I recently had the opportunity to read Maria Aurora Couto’s final opus, the posthumously published, At Home in Two Worlds: Essays on Goa (2024). To be honest, it was a sad read. Sad, not because of the poor quality of the writing; Couto never disappoints with her prose. Rather, it was sad because one contemplated not just her absence, but the absence of the generations she, and her husband Alban, represented; as well as the Goa she had first started writing about with her opus primus Goa: A Daughter’s Story published two decades ago in 2004.
A Daughter’s Story must have been written soon after the retirement of her husband, when they returned to Goa and the village of Aldona that they both so cherished. This was a book that spoke of the past, but there was a vision for the future. She spoke in A Daughter’s Story of the veglench munxaponn (unique humanism) that marks the Goan personality, and she made the history of her landed relatives the history of us all. At Home in Two Worlds, however, is a darker book, and the despair felt at seeing Goa dissipate, under the multiple threats of corruption, real-estate speculation, casinos, is palpable.
I was somewhat distraught in 2022 when on reading of her death I realised that I would never see Couto again. I had formally bid her goodbye in her home in Aldona in 2019, a visit I had made to communicate to her news of significant changes that I was committing to in my own life. Thanks to the Corona virus pandemic, I was unfortunately able to return to Goa only in 2023 – never had I spent this long a period outside Goa. On my return, I felicitously found myself resident in the village of Aldona. One of the first things I did on settling down was to seek out her grave. I found the niche where her remains and those of her husband were now placed. It was a small consolation that I could regularly pray for their souls, and on one such visit, I realised that I was relieved that she was now dead, because surely she had been spared the sight of what Goa has become following the pandemic.
Couto’s life and mine had remarkable parallelisms. The both of us, for example, had lived in Patna, had some kind of association with the Gaya district. What was interesting, was her observation repeated at least once in the book, that it was being in Patna that “I felt Christian in a way I was never made to feel in Dharwad” (119). Perhaps not unsurprisingly, it was precisely during my time in Patna, that I first gained a distinct sense of what it was to be Christian in India, and what it was not to be Hindu. Whether in Goa, or Bangalore where I studied, my sense of being a Christian was not challenged in the last. In Patna, it was. My own life changed substantially since then, and there is a sense in the book that this experience in Patna was not without impact, even though it is not explicitly elaborated.
What the many essays of this book offers are glimpses into the various interlocutors with which Couto had been conversing with during her, enviably rich, life. One among these is the late Prof. Alito Siqueira, to whom the book is dedicated. This dedication is no surprise, given how often Couto refers to Siqueira. One of the great losses to Goan intellectual life is the lack of a substantial corpus of works of Alito Siqueira – the man just refused to write! A scholar with a perspicacious insight into Goan life, those who knew him well, recognise his insights in the work of many scholars who work on Goa. We must be thankful to Couto who explicitly credits Siqueira for ideas she articulates and extracts entire segments of her conversations with him for our edification.
Another great service Couto has done to Goan historiography is to document, albeit sketchily, the trauma that was visited on Goans in the months, and years, following its integration into the Indian Union. Once again, Couto quotes persons extensively, and thankfully some of these names are Hindu. What we are left with, is a base on which future scholars can begin to explore the impact of the integration on Goan society.
This evaluation of the transition, also includes a reference to Sridhar Tamba indicating a major lacuna in the integration of this territory into India: “There was no treaty of transfer of power,’ he said, ‘[and] there was no treaty signed to preserve institutions and languages that would ensure continuity and a peaceful transition as happened, for instance, in Pondicherry.” Reading these lines, I was reminded of the very unfair criticism that the Member of Parliament Captain Viriato Fernandes drew in the run-up to the Parliamentary elections for stating the obvious, that the Goans were not explicitly included into the Constitutional contract. It made no sense to me that this should have been the subject of scandal, and in fact should have been read as proof of a patriotic desire to be properly and legitimately included into the national political community. So many of the problems we suffer in Goa may have been avoided had we but had the opportunity for our legal history and institutions to be properly recognised at the time of integration into India.
I felt a genuine sense of grief as I turned the last pages of this book; the sense that a familiar voice had now been silenced, or at least moved into another register. Nevertheless, this book, and, especially, A Daughter’s Story will continue to offer fruit for future generations of Goans who try to understand our complex territory. I will end by repeating what I indicated earlier in this piece, by crafting her personal family history into a narrative with a larger frame. A Daughter’s Story made that personal history of the Goan landed gentry, who did much to lay the foundations of what can today be considered Goan, the history of all of us, and thus a resource for the future, when we can rediscover what it means to be Goan.
Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requeiscat in pace. Amen.
(Jason Keith Fernandes
is a theologian and
socio-legal scholar)