Lembrando Prof. Dr. Teotónio de Souza

Vim para enterrar César, não para louvá-lo.

O bem que se faz é enterrado com os nossos ossos,

que seja assim com César.

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Acto III, cena 2.

Devo começar por dizer que estou bastante escandalizado com a recente tendência que notei, especialmente depois da morte do Manohar Parrikar, ex-Chefe Ministro de Goa, de elogiar sem reservas as figuras públicas e não refletir sobre alguns aspetos mais negativos do seu carácter ou sobre as suas intervenções na sociedade. A falta de reflexão aspetos menos atraentes da sua personalidade é uma indicação dos tempos perturbados em que vivemos, onde a crítica é vista como criticismo e desrespeito, não sendo sequer tolerada.

Gostaria de acrescentar que a crítica é a reflecção desapaixonada ou imparcial, que deve examinar ambos aspetos, positivos e negativos e refletir também sobre as razões mais profundas para estas qualidades. Por tanto, hoje, gostaria de começar com uma reflecção desapaixonada sobre alguns aspetos da vida de Teotónio. Preferia começar com o elefante na sala, com o facto de Teotónio ter sido uma pessoa difícil, especialmente em contextos profissionais.

Teotónio era uma pessoa rabugenta, ficava ofendido facilmente e frequentemente maldisposto em ter que reconhecer o trabalho de jovens acadêmicos, especialmente se estes não vinham ao beija-mão. Ai deles que o contradissessem, pois era certo que se montaria de imediato uma cena pública que destruísse o seu trabalho.

Seria fácil atribuir estas características claramente negativas só a Teotónio. As suas fraquezas, enquanto suas, foram também produto de um certo contexto social e Goês. Contexto este onde ele nasceu e dentro do qual trabalhou e contribuiu. 

É uma crítica constante que faço à comunidade Goesa, seja em Goa ou na diáspora, o não reconhecimento dos esforços dos seus filhos. Se não pertencem a uma família ou casta poderosa é quase garantido que a pessoa que desenvolve qualquer trabalho interessante até importante irá trabalhar sozinho, sem aplauso do resto da comunidade. O facto que qualquer reconhecimento, se vem, vem muito tarde, quando estes já estiverem mortos, implica que pessoas que se esforçam por articular novas perspetivas e criar novas iniciativas trabalham sem qualquer consolação. O caso de Teotónio é um exemplo perfeito. Conheço apenas um reconhecimento de Teotónio enquanto académico, o festschrift intitulado Metahistory. History Questioning History. Festschrift in Honour of Teotonio R. De Souza, tenho certeza que não foi uma iniciativa de alguma instituição Goês.

É um facto que trabalhar solitariamente sem reconhecimento pode ter um impacto corrosivo na alma. Torna-nos amargos, com tendência a que nos gabemos sobre os nossos sucessos e sem vontade de reconhecer o trabalho dos demais. A final, se ninguém reconhecer o meu trabalho, tenho que ser eu a faze-lo, verdade?

Isto não é apenas o caso do Teotónio, mas o caso de vários outros Goêses ilustres que tive a oportunidade de conhecer e é um facto que me deixa muito triste. Para re-enfatizar o que distingue as comunidades Goêsas no mundo não é somente a falta de institucionalização, mas também a falta de investimento na sua vida intelectual. Há já vários anos que tem havido um crescente interesse académico em Goa. Enquanto este acontecimento é bem-vindo, há também um perigo porque Goa esta a ser definida por académicos não Goeses e serão, consequentemente as suas agendas, ou seja, as suas preocupações, que irão determinar a representação dos Goêses. Creio que Teotónio percebeu este problema. Ele quis articular uma identidade Goêsa diferente do que dos Portugueses e ficou rabugento porque percebeu que era a única voz a desenvolver esta tarefa. Isto não sugere que concordo com a sua posição. Separadas por gerações, a minha perspectiva sobre a identidade Goesa é substancialmente diferente. Enquanto a posição de Teotónio era a do nacionalismo Indiano, a minha é influenciada pela necessidade de combatê-la. Mas acho que poderíamos concordar que tem que haver mais investimento Goes na sua propria representação.

Creio que grande parte da sua antipatia surgiu também da sua posição social. Bramane, mas não tanto.  Percebi essa peculiaridade depois de ler a introdução do seu livro Goa To Me (1994). Fiquei muito comovido pelos detalhes que partilhou sobre a sua vida íntima e pareceu-me um acto de coragem e honestidade. Este texto mostra de fato a crueldade do sistema de castas entre Goeses e demonstra o fato pelo qual somos incapazes de criar uma saudável e vibrante identidade Goêsa. Na nossa sociedade enfatizamos sempre a nossa posição social, e portanto diferença em vez de enfatizar semelhanças e criar um sentido de comunidade. Tenho uma história para partilhar convosco a este respeito. A minha primeira experiência de Lisboa quando cheguei para participar na reunião de Goeses pelo mundo, organizada pela Casa de Goa alguns anos atras (talvez 2007?). Fui nessa altura a Coimbra por um mês e utilizei esta oportunidade para almoçar com Teotónio antes da reunião. Durante o almoço, Teotónio partilhou comigo a sua leitura das políticas entre as comunidades Goesas em Lisboa, apontando os conflitos entre castas e como naquela altura a Casa de Goa era dominado por brâmanes.

Cheguei à Casa de Goa equipado com esta informação. Foi cumprimentado por uma pessoa e foi-me dirigida aquela muito antiga questão Goesa “De onde és em Goa?” Atenção que a pergunta não funciona como quebra-gelo numa conversa, mas para localizar a posição na hierarquia das castas da pessoa a quem é dirigida a pergunta. Normalmente não participo neste jogo, sempre indico que cresci em Pangim ou que moro em Dona Paula, mas deste vez indiquei que as minhas origens na Ilha de Divar. “ah!” respondeu a mesma pessoa, adicionando, “somos de Margão!”, demonstrando a sua posição superior na scala bramanica. Prometi a mim mesmo   que nunca mais participaria neste jogo. Não é minha intenção sugerir aqui que este é o caso na Casa de Goa, mas esta é uma atitude com a qual temos que lidar firmamente. 

Acho que vou deixar as minhas reflecções por aqui, porque suspeito que ja tenha gasto mais do que o tempo que me foi alotado. Agradeço a vossa atenção, e a Casa de Goa pelo convite. Desejo descanso eterno a Teotónio e agradeço o trabalho por ele desenvolvido.

(Apresentação proferida na Conferencia sobre a vida do Prof. Teotónio de Souza Casa de Goa, Lisboa – 22 March 2019)

Seeing Goa, Seeing Lisbon

“Quem viu Goa, excusa de ver Lisboa!”  (Who has see Goa need not see Lisbon) goes a saying that may have emerged and gained popularity in the late sixteenth century Goa, when the island-city of Goa, what we today call Old Goa, was at the height of its power. This must have been saying a lot, since at about the same time Lisbon was a pretty impressive European city itself. The latter city presided over a truly global trade thanks to the European discovery of America and grew in size as well as impressive monuments.

Goa and Lisbon are today denizens of two rather different worlds and one would think that the old saying would not hold good. And indeed it doesn’t for I would argue that he who has seen one or the other, must see the other. As so many others before me have remarked, to arrive in either Lisbon or in Goa from the other place is to embark on a journey of déjà vu, a sense that one has been here before.

My first proper encounter with Lisbon was when I entered the city

through the railway station of Santa Apolónia. Enthusiastic that I should not miss a thing, and believing that walking is the best way to see things, I decided to walk. Blessed decision, since it gave me my first sense of this déjà vu.  Perhaps a little more than a kilometre away from the station I walked into an area called Campo das Cebolas (field of onions). It must have been a field a long long time ago, since today there is no space for any agricultural activity close to one of Lisbon’s many touristic centres, the Praça do Comércio. 

What struck me about the Campo was the fact that behind the square that gave its name to the place was a huge governmental building dressed in the yellow that we in Goa today associate with the Police Headquarters and the Institute Menezes Braganza in Panjim. All at once, it was like I had been transported from Lisbon back to Goa, standing in a place where one could look at the Police Headquarters from across what is today called Azad Maidan in front of it. Don’t get me wrong, it is not quite the same view, the building and the square in Lisbon are on a much grander scale, but there is no doubt that both spaces speak a similar language.

Over time that initial sensation has kept repeating itself. This sensation is perhaps never as strong when I view the south bank of the river Tagus from a location in Lisbon. The view on the other side is of various Goan scenario’s stitched together; the view of Betim and Reis Magos from Panjim, the view of Vasco from Dona Paula. 

For a long time I thought that perhaps these imaginations of seeing Goa through a Portuguese landscape was just the product of some kind of (post?)colonial nostalgia. I was fortunately relieved of this guilty sensation when traveling from Lisbon to Coimbra with another Goan academic, who doesn’t really share many of my perspectives. Pulling out, again from Santa Apolónia, she remarked with delight at the landscape she saw; “But isn’t this exactly like in Goa?” I grinned at her in acknowledgement. There were portions of the river bank with its vegetation, and the fields that followed subsequently that did give one the feeling that one was in riverine Goa, with its bandh, backwaters, and paddy fields baking in the summer. One does get the feeling that perhaps a person with an eye trained to recognise different kinds of vegetation will not see quite the same vision that these two Goan academics did. But until the day in which we develop these skills, one suspects we must continue to see visions of the mother land when far away from home. This must not be a particularly bad thing.

If there is one thing in which Goa (in this case understood to be Panjim, the former Nova Goa) differs from Lisbon, then perhaps it is the relation of the two sides of the river bank to each other. In Lisbon, it is the north bank of the river Tagus that hosts the city; and the south bank, today home to a variety of dormitory towns, tends to be disparaged by Lisbon snobs. In Goa it seems it is the other way around.  Panjim is located on the south bank, and even though Ponjecars suffer from an incurable superciliousness, it is a fact that beyond some amount of threatened urban architecture, Panjim has not much to offer. Indeed, if denizens of the city want entertainment, they must perforce travel to the northern bank of the river Mandovi.

Who has seen Goa, need not see Lisbon went the old saying. However, with the passage of centuries, it would perhaps be more appropriate for those in Goa to rephrase it: Who has seen Goa, must indeed see Lisboa! One hopes that those in Lisbon will return the honour.

(A version of this post was first published in The Goan on 25 Oct 2015)

Notes of the Itinerant: Locating the best Goan lunch in Lisbon

It’s one of those standard questions when you meet someone new and they realise you are from Goa, or from a place deemed foreign; “Oh! Do you know where one can get the best Goan [insert appropriate location] food in Lisbon?” The question is annoying on so many levels. First, there is this manner in which one gets turned into an information hub on the exotic. The next thing you know, they will be asking you if we use elephants to go to school. The other reason for annoyance is perhaps because until recently I just did not know where I could find the best Goan food in Lisbon.

 It is not as if there are no Goan restaurants in Lisbon. There are quite a few, and a good number of them are in fact not bad. For example, I think fondly of Sabores deGoa, tucked away in the appropriately named Bairro das Colónias. But no matter how satisfying the meal, there was always something missing, and I could not quite place my finger on what this missing element. What I did know is that the absence was not the lack of authenticity that one finds in ‘Indian’ restaurants. Of course, there is no such thing as ‘Indian food’. The food that is so often passed off as Indian is the food inspired from the cuisine of the Punjab and other parts of the North western Gangetic plains. This is but one part of the nation-state of India. As is to add insult to this injury, most of the restaurants that offer this Indian food, may have a dozen or so offerings on their menu but the taste varies between three to four flavours. Shocking! It is for this reason that most often I steadfastly refuse to go out to dinner at an Indian restaurant. “If I wanted to eat food from home, then I would eat at home” I protest pedantically. “In any case, the food they offer is not what my mother would cook, and neither is it very good.” Mother, clearly, always trumps!

Some time ago I realised that what really bugged me about eating out, whether in an Indian, or a Goan, restaurant was the lack of an etiquette. Take a couple of European examples as illustrations. When one dines out in Portugal, there are invariably three courses that occupy the meal, soup, main course, and dessert. If one went the Italian way, one has the antipasti, primi piatti , secondi piatti and of course the dolce, the desserts.  Each of these culinary traditions has managed to articulate a etiquette such that there is an internal logic to the meal. One comes away having a full and complete meal, satisfied with the final product.

This has not been my experience with the Indian, and Goan, meals that I had in Lisbon. If I manage to bully my companions into addressing the meal my way, then we ensure that we get a couple of bowls of rice, and a variety of accompaniments. But invariably, possibly due to the fact that we are addressing not an internal logic of a culinary tradition but individual preferences of a variety of people the result is still less than satisfactory.

My search for the best Goan food in Lisbon, however, ended recently when I discovered that Lis Goa, the newest restaurant in town, had added a fish thali to its offerings. Those who have been in Goa will know of the immense popularity of the fish thali, whether for visiting tourists, or office-goers. The thali consists of the basic combination of rice and fish curry, with an accompanying vegetable. Subsequently, one can elaborate on this basic offering by adding fried fish, shell fish, dal, a variety of vegetables. The list of possible additions is mouth-wateringly endless and it is rice links all these various flavours together. Despite the elaboration, this is a peasant meal. There is no fuss to it, it is honest, and it works within the logic of the cuisine. Perhaps this is the reason for the fish thali’s almost universal appeal to Goans who eat out. And perhaps this is why Lis Goa figured that if they were going to represent Goan food, this is the one method through which they could do so best.

I have to confess that I was sold on the idea even before I arrived at the restaurant. This was the afternoon I was going to kill all homesickness with a lunch I could pretend I was having in Goa. There have been times when I have built up expectations and been woefully disappointed. This was not the case, however. This time round it was spot on. Lis Goa did not in fact disappoint.

It is not as if the offerings on the thali were exquisite. They didn’t need to be. The fact is that they were not bad. And they worked together. It offered one a full meal linked around the most basic elements of food in Goa and along the west coast – rice, fish, vegetable. My search for the best Goan meal in Lisbon had ended.

(A version of this post was first published on 5 July 2015 in The Goan Everyday)

Who speaks for Goa?

Seven years ago I travelled to Portugal for the first time and attended the Goan Diaspora Convention in Lisbon. Listening to Goans from Lisbon speak and make presentations I learned at that moment that there were many ways through which one could learn about Goa and Goans, and not all of these methods required that one actually be present in the territory of Goa itself.

Because of its long history with Goa, Portugal remains a site where Goan identity is produced. Given its peripheral location in the world it is not necessarily a privileged location for the production of Goan identity, but it is by no means an insignificant one. Over the course of years I have come to see how ties between the two places continue to ensure the production of ways in which Goa is understood, presented and represented. In other words, a Goan culture is produced as much in Lisbon, as it is in Goa.

One production of Goan culture was made obvious to me when I went out to dine at a restaurant that offers Goan food, ‘Jesus é Goês’ (Jesus is Goan). The quirky name stems from the fact that the owner of the restaurant, Jesus, is in fact Goan.  The food that an ‘ethnic’ restaurant serves is one way in which people learn about a culture. But this is not the cultural production that struck me. What struck me were the murals on the wall of the restaurant.

The walls of the restaurant pulsated with colour and a variety of figures who commanded that you stop and take notice of them. Across one wall a Puranic Shiva sitting in a tea-cup used a fork to paddle his way away from a funky Sri Yantra through an ocean of some, no doubt ambrosial liquid. One the same wall, a venerable tortoise supported a meditating baba who contemplated a samosa that seemed to have just appeared in front of him. Further away was a blue hand with an open mouth that seemed to pant from the chillies that were crossed on the plate in front of it. This was definitely a representation of Goa for the Goa-illiterate branco and my head was spinning from all the meaning I was taking in.

To begin with, despite the clear Catholic reference in the name of the restaurant, Goa is quite clearly represented as a Hindu space. However the Hinduism represented on the walls is one that has more than a fair share of influence from the hippy aesthetic. Growing up in the Goa of the 1980s I grew up to resent the challenge that the hippies brought to the Goan status quo and resented the spin that they put both on Goa and India. Here on the walls of this Goan restaurant in Lisbon, however, I had to acknowledge that the hippies had perhaps won the war. Their vision of Goa was now a part of how many segments of the world saw the territory.

This reinterpretation continues with the image of Ganesh head that presides over the restaurant. The cute pinkish kitschy elephant head would be familiar to, and warm the insides of any person from western India. Look closely, however, and one realises that the halo around Ganesh’s head is the crown of thorns that would have sat more appropriately over the head of Christ.

This is the kind of stuff that would make any traditional Indian secularist’s heart trill with delight. I am not known to appreciate this Hinduism meets Catholicism, we-are-all-brothers form of secularist propaganda largely because it is invariably so contrived. In this case, however, it really does come together effortlessly, perhaps because the ‘fusion’ is not so obvious. You need to look really hard, or be more than a couple of gins down for the crown of thorns to pop out at you.

Also populating the world on the walls of this restaurant is a strange animal. Quite unlikely the representation of any one figure, this animal reminded me of the composite animals that are very much a part of the subcontinent’s artistic tradition where the portions of elephants, crocodiles, lions, peacocks are brought together to create fantastical creatures. Commenting on contemporary Goan art some years ago, the art critic Ranjit Hoskote had noted this tendency among the then emerging set of Goan artists as well. In his essay Hoskote had tried to draw a link between ancient art forms and the contemporary, but I was not convinced. Even if these artists were either consciously or unconsciously continuing  an earlier tradition, they were still producing these images outside of a context of daily life. Here on the walls of Jesus é Goés, however, was this fantastical creature bounding around and decorating a quotidian space, very much like its ancestors decorated the temples of yore.

Amidst all of this largely Hindu kitsch, there is also a sign that refers to Goa’s Catholic tradition in the form of two garlanded and flaming hearts struck through with a knife. References, no doubt,  to the sacred hearts of Mary and Jesus it seemed as comfortable here in a Goan restaurant, as it would have in the kitsch Catholic art that populate Central America, or any other part of the Catholic world for that matter.

There is a certain Goa that is being presented to diners at Jesus é Goés. It may not be a Goa that Goans may recognise, but it is a Goa that nevertheless has a certain validity because it reinterprets various strands that in fact exist in Goa. That Goa is framed as primarily Hindu is true, and this remains problematic. However, it is also a fact that the presence of this Hinduism is not necessarily an imposition but the result of an engagement. This interaction is not necessarily piously reverential, but able to joke with it, play with it and in the process emerge with something that is actually interesting and stimulating.

(A version of this post was first published in The Goan on 6 Dec 2014)