"Avoid the Mansion" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (21 June 2014)

I had visited Hong Kong for the first time shortly before the British were to return the city-state to China. There was a palpable sense of uncertainty on the island. I wondered if this is how it had been in Goa in 1961 as the enclave lingered between Portugal and India. My layover in Hong Kong was on the return journey from what had been my first visit back to Goa after I had emigrated to California. Already, I missed being with family and friends. 

Seeking a sense of familiarity, I followed the spice route – or at least the fragrance of spices – in the narrow hallways of the building in which I was rooming and arrived at a tiny Indian eating place. It was so nondescript, it could not even be called a restaurant. Mostly incongruous because it was nestled in a skyscraper, it fit right in with the other eateries and little guest houses crammed into the many floors of the building. Throughout this Kowloon landmark, backpackers, entrepreneurs, and clients from across the globe made up its hustle and bustle. Infamously captured in a Wong Kar Wai film, the ground floor shopping area had been reduced to nothing more than a seedy underworld. There was much comfort to be had in this world within, ensconced as I was among these fellow migrants of similar hue. It was the best Indian meal I have ever eaten. True, I do not even recall, now, what the dish was. All that mattered was that it was eye-wateringly pungent and that the South Indian waiter, who nodded a welcome, had filled my plate with more food than that of any of the other patrons there. 

Nearly twenty years on, at a dessert cafe in a back alley that can only be described as a hipster paradise because we are seated by the side of trashcans and the weekend crowd we are engulfed in would not have frequented this neighbourhood in times past, I tell the people I am with that I had been to the now-Chinese territory before. They are a group of expatriate architects that I meet because of the conference I am attending in Hong Kong. “I’m sorry,” one of them scoffs when I say the name of the place where I had resided. He recapitulates quickly upon not receiving the reaction he had expected. “They’ve cleaned it up lots, I believe,” he equivocates. 

Certainly, when I stopped by the building a few hours prior, I had noticed the changes. An anthropologist colleague had accompanied me to the iconic building which she had read about in Gordon Mathews’ book, Ghetto at the Center of the World. There, we found what we had scoured the entire city for – a pair of dolls from the Disney movie Frozen. The popularity of the film had caused the toys to fly off shelves and appear on eBay at several times their original value. “My daughter will be so thrilled,” the anthropologist said as she studied the knock-offs. “And when she’s old enough, there’ll be even more of the story to tell her because I got them here,” she mused, as we walked around the warren of shops. The place had not changed to the point of being unrecognizable. Somehow, in this ultramodern city, it had managed to retain its unsanitised history – a hive of multiculturality, at once retrograde and the very definition of globalised modernity. 

Just before leaving for Hong Kong on that maiden voyage two decades prior, a European student who was on holiday in Goa gave me some advice on traveling to the then colony. “Whatever you do,” she warned, “do not stay at the Chunking Mansion.” I remember staring up at the sign outside the building after I had gotten a room there, and I had thought to myself how amusingly inappropriate the name was.

An online version of this piece as it appears in print can be seen here.

   

"The Matchmaker" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (24 May 2014)

Although I am told we had met, I have no recollection of my paternal grandfather for whom I am named. Indeed, growing up, most of the accounts I heard of him were less than pleasant ones. For example, if I was being naughty, I would be informed of how lucky I was that João Santana Benedito Ferrão was not alive to witness the mischief his namesake had gotten up to. Apparently, my father and his siblings were subjected to elaborately gothic punishments if they were caught being errant. Once, the senior Benedito had his two youngest children kneel outdoors on rock salt in the afternoon sun, because they had returned home late from school. Well, at least that is the way my dad and his sister remember their childhood. We have all heard those tall tales from our elders, surely, wherein youthful suffering is embellished and its sweetness doubled.

Upon moving to Australia a few months ago, I was put in touch with a Goan family in Melbourne. I was delighted to discover that they had known my family in Goa, and more so that they had known my grandfather. As it turns out, my grandfather had been responsible for setting up their parents. I tried picturing it – the stern Advogado Ferrão as matchmaker. It is an image I find hard to reconcile with the stories I had heard about the man from when I was younger. “But I wonder how he could do it,” the oldest sister remarked. “Your grandfather and my father were very good friends, but my mother was so many years younger than her husband-to-be.” In that day, proposals of this nature were not uncommon. Certainly gendered – it was not often that older women were paired up with younger men – one could muse that it was because of low life expectancy. Or, perhaps, practicality. “She had had it rough,” the Goan Australian woman said, reminiscing about her mother. The young bride my grandfather was responsible for matching up with his friend had survived the 1942 trek out of Burma.

As chronicled in Songs of the Survivors (2007), edited by Yvonne Vaz Ezdani, the Japanese occupied what is now Myanamar, beginning with an attack on Rangoon in December 1941. It was a couple of days before Christmas and a fortnight after Pearl Harbour, and there was no celebration to be had as the year came to a close in great uncertainty. World War II was well under way. In what came to be known as The Great Burma Trek, half a million people made the perilous journey through mountains and jungles to India as refugees. Among them was the Goan community that had called Burma home under the aegis of the British. Many died en route.

Earlier this month, my new Goan Australian friends journeyed to the homeland to celebrate a family wedding in Candolim. The groom and I knew each other as childhood friends in Kuwait where we had both grown up. His grandmother, the Goan woman from Burma whom my grandfather had set up with his compadre, was not to be there for his special day having passed on exactly a year ago. It was a bittersweet return for the family. “She’d had a good innings,” one of her daughters had said to me before she left for the family gathering in Goa.

After all these years, I had not expected to “find” my grandfather in Australia. When I was old enough to travel, my parents brought me to Goa to see my grandparents in Aldona. Before we left to return to Kuwait, my father remembers, Benedito Ferrão took the child that had been named after him into his arms and whispered, “This will be the last time I see you.”

My thanks to Frederick Noronha of Goa 1556 for loaning me a copy of Songs of the Survivors on short notice. An online version of this piece as it appears in print can be seen here.

"Tracking Down History" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (26 April 2014)

“[Their] … naturalization as British citizens moved the location of identity for Goans from Portugal to Britain. Geographically though, they lived in Africa.” In so saying, A Railway Runs Through: Goans of British East Africa, 1865-1980 (2014), Selma Carvalho’s latest book, encapsulates the complex socio-cultural and political identities of Goans in a history spanning Asia, Africa, and Europe. Because of my own familial connections with once-British Kenya, it has often been a source of wonderment that a community as small as the Goan one has not only found itself in so many parts of the world, but also been enmeshed in global histories. East Africa is so embedded in Goan cultural memory that even for those not connected with that diasporic history, the Swahili song “Malaika” is one that forms part of the “Goan soundtrack” – that aural legacy that continues to be heard at family and village celebrations, like stories of relatives in far off places. Bearing witness to the importance of oral accounts, Railway successfully transits from interviews to written sources to record a storied past.

In comparison to her previous book Into the Diaspora Wilderness (2010), Carvalho is far more attuned to the formation of racialized Goan identities in East Africa in Railway. This is apparent in her analysis of how Luis Antonio de Andrade, born in 1865 of mixed Portuguese and Goan origins, prospered in Zanzibar in the early 20^th century. A shrewd businessman, Andrade capitalized on his position “[a]s medical assistant to Sultan Sayyid Ali Bin Sayid,” while “never […] compartmentalis[ing] his identity. He was a Portuguese man; […] a member of the European clubs […]. But that did not preclude him from being an intrinsic part of Goan society” in Zanzibar. “Photographed on occasion wearing an African-styled fez,” Andrade was awarded the Brilliant Star of Zanzibar and honoured as a Chevalier of the Order of the Immaculate Conception by Portugal. 

 Yet, this analysis may have been extended by comparing someone as high profile as Andrade with such other transnational figures as the Goan cooks who also traveled between Asia and Africa. How might we understand their racialization as cosmopolitan figures who traversed continents and empires, even? This is not to imply that Railway does not address issues of class and caste. One notable area where it does so is in speaking of the 1936 “break-away and founding of the Goan Gymkhana” in Kenya, which “made a faction of upper-caste Goans even more insular and exclusivist.” However, even in highlighting the peculiar nature of political rifts in the community, it is still the history of the elite that dominates, further obscuring subalterns.

Because most of the oral history the book relies on emerges from interviews with East African Goans now resident in Britain, Railway eschews how those accounts might have been “coloured,” had

Africans also been interviewed. Apart from a reference to Joseph Zuzarte Murumbe, decolonized Kenya’s second Vice President – a man of Goan and Masai heritage – there is little other mention of the names of black Africans. Nonetheless, Carvalho effectively explores intersectionality in the making of identities in East Africa. For example, note her observation of how “[t]he unsung African-Asian partnership was pivotal in the emancipation of Goan women and the development of a middle class.” This astutely demonstrates how colonialism may have subverted entrenched notions of gender and class, but did so by participating in a larger system of racial difference. Accordingly, Railway is a useful text not only for those with an interest in postcolonial studies, but also for those wishing to explore the multiple tracks of global Goan history.  

An online version of this piece as it appears in print can be seen here. For more on the Histories of British-Goans Project, visit their website.

"Figuring Out Goa" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (15 February 2014)

One sentiment that will stay with readers of Refiguring Goa: From Trading Post to Tourism Destination (2013) is what the author has to say about Goan Studies: “Local scholars and researchers engage with each other […] However, a careful scrutiny […] reveal[s] a silo or tunnel effect. The discussions are in-depth but isolated.” With this provocative opening, one might expect Raghuraman S. Trichur’s book to interrogate academic and other intellectual institutions in the state.  And while that would be useful to get to the heart of the problem that Trichur identifies, his express purpose is to consider Goa’s economic and social history, engaging them as an anthropologist who sees the two as having been at odds with one another at various points in time, and particularly to the detriment of subalterns.

Refiguring Goa ambitiously covers the early colonial period, the acquisition of the Novas Conquistas, as also the relationship between metropolitan Portugal and its colonies during the establishment of the Estado Novo and, then, Salazar’s dictatorship, and, finally, Goa’s association with India during the postcolonial period. For Trichur, Goan Studies would do well to “investigate the social relations that contribute to the constitution of historical facts,” a process that the writer undertakes in his own study through economic analysis grounded in Marxist thought among other theoretical perspectives.

In so reading history, Trichur effectively exposes how key players came to occupy the positions they did at opportune moments. For example, the author observes that “[w]hile trade remained centrally important to Portuguese India in and after the 17^th century, it was not so much the Portuguese […] who prospered from it. It was the native elite,” namely, the Gaud Saraswat Brahmins (GSBs). Here, Trichur keeps with current trends in postcolonial thought, which attend to power relations across lines of race, often noting how collusion and strategy come into play. The dwindling of Portuguese imperial power in comparison with other Europeans that were making inroads into the Asiatic arena was coupled with the Iberians’ lack of emphasis on inland trade. Having focused primarily on the sea trade, the Portuguese witnessed a “decline in [their] prosperity” which, in turn, “saw the rise to power of the local GSBs.”

Yet, as Trichur finds, “[b]y the 1540s the changing political economic situation in Portugal, combined with the increasing influence of Christian missionaries in Goa, altered the situation of relative tolerance towards local customs,” which resulted in land confiscation among other draconian measures. Clearly, what this indicates is that the changing fortunes experienced by the Portuguese led them to turn their attention away from trade and more toward governmentality, guising economics as politics. Trichur seems to stop short at entertaining the possibility that this political transformation due to a sea change in economic trends was also what caused the growth of religious influence. After all, these would have been conjoined ways of exercising institutional authoritarianism.

Importantly, Refiguring Goa situates the erosion of the gaunkari or communidade system within this political economic context, because “[t]he Crown was [now] free to dispose of the land as per its wish.” Even so, the precolonial institution of gaunkari was to find itself undercut most dramatically “in the New Conquest areas […] under indigenous regimes […] By the end of the 19^th century,” Trichur writes, gaunkari had been “reduced to a corporate share and land-holding entity with different categories of membership,” as characterized by the exploitative relationship between bhatkars and mundkars.

Similarly, Trichur’s book detects the ways in which capitalist development through industrial growth, as with mining, greatly benefitted Goa’s elite communities in the postcolonial era. So also, he pinpoints how tourism has allowed Goa to be included in the Indian imaginary in a way that identity politics could not. With both these industries, nonetheless, Trichur maintains that it is the subaltern Goan communities that have been most affected.

With Refiguring Goa, publishing house Goa 1556 decisively queries the state of the non-existent field of Goan Studies. But a little self-reflexivity would serve the publishers themselves well. Although Trichur’s book is well-researched, some of its data requires more currency and it is apparent from the lack of uniformity of the citations that a style sheet was not employed. One hopes that the book will jumpstart an academic discipline that would be of great use to Goa and Goans.   

To see the print version of this article, visit here.