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.