India-Books/Culture
Colonisation
of India by the Portuguese, French, Dutch and British are divided by imperceptible differences
in sensitivities that each colonizing nation brought to the honey-milk Indies —
a land they had coveted, imagined and ascribed magical geographical and culture
nuances in the realms of their wandering mindscapes. While the British treated
India as “commercial colony” — geared to producing raw material to be exported
to England and imported back as finished products benefitting the colonizing
country rather than the colony. “The idea was creation of poverty by economic
drain,” says eminent Indian historian Romila Thapar.
But this
doesn’t seem to have happened with Portugal. “One does not hear of Portugal
taking back goods and bringing back finished products to India,” Thapar says. It probably left Goa richer than many of its
counterpart colonial “settlements” elsewhere.
These fine and distinctive layers of
colonization – the transition of India into a nation state from a colonial
state and the chaotic saga of Goa — which was under Portuguese rule till 1961 under
its last ruler Antonio de Oliviera Salazar — are the socio-political themes
that scholar, teacher and writer Maria Aurora Couto plays on in her new novel, “Filomena’s
Journey” to redraw the journey of her parents, Filomena and Chico, from the heart of Goa to Dharwad
in Karnataka, where Filomena fled with her family of seven children — to seek
refuge from her stormy marriage. Chico,
an unusually gifted musician failed to rise above “the decadence of a colonial
elite culture”; his frustration destroying the fragile filial mosaic— with
“arguments, brawls and binges of extravagance that terrified the children”.
Filomena gave her “children the best of opportunities
with a meager income from her estates back home in Goa”— and a semblance of
tranquility, Couto recalled.
The novel
that the writer Couto describes as a “tribute to her mother— an extraordinarily
resilient and strong woman” is also an exploration of Goa’s evolution and
integration into the country’s cultural and linguistic centre-stage from a
Portuguese and Konkani speaking coastal paradise.
“As a Goan,
I feel a lot of things should not have happened. For instance, English was
imposed on the state in 24 hours instead of the Portuguese in 1961. When the
Portuguese left, instead of employing Goans, officers were brought in from
Maharashtra. It was as if one lot of rulers had left and a new lot had come
in…” Couto said, picking up the leaves of “the historical debates around the
modern Goan identity and history” from her previous book, “Goa: A Daughter’s
Story”.
The stream
of indignant alienation runs through the novel reflecting in the clash of
cultural ideologies between rural and urban Goa— in the union between the simple,
practical and the committed Filomena from her grandmother’s village, Raia,
where her “avo” (grandmother) took care of the orphaned Borges (Filomena’s
family) brood and the “refined” Chico, from a affluent family in Margao, an old
elite settlement where life flowed to
the beat of a classical pre-war Europe. The
couple found it hard to reconcile to their conflicting aspirations to
stability, fame, luxurious living and the ensuing “failure”. The alienation is
also apparent to the way Goa relates to the rest of India, to faraway Portugal
and “post-transition” from the rest of the country – despite being a part of
the Indian Union. It is emblematic of an essential dilemma that assailed
several colonies at the cusp of de-colonisation— which in Goa arrived nearly
two decades after the Indian Independence in 1947.
“The problem
was the intransigence of the Portuguese dictator— who adopted a scotch and burn
strategy to destroy everything that Portuguese were behind. Coupled with this
was the sudden imposition of English — that gives the people an insecure
identity in mainstream India, particularly now with the influx of labour from
neighbouring states as an investment. Goa is being ruled by powers from beyond
the border. It has a large money order economy (from abroad) and the small captive
Goan population in the Union Territory might soon become a minority… Goans have
a unique individuality and personality — a society where women have equal
rights,” Couto told this writer in an interview.
“People call
it neo-colonisation of Goa”, the writer pointed out— grounded at some point in
a deep sense of alienation and uncertainty about identity. Couto contexts her
narrative in these contrasts — “the feudal culture of my parents in which the
elites prospered, the villages and the
transition… Now Goa has immense upward mobility,” the writer explains.
In the
process, the canvas of the family becomes the broad story of the new Goan society.
“I did not want to be judgmental in the process of exploration of the tragedy
of my father’s life, courage and faith of my mother,” Couto said. The seeds of the narrative were planted in
the three years of transition (1962-1964) when Couto returned to homeland as
the wife of senior Indian
Administrative Service officer Alban Couto to oversee
the “change” of Goa from a Portuguese colony to an Indian Union Territory- like
Hyderabad. “I was living in the history of the moment”, she said.
Couto had
access to “every world” as and IAS spouse – “the Catholic relatives in the
villages, the Hindu world of Dharwad in Karnataka where she grew up and the
world outside where she lived with her husband – both in the country and
abroad”. As a lecturer of English at the Lady Shriram College in New Delhi for
15 years, she was exposed to world literature, creative devices and “historical
resources” in archives around the world including Portugal, where she spent
time researching from “old Portuguese publications” of the times like the “Dicionario
de Literatura Goesa” and “O Ultramar”.
“I realized
that newspapers could be a rich source of political history,” Couto said.
The fact
that Couto is one of the last “surviving” few of her multi-lingual generation,
who speaks and reads Portuguese, Konkani and English helped her “put together
evidence to back her narrative” as a “legitimate history of modern Goa in memory”.
Her real
life research began from the period of “transition to the pre-war says of the
1920s and 1930s Goa to dig up family archives”. The events were tumultuous and
“cinematic”.
The story
begins with the death of Folimena’s mother Lilia at the birth of her fifth
child at Raia village on a stormy night followed by the death of her father. It
moves ahead with Filomena’s languid “growing up years that flits like expected
shadows amid the farms, rivers, orchards, rain and the fields in the village,
the Church, festivals, community, cousins and family celebrations” in concert
with the passage of seasons, temporality and natural harvesting cycles— set in
motion for hundreds of years ago.
At 26,
Folimena is swept off her feet by Chico – whom she marries for love in upscale
Margao - the dream town. The narrative from the point of Filomena and Chico’s
wedding “becomes narrower focusing on the couple’s relationship” till Filomena
shifts home to Dharwad with her seven children.
The telling divided
into four “segments” is detailed — like
a painting so vivid with colours, events, emotions and exchanges that at times
it is difficult to believe that “the story is resurrection of history from
documented and memory archives”. She uses “a third person” narrative device —
which hides the narrator (the author) from the glare of reader’s consciousness.
The “I” factor creeps in occasionally
but Couto is present there constantly — prodding the reader to travel
with the story of Goa’s modern history in a language that sheds light on
Couto’s “cultural” positioning in a postcolonial India — old world yet lucid.
“I imagined
my parents’ courtship. There are passages that read like fiction. I call it a
combination of resource and creativity,” Couto said.
-Madhusree
Chatterjee
(The
novel, “Filomena’s Journey: A Portrait of a Marriage, A Family & Culture”, has been published by Aleph Book Company)
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