Usha Amonkar excelled as a singer of Urdu ghazals.
Goan Catholic women like Patricia Rosario, Myra Menzies and Ophelia Cabral will be remembered in the domain of opera, Western classical music, and tiatr and cantaram. The Profiles, missed Ophelia and Shalini Mardolkar who have played historic roles in the first Konkani film Nirmonn (1966). The Profiles include a lone woman educationist, Propercia Correia-Afonso Figueiredo, and a Bombay-based surgeon Sandra de Souza, but missed Reita Faria, who shone brightly as Miss World in 1966 but refused to enter the glamour world of models and films and, instead, pursued a medical career.
The contribution of Clement Vaz has fortunately been complemented by an e-book devoted to prominent Goan women of our times. It is promoted by Goa Sudharop, a California-based Foundation,and can be downloaded from http://bit.ly/1bueCRm. Besides this praiseworthy initiative, we look forward to an ongoing and more competent skills in digital and other forms of updates, without ever forgetting that our women are the bearers of our culture and seeds of development.
The list of outstanding Goan women extends to a vast gamut of activities, covering educational, political, cultural activities, and professional occupations. They embrace teaching, legal practice, journalism, medicine, administration, and range from active roles in the freedom struggle to modelling and beauty contests. The performance in these latter cultural fields has been well covered by the efforts of Wendell Rodricks and André Rafael Fernandes.
The liberal phase of Portuguese colonialism played a significant part in promoting greater contacts between the Goan Catholic elites and Europe. Bernardo Peres da Silva and Constancio Roque da Costa, the earliest elected Goan MPs in the Portuguese parliament, were ardent promoters of modern westernized education in Goa. They encouraged Goan village communities to create scholarships to send their bright boys to Portugal for advanced studies. This did produce some results in the 1870s and contributed as leaven for the modernization of Goan society.
Curiously and ironically, many of these young beneficiaries of scholarships that sent them to Portugal were from Salcete. The Bardez elites were still traumatized by the memories of the Pinto Revolt and the brutal punishments inflicted by the colonial power. Many opted for advanced studies in Bombay and created a strong Goan intellectual base that served later to support the mass migration of Goans to British India in the early 20th century. Despite Portuguese attempts to wean the support of the poorer sections of these expatriates in British India, the elites played a leading role in the freedom struggle, and as disclosed by the recent research of Valmiki Faleiro, published as Patriotism in Action (2010), Operation Vijay involved high-ranking Goan officers in all three branches of the armed forces.
If the incipient Portuguese liberalism gave some impetus to touches of modernization in Goa, including some benefits of education to Goan Catholic women, these remained minimal even after the Portuguese Republic opened up to the Hindu elites. The full flowering of modernization in Goa had to wait for the end of colonialism, and more particularly for the Bandodkar revolution and the ‘Bhausisation’ of Goan politics with its bold land reforms and massive inputs into primary education and health, plus State assistance to private initiatives in secondary and higher education. This helped in pushing many among the former mundkars into the realm of the new elites.
The post-colonial improvements in primary health and the explosion of primary education taken to the most remote areas and closer to rural homes, boosted the girl participation of girls in education by numbers unknown in the past. Healthier and more educated women are our best guarantee of a prosperous and enlightened Goa.
However, as a darker side of these brighter prospects are the growing number of cases reported about the rapes. It is a somber aspect of Goa’s development, but the growing consciousness of its hideousness may be regarded as a hopeful sign of the trend towards “growing out”, rather than a successful “outgrowth”. What the President Obama affirmed in his very recent speech of the State of the Union, “success of women is American success”, holds true for Goa, the rest of India, and for all of mankind.
[This text is extracted from Ch. 21 of author’s latest publication *Goa outgrowing Postcolonialism*, due for official release on August 11 – 5.30 p.m., at the Goa Chamber of Commerce, Panjim. The book may be ordered from Amazon.in at http://bit.ly/1sdhbuO]
(Teotonio R. de Souza – Founder-Director of the Xavier Centre of Historical Research (1979-1994).Tweets @ramkamat)
