study of hypnotism, an actuality history has all
but forgotten. Readers encounter Abbé José Custódio de Faria (1756-1819) as the
discombobulated but wily monk imprisoned at the Château d'If in Dumas’
classic. Here, fiction coincides with fact, for the real Abbé had been
incarcerated at the Bastille at the time of the revolution.
Bhuierantlo
Munis was produced by
musician Chris Perry. His life itself provides the basis for Bardroy Barreto’s Nachom-ia Kumpasar (2015). I had the
pleasure of watching the movie with my parents at Panjim’s Maquinez Palace. The
highly lauded film recalls the yesteryear soundtrack of my parents’ generation.
As evidence, my mother and others of similar age in the audience sang along with
the on-screen performances. But as further proof of the cultural legacy of the
music popularised by Perry and the ever-amazing Lorna Cordeiro, whose lives are
fictionalised in Barreto’s film, I was additionally struck by how the
twenty-somethings seated in the row in front of me would also lend chorus to
the songs, many of which still play on Goan radio stations.
Coming as I do from a family that spans the Goan
diaspora, the region’s cinema has also taught me about the lives of relatives I
have only had passing acquaintance with. The first time I met my grandmother’s
brother, it was on his long overdue visit to Goa after having resided in
Karachi since before the end of Portuguese rule. Dinesh P. Bhonsle’s Enemy? (2015)
gave me some background about how returnees, like my great uncle, are kept from
reconnecting with Goa.
In Enemy? a Goan family once resident in
Pakistan return to their native land to discover that their ancestral home has
been seized under the aegis of the Enemy Property Act of 1968. Created after the
India-Pakistan War of 1965, the law allows the Indian government to take over
the properties of those deemed citizens of enemy nation-states. The act targets
Pakistani nationals, primarily those displaced by Partition, post-Independence.
For the many Goans affected by the act, it was not Partition that cleaved them
from their land, but the annexation of Goa by India which then made the
formerly Portuguese territory beholden to this law.
Goan cinema is its own form, its source material
deriving from local contexts and histories. Part of the Goan Story segment at
IFFI 2019, recent movies like Laxmikant Shetgaonkar’s Paltadcho Munis (2009),
Dnyanesh Moghe’s Digant (2012), and Miransha Naik’s Juze (2017) dwell
on memory at the same time as they challenge conservatism and society’s
rigidities. This current resurgence of Konkani filmmaking in Goa is arguably
emblematic of an endogamous cinematic movement, one I’d like to call Goan Verité.
Goans have adopted the word saudades from the
Portuguese, a sentimental term simultaneously expressive of nostalgia as well
as loss and yearning. Goan Verité explores saudades as it takes on current
realities and envisions ways forward for our community.
From The Peacock.
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