MONDAY, APRIL 29, 2024
ANISHA FRANCIS
MARGAO: Growing up, Frazer Andrade was a rather peculiar child, who skipped sports and picnics to dabble in history and sacred music. Even as most Goan families - Hindus and Catholics alike – consider it inauspicious to keep broken religious statues in the house, Frazer would constantly bring home figurines missing limbs and other old, dusty artifacts, much to his parents’ dismay. “I couldn’t help it; it pained me to see old altars and statues being burnt, wiping out years of tradition and craftsmanship. They do not make artifacts like those anymore; art styles are constantly evolving and if we
destroy them, all their stories are lost too,” says Frazer, 27, who is on a mission to
preserve and document every shred of Goan culture he can get his hands on, for posterity.
It started when his family travelled to Mumbai for school holidays and visited the Prince of Wales Museum there. “I was fascinated with all the artifacts on display - statues, scrolls, silverware and beautiful blue crockery. My father told me that there were a bunch of old knick-knacks in our ancestral home as well, that I had never paid attention to. I got back and began discovering the treasure trove of Goan culture we had in storage,” says Frazer, who then went back to the Museum for an internship in art restoration.
When a box of old Christian statues was dumped on the doorstep of the Chapel next to his house in Fatorda, he took it as a sign to begin salvaging these items of historical value, in good earnest. “I went to as many churches as possible, and appealed to the Parish priests to give me anything they were getting rid of, irrespective of the size, the material, and the extent of damage. I wrote e-mails to the churches I could not visit, and also shamelessly asked friends and family to spread the word,” says Frazer, who also raids scrapyards to look for discarded art. “Just the other day, I chanced upon an old iron host-press in the scrapyard, in great condition! In the old days, communion wafers would be handmade by the nuns, the dough would be pressed in the metal mould and baked on a fire,” he explains, excitedly.
His stunning collection now has items of varied origin, ranging from silver chalices to wooden altars, crosses and plaques, figurines made of bone, metal and ivory, robes and vestments, candlesticks, lamps - even he isn’t sure of how many salvaged treasures he has amassed. “Several were gifts, some were purchased, and many rescued from being destroyed,” he says proudly. Each object has been professionally cleaned, restored and polished/repainted if necessary and then, Frazer has painstakingly documented 375 of them, in great detail, on the only platform he has at his disposal to display his collection- a Facebook page called ‘Indo-Portuguese Christian Art’. Here, he writes a brief, engaging description of each object in English and Portuguese, to accompany the photograph. He’s nowhere close to finishing with this documentation though, and keeps salvaging new treasures.
“The dream would be to one day be able to publicly display these forgotten articles, and maybe pursue this full-time,” Frazer says wistfully. A qualified pharmacist, he points out that he cannot be stuck on his passion for too much longer, and needs to put the degree to use. But he admits that his heart will always be enshrined in his art collection. “I’ve been asked not to waste my time collecting junk, but irrespective of what it is made of, I will accept any of your old artifacts- even those not of religious significance- because anything that conveys stories and culture is valuable to me,” he quips.
