Goa through the eyes of the British

One of the more interesting perspectives on Goa has been left for us through letters written by Lieutenant-Colonel Bremner who was the British Consul for Goa between 1940 and 1943. 

Claude Edward Urquhart Bremner was born in India, on August 30, 1891, while his father Henry John Bremner was serving as a colonel in British India army. In 1911, aged 20, Bremner was commissioned into the army and arrived at Quetta. In 1919, he joined the Foreign and Political Department of the Government of India. Various frontier postings, left Bremner considerably ‘nervy’. He was thought to be a poor judge of character, unable to size up situations, with ‘a tendency to express immoderate views on insufficient data or even no data at all.’ 

It was under this cloud of ignominy that Bremner arrived at Mormugao on November 19, 1940. With him was his wife Anne. They drove from Belgaum to Goa. To Anne, the villages ‘looked dilapidated … small smoky huts between coconut palms and banyan trees.’ Thin pariah dogs barked at them, men wore just loincloth and women, ‘grubby cotton saris’; children ran around naked. 

Bremner, perhaps, believed he was being appointed to a position of strategic importance. Before the war, the resident engineer of the Madras and Southern Mahratta Railway at Mormugao had acted as the British vice-consul. These were generally honorary positions without a salary. The British consul-general at French Pondicherry, Reginald C F Schomberg was overall responsible for Goa. Schomberg’s alarmist view of Goa as a receptacle of German propaganda and a ‘fascist state’ whose ‘officials and leading citizens profess, admire and defend fascist principles,’ had hastened the appointment of a full-time consul-general. 

To begin with, the Bremners were put up in Vasco at the Palacio Grande Hotel, a ‘grey stoned walled building’ facing the sea, ‘directly over the docks and the railway.’ There was a tiny community of British residents in and around Vasco most tending to the affairs of the railway or the harbour. Bremner dismissed them as insular, harbouring a ‘superiority complex’, and unfamiliar with ‘the countryside beyond the roads to the railway station.’ 

Eventually a ‘suitable house’ was found for the Bremners at Altinho Panjim. Further up the hill were more houses, occupied by Germans. The Germans in question were Robert Koch, a businessmen later revealed to be a Nazi spy, and his wife Grethe. Shortly before Bremner’s arrival, Goa had offered refuge to three German ships, the Ehrenfels, Braunfels and Drachenfels. In July 1940, another Axis ship, the Italian SS Anfora also sought shelter at Goa.

The residents of Goa, Bremner thought to be in a state of ‘mental depression’ mired in recurring epidemics of typhoid, failing rice harvests, rising commodity prices and water shortages; the general despondency only ever lifted by frivolities such as Carnival, seen as an excuse to indulge in a ‘complete drunken orgy,’ during which time the elites put on fancy dress and raided each other’s houses. 

Within a year of his arrival, Bremner had gleaned information that the Goan Catholic population, ‘eagerly anticipated an early British occupation of Goa.’ By December 1941, Bremner was writing: ‘bazaars and to lesser extent countryside are flooded with wildest rumours including that of imminent occupation of Goa by us (British). This would generally speaking be welcomed by Goan Christians and the majority of the indigenous population groaning under taxation, grievances of top heavy maladministration, and injustice. Hindu trading community mostly pro-Congress and hence anti-British, would dread any such proposal.’ 

The idea that the Goan Catholic would have welcomed a British occupation and integration into British India, could have been little more than tea-table gossip. Was Bremner again falling into his old habit of relying on ‘insufficient data or even no data at all’? Had Bremner, even peripherally, been engaged with the Goan Catholic community, he would have encountered a different perspective. Nationalist Tristão de Bragança Cunha decried the creation of a Lusitanised identity among the Goan Catholic, distinct and severed from the rest of the Indian subcontinent. 

Bremner was by no means going to confine his clichés to just Goans. Goa, after all, was a port of call for other non-European races. In early 1942, the sloop ‘Gonsalves Zarco’ convoying ‘Joao Belo,’ brought a complement of European and African expeditionary forces. ‘Memories of the depredations of African troops’ Bremner wrote, ‘have been quickly revived and several Hindu families have already hurriedly removed themselves to safer areas … those who fear for their own safety and the chastity of their wives at the hands of the Negroes.’  The indigenous Goan population, even today, are not averse to racism of their own. The African, the khampri, is a figure of feckless stupidity and unbridled sexual appetite in the popular imagination. It could well be that Goans were reacting to the arrival of African troops, reinforcing the colonial stereotype of the African as sexually dissolute.

While in Goa, O K Caroe, at the External Affairs Department in Simla, thought little of Bremner’s abilities, writing in 1942: ‘He is inclined to dramatise himself and his work, and his reports and advice are not always distinguished for a wise perspective. These aspects are a part of his nature, and are, I’m afraid incurable.’ In 1943, M O A Baig took over from Bremner as the British consul-general for Goa. Upon India’s independence on August 15, 1947, India took over the Consulate in Goa but shut it down in 1955.

 (The writer is the 

author of Goan Pioneers of East Africa)