Abstract
This article analyzes the representation of December 1961 in two Goan short stories: the Portuguese-language “Rucmá, a mulherzinha de Salém” by Maria Elsa da Rocha and the Konkani-language “Guerra” by Sheela Kolambkar. I argue that these two stories avail themselves of the suggestive potential of the genre to represent Liberation not as a clean break in the socio-historical development of the territory, as it appears predominantly in the English-language literature of the territory, but as a discontinuity, which, in the wake of colonialism, left behind a tangle of undefined hopes, obscure fears and unsettled issues. Both “Rucmá” and “Guerra” represent the period prior to the Indian military action as a chronotope of uncertainty, which Liberation deepens rather than resolves. Writing post-1961, in a climate of growing tension during the democratization of Goa, the authors seem to advocate for social unity based on a recognition on the part of the two principal religious communities of Goa of a certain conformism in relation to colonial rule. In conclusion, I pose the question of whether this appeal to unity has a conservative function. The proposition underlying the article is that an internal literary comparatism, which juxtaposes the various languages of Goa, might shed light on attitudes concerning the main social facts and historical events in the territory.
On the morning of December 18, 1961, India began its military action to end Portuguese rule in Goa, codenamed Operation Vijay, or “Victory.” Fighting lasted a mere thirty-six hours and ended with the surrender of the scant Portuguese forces and a decisive triumph for the Indian army, bringing the era of European colonialism in South Asia to a sudden and dramatic end. Whether it be this sudden engrossment of Goa to the Indian Union, which Shrikant Y. Ramani called the “ultimate solution” (420) to Portuguese India, or the raising of a new dominion flag in Delhi fourteen years previously, which marked the independence of India from the British Raj, decolonization is often figured as a clean break, a split in an atelic but compartmentalized timeline. Yet, such shifts may be tangled and traumatic for those whose everyday lives are convulsed, leaving them with previously formed hopes, ambiguous fears and unresolved issues that complicate any detachment of a bygone past from a purely inchoate future. Even when major changes ultimately benefit the commonweal, someone always suffers in the process. The present article deals with two short stories that probe the issue of the decolonization of Goa and so challenge one-sided views of the moment: the Portuguese-language “Rucmá, a mulherzinha de Salém” by Maria Elsa da Rocha and the Konkani-language “Guerra” by Sheela Kolambkar. Both originally written in the 1960s, they reflect back on the moment colonialism ended and, though representing their protagonists critically, urge empathy for figures whose lives have been truncated in the process.
Rocha (1924–2007) first began publishing short stories in the post-1961 era, eventually contributing more than two dozen narratives to the Goan press and broadcast media, mainly the Margão-based newspaper A vida and All-India Radio’s local “Renascença” program. Of the last generation of Portuguese-language short-story writers, which included Vimala Devi, Epitácio Pais, Eduardo de Sousa and Augusto do Rosário Rodrigues, Rocha is the most concerned with the lives of Goa’s Bahujan, the non-dominant-caste Hindus, although her stories are often articulated from an elite Catholic, rather conservative viewpoint. An anthology containing stories mostly unpublished in the press was released in 2005 under the title Vivências partilhadas. Sheela Kolambkar (b. 1945), whom noted poet and critic Manohar Sardessai describes as one of the most skilled Devanagari writers of the same period (A History 200), arose alongside Damodar Mauzo, Chandrakant Keni, Pundalik Naik and Meena Kakodkar in the flood of literary production in Konkani that followed Liberation (Sardessai, “Modern” 214), a game-changing phase for a language that had been marginalized under colonialism. Comparable to Rocha, her writing has been seen as presenting a “woman’s perspective” on the “universe called home” (Dinesh n.p). Kolambkar received a prize for “Guerra” from the Marathi-language Goan daily Rashtramat on its publication and, in 2012, accepted the national-level Tagore Literature Award for the collection in which the story appeared.
Rocha’s “Rucmá” narrates the eve of December 18, 1961 and the onset of the Indian military action as experienced by the denizens of a large manor house, the casa grande. We meet two generations of a Catholic bhatkar, or landowning family, which has given shelter to a young Hindu widow and her small children, whose backstory is recounted in the first half of the tale. Over the course of the evening focalization shifts between the bhatkar son and mother, as they ponder their frustrations concerning Portuguese rule yet entertain doubts and misgivings as to the fast-approaching Indian future. While the story’s close sees Goa liberated, to general jubilation, it also leaves the household and its needy dependents facing uncertainty thereafter.
“Guerra” replaces Rocha’s variable focalization and Catholic standpoint with a first-person tale that plays with the unreliability of its Hindu narrator. It features two sets of neighbors: a Hindu family headed by the conformist, seemingly depoliticized protagonist, interested only in the immediate problem of getting on in life (though his younger sibling proves far less sanguine about the status quo) and a Catholic family, led by a colonial policeman with incongruous anti-Portuguese sentiments, whose daughters’s choice of partners come to figure the competing demands on Goan Catholic identity. The central twist with which the narrative concludes is that, when his friend next door leaves for Portugal, it is the Hindu narrator who comes to regret Liberation on a purely personal level.
The context of the production of these stories is as important as the moment they represent. Both were written in the early to mid-1960s, at a time when Goan society was undergoing a period of “convulsão sócio-económica” (Noronha Belga 2). I argue that Rocha and Kolambkar represent the complexity of thoughts and feelings on the part of their characters as a riposte to the overt parceling of society into opposing factions during the democratization of Goa in the 1960s, which Raghuraman Trichur reads as polarizing its inhabitants “along the lines of caste/class and religious affiliations” (91). Goa had been flung from colonialism, with its own strong, exclusivist construction of the territory’s image, into an intense debate about identity. Heated arguments over the competing claims of the two main religious groups, caste divisions, and the attitude and relation of groups in Goa to Portugueseness, colonialism and Indianity raged, reaching a head with the 1967 Opinion Poll in which Goa’s new electorate was asked whether the territory should continue its separate existence within India, the preferred option for Catholics and upper-caste Hindus, or merge into neighboring Maharashtra, a choice largely favored by the lower-caste Hindu population of the interior.
Internal Comparatism
The political complexity of Goa is reflected in its linguistic make-up. The territory’s literary field is perhaps the most internally complex of any former Portuguese colony, given the existence of major bodies of work in Portuguese (which faded from public use after it was disestablished post-1961), Konkani, Marathi, and English. Working with this multipolar reality forces a reframing of comparative literature. Rather than a traditional idea of juxtaposing autonomous linguistically defined cultures (see Bassnett 28), Goan literature requires a contrastive practice within a single, if highly variegated cultural community. If, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues, in India generally “the spheres of Indo-Anglian and vernacular writing are not in serious contact” (“A Culturally Different Book” 238), the situation is yet starker in Goa, with its linguistic cleavages and discontinuities with the past. Spivak argues that this lack of contact between literary constituencies, paradoxically perhaps, indicates “a struggle in the production of cultural or political cultural identity” (“A Culturally Different Book” 238). Does this statement hold true for Goa? The present article is a step toward exploring its applicability. In the specific instances on which I have chosen to focus, what we see instead is a relative continuity of theme and outlook, a suggestion of Goa’s particularity within the concert of India.
I hold that this sort of internal comparatism is crucial both as a present-day corrective to the linguistic hierarchies of the past, wherein Portuguese was given precedence over Goa’s bhasha languages and in order to achieve a fuller picture of Goan literature that does not simply reinforce perceived divisions within Goan society. Swapan Majumdar has argued that “the regional literatures [of India] should be assigned the statute of constituent sub-national literatures” (quoted in Bassnett 37). Given Goa’s fraught position as the internal ‘other’ of India (Parobo 1), the sort of comparative approach I advocate has the potential both to “stage the question of collectivity” (Spivak Death 26) and to reflect on the perspectival specificities of Goa’s colonial inheritance and differential post-colonial path vis-à-vis other parts of the Indian nation.
Despite the desirability of working across Goan languages, obvious philological problems arise for the critic who ventures into Konkani- or Marathi-language writing from the Ansatzpunkt of Lusophony. Translations are few and far between, which can skew impressions and undermine the original egalitarian impulse behind comparison, leaving the critic little further outside what Christopher Larkosh calls “the colony’s epistemological enclave” (199). Nevertheless, negotiating these problems—perhaps, in future, by moving away from single-authored studies toward collaboration with peers possessing other skillsets—is vastly preferable to airbrushing away entire swathes of Goan literary production, particularly important in a place where the limited franchise of representation has distorted the image of the territory and its society. Here the juxtaposition of work in the former colonial tongue and in the current official language of Goa is a move toward2 the “non-hierarchical transversality” Natalie Melas identifies as the proper aim of a postcolonial comparatism (41).
A linguistically plural approach to Goan literature can also emphasize the importance of significant patterns within the different literary languages. For instance, representations of decolonization abound in English-language Goan writing, though generally as part of novels. In Jorge Ataíde Lobo’s Liberation (1971), Carmo d’Souza’s Angela’s Goan Identity (1994), Ben Antão’s Blood and Nemesis (2005), Suresh Kanekar’s Of Mangoes and Monsoons (2009) and António Gomes’s The Sting of Peppercorns (2010), all sagas stretching over years, Liberation is presented as a link in the chain between present and past, major in emotional impact and personal ramifications, but shorn of contingency and presented as just one of many major events to have shaped the territory, the bygone as precondition either for the Indian present or for a successful life in diaspora. In essence, in these works the English-language present is framed as the inheritor of the past, a fulfillment of history viewed teleologically, rather than as any aleatory graft. Even in Dinesh Patel’s recent novella 1961: Umbra of Disillusion (2012), with its narrower scope, the past is revisited as touching prehistory rather than as its own current moment. What we have in Rocha and Kolambkar’s short stories, which belong to a genre that, as Norman Friedman reminds us, finds itself conditioned by the imminence of closure (146), is something different, a representation of ending, of time foreshortening, of a contingent moment, which disrupted social relationships and closed off half-formed potentialities.3 The effect is to elicit an empathetic response from the reader.
How does production in Portuguese and Konkani compare to the sizeable body of works in English on this theme? In the literature written in the former colonial tongue, “Rucmá” is the only piece of locally produced fiction I have encountered to depict 1961 so directly, although significantly later works by Goan authors published in Portugal such as Orlando da Costa’s 1973 play Sem flores nem coroas (regretfully unpublished and unperformed in Goa) and Leopoldo da Rocha’s 2008 semi-autobiographical novel Casa grande e outras recordações de um velho goês do tackle this theme. My knowledge of Konkani is insufficient to determine how common the representation of this moment has been in fictional works in that language. The limit to which I can affirm is that I have yet to encounter any other translated story with such a spatio-temporal configuration.4 The importance of “Guerra” in capturing a certain structure of feeling, however, is testified not just by the prizes the author has received on its account, but also by the story’s translation into English and Portuguese in Peter Nazareth’s Pivoting on the Point of Return and Alberto de Noronha’s Onde o moruoni canta; two works designed to represent Goan literature in the round to the Anglophone and Lusophone worlds respectively. Adjudicators belonging to distinct cultural constituencies have therefore deemed Kolambkar’s work fitting to represent Konkani-language writing across linguistic boundaries.
Given that the Goan novel in English has normalized the moment of Liberation as a milestone in a progressive history, what reasons could there be for the apparent circumspection shown toward representing this event by literature in other Goan languages? Why might Liberation be a theme for novels in one tongue and only scattered short stories in others? Now that English is largely the hegemonic language in today’s Goa, despite the official promotion of Devanagari Konkani, could the relative status of the other languages and their users play a role both in approach to theme and choice of genre? Elizabeth Bowen argues that the novel is a form of continuity, like history, while the short story consists of disruptions, breaks, apertures, and ambivalences (156). Though the history of English-language literature by Goans stretches back to the early twentieth century, it is only after 1961 that it takes center stage as the dominant language in Goa’s cultural conversation, assuming the mantle of Portuguese. The continuity in change culminating in the present actuated at a linguistic level finds its reflection in the novelistic treatment of the great historical shift of 1961.
Perhaps this context explains why “Rucmá” and “Guerra,” the former in a vilified colonial language discontinued for all intents and purposes, the latter in an autochthonous tongue that was, and to a degree still is, vying for space as a language of artistic endeavor, however bullish some aspects of its official promotion might be, should adopt the minor register of the short story. Adrian Hunter contends that this genre is disproportionately represented in similar colonial and postcolonial situations where “the form speaks directly to and about those whose sense of self, region or nation is insecure” (138). Given the uncertain situation of the literatures in their chosen tongues, it is understandable that Portuguese and Konkani writers should mark a distance from continuist representations of history. In addition, while male authors penned all the Anglophone novels, the two short stories analyzed here (in addition to Naik’s “Arjun Talap”) were composed by woman writers. Is it too much to consider this fact an exemplification of Claire Hanson’s view that, due to the short-story form lending itself to expressing the “other side of the ‘official story’ or narrative” (6), “the short story has been since its inception a particularly appropriate vehicle for the ex-centric, alienated view of women” (9)? The danger here perhaps is that a binary division risks essentialisms that might obscure both emergent female novelists and the long tradition of male short-story writers in Portuguese in Goa.
The Short-Story Chronotope of December 1961
What is evident, however, is that, speaking from liminal positions themselves, Rocha and Kolambkar use the short story to represent the unresolved (and perhaps unresolvable) discontinuities and ambivalences identified by Elizabeth Bowen, whose remarks pertain to a certain conception of the modern(ist) short story that is applicable here. Manoharrai Sardessai notes that, alongside Chandrakant Keni and Damodar Mauzo, it is with Kolambkar that the Konkani short story becomes modern in theme and treatment (126). Rocha also writes in the post-Chekhovian idiom that Charles May sees as dealing in mood and atmosphere, fragmentary in form because life itself is fragmentary, focusing on the breakdown of the everyday into moments of uncertainty, anxiety or revelation, and insisting that “beginnings and ends are not so neat and that ‘middles’ are a mixed business impossible to judge” (5), a dictum that has great purchase for Rocha and Kolambkar’s tales.
The brevity of the modern short story is not due to the anecdotal nature of the action presented (as with the classic “well-made” stories of O. Henry), but to the way in which its scope is “reduced in length by means of selection, scale or point of view” (Friedman 46). It is these techniques that have characterized the development of the short story over the course of the twentieth century: the use of ellipsis and compression to allow the representation of lives as “the flash of fireflies,” in the canonical formulation of Nadine Gordimer (180), the depiction of the present as transient, aleatory, and uncertain. In the two stories analyzed here, such reduction is achieved by representing the events around December 18, 1961 from the point of view of a handful of representative characters. In “Rucmá,” we are given a glimpse into the minds of two figures from the Catholic elite and a woman from the Bahujan, each reacting to sudden change as it happens against the background of longstanding hierarchies and relations. In Kolambkar’s tale, we are privy to the intimate thoughts and feelings of figures from communities whose public personas differed markedly and who have gone down in conventional history still wearing these social masks.
The narrowing of scope in “Rucmá” and “Guerra” is also achieved by constraining the slice of time depicted to the home spaces of the characters concerned. The effect is to constitute particular chronotopes, time and space made “artistically visible” (Bakhtin 84), which Ato Quayson has glossed, in a postcolonial context, as time-space organizations that call up “specific affective responses” and allow us “to relate an image to specific spatio-temporal and historical co-ordinates” (104). But how exactly are chronotopes apprehensible to the reader? Through—according to Liisa Steinby and Tintti Klapuri—the cognition of and discourse on the unfolding, situated events represented in narratives, the presentation of what Pier calls the “series of temporal markers conjoined with spatial features which, together, define specific historical, biographical, and social relations” (qtd. in Steinby and Tintti 107). While, as Stacy Burton has argued, any analysis of chronotopes “must recognize that the experience and perception of time vary from individual to individual and from event to event” (44), the sort of close attention required is seldom found in critical deployments of Bakhtin’s concept. The present article provides a case study of reading chronotopes, showing how a particular spatio-historical apperception occurs in Rocha and Kolambkar’s short stories, where “the nearness of the end” (Lohafer 249) represents late colonial time-space as a countdown to uncertainty, rather than a staging post on a teleological continuum with the present, which has been the province of Anglophone Goan novels.
In “Guerra,” the uncertain chronotope of Goa in December 1961 is sketched out in quick strokes:
Deparavam-se por toda a parte pessoas a cochilar. Chegavam, de repente, notícias de que as tropas indianas estavam já na fronteira, não faltando de mistura, rumores de que tinham recuado. De tempos em tempos, viam-se aviões a sobrevoar. Um certo desassossego perturbava a vida de todos. Alguma coisa estava iminente—era o sentir geral; mas o que aquilo seria exactamente, ignoravam-no todos (Kolambkar 48)
This representation of spatio-temporal insecurity is echoed in “Rucmá,” where similar rumors that “os indianos vão tomar Goa à força” (Rocha 100) are voiced. But in this story the generalized geo-political situation of anxiety is developed in more detail, as, in its focus on upper-caste Catholic subjectivities, is a delineation of what Sandrine Bègue calls an elite “with contradictory political aspirations shaped by their own economic interests” (144; translation mine). If in her work Bègue argues that this elite—to which Rocha belonged—hindered already ineffectual Portuguese attempts to “recover a link to the people” (140; translation mine), the key idea expressed by the characters in “Rucmá” is that this desperate situation, and the untenable position of the elite, was rather caused by the obstinacy of Portugal’s dyed-in-the-wool imperialism, as in the scene, which reflects Bart Keunen’s argument that the chronotope combines “cultural context with the dynamics of human consciousness” (41), where the Bhatkar scion, Gomes, a civil servant, recalls his colleague Fialho’s comment that:
O mundo está em evolução. Novas concepções éticas, racionais e altruístas. São agora consideradas um facto imprescindível para o progresso da Humanidade. A independência dos povos dominados é uma consequência natural dessa evolução . . . Pena que Portugal queira decidir de olhos vendados o futuro de Goa (Rocha 101).
Gomes’s recollection of these comments on Portugal’s blind imperialism is interrupted by the radio: “a telefonia insistia no hino a Angola: Angola é Nossa! Angola é Nossa!” (Rocha 101). The Goan’s inner disquiet and the nationalist stridency of the broadcast create a concise yet powerful spatio-temporal mapping of Goa’s geo-political status in the postwar Portuguese empire. The one-way communication imposed by radio betokens the truculence of a Salazarist-era colonialism—occupied principally with its vast, profitable African territories—that refused self-determination to Goa as a matter of principle despite its disinterest in the territory and the obvious imminence of Indian action.5
If there is any self-criticism by Gomes of the class to which he belongs, it is expressed in his memories of his workplace, the character’s qualms about his own inactivity and conformism. These recollections metonymize the anxious space-time of pre-Liberation for the members of Goan society who were cadres in the colonial administration. Gomes thinks of himself and his disoriented colleagues as “figurinhas representando uma farsa” (Rocha 101) and recalls the desperate attempts they made to send money to Portugal before the Indian forces destroyed the system in which they lived. Though the focus of the story is the central bhatkar family, care is taken to suggest that this disquietude was not a uniquely Catholic experience. Gomes remembers one Hindu colleague in particular: “o Sirvoicar era um que estava mais transtornado? Esquecera-se da gravata? Quem sabe? Mas vestia um bushcoat mal abotoado que deixava ver uma boa porção do seu peito peludo e a linha sagrada” (Rocha 102). The details of the name and the sacred thread mark him out as a devout believer and suggest that anyone who depended on the colonial system for his livelihood, independently of religious affiliation, would have experienced this period as one of trepidation and unease.
Hindu and Catholic Anxiety
Here a parallel can be established with the protagonist of Kolambkar’s “Guerra,” a Hindu who, after completing the fifth-year of the Liceu (Portuguese-language high school in Panjim) had joined the civil service, the classic trajectory of integration into the colonial apparatus for the local elite of all religions. Nevertheless, as “Rucmá” dramatizes via Gomes’s reflections, it was still the Catholics, and especially the traditionally privileged landowning class, who felt they had the most to fear: “que iriam fazer a eles, cristãos? Haveria guerra? Santo Deus, o que sabiam eles e os demais da guerra? Iam liquidar tudo? Saquear?” (Rocha 105). Though by the late colonial period Hindus constituted a majority in Goa, the prospect of sudden absorption into India, a country whose implicit identity for some was indissolubly bound up with Hinduism, could be an unnerving one for Goan Christians, a feeling compounded at the time by Portuguese propaganda that vitiated “the air with appeals to religious sentiment . . . spreading panic and insecurity particularly among the Catholic elite” (Couto 397).
If Rocha and Kolambkar both take pains to show the approach of the Indian military as a time of fear and confusion, they are also careful to avoid the burden of Tristão de Bragança Cunha’s “de-nationalization” (n.p) falling solely on Catholics, which Victor Ferrão has identified as a singularly pernicious development in post-1961 Goan political discourse (25). In “Guerra,” the Hindu narrator is portrayed as a conformist who, whatever his inner feelings might have been, was little interested in protesting against colonial rule. His reaction to the discovery that his brother had been apprehended by the police for involvement in anti-colonial agitation epitomizes his spatio-temporal attitudes:
Ao ouvir aquilo perdi a cabeça com o meu irmão. Quem o havia mandado entregar-se a estas actividades indesejáveis? Eu cá estou a matar-me para o instruir e ele, em vez de estudar, vai meter-se em semelhantes alhadas? Até tenho medo de perder o meu lugar. E o que será se for despedido? Não temos outro rendimento. É certo que recebemos uma pequena pensão do pai, mas isto não chega. Temos de casar a Jiú e instruir os três irmãos mais novos (Kolambkar 47).
In both Rocha and Kolambkar stories we glimpse how family responsibilities and personal ambitions could lead individuals to acquiesce with the status quo and fear any significant challenge to its continuation. Kolambkar’s chronotopic representation is more complex on this subject, undoing the binary identified by Ferrão, whereby a certain Hindu discourse implicates Goan Catholics alone in “the crimes of their colonial masters” (34). Here, it is the Hindu who is quietist, whereas the Catholic police chief desires freedom from the Portuguese in his heart of hearts. We learn that it is he who arranged for the release of the narrator’s brother. Faced with his neighbor’s promises to reprimand and physically punish his sibling, Senhor Pereira demurs and reveals his true sentiments: “sinto-me feliz por ter podido ser útil a um moço que luta pela liberdade de Goa. Deus o abençoe” (Kolambkar 47). Whether this anti-colonial colonial police officer is a plausible representation is another question; what remains is a symbolization of the complex spatio-temporal entanglements of the late colonial period.
In “Guerra” the chiastic ambiguity of the Hindu and the Catholic is carefully built up over the course of the story in order to prime the surprise revelation with which it ends. Though Senhor Pereira works for the colonial regime supposedly enforcing its laws, and his eldest daughter has married a European lieutenant, he expresses vehemently anti-Portuguese views to his neighbor. At one point, Senhor Pereira declares: “não é boa esta raça de paclé [whites]. Têm a pele branquinha, mas a alma negra como pez” (Kolambkar 45). Nonetheless, the complex imbrication of this Catholic individual’s identity with the “others” who so irk him is registered in the Konkani text by his concluding his outburst with an oath in “português castiço” (Kolambkar 45). While obviously a circumlocution to avoid a swearword, the contrast between Senhor Pereira’s spontaneous use of “pure” Portuguese and the sentiments expressed make the implicit point that any overlap in identity with the colonizer does not necessarily entail seamless political alignment.
Kolambkar’s text is at its most subtle in the way it refuses any simple binary between Hindu and Catholic while suggesting the real divisions that existed between the two communities. When Senhor Pereira declares to his neighbor that he would prefer his younger daughter to marry a Goan, the narrator cannot hide his enthusiasm: “sentia uma grande alegria. Hoje o sr. Pereira parecia-me outro. Eu via afinal a centelha do orgulho de ser goês luzir no peito de alguém . . . e, o que era mais, no coração dum cristão que, por sinal, trabalhava na Polícia” (Kolambkar 45). Yet the narrator does not show himself to be anything of a patriot. Just like his general conformism, his keenness here seems entirely self-interested. Over the course of the story, we learn that the narrator is in love with Senhor Pereira’s daughter. The policeman’s stated preference for a Goan son-in-law leads the narrator, it seems, to entertain unvoiced “grandes esperanças” (Kolambkar 43). Here Kolambkar suggests how, whatever the situation, disentangling political position from self-seeking concerns is impossible, further undermining the sort of disfellowship Ferrão censures. At the same time, the unspoken improbability of Senhor Pereira agreeing to a cross-faith match and accepting the Hindu as an appropriately “Goan” suitor, given an established Catholic reservation of the Goan (“goenkar” in Konkani) for Catholics and exclusion of Hindus as “konknne” (see Coutinho 61), implicitly recognizes colonial-era discrimination and the limits of community informing the present and not simply abolished in 1961.
Elite Discomfort With Colonialism
In “Rucmá,” the inverted patterns of ambivalence between the narrator of “Guerra” and his neighbor are replaced by internal contradictions within Gomes and Dona Virgínia, who are characterized by their emotional ambivalence to both the current Portuguese regime and the looming Indian future. Where Kolambkar excuses her Portuguese-tinged Catholic policeman, Rocha recognizes the elements of elite attitudes that, though anti-colonial, could not be assimilated to the Indian nationalist position she herself proclaimed. Gomes’s reflections on his working life revolve around his frustration at being “o serviçal competente” of a “director europeu, de cara rubicunda avermelhada por farras diárias” (Rocha 100). Here, we have an expression of what Teresa Albuquerque saw as the particular frustration of the Goan elite in the pre-1961 period at the systematic preference for the metropolitans over locals at the very highest positions (218), a preference which, as the director’s unprofessional behavior suggests, reflected the racist bias of colonial hierarchy.
At the same time, Gomes’s dissatisfaction with the status quo does not indicate any eagerness for absorption into India. Thinking over how a change in regime might affect his workplace:
Procurou mover as peças de xadrez da situação. Avançou com um indiano na cadeira do Director rubicundo. Chi! Pôs o indiano da cadeira de Director-adjunto, igualmente conspícuo. Desceu na escala! Nada! Porteiro … ! Sorriu, satisfeito, pelo xeque-mate que dera à Índia (Rocha 101).
There is in Gomes’s attitude a certain depreciative view of the “other India,” shown in the conspicuousness he attributes to the idea of an Indian (a category from which he appears to exclude himself) in a position of authority in Goa. Whatever his discontent with the present, his interpellation by the colonial ideology is evident, reflected in his nostalgic reaction to the “cantilena de fados” on the radio that transport him to the “ruas da Mouraria que ele visitara quando das comemorações henriquinas” (Rocha 101). In the immediate pre-1961 period, Portugal had a policy of sending members of the Goan elite to Portugal in an attempt to strengthen emotional ties to the metropolis. A particularly large contingent visited the country in full patriotic spate in 1960, when the five hundredth anniversary of the Infante Dom Henrique’s death was commemorated, which is Gomes’s frame of reference here. Yet, rather than any Portuguese nationalism, the checkmate he imagines might reflect more the certain autonomist dream of a “terceira corrente,” embodied by António Bruto da Costa (ix), branded traitors after 1961 according to Couto (68). Though the recent agitation in Goa for special status might be viewed as a recrudescence of this ambition, during the Portuguese period the autonomist cause had little purchase outside of a small elite. When the “Xeque-Mate a Goa” happened, to reprise the title of Maria Manuel Stocker’s book on the “princípio do fim do império,” it resulted instead in a comprehensive victory for interests unaligned with Gomes’s elite.
In a different way, Dona Virgínia also displays a ravel of ambivalence. This Indo-Portuguese grande dame is a compendium of upper-caste Catholic misgivings about the Indian Union, partly derived from clichéd prejudice, partly from the insinuations of Portuguese propaganda. She fears that Indian rule would bring communism to Goa, resulting in the confiscation and redistribution of her property (Rocha 103) and sees in India’s designs for Goa not a noble wish to liberate the territory, but a low desire to appropriate its mineral wealth (Rocha 105). Perhaps more than any concrete fear, what unsettles her is a certain image of the greater subcontinent, represented by the elements that flit through her dreams: “roupas dependuradas das janelas, paredes manchadas de escarros, enormes ventres de crianças semi-nuas” (Rocha 103), a nightmare of disorder and poverty for this landed patrician. Dona Virgínia is depicted praying ardently for the Indian threat to fizzle out. At first she exclaims; “São Francisco há-de proteger-nos! Deus me livre de viver com aquela malta” (100). Later, she prays to Saint Jude, “o Santo dos impossíveis” (102), a progression that shows how, even in Dona Virgínia’s cushioned world, the direction history would take was making itself felt.
Yet, whatever her worries for the future, via the interspersed memories which pass through Dona Virgínia’s mind, we see how her attitude toward Portuguese colonialism is far from one of straightforward acceptance and affiliation. If Kolambkar raises the issue of an overlap between Catholic colonizer and colonized, Rocha probes it more deeply. One memory in particular stands out in this respect. Dona Virgínia recalls when she was a young wife and attended a “banquete na Câmara” (103) and sitting in pride of place next to the Governor-General, a reflection of the intimate relationship between the local elite and the colonial administration. Yet the moment of that night that sears itself into her mind, so much so that she remembers it decades later, is when she hears a metropolitan acquaintance commenting to other white women: “olhem a Gina Caneca, está mesmo muito chic, não é” (Rocha 105). The insult caneco or caneca was current in Goa and other Portuguese territories that had a substantial Goan Catholic population.6 It worked rhetorically to install a difference between Europeans and Goans incited to adopt European ways but, according to the underlying metropolitan logic, disbarred in practice from an equally natural claim to a Portuguese identity.
The subtlety of Rocha’s depiction, the way the scene represents how the intimacies of the Goan colonial context “enacted proximity and distance” (Bastos 131), lies in the way the word is shown to rankle all the more for its casual use, for its presence in an admiring phrase lacking any overt hostility. Dona Virgínia remembers her late husband trying to comfort her, attributing the word to petty spite. Yet she also recalls his pensive mood afterwards, the manner in which he stroked his beard “olhando um olhar distante” (103). In fine, this distance is the felt gap between even elite Goans, their intimacy with the colonizer’s language and culture notwithstanding, and the metropolitan officers of the administrative apparatus. Here, scarcely hours in the diegesis before the Gordian knot of colonial Goa was slit by the Indian army, Rocha’s metonymic images represent the hypocrisy of a Portuguese discourse that denied the subordination of the so-called overseas provinces and supplied coordinates for the uncomfortable position of the Goan elite within them.
The Domestic Sphere and Spatio-Temporal Relations
The psychocartographies of both “Rucmá” and “Guerra” center on the delimited private space of the characters, whose houses have a structural importance for the plots. According to Susan Lohafer, the brevity of short stories means that the protagonists enter and leave narrative space in quick succession, and, as a consequence, their diegeses often revolve around arrival or departure from home (Reading 19). If, as Bakthin argued, houses are “materialized history” (247), and so a subsidiary order of generic chronotopes akin to what some critics qualify as “motivic chronotopes” (Bemong and Borghart 6), in the context of Goa the dwellings involved in “Rucmá” and “Guerra” take on a particular symbolic value. Perez and Sardo describe Goa as “the owner of an identity divided between two cultures, joined in singular affinities” (13). This problematic bond between Hindus and Catholics has been a fitful subject in Portuguese-language Goan literature, in which a series of different motifs have been used to figure this relation. In Orlando da Costa’s O último olhar de Manú Miranda, for example, the trope of the double is used to body forth the dynamics of this complex tie. In Rocha and Kolambkar it is within and through houses that the central interfaith relationships are staged.
In “Guerra,” the adjoining properties of the Hindu narrator and Senhor Pereira model the neighborliness of the two main religious communities. If we take neighborhood as a relation of propinquity in which a certain common space exists but that also implies a private hinterland, which is screened off, then this motif might be considered particularly appropriate to figure the disjointed connection between the two religious groups of Goa as described by Perez and Sardo. The main point of contact and interrelationship in Kolambkar’s story is the balcão, a typical and emblematic feature of Goan domestic architecture. It is in and around this space of open social interaction between the narrator and Senhor Pereira, and the hidden relationship between the narrator and his neighbor’s daughter, that some of the complex affinities and divisions between the two communities are teased out. If, as Rowena Robinson states, “the vast majority of Goans speak proudly of the cultural unity that binds Hindus and Christians” (289), there is a common acknowledgement of a concomitant separation, and, at times, strife. Albuquerque writes that the effect of proselytization was such that Catholics considered themselves “a new breed, a race apart” from their Hindu fellows (217). Surely similar, if inverted, sentiments must have existed on the part of Hindus. As quoted here, Ferrão has commented at length on negative constructions of Goan Catholics in the present that reduce them to colonial mimics. It is in order to further a unity based on understanding and self-critique, rather than to reinforce the cleavages of history, given a new twist in the post-1961 dispensation, that Kolambkar appears to be writing.
Yet the discontinuity wrought by history remains. By the close of “Guerra,” the Hindu narrator has lost his friend, his love and, we learn, his unborn child. The slight possibility that their two houses could be joined has been dashed at the time when Goa, ostensibly, was released from the divisions of colonialism. There is a poignant irony, and perhaps a warning for the future, in the fact that it is Liberation which has made this particular instance of community conflation impossible. If for the narrator the loss of any future home is metaphorical, for Senhor Pereira it is very literal: with his family having been evacuated in the run-up to the invasion, he finds himself imprisoned as an alien agent, before opting for deportation to Europe to rejoin his loved ones. While new openings in Goa are surely presenting themselves, some possibilities of the past exist no longer.
Rather than any simple deliverance, the end of colonial rule is portrayed in “Guerra” as a grave disruption to the lives of the two main characters. When the narrator hears his brother rejoicing at liberation and the fact that “não foi uma guerra como dessas que se vê nos filmes . . . a guerra acabou logo” (44), the narrator morosely reflects: “tolinho, tão pouco entende disto. Nesse dia, a guerra não terminou, apenas começou” (44–45). But which war? That to prevent the divisive mistakes of the past recurring? “Guerra” ends with Senhor Pereira having been deported with nothing but “a tristeza de ir, deixando a sua Goa” (49) and the forlorn narrator left wondering about his friend: “Por onde andará ele? Em Portugal? Em Angola?” (49), the last possibility foreshadowing how, for those leaving India for Portugal, over a decade of dictatorship and colonialism awaited, and perhaps further conflict in Africa. At this moment in which “Goa inteira se rejubila” (44), the narrator’s mind still circulates in the space of the Portuguese empire from which the territory has just been sundered, showing the intricate entanglement of personal response snaking paradoxically through the clean break in historical epoch. For the narrator, as for Senhor Pereira and his family, one war just starting is the struggle to rebuild their lives without the framework of the past.
“Rucmá” also begins and ends in two houses expressing widely variant spatio-temporal positionalities. The first half of the story concerns the eponymous lower-caste woman, whose life is depicted as cyclical, traditional, below the winds of history. She finds herself forced to depart her village when a snake kills her husband, leaving her and her children without a breadwinner. Abandoning their shack, she finds her way to the casa grande of Dona Virgínia and her son, where she and her children are given shelter in the bhatkars’s vansai, an annex designed to receive visitors. It is noticeable that Dona Virgínia takes Rucmá in because she recognizes the woman will be “uma real ajuda” (Rocha 100), not out of any charitable impulse. Even when giving a positive representation of Goan hierarchy, here at least Rocha does not idealize it.
The first half of the story is recounted by Rucmá to her new badcarni, or lady, as they sit on the balcão of the casa grande. The traditional order the house represents is spatially enacted by the way she tells the story to Dona Virgínia “assentada aos pés da sua senhora” (Rocha 92). Rowena Robinson describes how caste status in Goa was played out in domestic space:
When lower-caste persons come to the house of an upper-caste, ‘decent’ family, they usually . . . sit at a lower level than the oontz lok (high people). The higher castes are borem munis (fine people), while the lower castes are sokol munis (low people). The implication is clearly of higher and lower status, and ranking along a certain scale of moral value or ‘goodness’ and the patterns and idiom of deference give expression to it (310).
As well as demonstrating the poetics of intimacy Erik Van Achter sees as characteristic of the Portuguese short story (270), via the sort of tale sharing found throughout Rocha’s oeuvre, the spatial arrangement of the scene encodes the stratified caste hierarchy of colonial Goa on the eve of the Indian military action. The story’s close, in turn, marks the symbolic end of the old order wherein, according to Arun Sinha, the Catholic and Hindu elites oligopolized the land (50). As the Indian army advances and a series of detonations fissure the walls of the casa grande, causing the old bhatkarina to die of shock, we are told that the force unleashed “abriu comunista portas e janelas do quarto de Dona Virgínia” (105). The seal of the old system is definitively broken.
The final scene sees a repetition of the opening configuration, with Rucmá sitting at the feet of Dona Virgínia’s son. Now, however, no longer an authoritative bhatkar, he has been reduced to a “sudário de dor” (Rocha 105). The ground has shifted beneath their feet and the future is now radically uncertain. Rucmá, deprived of her benefactress, has seemingly been thrust back into the precarious position from which she started out and wails “que fizeste, ó Brahma? Que fizeste? Levaste-me a minha árvore de sombra! Badkarnim! Badkarnim!” (106). The third element present is Kunvor, the family dog (whose name means ‘Prince’ in Konkani). He is pointedly described as having been whelped by a “cadela-polícia do Quartel-Geral de Pangim” (Rocha 106) and is distraught at his inability to chase away the “pássaro tão grande” (Rocha 106), the Indian helicopter flying overhead. If Gomes and Rucmá represent those Goans caught out by events, with the panicked defencelessness of the little woman from Salém perhaps suggesting the need perceived by the author for the continuing superintendence of the elites, then the dog’s confusion and impotent rage stands in for the ultimate futility of Portuguese bluster about the maintenance of the territory.
The helicopter’s appearance inaugurates a new chronotope. It releases a flutter of leaflets in Konkani that announce “irmãos, vós estais libertados. As forças indianas estão em Goa” (Rocha 107). The local children rush joyfully to pick them up, representing the general feeling concerning the end of Portuguese rule. Yet, as for the narrator of “Guerra,” for Gomes and Rucmá there is no simple moment of Liberation. What begins here too is the difficult rebuilding of lives stripped of previous certainties, if open to new possibilities. It is noticeable that, both in “Rucmá” and “Guerra,” the uncomplicated celebration of the new order is attributed to the young and the carefree, the new post-colonial generations that, contrary to preceding generations, will grow up “num meio e ambiente totalmente diverso e totalmente disligado do passado” (Noronha Contracorrente 8).
While neither author questions the reality of Liberation, which in both stories is carefully established as the prevailing sentiment in Goa, both Rocha and Kolambkar present it in a fashion that, if non-divisive, acknowledges the fact of loss, disruption and initial difficulty. If, as the saying goes, it is an ill wind that blows no good, conversely here we see that even currents of progress are detrimental to some. For the main characters featured, Liberation proves to be an instantiation of Bhabha’s “unhomely,” a moment of dislocated non-coincidence felt between “the home and the world,” “the past and present” and the “psyche and the social” (20). The literal unhoming of the characters, whether through death, expulsion or proleptically by heartbreak, figures the way in which, for a small minority of the Goan population at least, Liberation discontinued aspects of their lives and propelled them into a new future that contained some of the dynamics of dislocation and exile, “the loss of a whole family past, centuries-old institutions and a certain mode of life” (Furtado 48; translation mine). Both “Rucmá” and “Guerra” show how, as well as relating to the traumatic impositions of colonialism and the international displacement of people across space in its wake, Bhabha’s phenomenon of the unhomely can be produced in situ by historical shifts entrained by the defeat of imperial rule.
Multidirectional Postcolonialism
Miguel Vale de Almeida has stressed the need for postcolonial debates on ex-Portuguese spaces to examine the discriminatory relations instigated under colonialism while eschewing simple binaries (10). By showing the tangled lives around the clean break of December 1961, the complex attitudes of the characters toward Portuguese colonialism and the Indian nation, the complicated ties across class divides and religious affiliations, both Rocha and Kolambkar make contributions to such a debate in the context of Goa. The 1960s were a turbulent time in the politics of the territory. Democratization had given a new voice to segments of the population sidelined under colonialism, but also gave a fillip to factionalism, communalism and class conflict. If, as Alexandre Moniz Barbosa writes, in the period following 1961 “the electorate was split vertically on a religious and caste basis” (11), fruit of a contemporary politics that “widened the chasm between the two major communities in the territory” (Couto 43), then we can see how the preoccupation of Konkani writers (and which can also be detected in the post-1961 Portuguese-language authors) with “bringing about a cultural unity among the Hindus, Catholics and Muslims” (Sardessai 2015) could reflect irenic designs. The way in which “Rucmá” and “Guerra” represent a complexity of allegiances and emotions across the Goan spectrum attempts to forestall any hardening of the dichotomies in society, the splitting into discrete constituencies that, ironically, has in some ways continued the divisiveness of colonial discourse.
Yet do these stories invite unity in the name of their own partis pris? Despite recognizing hierarchies of class, Rocha’s is a conservative view of Goa that views internal injustice as a consequence of colonialism rather than an aggregate of both Portuguese rule and local domination by a native elite. Rather than the Indian intervention severing the “nexus between the land owner and the foreign rule” (Kamat 135) and allowing a new social mobility, in “Rucmá” it merely increases the need for Gomes qua bhatkar to take care of his mother’s ward. Unity here favors a static state. “Guerra” generates empathy via the procrustean suggestion that any non-Indian-nationalist viewpoint Goans might have held was merely a mask worn under duress. The policeman—an agent of colonialism but a nationalist inside—is perhaps too perfect a paradox, the perfection of which allows such a figure to be spared the extopy any other attitude would generate. What of those Catholic Goans (and, perhaps, Hindus) who might have held another idea of Goa? Does the proclamation of unity also serve a certain hegemonic construction, which has led to the attempt to impose an upper-caste Hindu Konkani over other variants? Here perhaps Rocha would disagree with my questioning of Kolambkar. In a poem Rocha wrote weeks after Liberation, entitled “Sâdhu,” the poetic voice asks of the eponymous sage:
Sâdhu
Porque me olhas assim
Acaso não te lembravas
Que um Brahmane em Goa
Sob um forçado de séculos
A que o havia votado
Um mero capricho do Fado
Inda há pouco
Tinha de ser assim?
Jai Hind! (“Sâdhu” 1)
The poetic voice here has the opportunity, after the dramatic removal of the “forçado de séculos,” to make the declarations of which another “capricho do Fado” deprives Kolambkar’s policeman. Yet the caste identity articulated here is clear. Parobo argues that the seamless integration of Goa into the post-colonial Indian mainstream of upper caste ascendancy was checked by the election of Dayonand Bandodkar’s MGP in 1963 (13). Are appeals to unity across faiths in this period merely a response to a bahujan mobilization that in the 1960s threatened to break “the stranglehold of upper caste dominance in Goa” (Parobo 233)? This is a question to which the sort of comparatism essayed here might help answer.
Whatever the case may be, both “Rucmá” and “Guerra” make use of open endings, in which, according to Bonheim, rather than bringing events to a definitive conclusion, as is common in longer forms, ends with the suspension of action (119). The chronotope of uncertainty which both stories create is not resolved by Liberation so much as deepened, encouraging the reader both to critique and empathize with the central figures, deconstructing any binary division between Catholics as pro-Portuguese and Hindus as necessarily repressed nationalists, though the attitudes of both authors are perhaps not as selfless as they first appear. The sort of internal comparatism practiced here, which depends on finding common tropes, settings and approaches between the different Goan literatures, has much to tell us about the stances of different constituencies within local society to its main social facts and principal historical events, the limits to identity in the territory and the particular makeup of Goan literature in the round as a multilingual subnational Indian literature. Within the space of the former Third Portuguese empire Goa, and the characters created by Rocha and Kolambkar have their particularity too. Despite the galvanic disruption of their lifeworld and the uncertain situation in which they come to find themselves, the characters of the two stories, with the exception of Dona Virgínia, the colonial policeman and his family, are left to rebuild their lives in the new democratic regime India would bring, the greatest advance to come from December 1961, an end to Salazarism for which that rest of the Portuguese empire would have another fourteen years to wait.
Footnotes
Paul Melo e Castro is a lecturer in Portuguese at the University of Leeds. He is currently working on the analysis and translation of Goan short fiction as a part of the Fapesp thematic project “Pensando Goa.”
↵1. This work was carried out as part of the FAPESP thematic project “Pensando Goa” (proc. 2014/15657-8). The opinions, hypotheses and conclusions or recommendations expressed herein are our sole responsibility and do not necessarily reflect the ideas of FAPESP.
↵2. I employ the preposition ‘toward’ as any dehierarchization is inescapably asymptotic. While I use Rocha’s original, lacking Konkani I refer here to the Portuguese translation of Kolambkar’s work. Though an English language version does exist, I prefer the Portuguese rendering due to its translator’s more idiomatic approach. Here is not the place to adjudicate between the competing claims of Lawrence Venuti’s concepts of domestication versus foreignization in translation practice (1995). The main thing for the non-speaker of the original language of composition is that despite the shift in tongue there is no real divergence in conceptual grid (see Lefevere 76) between the two renderings of “Guerra,” which seems a mutual guarantee of accuracy. Though all quotes in the present article shall be from the Portuguese, it is vital to remember that this is not the language, let alone the script, in which the story was originally written.
↵3. Interestingly, the Hindi-language film Trikal, which depicts a Catholic Goan migrant returning home in the mid 1980s and recollecting events that took place in the run-up to December 1961, is something of a halfway house between these two different tendencies. Obviously made for a national Indian audience, but developed with the collaboration of dominant-caste Catholic Goans such as Mário de Miranda and Mário Cabral e Sá, the film both reflects the desire of mainstream India for Goa to embody difference and an attempt to understand upper-caste Goan Catholic culture on something approaching its own terms.
↵4. According to the translator and critic Augusto Pinto, Jayanti Naik’s “Arjun Talap” [The Arjun Boulder] is the other notable Konkani story set against the backdrop of Liberation. It concerns a young freedom fighter returning home after various escapades for secret meetings with his lover at the eponymous boulder. The last time he comes is when Liberation is drawing to a close. Before they can meet again, his lover contracts cholera and dies on December 20th. After some time pining for her, the freedom fighter also dies. Later their spirits are manifested in the form of two entwined snakes which are last seen at the boulder. Here we see a similar theme of personal loss set against collective triumph as found in Kolambkar and Rocha.
↵5. Indeed, in the eyes of António Rangel Bandeira, even the endgame of Goa was undertaken with one eye on Africa: “all evidence leads one to believe that Salazar planned to use the loss of Goa to arouse nationalist hysteria which could ideologically mobilize Portugal, especially the Armed Forces, for the war in the African colonies” (17).
↵6. A rough Anglophone equivalent might be the insult “wog.” Within the field of racialis\zed epithets in colonial Goa, it existed alongside paklo, “a derogatory term used by indigenous elites to dismiss the whites, in the context of the complex power equation between the ‘whites’ and the indigenous elites” (Parobo 186) and the term mestis to refer to descendentes, an aspersion—within a local context that prized purity of blood—on their prideful claims to an exclusively European ancestry.
Resumo
Abstract
This article analyzes the representation of December 1961 in two Goan short stories: the Portuguese-language “Rucmá, a mulherzinha de Salém” by Maria Elsa da Rocha and the Konkani-language “Guerra” by Sheela Kolambkar. I argue that these two stories avail themselves of the suggestive potential of the genre to represent Liberation not as a clean break in the socio-historical development of the territory, as it appears predominantly in the English-language literature of the territory, but as a discontinuity, which, in the wake of colonialism, left behind a tangle of undefined hopes, obscure fears and unsettled issues. Both “Rucmá” and “Guerra” represent the period prior to the Indian military action as a chronotope of uncertainty, which Liberation deepens rather than resolves. Writing post-1961, in a climate of growing tension during the democratization of Goa, the authors seem to advocate for social unity based on a recognition on the part of the two principal religious communities of Goa of a certain conformism in relation to colonial rule. In conclusion, I pose the question of whether this appeal to unity has a conservative function. The proposition underlying the article is that an internal literary comparatism, which juxtaposes the various languages of Goa, might shed light on attitudes concerning the main social facts and historical events in the territory.
- © 2017 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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