"How Bollywood Lost its Goan Rhythm: An Interview with Bardroy Barretto, Director of Nachom-ia Kumpasar" in SCROLL (4 January 2025)

While it has been a decade since the release of Nachom-ia Kumpasar, this year also marks the 80^th birthday of the legendary Goan singer Lorna Cordeiro (b. 9 August 1944). In this interview with Bardroy Barretto, director of the Konkani-language film Nachom-ia Kumpasar (2014), we discuss its chronicling of the contribution of Goan musicians to the Golden Era of Indian cinema (late 1940s-1960s). Set in Goa and Bombay of the 1960s, Barretto’s film fictionalizes the period by portraying the lives of musicians who are, in turn, inspired by real-life Goan entertainers, Lorna Cordeiro, Chris Perry (1928-2002), and others.

Even as the film demonstrates how Goan music with its Portuguese influences created the soundtrack for Bollywood in the second half of the 20^th century, Nachom-ia Kumpasar also bears witness to the part played by the Indian film industry and film history in undermining the legacy of Goan musicians. Additionally, the interview includes Barretto’s perspective on how Bombay became a site of possibility for Goans at the end of Portuguese colonialism, their forays into entertainment giving rise to Goan, Konkani-language theatre (tiatr) and film, as well.

Further, as Nachom-ia Kumpasar and its director evidence, Goan musicians not only brought their Portuguese colonial-era musical training to Bollywood, but also the rhythms of jazz. While such musical histories may be forgotten, and as Barretto’s film and this interview make clear, the mark Goans left on Indian cinema’s soundscape cannot be unheard.

*

RBF: What drew you to make this film and why choose the medium of a fictional feature rather than a documentary to chronicle the history of Goan musicians in Indian cinema?

BB: To start with, I had no idea that Goan musicians populated military/services/railways and circus bands and played the piano scores in sync with the films during the silent era. They entertained the elites in the jazz clubs in Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Bangalore, and even far away Burma (now Myanmar). They also played in the princely states’ in-house bands. There were thousands of Goan musicians employed in British India.

Post-Independence, Prohibition was declared in the Bombay State (Bombay Prohibition Act 1949), which dealt a death blow to the jazz clubs, so these musicians gravitated toward the nascent Indian film industry and went on to change its soundscape. I discovered these musicians while doing research for Nachom-ia Kumpasar.

Goa did not have a film culture, save for a few films in the mid-1960s to 1970s. As a result, there was significantly less moving image documentation of Goa. So, when I set out to do Nachom-ia Kumpasar, a fictional feature was a natural choice as it is a popular mass medium versus a documentary. The idea was also to start a Konkani cinema movement and make Konkani cool as the younger population was shying away from it. Looking back, I think we did succeed, as just two films were released in 2014, and the number jumped to multiples of tens in the following years. Seeing the film’s commercial success, many filmmakers joined the bandwagon to make more Konkani films.

Anthony Gonsalves (1927-2012) is one musician who stood out for me. I had the opportunity to talk to him and understand the world he came from. He is the one who orchestrated and harmonized Indian ragas, a form that is otherwise played in monotone. This blend of Western and Indian idioms changed the soundscape of Indian film music. I deliberated for a long time about doing a documentary on him but handed over my research to another filmmaker to do the documentary and to Naresh Fernandes for his book Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The Story of Bombay's Jazz Age (2012).

I had written a blog post on Gonsalves way back in 2010. This is my only written material on the subject in the public domain.

RBF: Before getting into the action, Nachom-ia Kumpasar begins with a voiceover that informs viewers of its belief that, for Goa, its story is its music. That music is identified in this opening moment as being a blend of Dravidian and Portuguese rhythms.

Adding to this idea, in Taj Mahal Foxtrot, Naresh Fernandes explains that while the Portuguese, who colonized Goa between 1510-1961, ‘neglected higher education’ in the region, the one thing they did attend to by 1545 was the establishment of ‘parochial schools that put into place a solid system of musical training’. In turn, this allowed Goans to function ‘as the musicians of the [British Indian] Raj’, because of their education in Western music. As the hold of the feudal agricultural economy in Portuguese India decreased and jobs became scarcer, British India beckoned to Goans, and musical entertainment became a service they could provide there and then elsewhere in the British empire, British Africa included.

Yet, as your film underscores so gracefully, Goans made ‘Western’ music their own. Is it true to say that while Goan music has marked Portuguese influences, Goan musicians always put a local spin on European music (even during the colonial era)? And/or is it also the case, as one sees in Nachom-ia Kumpasar, that Goans incorporated the inspirations they encountered as travellers beyond the shores of their homeland?

BB: When the Portuguese colonized the land of Goa and its people, they also inherited a social structure, that is the caste system, which was prevalent at that time. The bamonns (Brahmins) and the chardos (Kshatriyas) owned land and were at the top of this caste hierarchy. At the bottom were the sudirs (Shudras/Dravidians), who practiced traditional occupations and were artisans, and there were also the tribal or indigenous communities.

This lower stratum had its own traditional ritualistic rhyme and rhythm comprising drums, vocals, and sometimes cymbals, music which was passed down the generations orally and in practice. The tribal communities had rhythm in their blood. But it was the formal training in the parochial schools under Portuguese rule that got those at the lower end of society ready when British India beckoned. Now they could read and write music and amalgamate it into any musical composition and movement.

Being from the oppressed class, they also used music as a tool for social change, which gave rise to the popular form of Konkani music, simply called cantaram (songs), which bear Portuguese influence. The Western influence they encountered as music hands in British India was further fused into their own indigenous tribal rhythms. They wrote political protest songs about social evils such as dowry, land rights, alcoholism, and so on, which were prevalent at that time. They also wrote about love and affairs back home. They explored a range of topics and emotions in their music.

At the same time, the elites and the seminary-educated musicians mostly stuck to refined forms of music, namely the mando, dulpod, and devotional songs (usually hymns).

The film’s voiceover articulates all this only as an observation. The visual with the voiceover is of a church with a mestre walking toward it, followed by a child holding a trumpet while his father and two musicians happen to stroll by. This vignette is imagined as occurring during the period of Portuguese India. The voiceover, along with the visual, is open to interpretation.

As another observation, if we superimpose the evolution of Goan music with that of Brazil, another former Portuguese colony, similar patterns will likely be observed. I spent a month in Brazil in 2007. The Afro-Portuguese blend gave rise to forró in Manaus, frevo in Recife, axé in Salvador de Bahia, and the smooth samba down south in Rio de Janeiro. I suppose this, too, is possible because of the Portuguese system of musical training which blended with African rhythms. 

RBF: Inasmuch as Nachom-ia Kumpasar is a film about music in the Golden Era of the Indian film industry (late 1940s-1960s), it is also a story about post-Portuguese Goa, beginning as the film does in Bombay in 1964. In a sense, this ties together the post-European trajectories of both these regions which were, actually, both under Portuguese rule at some point in their histories. Through scenes set in kudds, the community halls Goans established for themselves in Bombay, and the shows that the characters Donna, Lawry, and their band play in that city, your movie acknowledges the deep links Goans have with Bombay. Furthermore, Nachom-ia Kumpasar considers how Goans contributed to the making of modern Bombay, as have so many communities in that cosmopolitan metropolis.

As your film looks back on the 1960s, how does it acknowledge the difference of that moment and what it made possible in Indian history? What lessons might we still learn from that time? And how different is that period in comparison to the contemporary moment?

BB: The large-scale emigration of Goans (cooks and musicians) to British India-ruled Bombay started after the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1878.

Contrary to the popular notion that Goans mainly worked as cooks, seamen, and musicians, there was an immense contribution by Goans in varied other fields, be it medicine, the arts, literature, administration, education, advertising, journalism, and sports. This influence lasted till the early 1990s and played a large part in the making of modern Bombay. Sadly, their contribution is now reduced to small print or slowly being erased.

I landed in Bombay in 1988, three years before the liberalization of the Indian economy in 1991. Getting rid of the old to build anew was not so rampant; I could keenly observe the Goan community in Greater Bombay, which helped me re-construct (for the film) the kudds, the community halls, and the one-room-kitchen tenements in which they resided. The jazz clubs had disappeared, making way for Indian Orchestra Bars, and then, soon, Bombay changed to Mumbai in 1995. The Goans are now slowly dispersing to the distant suburbs for more extensive and affordable housing.

RBF: In addition to its use of Goan music, Nachom-ia Kumpasar is also mindful of other forms of Goan cultural production, including tiatr (which is scripted in Romi Konkani, is musical in style, and often addresses contemporary social and political issues). Again, this is a Goan art form that owes its history to Bombay, the first tiatr, Lucazinho Ribeiro’s Italian Bhurgo (Italian Boy), having been performed there in 1892.

Not only does Prince Jacob, a legendary actor of the Konkani stage, make an appearance in the film (and I will return to Pisso Santan, the character he plays shortly), but the film’s closing credits also feature a scene that is straight out of a tiatr. This musical scene includes a comedic performance by, among others, Pisso Santan and Donna, now playing roles as tiatrists as the film ends. In this interplay between stage and screen, music is the most obvious intermedial connection. How did tiatr, an often undervalued Konkani theatrical and literary art form, influence your making of this film?

BB: All the tiatr productions were based in Bombay till the late-1970s. They had their first few shows in Bombay and then travelled to Goa. Goa had khells, which are usually plays in three acts, that were staged during Carnival time and were performed in the open. In the 1970s, Rosario Rodrigues and, later, Rose Ferns were the pioneers to take these khells onto a stage, thus giving birth to khell-tiatr. Both these forms (tiatr and khell-tiatr) evolved and merged and are now simply called tiatrs.

Similarly, all the earlier Konkani films were helmed and produced by these same Bombaimcars (Bombay Goans). Their exposure to working in the growing Indian film Industry as musicians, film studio hands, and in film production gave them a head-start in cinema. Al Jerry Braganza (Antonio Lawrence Jerry Braganza) produced the first film in Konkani, Mogacho Anvddo (Love’s Craving) in 1950 during Portuguese rule. For the second Konkani film, Goa had to wait for thirteen years. Amchem Noxib (Our Luck) was released in 1963, two years after Portuguese rule ended, and was produced by Frank Fernand, a noted film arranger then. He followed it up with Nirmon (Destiny) in 1966. Chris Perry joined in producing Bhuierantlo Munis (Man from The Cave) in 1977.

Save for a few Konkani films, most of the Konkani music was written for tiatrs. Both these forms, tiatr and Konkani films, owe their history to Bombay as the Bombay Goans (who played in the jazz clubs and film studios) are the pioneers of these art forms. If not for tiatrs, just producing Konkani music would not be commercially viable. These tiatrists and filmmakers had the wisdom to record these songs for posterity; I don’t think they were paid any royalties.

All this changed with the advent of audio cassettes in the early-1980s; the production and marketing costs were not so prohibitive. Now, they could produce and monetize their music by selling cassettes. Local music labels, too, sprouted up in Goa.

All the songs that appear in my film were originally written by Chris Perry for his two musical shows, Nouro Mhozo Deunchar (My Husband, the Devil) and Tum ani Hanv (You and Me). Chris Perry put Lorna through her paces for over six months in Bombay, rehearsing with his band; finally, she made her debut at Trincas in Calcutta and then played at Astoria in Bombay. A few years later, Nouro Mhozo Deunchar was Goa’s introduction to Lorna. For the first time in the history of tiatrs, the band, which usually played from the pit, took centre stage. For the film, it was apt to migrate some songs to a tiatr setting as that is the medium the songs were written for. 

RBF: When Donna first meets Lawry and his band in Bombay, he asks her to sing the song ‘Pisso’ (‘Madman’) during a rehearsal. She suggests that despite its despondent theme, the song could be performed in a more upbeat fashion. Lawry finally relents and Donna’s cheery spin on the song makes it a hit. Later in the film, when Lawry and Donna’s relationship becomes irreparable, Donna declares that the only thing she will ever be married to is music.

What is compellingly portrayed here is her agency as a woman who not only has an impact on the band’s sound but also expresses her creative ambition and self-belief apart from her professional and romantic relationships.

Could I ask you to comment on how much this drew from the history of that moment? I ask this especially given that the music in the film, much of it by Chris Perry and Lorna Cordeiro, including ‘Nachom-ia Kumpasar’ (‘Let’s Dance to the Rhythm’) from which the movie derives its title, is actually from the period of its setting.

BB: There was a story in the songs. The songs were set to a playlist to tell a story; later, the scenes were written to take the songs forward.

The main events in the film start in Bombay in 1964, just when Prohibition was lifted, and end in 1975 when the entertainment tax was raised for hotels and clubs playing western music, forcing these jazz and big band musicians towards making music for the Hindi film industry. The love story of Donna and Lawry is set within this timeline. Then, twenty years later, in 1995, when Bombay changed to Mumbai, Donna makes her comeback.

The song ‘Nachom-ia Kumpasar’ represents the spirit of a young Donna who just wants to sing and have a good time. The upbeat version of the theme keeps recurring whenever Donna wants to break free and turns blue when she’s down.

For ‘Pisso’, the lyrics and music are diametrically opposed in terms of emotions. It is the sheer genius of Chris Perry to have set such an upbeat rhythm to a despondent theme. So, we started with a slightly morose version and used the original as Donna’s take, thereby transforming how the band played the song.

All the songs are interpreted to tell a story; sometimes, the lines between their professional and real lives blur, but the characters’ emotions ride on from one song to the next.

RBF: I would also like to ask you to reflect on Nachom-ia Kumpasar’s treatment of gender more generally. Two examples come to mind. Firstly, although Lorna Cordeiro is often described as ‘The Nightingale of Goa’, it is notable that her crooning style is not typically feminine; similarly, Donna sings in a manner that veers between being demure and, then, far from it. This is especially stark in the context of the rest of the bandmembers being men. What does this say about how women may have used the space of performance to craft their identities at this mid-century moment?

Then, in several scenes, news of goings-on in Bombay are made known in Goa through the appearance of a ‘chorus’ of three men who hang out by the village gathering spot, a large cross. Interestingly, these village gossips are men, their commentary on the characters’ lives in Bombay and Goa ranging from such topics as the musicians’ love affairs and failures and successes. As women are so often characterized as being gossips, was it a deliberate choice to have these characters be men? In your film (and elsewhere), what is the role of gossip itself as a form of community storytelling and information-sharing? 

BB: Though the audiences in these clubs were the elites of South Bombay, the prodigious musicians who entertained them came from humble and strict Catholic upbringings. I imagine their training under the mestres made them dignified and disciplined musicians, not necessarily entertainers. A few among them stepped out and became brass band leaders (such as Lawry and Chic Chocolate in the film). Donna comes from this background with a pious and anxious mother always keeping her in check.

Matriculation, followed by shorthand and typing, is what many girls did at that time to get into private companies as secretaries and telephone operators. But a spirited Donna cannot be contained. She has her way and joins the band, a not-so-dignified career in those times. For a young and carefree Donna, the line between her and the upper-crust audience doesn’t exist. She made the stage her own and mingled with the audience against the wishes of her mentor Lawry.

The three men are the ‘three loafers’, with Romeo (the conventional village hero) being the leader of the pack. They gather at the local meeting point and exchange the juiciest gossip from the recently arrived seaman who came home after a brief pit stop at the kudds in Bombay. The kudd residents, too, were all men. So pretty much, it was the men who spread these canards with a little bit of spice.

I used the three loafers as a device, they were the voice of the people, to say things that are difficult to digest. The audience consumes this gossip yet doesn’t take the loafers seriously. 

RBF: Like a refrain, the theme of drunkenness appears recurrently in your film. The band sings the song ‘Bebdo’ (‘Drunkard’), which continues to be popular in Goa today and, also, Santan, the washed-up alcoholic played by Prince Jacob, continually reappears at various junctures as comic relief and as the drunken voice of conscience.

Clearly drawing from Bollywood’s consistent portrayal of Goans as drunkards, Nachom-ia Kumpasar plays against the grain in creating a Goan drunk who has self-awareness of why he is an alcoholic and who sees alcoholism as a symptom of other bigger issues. Santan communicates as much to Donna who slowly descends into alcoholism as the film progresses. Her increasing desire to drown her sorrow in drink is in tandem with the failure of her romantic relationship and the diminishing fortunes of Goan musicians as they are sidelined by Bollywood over time. A touchy subject, especially given how Goans and Goan culture are represented by Indian cinema, why was it important for you to use drunkenness as a metaphor?

BB: Alcohol is not portrayed as a taboo in Nachom-ia Kumpasar; everyone has a drink at the end of a hard day, yet not everyone shown is an alcoholic, unlike in the Bollywood films, which portray all Goans as drunkards and Goan women in frocks as women of loose character. Alcohol is synonymous with Goan culture, be it a wedding or funeral. Also, the famous feni is a cure for everything, be it a headache, toothache, high fever, and even a panacea for love gone wrong.

Pisso Santan (Mad Santan) - is he a drunkard, or is he a madman? He is a jilted lover; alcohol is his solace, and insanity is his escape from reality. He is a voice of conscience. Everyone hears him, yet no one listens. Always ignored by Lawry and the band throughout the film, he eventually succeeds in drawing Donna into a conversation towards the end of the film. Are they alcoholics, or are they victims of love gone wrong? Is Donna, too, heading toward insanity? Their track stops there in the film, leaving the audience to interpret and draw conclusions themselves.

RBF: Returning to the first rehearsal scene, in the background of the set, one notices a few posters. These include images of Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong. While the influence of Black American performers of the jazz era, and even after, is apparent in the history of Bombay’s music scene, it seems that Goans were particularly attuned to this inspiration.

Chic Chocolate, who appears in your film as a character, is actually fashioned after a real-life person of the same name. The Aldona-born trumpeter António Xavier Vaz (1916-1967) christened himself Chic Chocolate and famously modelled his performance style after Louis Armstrong; the two met in Bombay during Armstrong’s visit in 1964.

Because of Portuguese colonialism, European classical music training was part of Goan life, but at what point did popular Black American music also become significant in the (Goan and diasporic) zeitgeist?

BB: The trained Goan musicians were introduced to jazz by the early African American jazz bands helmed by Leon Abbey, Crickett Smith, and Teddy Weatherford during the 1930s. The Goan musicians at once took an affinity to this music. With swing music, they could express themselves, breaking into improvised solos. This expression found its way into Indian cinema too.

It was interesting to re-imagine this world. There were clues in the stage names Goan musicians adopted. Cristovam Perreira became Chris Perry, Franklin Fernandes became Frank Fernand, and António Xavier Vaz became Chic Chocolate, to name a few who ditched their Latin names for English ones. Chic styled himself after his hero Louis Armstrong.

Now, for the prized merchandise of jazz posters seen in the film. Did the musicians get them from the affluent patrons at the jazz clubs as a matter of gratitude? Or did their fellow-Goan seamen get them during their trips overseas?

RBF: So those posters are rather evocative as props! The appearance of Chic Chocolate in your film as a fictionalized person who also was a real musician reminds the audience that the performers you portray were part of Bombay’s music history. They brought American Jazz and European classical influences with them and created the sound that would become synonymous with Bollywood. Performers like Anthony Gonsalves, who worked with fabled Goan-origin, Indian film playback singer Lata Mangeshkar (1929-2022), even attempted to synthesize Eastern and Western rhythms.

Yet, as your film notes, Chic Chocolate was not even recognized for his musical contribution to the film Albela (1951), a familiar tale true of the legacy created by many Goan musicians. Why were Goans given short shrift in this regard and, apart from your film and the work done by Naresh Fernandes in Taj Mahal Foxtrot, are other efforts underway to address this erasure?

BB: It is widely known that mostly the Hindus were the music directors and the Muslims were the lyricists. The Christian Goan composers and arrangers who played an important role were reduced to the small print or not credited. These three communities used to do the baithaks (sittings) and created cult melodies for Indian cinema. The likes of Frank Fernand, Sebastian D’Souza, Chic Chocolate, and Anthony Gonsalves, to name a few, changed the soundscape of Indian film music. They introduced harmonies, fado bridges, jazz interludes, and Goan folk rhythms during the Golden Era of Indian cinema. Sebastian D’Souza helmed the western orchestra for many decades, Anthony Gonsalves contributed by orchestrating the ragas, and Chic Chocolate first introduced swing to Indian films in Albela. Sadly, these contributions were not celebrated or recognized.

Taj Mahal Foxtrot and Nachom-ia Kumpasar put a spotlight on these unsung musicians. Wind of Fire: The Music & Musicians of Goa (1997) by Mario Cabral e Sá is a well-researched book on Goan musicians, both western and Hindustani. Songit, Doulot Goenkaranchi (Music, The Wealth of Goans) (2004) by Bonaventure D’Pietro is another effort that highlights these musicians. The title of Bonaventure D’Pietro’s book is actually the name of a song by M. Boyer, who composed it in either the late 1970s or early 1980s. The song names Goan musicians and the person who actually took credit for their work. The song ends by saying that Goans gave their music to the films but were not credited and were only portrayed as drunkards on screen. These lyrics are what Lawry verbalizes towards the film’s end in Nachom-ia Kumpasar.

Symphony of Passion (2022) by Melvyn Savio Misquita is one more piece in the jigsaw puzzle which gives Goan musicians the recognition they rightly deserve.

All these glorious musicians deserve at least a Wall of Fame, if not a Hall of Fame. I hope that more and more efforts are put into shining a light on these musicians.

RBF: In closing, what do you see in the future of Goan cinema? What would you like to have it do and what might audiences expect from you next?

BB: The future of Goan cinema is in good hands as many more films are being produced. Out of quantity, we will get quality.

As for me, I will continue to document the Goa of the past in cinema. A film centered around football as a religion set between 1975 and 1985 will be my next film, fingers crossed.

*

From Scroll. (Adapted (and with permission) from the journal Portuguese Studies 40.2 (2024). Additional thanks to the staff at the Louis Armstrong House Museum.)

"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.

*

 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.