13 Aug 2022  |   07:16am IST

The Karachi connection:75 Years of being Goan in Pakistan

Vivek Menezes

L

ate tonight “at the stroke of the midnight hour” it will be Independence Day across the border, and Tollentine (Tolli) Fonseca’s stirring arrangement for the Qaumī Tarānāh will begin to play across the length and breadth of the country that was brutally cleaved apart from India during Partition in 1947. The late naval bandmaster’s contribution, often misattributed to his friend Ahmad Chagla, is just one footnote to the remarkable - and continuing – story of Goans in Pakistan.

This astonishing history remains hidden in plain sight, despite outsized contributions to both countries – and indeed the world – by indisputably the most accomplished and successful outpost of the Goa diaspora. It was Anthony de Mello of Saligao and Karachi who founded the Board of Cricket Control of India (BCCI) and Cricket Club of India, and also chaired the organizing committee that established the Asian Games. Another example: Frank D’Souza was the first Indian on the immensely prestigious Railway Board, and later set up Pakistan Railways at the mutual agreement of both his countries (he had opted for India in 1947).

Goa’s connections to Pakistan track back 180 years to Charles Napier’s opportunistic 1842 annexation of Sindh, and the breakneck development of “Currachee” into an essential port city for the Bombay Presidency. In her useful 2019 paper, Profiling Karachi Goanness (1840s – 1970s): Monuments to Goan Emigration and Identity, the historian (and former Director of Education of the Government of Goa) Dr Celsa Pinto, describes how ambitious Goans piloted dhows up the Arabian Sea coastline“to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the formation of the Indian Flotilla in 1850, the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 that made Karachi, South Asia’s closest port to Europe, the construction of the Lloyd Barrage and the fact that Karachi had become the biggest wheat exporting port in the British Empire.”

In this 19th century boom town – think Dubai more recently – huge fortunes were made by pioneers from Portuguese India, who vaulted themselves up to push against – and sometimes even surmount – the colonial “colour bar”. As the community historian Menin Rodrigues puts it in his recent Footprints on the Sands of Time: Goans of Pakistan 1820-2020, “the early Goans who came here in sizable numbers and brimming with hope, were a mixed bag of talents with professional and semi-professional skills; many were unskilled too.” Through dint of sheer effort, they “excelled in everything they touched, grew in numbers (never more than 20,000 at any point in time) and affluence, and made an indelible impact on the society, rulers of that time, [and] development of the town and [all of their] countries (British- India, India and Pakistan) at large.

The lore of the Karachi Goans is almost beyond belief, considering the tiny numbers involved (by contrast just the village of Santa Cruz in Tiswadi has always had a larger population): the first two Cardinals of South Asia, the first two Goans to play test cricket, distinguished servicemen aplenty for both Pakistani and Indian armed forces. Many emerged from the substantially Goan-built and Goan-administered St Patrick’s School in Karachi - where the current principal is Anthony D’Silva – which has yielded two Presidents and two Prime Ministers of Pakistan, as well as BJP co-founder LK Advani.

Dr Celsa Pinto grew up near St Patrick’s, before leaving in 1964 at the age of 13. She attended the sister institution St Joseph’s Convent, where “I received world-class education at the hands of many a Goan teacher.” She says her home Lotia Mansion, “was a cosmopolitan building with Shia and Sunni Muslims, Hindu and Catholic Goans, East Indians, Parsees and Punjabi Christians all living in harmony” and points to a shop in Karachi called ‘Amchem Goa’ that posts often on social media about its thriving business selling bebinca, sorpotel and other delicacies originally from the Konkan.

Like many others with roots across the border, Pinto says “with love for India, my motherland, and affection for Karachi, my birthplace, I sincerely wish that the 75th Independence Day would lead to friendly and closer ties between India and Pakistan.” It is the identical sentiment shared by successive generations of Goans in the so-called “enemy nation” including the wonderfully talented 29-year-old artist Zoila Solomon, whose warm, textured paintings (her 2021 gouache Staple Food accompanies this column) often return to“fragments of the stories and experiences that my mother and relatives have shared with me over the years, carefully woven together to pay homage to my Goan roots.”

Via email, Solomon told me her mother Catherine (Fernandes) Solomon left Goa in 1992 to get married in Karachi, “and even while living and being a part of the Pakistani culture, and molding herself to fit the local Pakistani life, never fails to always have the right hint of Goan in her. I see Goa come to life through the deliciously spicy vindaloo and sorpotel- through the recheado fried fish that she makes. I see it in her Christmas traditions of making sweets every year. I see it through the animated conversations held in part Urdu and part Konkani over WhatsApp calls with her siblings in Velsao. I see it in the tiniest of details that make me so proud and so honoured to have my artwork based on and informed by my mother’s and my heritage.”

All this is precisely the theme of Aanchal Malhotra’s superb new book, In the Language of Remembering: The Inheritance of Partition - which was launched in Panjim earlier this year at the first Liberty & Light Festival of Goa - where the acclaimed 32-year-old historian “reveals how Partition is not yet an event of the past and its legacy is threaded into the daily lives of subsequent generations.” Her explicit intention is to “serve as a reminder of the price this land once paid for not guarding against communal strife - and what could happen once again should we ever choose division over inclusion.”

With great relevance to Dr Pinto and Zoila Solomon and everyone else who carries the trauma of unmooring in 1947 (which includes my own maternal family), Malhotra writes in her epilogue that “For seventy-five years, we have endlessly concerned ourselves with the geopolitical consequences of this historical event, and not nearly enough with how it has registered – through remembering or forgetting – in collective memory and public consciousness.” Noting the Prime Minister’s 2021 announcement that August 14 will henceforth be commemorated as Partition Horrors Remembrance Day, she writes that “the struggles and sacrifices made at Partition were not one-sided, and so while a day of remembrance is welcome, it cannot exclusively apply to Indians, and must extend beyond our frontiers, potentially paving the way for cross-border conversations and gradual reconciliation.”