GOA TRAVELS
BEING THE ACCOUNTS OF TRAVELLERS FROM THE 16TH TO THE 21ST CENTURY
Editor: MANOHAR SHETTY
Rupa Publications India Pvt Ltd
Pp 308 Rs.295
| STANLEY COUTINHO
When a poet takes to collecting writings of old he unwittingly carries with him his “undefined, marauding inner anxieties” lending a rather quaint yet delightful metre to his depiction, his introductory observations, and to the method of collection itself. The reading leaves you in a pensive-cum-elated mood as when you have ingested the umpteenth reading of the Ode on a Grecian Urn or To A Skylark. And so is Manohar Shetty’s latest presentation: Goa Travels.
At the same time, personal accounts of times long gone by tend by their very antiquity to fascinate. And when those accounts relate to Goa – a land that has attracted visitors of every creed and profession, trade and politics over misty millennia – a deeper glow engulfs that fascination.
Manohar Shetty went to college in Bombay fascinated but wary of losing his mind unconditionally to the clutches of a whimsical chemical, tentatively managed a family-owned restaurant there and then moved with his beloved ‘V’ from Bombay (described amidst a million mixed emotions in one of his several poems: “But a vacant darkness swarms / within me too, and cannot go beyond / this fixed fond smile” – The Mannequin) to Goa which, he says, has not inspired as much poetry as he had expected, yet; from his initial poetry that were but “savage outpourings heaping scorn on the establishment…” to his realising that “a spark, phosphorous-like, had bobbed up …”; from the “scrawny, long-haired young man at odds with family and the college curriculum,” to being a Homi Bhabha Fellow and a Senior Sahitya Akademi Fellow …honours which he carries as easily as his several other achievements.
Goa Travels is another of those achievements. After publishing several of his collections (the first being A Guarded Space in 1981), he found that the brochure-ridden face of Goa hid, perhaps smothered, a long history of literary culture. His first anthology of tales from Goa was Ferry Crossing — Short Stories from Goa. The book under review is an attempt to see Goa through the eyes of the numerous visitors (some friendly, some not so) over the centuries. In analysing these writings, significantly, Manohar observes that none of them mentioned Goa’s beaches “even in passing”.
The book is divided into three parts viz. The Early Traveller, The Inquisition In Goa, and The Contemporary Traveller. It is significant that he has a separate division for the Inquisition (containing only one account) as this was perhaps the most degrading period of the Portuguese church-dominated rule. Gabriel Dellon, the narrator, was persecuted for practising Judaism; his is perhaps the only eye-witness account of the period and needs to be read to understand the “universal and violent trembling”. Manohar, in his introduction, puts it in perspective: he escaped detection as a Jew during his lifetime but 12 years after his death he was posthumously convicted, his body was exhumed and burnt at the stake; his sister however was burnt alive. As Manohar says: it savaged the social fabric of the place.
Among the “early” travellers is Duarte Barbosa who gives what is clearly an eye-witness account of a widow committing sati – though not in Goa (where it was banned by Afonso de Albuquerque), but in Vijaynagar. He was here sometime between 1500 and 1517. The Italian Pietro Della Valle, who came to Surat in 1623 and went to Calicut, also speaks about Sati where he tried to convince a “willing victim” from this ultimate sacrifice. The next account is by one Fernão Pinto who accompanied the body of St. Francis Xavier to Goa. Anthony Monserrate, one of the Jesuits who spoke to Akbar about Christ, follows. There are several subsequent stories wherein the Jesuit encounters with Akbar and his immediate progeny are described. Pierre du Jarric, a French Jesuit, professor at Bordeaux and a chronicler of the Jesuit Missions that arrived at the Moghul Court in 1580, 1590 & 1594 is another of them. Monserrate also reports discussions with Akbar about celibacy, marriage, spiritual children, and the last judgement. John Huyghen Van Linschoten, here between 1583 and 1588 recorded the decadence in Portuguese Goa during its incipient decline from its heights of glory. He speaks of the Portingalles, Mestiços, their houses, courtesies, marriages, and other ‘customes’ and manners.
Ralph Fitch, the British pioneering traveller around 1583 is accredited with having whetted the appetite of the East India Company. Among the better known of the early writers are Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (wealthy and famous jewel merchant – diamonds who was in Goa in 1641 and 1648, and noted the rapid decline in Portuguese prosperity); Alexander Hamilton, Calvinist Scotsman who was in Goa in 1692 &1704, and gave a rather depressing account of the Portuguese – particularly the clergy– which was corroborated by Jacobus Canter Visscher, Dutch Pastor who visited Goa in 1717. Hamilton mentions the legend of St. Francis Xavier’s arm being sent to the Vatican; and Richard Burton, the famed translator of One Thousand and One Nights, says Manohar, expelled much bile on Goa in his racist and misanthropic Goa and the Blue Mountains.
A native Goan whose book (An historical and archeologically sketch of the City of Goa, preceded by a short statistical account of the Territory of Goa) is one of the most popular tomes on the Portuguese in Goa, is next: Jose Nicolau De Fonseca. He was originally from Colvale, and practised as a doctor in Bombay. One would have expected to find some writings about the period when Goa was occupied by the British between 1812-1815 during the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance during the Napoleonic Wars. But then that is the choice of the editor.
Then there is a host of Contemporary Travellers that Manohar mentions in his introduction but does not include their works, including Somerset Maugham; others are either cliché ridden or based on incorrect information of Goa. Those who are included are Graham Greene (1964) and David Tomory among others. But the most interesting is the inclusion of Manohar Shetty’s The Shady Invasion of the Beach Umbrella. Smacking of Abou Ben Adhem, this chapter ties up the purpose of the book. Here we find the real anguish of the Goan against the tourist-brochure type of Goa. And then there is his concluding poem – covering the huge gap between the Bombay he left and the Goa he had adopted as his own. Sensitive. Moving. Disturbing.
When a poet takes to collecting writings he leaves you in a pensive-cum-elated mood as when you have ingested the umpteenth reading of the Ode on a Grecian Urn … and so is Manohar Shetty’s latest presentation: Goa Travels.
