"Goan Verité-Cinema & Saudade" in THE PEACOCK: The Prof (27 November 2019)

I knew Goa through the movies. Or, rather, the stories my father told me about them. Not having been born in Goa, these twice removed narratives of our fabled homeland had to make do in the absence of the films themselves and visits to Goa.

And if I heard these tales in relay from their actual source, then this was only fitting given the material. Believed to be inspired by French novel The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), Bhuierantlo Munis (1977), one of my father’s favourites, was the first Goan film to be shot in colour. In his book, Alexandre Dumas features a character who is fashioned after and named for a Goan priest who pioneered the study of hypnotism, an actuality history has all but forgotten. Readers encounter Abbé José Custódio de Faria (1756-1819) as the discombobulated but wily monk imprisoned at the Château d'If in Dumas’ classic. Here, fiction coincides with fact, for the real Abbé had been incarcerated at the Bastille at the time of the revolution.

Bhuierantlo Munis was produced by musician Chris Perry. His life itself provides the basis for Bardroy Barreto’s Nachom-ia Kumpasar (2015). I had the pleasure of watching the movie with my parents at Panjim’s Maquinez Palace. The highly lauded film recalls the yesteryear soundtrack of my parents’ generation. As evidence, my mother and others of similar age in the audience sang along with the on-screen performances. But as further proof of the cultural legacy of the music popularised by Perry and the ever-amazing Lorna Cordeiro, whose lives are fictionalised in Barreto’s film, I was additionally struck by how the twenty-somethings seated in the row in front of me would also lend chorus to the songs, many of which still play on Goan radio stations.

Coming as I do from a family that spans the Goan diaspora, the region’s cinema has also taught me about the lives of relatives I have only had passing acquaintance with. The first time I met my grandmother’s brother, it was on his long overdue visit to Goa after having resided in Karachi since before the end of Portuguese rule. Dinesh P. Bhonsle’s Enemy? (2015) gave me some background about how returnees, like my great uncle, are kept from reconnecting with Goa. 

In Enemy? a Goan family once resident in Pakistan return to their native land to discover that their ancestral home has been seized under the aegis of the Enemy Property Act of 1968. Created after the India-Pakistan War of 1965, the law allows the Indian government to take over the properties of those deemed citizens of enemy nation-states. The act targets Pakistani nationals, primarily those displaced by Partition, post-Independence. For the many Goans affected by the act, it was not Partition that cleaved them from their land, but the annexation of Goa by India which then made the formerly Portuguese territory beholden to this law. 

Goan cinema is its own form, its source material deriving from local contexts and histories. Part of the Goan Story segment at IFFI 2019, recent movies like Laxmikant Shetgaonkar’s Paltadcho Munis (2009), Dnyanesh Moghe’s Digant (2012), and Miransha Naik’s Juze (2017) dwell on memory at the same time as they challenge conservatism and society’s rigidities. This current resurgence of Konkani filmmaking in Goa is arguably emblematic of an endogamous cinematic movement, one I’d like to call Goan Verité.

Goans have adopted the word saudades from the Portuguese, a sentimental term simultaneously expressive of nostalgia as well as loss and yearning. Goan Verité explores saudades as it takes on current realities and envisions ways forward for our community. 

From The Peacock.

"She Sings Again" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (9 August 2015)

While in England, it was wonderful to hear news of Bardroy Barreto’s film Nachom-ia Kumpasar (2015) winning the Lebara Play Audience Award at this year’s edition of the London Indian Film Festival. Just a few weeks prior, I had the pleasure of watching the movie with my parents at Panjim’s Maquinez Palace. The experience was memorable for many reasons, not least of which was that the film recalls the yesteryear soundtrack of my parents’ generation, as evidenced by the fact that I could hear my mother and others of similar age in the audience singing along to some of the songs. But as further proof of the cultural legacy of the music popularised by Lorna and Chris Perry, whose lives are fictionalised in Barreto’s film, I was additionally struck by how the twenty-somethings seated in the row in front of me would also lend chorus to the songs, many of which still play on Goan radio stations, today. It was quite the tribute to Konkani music of the 1960s, as is indeed the film Nachom-ia itself. While mainly telling the story of the relationship between its main characters, the musician Lawrence Vaz and younger singer Donna Pereira, their affair unfolds against the backdrop of the Indian film industry and its relationship with Goan musicians half a century ago.

In Nachom-ia, the highs and lows of Lawry and Donna’s relationship seem to function as a barometer of the fortunes of Goans in early Bollywood. Set primarily in Bombay, with a few scenes taking place in Goa, the film chronicles the lives of Goans in newly independent India, featuring such locations as the kudds set up by village associations in the big city. Generally bachelor societies, the kudds served as homes away from home for Goan men, and continue to function as stops for travellers to this day. And though the film has a largely male cast, it is clearly Donna’s trajectory as a singer and a woman that is the impetus of this movie. Over the course of Nachom-ia, we see Donna become more independent even as her romance with Lawry ebbs and flows. Coming from a sheltered home, Donna’s mother is epitomised as being an overly protective Catholic woman who chastises her daughter about cavorting with musicians and skipping church choir practise. It comes as much as a surprise to the audience as it does to Donna that her love interest, Lawry, is married and is soon to be a father. All of Mrs. Pereira’s concerns about her daughter’s future appear to now be warranted, for how is Donna to be a marriageable prospect if she does not matriculate, hold a serious job, or keep up with her churchly duties, leave alone stop seeing Lawry?

Yet, Barreto’s film is not a tale of failed morality, or solely one of failed love. When Donna declares to her quietly sympathetic father that the only thing she will ever be married to in this lifetime is music, Nachom-ia bears witness to a woman’s ambition apart from her relationship to men. It also foregrounds the possibility of cultural production as being a field that is viable professionally; in looking at the recent past of Goan artistry, the movie enquires of Goans how they regard the arts and artists today, and especially Goan women who are involved in such pursuits. Interestingly, the film also subverts gender roles when, for instance, it portrays men as gossips; this is the case with three men who have recurring appearances in the film as the village tell-tales who gather by a cross to share the latest information about goings-on in the community. Nonetheless, the film does not entirely demonstrate the empowerment of its women characters. More could have been done with the role of Lawry’s wife, who appears to be wilfully ignorant of her husband’s affair. Another trope in the film is that of the long-suffering woman, as is borne out in the later disappearance of Donna from the music world, and life itself.

On the one hand, Donna’s withdrawal from performing is meant to signal the poor hand dealt to Goan musicians who were once the lifeblood of Indian cinema. Even though she parts ways with Lawry, Donna continues to be successful, her pain fuelling her simultaneous descent into alcoholism but also her spirited performances. It is further proof that despite Donna’s turbulent relationship, the entertainment industry provided her with opportunities to support herself. But the change in the industry and its lack of recognition of Goan talent, in turn, affected the professional and personal lives of people like Donna and Lawry. But even within this exploration of filmic history and its impact on Goan musicians and singers, Donna’s suffering, as manifested in her self-exile from the thing she loved most in life, is over-emphasised especially because she is a woman who loses out on the love of a man. The film does ends on a note of hopefulness, and one hopes it signals a new wave of Goan cinema that has many fine stories to tell.

From The Goan.