"Janakye Bai’s Story in New Colours: Velip Oral Traditions Illustrated" in the JOÃO ROQUE LITERARY JOURNAL (February 2025)

The illustrated book The Story of Janakye Bai (Goa 1556, 2026) chronicles a tale that has been passed down over several generations amongst Velip people, one of Goa’s Indigenous communities. The story revolves around Janakye bai, a girl who chooses to run away from home rather than resign herself to a fate she refuses to accept. This book appears in two editions, one in Velip Konkani and the other in English. Vithai Zaraunker, a member of the Velip community and an Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at the D. D. Kosambi School of Social Sciences and Behavioural Studies at Goa University, envisioned this book project which records the story of Janakye bai as narrated by Leelavati Zaraunkar and Sita Vaiz. Salil Chaturvedi translated the tale, which has been illustrated by Asavari Gurav.

As Zaraunker explains in her introduction to the book, The Story of Janakye Bai emerges from a project titled “Old Songs, New Stories: Tales from the Velips of Goa,” which was sanctioned by Sangeet Natak Akademi, New Delhi under the programme for Safeguarding the Intangible Cultural Heritage of India. In 2014, Zaraunker participated in this mission as an independent researcher under the guidance of the late Professor Alito Sequeira of Goa University. This gave Zaraunker the opportunity to document the story that would become this illustrated book.

The development of the book occurred in a joint venture instituted by Goa University and Japan’s Konan University. Professor Kyoko Matsukawa who teaches at Konan created a consultancy that would allow Zaraunker to produce the book as part of the scheme, Anthropological Research on Education and Voicing of Self-Narratives and Multi-Media in Goa. Indeed, this anthropological approach and multi-media focus are mirrored in the book which, aside from the illustrated narrative, contains QR codes that allow readers to listen to recordings of songs associated with the oral tradition from which the story arises.

The Story of Janakye Bai highlights the importance of storytelling and oral tradition in Velip and other indigenous communities, not only for cultural and linguistic reasons, but also to challenge conceptions of tribal identity and ideas of what constitute Goanness. These are some of the matters Zaraunker considers in this interview.

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RBF: I am assuming that you grew up hearing of Janakye bai from the time you were young. What is your first memory of this story?

VZ: Yes, I grew up listening to this story. My mother Leelavati Zaraunkar narrated it to me as a child. At the end of telling me the story she used to say, “Look Janakye bai is there on the moon.” This is my first memory of the story.

RBF: In your introduction to the illustrated book, you explain how you first chronicled the Janakye bai story as part of the anthropological project “Old Songs, New Stories: Tales from the Velips of Goa.” This was an academic study and you are also a researcher and professor. Yet, in this iteration, the tale of Janakye bai is relayed to us in the shape of an illustrated text, one that “translates” its orality into writing while adding the visual element of pictures (along with a way to hear the songs that are traditionally part of the telling of this story). Why this form and who are the audiences you hope it will reach? 

VZ: I am hoping to reach the Indigenous community, young people especially. Many members of the
community may not be comfortable with formal academic writing. Some do not read or write fluently. I wanted the story to be accessible even to someone who simply turns the pages and looks at the images. The visual element allows the narrative to be understood beyond the barrier of literacy.

For instance, when I showed the book to my mother, Leelavati Zaraunkar, who is one of the narrators of the story as it appears in the book, she immediately connected with it. She recognised various scenes from the tale through the illustrations. She could relate the images to the oral story she carries within her memory. That moment confirmed for me that this form was necessary. The book was not alien to her; it spoke to her.

The inclusion of illustrations and the possibility of listening to the songs helps keep the essence of the performative and oral dimensions of the story. It does not treat the oral narrative as something to be “fixed” in text alone. Instead, it attempts to translate orality into writing while still respecting its rhythm and visual imagination.

Today, many young people from the Velip community are distanced from oral traditions. Due to stigmatisation and discrimination, tribal identity is often perceived negatively by non-tribal communities. Oral traditions are treated as primitive or backward. As a result, youngsters feel that learning or listening to these stories is not valuable.

I speak from experience. Growing up, I faced discrimination within educational spaces because of my language, social background, and community identity. I was repeatedly made to feel that the way my community dressed, lived, or spoke was inferior. I learned very early on how to remain silent, how to blend in, and how to hide my identity in order to survive in educational institutions. It was only during my postgraduate studies, when I encountered concepts like othering and orientalism, that I understood these experiences were not personal failures. They were outcomes of dominant knowledge systems that construct certain identities as inferior. That realisation changed how I looked at my community. I began to see my community not as one that is lacking knowledge, but that is rich in its own systems of wisdom, values, and lived histories.

This illustrated book is therefore also an intervention. It tells young people: your stories matter. Your language matters. The way you speak, the way you sing matters. Your identity is not something to hide. By presenting the story in a visually engaging and accessible form, I hope young people from my community can see their traditions and themselves represented with dignity.

At a time when these oral traditions are on the verge of extinction due to stigma and discrimination, the book becomes a bridge—between generations, between orality and print, between community and academia. So, this form is not merely aesthetic. It is political. It is ethical.

RBF: “The Velip language has been spoken for a long time … in Goa … Our language is also Konkani, but it has no status among the various Konkanis … Our Konkani is not known as Konkani but as a ‘tribal dialect,’” you underscore in your introduction.

Much has been made politically about Goan identity and its connection to the status of varying forms of the Konkani language, especially with regard to the differing official categorizations of Romi versus Nagri tongues and scripts. So also, when it comes to literary expression in Goa, there is a contentious history of the sidelining of Romi-scripted works, most notably in how the state chooses to render its support.

In the midst of this, what you point to is how Velip Konkani does not even factor into such debates when the language is dismissed as being a “tribal dialect.” If on the one hand efforts like The Story of Janakye Bai demonstrate diverse types of literary and linguistic traditions in Goa, on the other hand, it also draws attention very specifically to the stigmatization of Goan tribal identity and its representation.

This brings up two questions for me. The first is what might a project like this, one that comes from the community itself, do to counter the marginalization of Velip people and other Indigenous Goans? And the second question has to do with the book being produced in two languages: what does translation do to expand upon how Velip identity may be represented and preserved?

VZ: I would like to begin with the first query. We must first ask: how have Indigenous people been constructed through literature and scholarship? For a long time, mainstream scholarship has defined us as backward, primitive, illiterate, and without knowledge. Our struggles, our resistance are rarely recognised. When our knowledge systems are acknowledged at all, they are often reduced to “folktales,” stripped of their political, historical, and epistemic depth.

The Story of Janakye Bai directly challenges this dominant portrayal of the Velip community as silent, passive, or voiceless. We are not voiceless. We are not silent. What exists is a failure of dominant scholarship to listen, and a failure of academic systems to take Indigenous narratives seriously. This work was guided by critical questions such as: Why have stories like the one about Janakye bai never appeared in scholarly writings on the community? Why do such narratives remain confined within the community, even though the community itself has been extensively researched? Why are stories of exploitation absent from academic records? Why have histories of Indigenous resistance consistently not been recognised? Why are tribal knowledge systems dismissed merely as folklore?

When a project like this comes from within the community, it speaks to lived experience rather than about it. That itself becomes a powerful counterpoint to marginalisation.

I now come to your second question regarding translation and the book being produced in two languages. The translated version is meant for readers who may not understand Velip Konkani. It enables tribal literature and knowledge systems to reach a wider audience—academics, policymakers, students, and readers beyond the community. Translation, in that sense, becomes a bridge. It expands visibility and invites recognition. At the same time, publishing the Velip Konkani version is equally, if not more, significant. In dominant discourse, Velip Konkani is dismissed as a “tribal dialect.” It does not even enter debates about scripts or linguistic status in Goa. It remains invisible within conversations about identity and language politics. Bringing out the Velip Konkani version is therefore a political move.

The mainstream may marginalize Velip Konkani, but I see the sustenance of the language as an act of resistance. Printing it, preserving it, and circulating it affirms its legitimacy. It tells young people in the community that their language is worthy of print and worthy of intellectual respect. A book like this dignifies the language and expands the representation of the Indigenous communities of Goa. This project thus challenges the structures that have marginalised Indigenous communities in Goa.

RBF: This book has many components: the gathering and synthesization of assorted narrations of the Janakye bai story, illustration, translation, and the inclusion of songs via QR codes. How long did it take to make all this happen? What challenges did you face in the process?

VZ: A primary concern was about adequately representing the community with respect while keeping in mind the existing stereotypes about the community. With this in mind, I adopted a different approach, especially in how I wanted the illustrations to be produced. Since I know the Velip community is embedded in nature, I wanted the illustrations to reflect this. Working with the illustrator, I ensured that the illustrations would represent the way we are and the way we see ourselves rather than how others see us stereotypically. This required continuous engagement with the artist so as to deconstruct notions and ensure that the way the illustrations were done would counter the marginalization of Indigenous people. I had many challenges when I was working with the artist as they had their own perception about the community.

QR codes are included so that readers can hear the songs alongside the story. When one listens to the songs at the same time as they read the lyrics in the book, there is a difference. The character shift or addition or deletion of details happens in each telling depending upon the mood and environment of the storyteller. Therefore, oral traditions cannot be fixed in written form. To make people know and understand their importance, the QR codes allow readers to listen to the songs.

Translation was not an easy process, though. This work was translated through the use of a third language, which in this case was Hindi. The work was translated by Salil Chaturvedi, who does not know Konkani. Hence, the work was translated by Salil and me: we would sit together and, first, I would translate each word into English and then translate entire paragraphs or songs into Hindi for Salil. In turn, he would translate the Hindi text into English.

Before Salil, I had tried working with a person who knows Konkani. However, this translator could write and speak standard Konkani, but not Velip Konkani. Because this person was not familiar with Velip vocabulary, the whole meaning of a sentence would change. In one instance, the work “nagn,” which means marriage, was translated as “naked.” So, as I discovered, sending the content to someone who does not know Velip Konkani could lead to misinterpretations. Thus, translation was the biggest challenge. It took us almost a year.

RBF: I want to come to the text itself. Incest, as your introduction declares, is central to the Janakye bai story but, of course, it is not something exclusive to any community. The book deals with this issue very carefully through a feminist perspective. I see the story as offering girls and women a viewpoint that challenges patriarchy and not simply accepting things just for the sake of maintaining peaceable relations at home. At the same time, this must have been a delicate matter to consider. How has the book been received by the community?

VZ: Yes, of course the story had to be communicated with care because it is about incest. Before someone reads the story, as already declared in my introduction, the story is about incest and the Velip community resists incest. Incest is seen as a sin in the community. Janakye bai therefore is a symbol of resistance. Her story is a message to young girls about how to uphold their dignity, regardless of who they may have to contend with. Even if it is your family, you have the right to choose and you are an agent of your own life. When your freedom is in danger, you have every right to resist.

This book has not yet reached the community widely. I have not gotten any reaction to the question that you have asked about how the book has been received by the community. It will take time to learn this. However, I have received feedback from young members of the community with whom I shared an interview that was done with me about the book and that was published in The Navhind Times (23 January, 2026). Based on the interview, many of the educated youth from my community said they thought this was a great effort.

 

RBF: Late into its development, Janakye bai transforms into a member of the Mhar community so that she may visit her family. This is very striking because a celestial being allows her the opportunity to take on any form of her choosing but, even so, she deliberately asks to become a Dalit person rather than someone of a higher caste or status. There is an equation here between communities—tribal and Dalit peoples. What should readers make of this likening of Goa’s marginalized communities?

VZ: First, it points to an important social reality: tribal societies do not have caste divisions in the way caste society does. The very idea of caste order is something that tribal communities historically did not practise; rather, it was learned and imposed through continued interaction with caste-based society. Janakye bai’s transformation makes evident this division and, at the same time, critiques how caste enters and restructures social life.

Second, Janakye bai’s choice to become a member of the Mhar community can be read as an acknowledgment that tribal and Dalit lives—while shaped by different histories—share similar experiences of exclusion, and marginalisation in Goa. The story identifies that everyday experiences of discrimination, exploitation, and social humiliation are not isolated across the tribal and Dalit communities.

The likening of tribal and Dalit identities in this moment is therefore not accidental. It is a powerful statement that oppression does not function in separated categories. Instead, these are overlapping social realities. The story reminds readers that marginalised communities are often divided and classified differently by dominant systems, even when their lived situations are connected.

In that sense, the narrative offers a message both to readers and to the communities themselves: oppressed castes and Indigenous peoples should not be seen as essentially disconnected. Their struggles interconnect, and recognising this shared ground opens up the possibility of unity rather than division.

Janakye bai’s choice, even when she is free to assume any form, becomes an ethical and political gesture. It affirms self-respect in identities that dominant society devalues, and it challenges hierarchies that place some lives above others.

RBF: Finally, what is next for you? Will you be doing more work with Velip oral culture?

VZ: Yes. I have transcribed more than ten stories from the community so far. These stories are not merely stories but, rather, are the knowledge system of the community. I say this because when there was no formal school available for the children from the community, these stories were used to communicate moral values, freedom, and agency to the children. Hence, according to me, we do not get knowledge only from schools or educational institutions—we also get knowledge from our elders and communities.

From the João Roque Literary Journal. 

"A Book full of Rice - Portuguese Colonialism, Food and Society in Goa: 1900-1961 in the JOÃO ROQUE LITERARY JOURNAL (September 2025)

 

Once an Assistant State Librarian at Goa’s Krishnadas Shama State Central Library, Maria de Lourdes Bravo da Costa also served as a Reference Librarian whose specialty was Indo-Portuguese History. Accordingly, the focus of da Costa’s latest book comes as no surprise, its title being Portuguese Colonialism, Food, and Society in Goa: 1900-1961 (Bloomsbury 2025).

Attending to the final decades of Portuguese rule in Goa, da Costa’s book looks closely at rice production in the capital of Estado da Índia, arguing that despite being a dietary staple, the crop regularly fell short of the requirements of Goans, and especially those from marginalized backgrounds. In her book, da Costa examines how the problem of rice insufficiency was emblematic of entrenched social hierarchies, especially in the context of bhatkar-mundkar (landlord-tenant) agrarian economies in Goa. Yet, as da Costa also finds, the failure to meet the basic needs of its people evidenced the decline of Portuguese India.

As is clear, da Costa’s book delves into social, economic, and political concerns related to Goa’s twentieth century history. Nevertheless, da Costa’s research also includes cultural and literary perspectives, topics she says more about in this interview with R. Benedito Ferrão.

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RBF: What led you to the study of rice and especially in the period of Goan history you cover in your book?

MLBC:  Rice is the staple food of the Goan people, and any serious study of the region’s history must acknowledge its central role within the community. In my own writing and research, I’ve explored how rice shaped not just daily sustenance, but also systems of power and survival. When this basic cereal was in short supply, it wasn’t just hunger people faced — it was vulnerability. Those who had no land of their own to grow rice, especially the subaltern classes, found themselves increasingly dependent on landowners. That dependence became a tool — a way to control, exploit, and dominate. And it wasn’t just individuals who used it to their advantage. The very institutions that governed agrarian life — our Comunidades, and the colonial rulers behind them — all played their part in reinforcing these hierarchies, with rice as both the currency and the chain.

The sixty years I chose to explore were marked by events that left a lasting impact on Goa and the wider world — two World Wars, the Great Depression, the long struggle for freedom from colonial rule, and ultimately, the end of Portuguese control in Goa, Daman, and Diu. What drew me to this period wasn’t just its historical significance, but its nearness. I had lived through the final years of Portuguese rule as a child, and the memories of that time have stayed with me. More than that, I grew up listening to stories from elders — people who had experienced those events firsthand. Their recollections, shared around the home or in conversation, made history feel vivid and alive. That intimacy, that sense of lived experience, made working with contemporary history far more meaningful to me than delving into the distant past.

RBF: An intertext you rely on quite a bit is one by another writer with whom you share a surname: O Signo da Ira / The Sign of Wrath (1961) by Orlando da Costa (1929-2006). Quite symbolically, this work of fiction in Portuguese was published (in Portugal) in the same year as the end of Portuguese rule in Goa. Inasmuch as da Costa’s novel is set against the backdrop of Goa’s rural agrarian economy and portrays the hardships encountered by mundkars, it coequally represents the stratification of caste-ridden social hierarchies in late Portuguese Goa.

In employing O Signo da Ira, you parallel this work of fiction and the historical realities of the period of its setting. What role does historical fiction play in helping us understand the past?

MLBC: O Signo da Ira serves as a literary archive of a time when Goan society was on the point of transformation. Da Costa's portrayal of rural and urban settings, the complexity of caste and class, and the prevalent atmosphere of fear and inertia, all contribute to a textured historical understanding that goes beyond facts and timelines.

Historical fiction invites us to see history not just as a series of facts, but as a human story — layered, subjective, and alive. It allows us to question dominant narratives, reclaim silenced histories, to feel the past, and to better understand the forces that shaped our present and, in this particular case, continue to shape Goan (and lusophone) identity today.

My interest in O Signo da Ira stems from its focus on rice cultivation and the power dynamics between the
bhatkar and mundkar. Although the author briefly notes that the story is based on this relationship, the novel deeply engages with these themes. It begins with the preparation of fields for the winter rice crop (vangana), grounding the narrative in agrarian life. However, rice is not just a crop — it becomes a symbol of survival and a tool of exploitation in the story. The bhatkars control land and, by extension, the mundkars, reinforcing caste and class hierarchies. Through this lens, the novel exposes how food and land are central to systems of oppression. O Signo da Ira thus functions as both historical fiction and social critique, giving voice to the often-silenced realities of rural Goan life under colonial rule.

In reading the novel through the lens of rice cultivation, I found it became much more than a historical fiction set in colonial Goa. It served as a critique of agrarian injustice, a document of lived realities, and a reminder of how sustenance — something as essential as rice — could also be weaponised in maintaining systems of inequality.

RBF: O Signo da Ira is not the only literary or cultural text you work with in your book. You also analyze Leslie de Noronha’s The Mango and the Tamarind Tree (1970), work by the Moraeses (Francis or “Frank” and his son Dominic or “Dom”), and also themes in Goan folk songs of the dulpod variety. In all of these examples of cultural production, you seek out how they represent food. How are sustenance and memory intertwined in these expressions of Goan (and diasporic) cultural life?

MLBC: In Goan and diasporic cultural expressions, food represents more than sustenance — it is a vessel of memory, identity, and belonging. Traditional dishes like fish curry-rice or sarapatel carry stories of home, family, and heritage, often passed down through generations. In the diaspora, preparing these foods becomes a way to reconnect with Goa, preserving cultural identity in new environments. Another interesting example is the chouriço–churisas or linguisas de Goa. For many, it is one of the most cherished foods in Goa, as well as for expatriate Goans.  An ode to it was written by far and nearby Goan writers, maybe closer in Bombay or far away in Canada.

RBF: Even though your book is about Goan food history, in many ways it is also about the significance of fiction, poetry, and music by Goans in the establishment and maintenance of Goa’s culture. Now that you are retired after many years of service as a librarian, what do you reckon has changed in the way that Goans engage with literature by Goan writers? To be plain, this question arises from my own interest as a scholar of Goan literature and the observation that it is a subject that does not receive adequate attention in academia in Goa.

MLBC: I would agree with you — for a long time, Goan writers were not recognised as having a serious place in literature. We see that while Goa did produce literature in Portuguese during the colonial period, full-length novels were few and far between. What we do have, however, are short stories and significant contributions by Goan writers in Marathi and Roman Konkani.

After the annexation of Goa in 1961, the literary scene diversified further. We began to see works in English, Konkani (both Romi and Devanagari scripts), and Marathi, along with a handful of publications in Portuguese — mostly short stories, a few novels, and some essays. I am speaking specifically about Goan literature in Goa.

Although my own work has drawn on fiction, poetry, and music by Goans to understand how culture was established and maintained, this approach hasn't always been widely accepted. Many conservative historians still regard archival documents as the only legitimate source for historical inquiry. That said, this trend is gradually shifting. More scholars are beginning to see the value of alternative sources — including fiction — in capturing the emotional and cultural realities of a society.

In this spirit, I have used newspapers as a kind of “people’s archive” — a living record of voices, opinions, and everyday experiences that formal archives often overlook. While this approach may not be accepted by all, it is heartening to see a growing openness toward literary and cultural texts as valid sources of historical understanding.

Fiction is often undervalued in academia for lacking factual credibility, yet it offers deep insight, especially when official records are limited or biased. It is up to the researcher to critically engage with fiction as a cultural and emotional archive. Meaningful analysis requires depth — not simply citing many sources, but closely examining a few relevant texts within the research context. When approached thoughtfully, fiction can powerfully complement or challenge official historical narratives.

I would like to add that the São Paulo University, Brazil, academic group, Pensando Goa, and the  GIEIPC-IP - Grupo Internacional de Estudos da Imprensa Periódica Colonial do Império Português, based in Lisbon, are responsible for opening up new dimensions of research, and I am happy to be an active member of both groups.

RBF: In closing, how would you like to see your book engaged with in Goa and elsewhere?

MLBC: I’d like my book to be seen as part of an effort to rethink how we engage with Goan history — not only through documents and state archives, but through the textures of everyday life: food, fiction, music, memory. In Goa, I hope readers connect with the work personally — especially those whose families have lived the realities I explore, like the politics of rice cultivation or the bhatkar–mundkar relationship. These are not just economic structures, but deeply emotional and cultural ones, shaping how people experienced power, identity, and survival.

I’ve used fiction, poetry, and song not just as background or context, but as sources — as living archives. And I’ve treated newspapers as “people’s archives,” where voices often excluded from official records could still be heard. I hope that readers and researchers begin to see these forms as essential to understanding history — particularly in postcolonial and regional contexts like Goa.

Outside Goa, I’d like the book to challenge the more superficial or romantic views of the region. Goa is not only a tourist destination or a footnote in Portuguese colonial history — it is a place of deep literary, linguistic, and social complexity. If the book can help spark more interest in Goan literature — whether in Portuguese, Romi or Devanagari Konkani, Marathi, or English — and open up new ways of thinking about cultural memory and resistance, then I’ll feel it has done meaningful work.

In the end, I hope it encourages others — students, scholars, and general readers — to look more closely, to read more deeply, and to question the boundaries between history and culture.

From the João Roque Literary Journal.  

"Of Red Dust, Regional Tales, and Life Stories: A Conversation with Paul Melo e Castro on Translating Goan Fiction" in the JOÃO ROQUE LITERARY JOURNAL (December 2024)

Apart from his work as a critic and scholar of literature from the Portuguese period in Goa, in recent years, Paul Melo e Castro has steadily been translating the Portuguese-language works of Goan writers into English. Primarily focusing on those authors of the mid- to late-twentieth-century whose genre of choice was short fiction, Melo e Castro’s most recent translations are three books, each anthologizing the work of a specific author. Those writers are Augusto do Rosário Rodrigues (1911-1999), Maria Elsa da Rocha (1924-2007), and Epitácio Pais (1924-2009).

Through such endeavours, Melo e Castro, presently a lecturer in Portuguese and Comparative Literature at the University of Glasgow’s School of Modern Languages & Cultures, has provided a new generation of readers the stories of the previous century, saving several of these tales from obscurity or, even, complete disappearance. After 1961, when Portuguese colonialism in Goa ended, lusophone literary production in Goa tapered off as Goans grappled with the socio-cultural changes brought on by the Indian annexation. Simultaneously, concerns about the status of Goa’s regional languages, Konkani and Marathi, took on political valences while English and its ties to globalization also meant that that language (replete with its own history as a colonial remnant) occupied the public imaginary. In the meanwhile, Portuguese continued to fade into the background in Goa.

While on the one hand the eclipsing of Portuguese literature by Goans has much to do with the diminishing presence of the Portuguese language in Goan society and culture, its decline arguably also has to do with the lack of engagement with non-contemporary literature (in any language) by Goan civil society and academia more broadly.

In this interview with R. Benedito Ferrão, Melo e Castro talks about the translations Life Stories: The Collected Stories of Maria Elsa da Rocha (Goa 1556, 2023), Weeds in the Red Dust: The Collected Stories of Epitácio Pais (CinnamonTeal, 2023), and Regional Tales (CinnamonTeal, 2024) which brings together stories by Augusto do Rosário Rodrigues.

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 RBF: How did you discover the writing of these particular authors and what led you to the task of translating their stories?

PMeC: I encountered these stories in a mix of ways. Some colleagues who visited Goa for material on early-twentieth-century Portuguese-language feminism – specifically the Goan Maria Ermelinda dos Stuarts Gomes – went to the old Central Library and were told about Rocha by Maria de Lourdes Bravo da Costa Rodrigues, who was head librarian then and continues to be a very active scholar. One of these colleagues, Claire Williams, brought me back a copy of Vivências Partilhadas (2005), an anthology of Rocha’s stories put out by Óscar de Noronha, who has done an enormous amount to preserve and promote Goa’s heritage. Vivências Partilhadas provides the bulk of the stories in my translation, though it also includes work that only appeared in local papers and some that went unpublished and which Óscar graciously passed on to me.

I met Maria de Lourdes personally a few years later when I myself had the opportunity to work in the old Central Library. When I mentioned I was after stories in Portuguese, she went and fetched Augusto do Rosário Rodrigues’s Contos Regionais (1987) off a shelf. I’d never heard of it, and in all honesty the collection would likely have remained in oblivion were it not for Maria de Lourdes. It might well be that the copy in the central library is the last remaining.

Epitácio Pais is a slightly different case. Another Goan author I’ve worked on and translated, Vimala Devi (the pen name of Teresa de Baptista Almeida) organised an anthology of Goan writing in Portuguese with her husband, the critic, translator and novelist Manuel de Seabra. It’s entitled A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa (1971). The anthology is accompanied by a companion volume on Goan history, society, and identity that deserves to be better known. A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa is very easy to find in the UK. The Portuguese government, which published the work, must have offered copies to all the British universities with Portuguese departments. It was where I first learnt about Goa’s Portuguese-language heritage.

Devi and Seabra discovered Pais’s work after soliciting information and contributions in Goan papers like O Heraldo and Diário da Noite. A couple of years after the anthology, in 1973, a collection of Pais’s stories entitled Os Javalis de Codval was published in Lisbon by Editorial Futura with an introduction by Seabra. Most of the stories in my translation come from there, though a number are unpublished and were shared with me by his daughter Sharmila Pais (also a very active scholar). As some of Seabra’s own work was brought out by the same publisher, I imagine he brokered Pais’s collection. While Javalis is long out of print, it’s easy to find in libraries or second hand and was one of the first full pieces of Goan literature I ever read. It was Javalis and Devi’s Monção that made me think there was something worthwhile for me to do with Goan writing as a scholar of literature.

As for the translations, I think the impetus for those came from Frederick Noronha. I think everyone in the world with any kind of interest in Goa winds up in contact with Frederick sooner or later. We met briefly in Goa and corresponded by e-mail about my work. In essence, with the DIY attitude he has, he said something like: “We don’t know the authors you’re talking about and don’t speak Portuguese. I’ve got my own publishing venture. I’ll publish them if you translate them.” I’d always been interested in translation and as I set about putting together an anthology of Goan writing in Portuguese for Goa, 1556, I realised I enjoyed translating very much and felt I was doing a good job. I haven’t stopped since, also translating Portuguese, Brazilian, Macanese, and African authors.

RBF: These have not been your first efforts at translating writing by Goan authors. For instance, your two-volume Lengthening Shadows: An Anthology of Goan Short Stories (Goa 1556 and Golden Heart Emporium, 2016) similarly gathers works by Goan writers in Portuguese, reoffering them in English. However, in an essay that appears in the anthology, you claim that it functions as an “autopsy of a dead literature,” understandably because Portuguese is a language that Goan writers seldom write in anymore but, perhaps, even more so because Goan writing in Portuguese is very rarely consumed in Goa in the present day.

Even so, by the very fact of the reappearance of these stories in English, do they present the opportunity to re-enliven the study of Portuguese outside of that language itself and, also, to breathe new life into these works of fiction by making them available to contemporary audiences?

Further, what possibilities might you envision for the use of your translations of these stories by Pais, da Rocha, and do Rosário Rodrigues, especially as one contends with the fact that writing by Goans tends to find such limited readership institutionally and more generally?

PMeC: “Autopsy of a dead literature” is a rather histrionic metaphor, isn’t it? My thoughts and feelings on this sort of thing have moved on somewhat. All literatures “live” – if that’s even the right word – when they’re read. A “classic” in Italo Calvino’s definition never stops being read and so accretes a cultural meaning that goes beyond itself, never stops being turned into slightly different works by all who read them, a sort of inexhaustible mine. I think something similar is true across the literary spectrum. A literature might no longer be produced – though even something as “dead” as Goan literature in Portuguese still shows surprising signs of life, such as Ave Cleto Afonso’s sadly unheralded pastiche of Camões, O Vaticínio do Swârga (2013), or the very recent fiction about Goans in Mozambique by Álvaro Carmo Vaz – but it can always go on being “refracted,” which was Belgian translation theorist André Lefevere’s term for the many ways in which literary works can be re-written (and includes adaptation, translation, scholarship, journalism, education, and the myriad forms of online discussion Lefevere never lived to see, having died in 1996).

Goan literature in Portuguese continues when it’s refracted (translated into a different language, written about in relation to other Goan literatures, other Portuguese-language literatures, and any other literatures that might bear some comparison – Filipino literature in Spanish is one possibility among many). This exchange between us here, for instance, breathes life into the stories we’re talking about, adds to their stock of meanings and affects and maybe makes possible further refractions. For me, one of the most important things translation in particular does is make possible unexpected readings and connections, as it opens texts up to very different readers across space and time. But what goes for Goan literature in Portuguese applies to all other Goan literatures – the more they’re refracted, the more they’ll “live.”

RBF: Born in Aldona in 1924, Maria Elsa da Rocha’s stories reflect the social concerns of her time. Yet, despite her twentieth century nascence, one picks up on the zeitgeist of a previous era (perhaps the nineteenth-century) that seems to permeate a few of da Rocha’s stories, even when they may be set in the author’s day.

Evidently drawn from an earlier period, “Dom Teotónio,” a tale your note describes as being about “the gradual decline of the bhatcars,” is replete with swashbuckling masked intruders whom readers may associate with another epoch. Contrastingly, at the same time as “Destyagi”/ “The Émigré” feels more recent (especially because of its mention of Dabolim, site of the airport in Goa, from whence the titular returning diasporic character makes his way to his ancestral home), its depiction of feudal conditions has an inescapably archaic quality.

Revealingly, both, your translation of da Rocha’s own preface to Vivências Partilhadas, from which Life Stories is drawn, and the preface to the English version written by Helga do Rosario Gomes, da Rocha’s niece, convey that the short-story writer often drew from her own family’s oral history.

In the hands of da Rocha, her contemporaries, and even writers who follow, Goan fiction, but the short story most specifically, appears to never fully eschew the nineteenth-century; to put this conversely, a generic quality of the Goan short story seems to be the influence it bears of the legacy of that period. Is it too simple to say that this is because social realities, like the persistence of caste differences, continue to be imbued by the feudality of yore? As someone conscious of her own elite familial history, how might da Rocha’s stories, then, be instructive in their fictionalized chronicling of such heritage?

PMeC: I think you’re right to suggest that Goa had its own particularly long nineteenth-century and that this in turn cast a long shadow across the twentieth. There are others who can write about the 1800s with more authority than me, but I see its influence on later authors in the paradox that if on the one hand it was when a certain Goan elite began to see itself on the historical margins – as regards British India, and especially a Bombay in dramatic expansion, though this modernisation process might seem less simply positive to us today than it did to Goan intellectuals then – it was also a period when socially, politically, and culturally this elite’s position and influence in Goa was at a zenith.

The Goan “casa grande” that so fascinates Rocha – and Rodrigues, for that matter – are consolidated in the nineteenth-century. The sort of interiors Rodrigues and to a lesser extent Rocha describes – metonyms of an identity they wish to transcend but can’t help sighing for – are stuffed with the nineteenth-century. At the same time, if the nineteenth-century weighs heavy, then the advent of Salazarism is equally important, in that it both brought the positive aspects of the nineteenth-century to a shuddering halt and gave its negative elements a sort of zombie existence that would continue until 1961. It’s worth saying that this shock was unevenly distributed though, which is why figures like Rocha, Rodrigues, and Pais, in their different ways, felt it so keenly. I imagine the peasantry didn’t notice too much difference. Indeed, the shock of moving from the First Republic, with all its chaos but real idealism, to Salazarist dictatorship might have had the most powerful psychological effects in Goa out of all the spaces that constituted Portugal at that time (though again, for an elite). In Europe, initially at least, there was some perception of stabilisation. In Goa, on the contrary, it was as if history – as progress, at least – had been thrown into reverse.

You’re right to pinpoint caste as an overriding theme. I sometimes see comments to the effect that caste is largely implicit in Goa, powerful but not mentioned. The same can’t be said for Goan literature in Portuguese, where caste is probably the most common theme (besides, marriage, which is obviously related). All sorts of anxieties about modernity and tradition, change and identity, injustice, and progress revolve around the issue of caste in Rocha, Rodrigues, and Pais, though there are as many differences as similarities to their respective attitudes towards it.

It seems to me that there are two elements in Rocha’s stories that pull in different directions. The first is their basis in real life, the anecdotal origin you mention. She says in her introduction that her stories are largely adapted from things she herself had lived through or stories that she had been told. It’s why the title of her anthology in Portuguese – Vivências Partilhadas – is such a well chosen one. A “vivência,” derived from the verb “viver,” is an experience lived through. The other element is a certain idealism or romanticism that has a certain conventionality. The struggle between the messiness of life and the attempt to shape it into a story – the attempt to turn vivência into experiência, perhaps – is at its most interesting in Rocha.

RBF: Two stories in Regional Tales by Augusto do Rosário Rodrigues stood out to me for their shared concern about familial continuity. Without giving away too much, “The Heir Apparent” and “Felicidade and Ventura – a Christmas Tale” hinge upon orchestrations of identity, where closely guarded secrets allow for the preservation of the heteropatriarchal family. While again having to do with caste, as you note in the essay that closes the book, these stories expose “[t]he myth[-making] of bloodlines.”

The recurrence of this theme in do Rosário Rodrigues’ stories, as it relates to Goan Catholics, echoes the analysis of the malleability of caste that Anjali Arondekar lays out in Abundance: Sexuality’s History (2023), a book about the Gomantak Maratha Samaj, a Bahujan Hindu Goan community. In both instances, caste and genealogy are always precarious, their “reality” bounded by the acceptance of their fictionalization. For do Rosário Rodrigues’ part is there a delicious irony to be savoured in his metafictional approach to revealing the artifice of caste and genealogy as constant fictions through the very form of fiction?

PMeC: Absolutely. Caste is largely stories people tell themselves and others, the reality of which is in their effects on ideas and interactions (the same goes for race, which is another social category that features prominently in Rodrigues’s work). One of the interesting things about Rodrigues is that, though he’s very clear race and caste are hoary mythologies that should be abandoned, he still can’t quite get away from caste and race-inflected thinking. The two stories you mention are curious examples. As you say, both are about the reproduction of a certain social formation when procreation fails. In the “Heir Apparent,” there’s a very real moral bankruptcy, but the second is a question of misfortune. But as subversive as the stories are in some ways, essentially the plots come full circle. There’s something of Lampedusa’s The Leopard about the whole collection – caste must be abandoned, but so that society will stay pretty much the same (but yet also somehow become fairer and more meritocratic). There is a similar structure of magic feeling in Rocha. Pais, though, for whom history is tragic, has a quite different outlook.

It's very interesting to bring up Anjali’s work. Your comments show, I think, the uses of refraction and the sort of comparative approach the study of Goa could only benefit from. On the one hand, a complex and nuanced archival work. On the other, a series of apparently light-hearted short stories about vanished times and outdated elites who might have thought themselves almost to be in a different world to the Bahujan group Anjali writes about. But by bringing them together for a moment, we can think about issues of caste and genealogical constructions as they effect agency and identity across Goa and beyond in broad terms, casting a little new light on both sides of the comparison.

I greatly enjoyed translating Rodrigues’s work. At their best, they made me laugh out loud. But his particular weakness, especially in the lesser stories, is with plots, which either peter out or end patly. His critical eye allowed him an irony to savour, as you say, but he had great trouble conceptualising an alternative to the world he depicted. I don’t think it’s surprising that the stories in which he did offer some kind of programme, such as it was, represent wishful thinking to the highest degree. Apparently, he told Devi and Seabra that he was writing a “novel of manners” (romance de costumes). I don’t know if it was never finished or simply lost, but it’s a great shame we don’t have a novel-scale example of Rodrigues’ attitudes, with the more structural working out of relations that would imply.

RBF: I found Weeds in the Red Dust: The Collected Stories of Epitácio Pais to be prescient for its author’s attention to issues of land and labour rights, economic instability, and social immobility; the earthiness of Pais’ characters is signalled by the book’s title in its symbolic reference to that most recognizable feature of Goa, its rust-coloured soil.

Yet, inasmuch as Pais’ stories portray the condition of the marginalized, as you point out in “The Tragic Visions of Epitácio Pais,” which readers’ can find at the book’s end, the author delivers a keen understanding of the socioeconomic infrastructure underpinning the disenfranchisement of his characters. As you observe, in stories like “Shanti,” “On the Train,” or “A Woman’s Fate,” where female characters toil in fulfilment of gendered expectations, Pais’ object is not so much to have his readers feel pity for these women’s plights but, rather, to have them notice the “inevitability” of these characters’ condition. Put differently, the characters suffer as women because it is the prevailing order of things (society, economics, caste, gender) that predetermine their lives.

“Characters, like the humans they model, always act in space,” you write in analysis of Pais’ stories, adding that “[s]pace, in turn is produced by actions and interactions.” As poignant as this observation is, I wondered if Pais’ stories may alternatively be seen as apprehending inertia rather than action. Thus, is the author’s “tragic vision” the cognition he offers of the potential immutability of circumstances: where his tragic figures are only symbolic of others who will interchangeably meet with similar fates for as long as the ground realities remain unchallenged?

PMeC: There is a lot in your last point. I would counter though, that in terms of how space is made, and portrayed, inactivity itself might be thought of as a kind of action (which might well show the limitations of these sorts of metaphors). Actions can be performed, can fail, can be thwarted, can be dreamt-of but not undertaken all with knock-on effects for space. A certain dynamic of space and behaviour continues because contextual forces are not yet strong enough to overcome the social point of rest. I agree with your take on Pais’s stories. One way of summarising his “tragic vision” (as Seabra called it) would be “structure trumps agency.” And, as you say, there’s nothing dewy-eyed in Pais’s writing. There’s no fishing for sentiment. Only a sort of despairing small “c” conservatism that expects worse unintended effects from radical change. If Rodrigues and Rocha both articulate a slightly unconvincing idealism, Pais is almost entirely pessimistic. That, ultimately, is what I take as the tragic in literature, the representation of individuals caught up in forces that exceed individual control and in which volition and outcome rarely coincide.

RBF: In closing, I wanted to ask about what you are presently working on and also what you might like to pursue in terms of future research.

PMeC: In terms of translation, I’ve been working in fits and starts on the work of José da Silva Coelho (1889–1944). His satirical stories might be roughly compared to the work of Francisco João da Costa (Gip) in the preceding generation. But where Gip is recognised today – if not read, perhaps – Coelho has been largely forgotten. I think here we see the value of publishing in book form. Jacob e Dulce (1896) was published as a printed book and so Costa is remembered. Silva Coelho’s work wasn’t and he’s now almost entirely out of mind. It’s true that, in one of her texts, Maria Aurora Couto describes him as being “considered Goa’s greatest short story writer in Portuguese,” but it’s not clear who did the considering or whether she herself had read any of his work.

There’s also a very odd publication history in Goa. His press work was popular and well known in Goa in the 1920s, if somewhat controversial. Afterwards, however, it disappeared from view. Partly due to the ephemerality of the press, partly due to the onset of Salazarism. When Seabra and Devi were preparing A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa, they corresponded with the poet Mário da Silva Coelho, José’s brother, who shared clippings of his brother’s work. It is down to this exchange that what is left of Silva Coelho’s work has survived. A good deal of the papers in the Central Library from the time are too fragile to consult and could well be lost now. Needless to say, the condition of Goa’s nineteenth and twentieth century press archives is an extremely sad state of affairs. In the 1970s, Manuel de Seabra prepared an “Almost Complete Works” of Silva Coelho for publication in the old Boletim do Instituto de Menezes Bragança. But only sections ended up being published, for obscure reasons, partly to due to anti-colonial feeling against an “old guard,” partly due to their content, which is by turns unforgiving and bawdy.

My translation will have five sections: “Regional Tales” (a collection of satirical short stories which provide a pocket panorama of First Republic Goa, and which likely inspired the title of Rodrigues’ collection), “Blithe Times” (a selection of Silva Coelho’s crónicas, a journalistic form popular across Iberia and Latin America mixing aspects of the short story and the opinion piece), “Harmonies and Melodies” (prose poems that set the Goan landscape to Western classical music), “Indian Legends” (re-writings of Goan myths and tales, often with a contemporary frame), “Oriental Mischief” (ribald tales of the Novas Conquistas, where Silva Coelho lived and worked, and which could equally be titled “Orientalist Mischief”) and “Truths and Lies” (sketches of manners, often based around some sort of interpersonal moment and which are almost modernist in their own way).

I think one of the most interesting things about Silva Coelho was how secure he seems in his identity. He has plenty of criticisms of the world around him and certainly wasn’t backwards in coming forward about them. But the sort of existential angst you see in Goan poets living in Portugal in the 1920s and 30s or someone like Bragança Cunha is completely absent. He doesn’t measure Goan identity against an outside ideal and find it wanting.

You asked what I thought my translations might achieve (or at least contribute to). As I say in my afterword to Rodrigues work, I’m pretty sure that he read those of Silva Coelho’s stories that came out in the Boletim and that they must have spurred his own Regional Tales (hence the common title). Here we have a practical example of the importance of literatures recycling their pasts. The hope would be that, as well as illuminating the past, the stories might offer something that can be adapted, overturned, improved on. In a word, refracted.

From the João Roque Literary Journal. 

"Interview: Author Peter Nazareth on Working with Idi Amin, the Goan diaspora in East Africa and More" in SCROLL (22 August 2021)

 

Peter Nazareth, writer, professor, and critic ended his teaching career of nearly five decades at the University of Iowa on 1 July, 2021. Despite having spent the majority of his lifetime as an educator, Nazareth also worked as a bureaucrat in Uganda, where he was born to Goan parents in 1940. His experience in the Idi Amin administration in the early-1970s led to him writing the novel, In a Brown Mantle (1972) which prophesied the expulsion of Asians from Uganda. In part, this led to Nazareth’s own departure from his birth country.

While he was a college student at Makerere University College (Kampala, Uganda), Nazareth met Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o who became a lifelong friend. Prior to his departure from Uganda with his family, Nazareth obtained a graduate degree at Leeds University. However, it was not England the Nazareth family would migrate to but the United States. In 1973, Peter Nazareth accepted the Seymour Lustman Fellowship at Yale University, after which he was a Fellow of the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa. He went on to become a professor there, Chair of African American World Studies in 1991-1992, and advisor to the IWP.

As a littérateur who crosses the boundaries between fiction-writing and writing about fiction, the breadth of Nazareth’s legacy is as varied as the continents he has lived in. Apart from writing his own novels and short stories which are a record of the Goan diasporic experience in East Africa, he was one of the first to anthologize literature by Goans from around the world. In this interview, Nazareth reflects on his life experiences and work, his critics, other authors, and also what the future might hold.

*

“Your [ask] whether I ever met [Idi] Amin. I did. The scene in The General is Up where Ronald has his back to the wall while he hears the General give a scary speech while launching a new development bank was based on my experience: I had my back to the wall...

“I once went for a drive with my wife and daughters in Entebbe and as we turned round a corner, I found myself looking into Amin’s face and he into mine...

“I used to have two nightmares about Amin. One, that he discovered that I had written a novel based on him ...  The other was that he would make me an ambassador to another country, which was [the] first step to being killed.”

RBF: These are quotes from your response to an August 2020 query from Jeanne Hromnik, a South Africa-based Goan writer, who asked on a listserv called The Goa Book Club about the relationship between your time in Uganda’s Finance Ministry, under the Idi Amin administration in the 1970s, and your novels. In a Brown Mantle (1972) foretold the expulsion of South Asians from Uganda in the same year as its publication while The General is Up (1984) looks back on those events. Neither of the novels name Amin nor Uganda; instead, the action unfolds in the fictitious country of Damibia and, as the title of the second novel intimates, the General stands in for Amin.

I can only imagine how traumatic it must be to dredge up these memories. I am so sorry that you and your family had to deal with this.

PN: Things were not always scary.

Soon after Amin’s coup, I was chairman of the parent-teacher association of the school my two daughters went to. We were opening a new building. This was to be followed by a dance.

We decided to invite Abu Mayanja to open the new building. Then there was to be a barbeque followed by the dance. Who were we to invite as the guest of honor for that part?

We decided to invite Amin’s wives. There were four [at the time]. Two accepted: Mama Malyamu and Kay.

Abu Mayanja was a powerful Muganda politician.  He was imprisoned by Obote and he was released when Amin came into power. I had to give the speech to introduce him. I was in a tight spot because I admired his courage but I despised his politics.

I think I gave the most skillful speech of my life. Abu Mayanja was so impressed by it, he squeezed my hand.

Then came the barbeque. We were running a little late and, exactly at that time, a young army man arrived with the wives of Amin and another woman who was painted and sat right through the barbeque glaring at Amin’s two wives. I discovered when I got to Iowa and read a magazine that she was Amin’s mother and she was a witch.

My wife [Mary Nazareth] asked a friend to give her a ride home with our two daughters, Kathy and Monique.

The young officer who brought the wives and mother and I talked. I discovered he believed in fighting every week or he would go soft. I told him I had tried to get the army band for the dance but could not get them so I had to settle for the police band.

“Next time you want the army band, tell me,” he said. “I’ll get them for you.”

I was to discover he was the biggest killer in Uganda. He was called Major Maliyamungu, which means something like “God’s affair.”

Anyway, I had to dance with the guests of honor. I danced with Mama Malyamu and then with Kay.

You will see in the movie The Last King of Scotland that, much later, Kay was killed and dismembered but her body was sewn together and Amin gave a lesson about what happened to people like her.

RBF: This is quite a moment that you recall! A dance sounds like the appropriate metaphor to conjure up in explaining how one might maneuver between happier events and tense political episodes.

When you watch something like The Last King of Scotland, how much do such fictionalizations recall the past for you and at what point do such productions feel like they do not do the past justice at all? Regardless, it must also feel traumatic at times to see or read about that era.

 

PN: What you mentions is very real to me so it is not really from the past.

 

I may or may not have mentioned that there is a Ugandan, John Otim, who has been communicating with me about a novel he has been writing (and it is nearly ready for publication) called Strongman. It draws a lot from my novels but at the same time is different from my novels in style, rhythms, angles towards the Amin figure, music (it draws from the Beatles, Cliff Richard, and other singers), space (it flies over Africa).

He says that two Ugandans who have read it are not happy that he has not presented Amin as a complete monster, but what he has done works, and I pointed out to him that some people who met Amin said he was very charming. All I can say is that it works.

And it tears apart the movie The Last King of Scotland. 

I have not met Otim but he studied in Makerere, and later in the US, and then taught at a University in Nigeria, and now is jobless in his hometown Lira in Uganda because of coronavirus.

I know Lira for two reasons. When I was young, my father decided to drive us around towns in Uganda in his Ford Consul and one of the towns we went through was Lira.

Second, soon after the coup, Amin was trying to stop all Obote projects and all projects in Obote’s hometown, which was Lira. The head of my department in the Ministry of Finance, Anthony Ocaya, persuaded the government to send someone who would not be accused of being tribally biased, and they decided to send me. 

The project was the construction of a sugar mill financed by the Soviet Union. By the time it was functioning, I was not in the country.

RBF: The feeling of the present-ness of the past, as you experienced it, makes sense in how it continues to be an integral part of who you are and were. From that perspective, it also seems apt that you would be in correspondence with contemporary writers who delve into East Africa's history.

I never asked you how you came to be a part of the Ministry of Finance! I'd love to learn more about this.

PN: When I came back from [graduate studies at] Leeds with my wife and daughter, I applied for a position at Makerere [University]. I was turned down. I tried to fight my case, but I did not succeed.

It was late in the year and the only job I could get was in the government as my hometown of Entebbe was essentially a government town. I was interviewed by an English officer in the Ministry of Public Service who then posted me to the Ministry of Finance temporarily until they found a more suitable place for me.

As it turns out, the Secretary to the Treasury was a powerful man who got to like me and kept me in the Ministry. I liked the Ministry too because I did all kinds of important things and kept on improvising.

I had to do a short study in Law and take an exam, which I passed. And I was promoted to Senior Finance Officer in the Ministry.

I developed my writing skills.

The Ministry had its hand in many other organizations. I had time to read books when I was not busy.

Towards the end of my Leeds experience, I thought I had been miseducated all my life (due to colonialism) and would have to re-educate myself. The Ministry of Finance was just the place. It took me three years to do a basic re-education. I heard a bang in my head that told me I was ready.

At the same time, I got very involved with the Entebbe Goan Institute and became President three times. This part of the story is told in The General is Up.

You might say I had a different kind of life in the Ministry. In addition to my novel, I also wrote a book of literary criticism. Clerks and secretaries typed my manuscripts. I gave them credit in both books by name since they worked gratis.

RBF: In replying to Jeanne Hromnik’s question (on the Goa Book Club listserv) about why you chose to fictionalize certain elements of your novels, you state: “I was working in the Ministry of Finance in Uganda. We had to take an oath not to give away secrets. I decided to write a novel set in a country called Damibia so I could not be accused of writing about Uganda and making it possible I would end up in prison.”

By the time you were at Yale, In a Brown Mantle had already been published and not long thereafter, the expulsion of Asians from Uganda was underway.

Did you decide not to return to Uganda because of the recurring nightmare you used to have of Amin discovering your novel?

Also, while your immediate family was with you, did you still have other members of the family in Uganda and were you concerned for their safety?

PN: Outsiders do not understand the complexities of Uganda.

Although my citizenship was taken away (by one person), another person gave me a newly printed certificate that permitted me to stay on in Uganda and continue working in the Ministry of Finance. My wife and two children were also given that certificate so I could stay on.

The head of my department in the Ministry of Finance at that time was Anthony Ocaya. He was an Acoli, a different tribe from Amin.

He told me to stay on. But things changed after a few weeks and he talked to me and told me to leave the country because he was going to leave three weeks after I left to work in the US because he was tired of dodging assassins. He said we would meet in Washington.

I stayed at his place on my way from Yale to a conference at Kansas City. I had wanted to stay on in Uganda but my friend Joje Waddimba sat me in his car and talked me into leaving for the sake of my wife and children. He said he would come to the airport to say goodbye. 

I took leave of a few weeks so I could depart. This was to make sure I would not be stopped from leaving. Officially, I was supposed to return to Uganda after the Seymour Lustman Fellowship was over. But my fellowship had two more months to go.

I received a letter from a junior officer in the Ministry of Finance saying my leave was over and when was I coming back? I replied that my fellowship was not over but my permission to return from immigration did not cover those two months so I could not come back. The letter from the junior officer said that he consulted the Standing Orders and found that I was considered to have abandoned my position. He thanked me for my seven years of devoted service.

I had not intended to return but I wanted to keep all my options open.

From Yale, I was invited by Iowa to join the International Writing Program and to teach in African American Studies.

My sister, Ruth, left Uganda for England and then Canada a few weeks after I left. My brother-in-law Cyril left for Canada a few weeks later. Cyril died suddenly in Toronto.

My brother John, 7 years younger than me, obtained a degree in Makerere (Maths Honors) and started working in the Ministry of Planning in Entebbe. He could not stand the irrationality of the government and he applied to the University of London to be accepted for further studies. He was accepted and left for London. 

David, my other brother who is two years younger than John, had his citizenship confirmed and did not have to leave. But his girlfriend Lydia had all her documents stolen and had to leave. And so David left. The first message I got from him was he was getting married and he asked for my blessings.

My brothers wound up in Canada. John found a way to argue with the British in Ottawa that David deserved the British citizenship (prior to becoming a Canadian) because our late father had an MBE and British citizenship. My brothers’ children were born in Canada.

I had a younger brother, Rex, who died years ago in Bombay when my parents took him and David there with them on holiday.

RBF: Because of your time at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program (IWP), you have been able to interact with several writers, in a sense allowing you to remain connected with East Africa even after your exit from Uganda.

For instance, you were asked by Heinemann in America to evaluate the manuscript that would become Kenya-born writer M. G. Vassanji’s first novel – The Gunny Sack (1989). Vassanji was then invited to IWP. While he was there, you arranged a local launch of his book and you’ve also taught his work in your courses.

What are your thoughts on Vassanji’s use of literature to look back at the South Asian community in East Africa during British colonial rule and after?

Coincidentally, both The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets (1994) have Goan characters in them. But, as Clifford Fernandes notes in his 2017 essay “The Fallacy of Vassanji’s Goans,” the author often misrepresents Goan legacies, and especially in The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003). Of the novel’s pivotal setting in 1950s’ Nakuru, a racially diverse region of Kenya where the anti-colonial Mau Mau rebels are being retaliated against by the British, Fernandes finds it curious that there is only one mention of a Goan character. In his estimation, “[f]or much of the book, Goans disappear from the colourful and dramatic world of Vikram Lall, as if they were never there in East Africa.” Fernandes’ purpose, as I see it, is to argue for a truer representation of diversity in Africa even as Goans were (and are) minorities in the region.

In his historical fiction, is Vassanji appropriative at the same time as he is dismissive of the Goan presence in British colonial East Africa?

PN: Moyez Vassanji and I had a close relationship when he and his wife, Nurjehan Aziz, edited several journals and introduced me to many African writers. I don’t think he knew I had written a favorable review of his first novel for Heinneman.

I don’t think he really understood my novel In a Brown Mantle since he was not from Uganda. Vassanji is not a good literary critic. He said in a review of my first novel [in And Home was Kariakoo: A Memoir of East Africa (2014)] that I expected my narrator [Deogratius (or Deo) D’Souza] to be an idealist when in fact the character was corrupt. I thought this was obvious. 

The word “bastard” in the last line of my novel [“‘Goodbye, Mother Africa,’ I said, as the plane lifted off. ‘Your bastard son loved you.’”] has a double meaning. At the end, by going through the story of all the confessor figures who haunt him including Pius Cota, [Deo] recognizes his sins.

I think Vassanji felt guilty when he took ideas from other writers to stimulate his own writing, not realizing there is room for many writers. I was initially upset by the fact that he used the same epigraph from T. S. Eliot in The In-Between World of Vikram Lall as I did for In a Brown Mantle.

[From In a Brown Mantle: “Who is the third who walks always beside you? / When I count, there are only you and I together / But when I look ahead up the white road / There is always another one walking beside you / Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle” – T. S. Eliot, “What the Thunder Said” from The Waste Land.]

I taught The In-Between World of Vikram Lall only once.

RBF: Well, one cannot miss that other coincidence between The General is Up and Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets – both have crucial Goan characters named Pius. Your Pius Cota, however, appears a decade before Vassanji’s Pius Fernandes. Makes one wonder.

A sensitive subject, now. Some have accorded other meanings to your use of the moniker Pius, seeing in it a similarity with the name of Pio Gama Pinto (1927-1965), a Goan journalist and anti-colonial activist who became independent Kenya’s first political martyr. But isn’t it the case that In a Brown Mantle has also been (allegorically) connected to Pinto?

PN: Pio Gama Pinto was assassinated while I was still at Leeds (with my wife and daughter).  Malcolm X had stayed with Pio on a visit to Kenya. He was assassinated just before Pio [both in 1965 and three days apart]. 

I knew by intuition that Pio was next.

When I started writing my novel, I had Pio in mind but I had never met him. I called the character Pius because that was a saint-like name. Cota was a solid name like a rock. In contrast to the novel’s narrator.

Pio’s brother, Rosario, read my novel, assumed the character was Pio, and threatened to sue me in England because the character was not like Pio, and if I knew his brother, I would not have said what I did.

When I mentioned this at a Goan conference in Toronto, I received a message from Pio’s widow [Emma Gama Pinto (1928-2020)] telling me to forget about Rosario.

As a writer, I have received most of my criticism from Goans.

RBF: After Leeds and Iowa, did you ever return to Uganda for a visit?

PN: I did not return to Uganda for a visit. My writing went back. There was much more writing than there would have been if I went back. 

RBF: You and Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o have been friends for several decades now, even finding yourselves in the same countries on three continents – Africa, Europe, and North America. Was the University of Makerere where you first met? In your 2018 interview with me for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Portuguese Diaspora Studies, you told me that it was Ngũgĩ who advised you to “[start] writing about Goans,” and you did so in your fiction while also portraying them within the colonial multiculturality of East Africa. Conversely, would it also be right to say that you have influenced his work?

PN: Ngũgĩ gives me high praise in his 2016 non-fiction book Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening. When I thanked him, he said the book would not have been written without me.

I was two years ahead of him at Makerere. Ngũgĩ told me I was lucky, on my return to Uganda, to be working in the Ministry of Finance because teaching at university took up most of the energy that would otherwise go into writing.

Ngũgĩ wa thiong'o, Elvania Zirimu holding Kathleen Nazareth, unidentified person holding Julia Zirimu, Pio Zirimu, Peter and Mary Nazareth.

RBF: Also back in our previous interview you had told me how your call for a 1983 special issue of Journal of South Asian Literature, that would focus on Goan writing [republished as Pivoting on the Point of Return: Modern Goan Literature (2010)], put you in touch with Richard Lannoy (1928-2016). He corresponded with you, sharing the unpublished writing of his late spouse, Mozambique-born Goan Violet Dias Lannoy (1925-1973). Later, this would lead to the posthumous publication of her novel, Pears from the Willow Tree (1989). You’ve mentioned to me that you had met Richard in England following your correspondence with him. Could you tell me more about this and his memories of Violet?

PN: It was the summer of 1992. We had gone to England for a celebration of Andrew Salkey. Richard Lannoy invited us to his place at Bath.

I taped an interview with Richard. He told me that Violet had met the man who became her first husband [Behram Warden], a Parsi, at a Gandhian camp [in India].

[Behram’s] father refused to let them get married. He told all the chemists in Bombay not to give his son the required medicine to deal with his asthma.

The next time he had an attack of asthma, he died.

After Violet died, Richard took care of her papers. He discovered a lot of papers in which she had written in a garbled way to her dead husband.

Richard could not read the papers but he knew she did not love him. He burst into tears.

I took the interview tapes with me and handed them to someone who transcribed most of my tapes—but she vanished without a trace.

RBF: This is a rather unfortunate set of events. Perhaps the lasting legacy of your interaction with Richard Lannoy is that Violet’s novel was published – something she was unable to achieve during her lifetime despite much effort.

You retired on 1 July, 2021, right? How many years of service did you complete at University of Iowa and what are you looking forward to doing now that your time is all your own?

PN: I started teaching when I got to Iowa in August 1973 and I did not receive a break (or vacation) until I retired this month. Work got more intense in the Spring 2021 semester: I taught three classes on Zoom, one or two classes every day except for the weekend—and then I had to read and grade essays.

I did not enter my office for a year and a half and then I entered it with my wife to clear out the office and also give away some books. 

I don’t know what I will do next. What I know from past experience is that things will turn up.

From Scroll.