MESTIÇOS

The word mestiço, comes from the Spanish word mestizo, is métis in French, and mixticius in late Latin, and all draw their existence from the Latin root, mixtus, or to mix. It’s a word used mostly in Spanish and to identify the offspring of European and Amerindian unions. But in the former Portuguese colonies of Macau, East Timor and Goa, mestiços are the children of Portuguese-Goan marriages or partnerships.

In Goa, mestiços occupy a difficult space in a place of contested identities and many struggles to protect independent identities. Ever since I read a few random sentences in Mario Cuoto’s book on mestiços I’ve been curious about the past and the fate of the community in post liberation India. Perhaps many left India in 1961 finding safer passage to a new life in Lisboa or elsewhere in Portugal. Their numbers could never have been too high. The 1881 census records some 2,500 mestiços in Goa, just about 0.5 percent of the total population. Yet, records suggested that they exerted  proportionately far greater influence, often abusing their position to stay connected to the powers that were – the Portuguese authorities.

I’m not sure how much this community has been studied, but Cuoto’s book, Goa: A Daughter’s Story, suggests that the private records run deep. In conversation with Malbarao Sardesai, the then 90 year-old head of the Sardesai family and a famed Indian musicologist, she learns that “..it was the mestiços who were the troublemakers; they were disliked intensely and were a law unto themselves.”

So far, I’ve only come across the story of one particularly terrifying character – Agente Casmirio Monteiro – who was allegedly an agent of the much feared Portuguese secret police, PIDE, or Policia International de Defense do Estada. Monteiro allegedly killed many freedom fighters and tortured anyone who posed a challenge to the Portuguese. His was allegedly reviled and revered by different sorts of folks across Portuguese Goa. And even today his name evokes strong reactions.

One Goankar  recounts how, during his childhood years, on his way to school everyday in Margao, he passed the police station, a building then well known as a center where suspects were brutally interrogated, and often flogged with chicotes, or whips. Agente Casimiro’s office was at one end of the building. Antonio recollects here:

“I have a vague recollection of Agente Casimiro who in his white vest used to lean on the window and watch school children go to these two schools.”

“It must have been in the early fifties when we as teenagers used to go to school in small garrulous groups. One fine morning right in front of Agente Monteiro on his window, I said to my colleagues in Portuguese ”Arreh ‘ one day or other, Goa will be free from the colonial rule.” Agente Monteiro heard me ( and at that time, I didn’t know who he was ) and gave me a sort of wry smile.”

“On being told of his identity, my carefree trips to Loyola School were never the same again.”

Probably, Agente, whose who allegedly also responsible for the assassination of FRELIMOs leader, Eduardo Mondlane through a letter bomb in Mozambique, and the murder in 1965 of General Humberto Delgado, a dissident Portuguese politician who challenged the dictator, Salazar, is one one extreme of a much more varied community.

I’m curious to find descendants of Portuguese era mestiços who might shed some light on the roles played by their ancestors, or to reflect a more diverse side to the community.

Historian Teotonio R de Souza has suggested that there are many more fascinating insights into the culture of Goa’s mestiços.

“Contrary to general belief, more white blood transfusion may have entered the Goan society through white females who married propertied and influential Goan “ganvkars” than through Portuguese males for whom native taboos made it difficult to find high caste native mates,” he wrote in a review of Maria Aurora Cuoto’s book, Goa: A Daughter’s Story.

A tip of the hat to Graham Greene

I stole the title of this blog from Graham Greene’s 1964 story, Goa the Unique, published in the Sunday Times in March that year.

Greene would have been 59 or 60 years old when he wrote “Goa the Unique,” a piece for the Sunday Times,  shortly after his travels in India led him to explore some part of Incredible! Goa. This was Goa before it became a state, when the verdict about Goa’s destiny was unknown. Many assumed, as Greene hints, that Goa would soon join its poorer – and by Greene’s suggestion, inferior – neighbour, Maharashtra.

“In the first Indian village outside Goa on the road to Bombay you are back to the mud huts and broken thatch which are almost a sign of affluence compared with the horrible little cabins made out of palm fronds and bits of canvas and any piece of old metal on the outskirts of Bombay,” he wrote. “These are dwellings to escape from; how can their inhabitants feel loyalty to Maharashtra – the huge amorphous member-State of the Indian Union neighbouring Goa, into which Goa must almost certainly be sooner or later submerged.”

In the end Goankars opted for statehood over a merger with Maharashtra with 54 percent voting for an independent state.

I recently discovered that Greene was an MI6 agent during the second world war, sucked into the intelligence vortex thanks to his reputation for voracious travel coupled with his keen insight into local cultures, politics and evolutions. In his piece on Goa, too, his writing boasts an insight not often seen in journalists writings even today when there is so much more access to information, people and movements. If the Sunday Times was printing features of this length and depth in 1964, reading Goa the Unique is a also lesson in the state of decline in global journalism.

But I digress. Greene’s essay, which recently found its way into Jerry Pinto’s eclectic collection of stories on Goa, Reflected in Water (Penguin Books India 2006) tells us that Christian Goa is split into two parts – the wealthier southern Jesuits and the poorer northern Franciscans. I haven’t asked anyone about this divergence but I hadn’t picked up on it at all in my first month here. Greene is fascinated by Goa’s syncretic lifestyle. Describing  nazar utharna rituals and local belief in supernatural phenomena, he takes us into the uniquely Christian, Hindu amalgamation of faith and practice in Goa.

Greene writes about the rest of India much like Naipaul — alright, that’s not fair. Nobody writes about India like our Trinidadian friend but India is seen as gloomy, poor, backward – which, I suppose it was in 1964. That view of India is much like writings on India during that period, which have been written about extensively in Ramchandra Guha’s book, India After Gandhi.

That’s not to say Greene is wrong. Certainly, even today, Goa seems pretty unique, despite sharing its rich, coastal Konkan culture with both Maharashtra and Karnataka. In addition to Greene’s admiration for the scenic and cultural beauty of this area, he may also have felt a religious tie to the land. In fact, Goa’s Catholic culture does attract a wide range of religious tourists, besides many others who may be non-practicing but feel an unspoken, cultural tie in a land dotted with splendid, white-washed churches. Greene, too, was a converted Catholic. He was baptized in February 1926 at the age of 22 just before he married Vivien Dayrell-Browning, herself a convert who brought him into the fold. It is said that Greene never remarried and never divorced Vivien Browning even after they separated in 1948 because of his strong, Catholic views. That, of course, didn’t stop him from having many, many relationships.

But in any case, this bond may have, in part, influenced his romance with Goa.

The world evoked in Greene’s essay may be under some communal pressure today, thanks in part to rising fundamentalism worldwide. But Goa’s syncretic traditions remain, a fascinating reality despite 451 years of colonialism.  The sense of mutli-religiosity and multi-culturalism that Greene captured clearly exists today, almost a half century later, much of it woven into the fabric of language. Portuguese is, more or less, dead but viva la Konkani.