We exist outside of ourselves. This moment of consciousness is the birth of literature – the ability to perceive ourselves and to give form to perception is what allows us to introspect and immortalise experience. It is a profound loss to Goans that we grow up exiled from our own literary legacy. Our collective sense of self cannot adequately heal as long as we remain estranged from our literature. And there is only an erasure of ourselves if we choose to ignore wide swathes of writing which is in, what we now consider to be a foreign language – Portuguese.
That Portuguese as a language remains inaccessible to many of us has been a problem. To this end, the group Pensando Goa, whose members are spread across the globe, has done much to breathe life into this dead lung of Goan literature by translating works into English, by reclaiming them as an essential part of Goan historiography, and by enriching us with meticulously researched author biographies.
One such splendid sketch biography of the writer Francisco Joao da Costa, emerges from the scholarship of Sandra Ataide Lobo, in the book Woven Palms: Colonial and Post-Colonial Goan Literature in Portuguese (UWP, 2019). Lobo holds a doctorate in History and Theory of Ideas from the University of Lisbon. She was born in Goa, the daughter of former judge, lawyer and writer, Jorge Ataide Lobo of Siolim.
Francisco Joao da Costa was born in Margao on December 28, 1859, the same year his uncle Bernardo Francisco da Costa founded O Ultramar, a newspaper whose checkered history of dodging Portuguese censorship would come to an end in 1941, when it was banned by Governor-General Jose Ricardo Cabral. This then, was the family, FJC was born into, a family of wealthy Catholic Brahmins, entrepreneurs who initiated the private press and manufacturing industry, many of whom had studied in Lisbon, and who although not quite political rebels – they allied with the Portuguese govt – were not entirely obsequious in their views either.
In his early thirties, he started writing Notas a Lapis in O Ultramar, and assumed the pseudonym GIP, which might have been an acronym. GIP was not a pseudonym in the strictest sense; everyone knew who the writer was within elite Margao society. Lobo writes, ‘FJC and GIP were local writers who only rarely acknowledged the outside world. But that world, where things moved and events occurred, where intelligent life was possible and dreams mobilised those who believed in them; that world was a constant frame of reference in Notas a lapis, either directly mentioned or by means of literary allusion.’ So exactly which world did FJC and GIP inhabit? It is in FJC’s writings that we, for the first time, see a world suspended between a crumbling past and a yet to be realised modernity, between the East and West, between stymied ambitions and ungraceful affectation, between a powerlessness wrought by colonialism and a power enabled within the elite Catholic Goan community by the very same colonialism, which had created a chimera of sorts. FJC’s writings, the satirised affectations and the imbroglios within families, provide us with perhaps the most insightful viewing of Goan society ever documented.
In 2011, I had a personal tour of Margao by its one-time mayor and documentarian Valmiki Faleiro. He’d said to me, ‘To understand GIP you must understand Margao.’ Later, I visited the Loyola-Furtados and the Costas in their elegant homes; to understand GIP’s Margao, a town he fictionalised as Breda (possibly a reference to the Parisian quarter Breda, known for its prostitution), we must understand the opposing politics and rivalries between these two families, when in the wan days of the Portuguese monarchy and filled with the as yet unrealised dreams of Republicanism, Goans experienced a period of local political representation and franchise. This ignited disparate ambitions of indigenous power, giving rise to the Partido Indiano fronted by the Loyolas and the Partido Ultramarino supported by the Costas, which culminated with the tragic massacre outside the Margao Municipal Building on Sept.21, 1890.
FJC was often accused of ridiculing known personalities and targeting particular families (the Loyolas perhaps), to which he protested that he had merely ‘created some types with vices and customs more in evidence in these families.’ Many of them studied in Lisbon and Paris, they read European authors, re-acted European plays at the Harmonia theatre founded by the Costas, dined on imported European wines and delicacies, and they lived in houses which embraced Indo-Portuguese aesthetics. But it was a European enculturation, which to FJC seemed anaemic, lacking in substance, and robbing Goan society of its vitality and progress.
FJC read in several languages; he employed language to satirise just how thin the veneer of European enculturation was in Goa, and that underlying it was the native language and native traditions which were strong enough to resist erasure. Perhaps his brief stay in Bombay (Lobo posits this period to be between 1883 and 1885) first made him aware of a dissonance in Goan society; but he never assumed the heavy burden of offering a diagnosis and remedy.
It is unlikely we will ever be able to explore with greater depth FJC’s personal life. FJC, the man with a receding hairline, the man with a fondness for drink, the man who changed how we view Goan literature and Goan society, died in 1900, at the age of 41. Had he, Francisco Joao da Costa, been an early victim of that awful Portuguese disease which affected so many writers– saudosismo?
(The writer is the author of Goan Pioneers of East Africa)
