Beyond Nostalgia: The Prescriptions of Maria Aurora Couto

There are some who would charge the works of Maria Aurora Couto of being guilty of the sin of nostalgia. This charge would be extended to her latest book Filomena’s Journeys. While nostalgia trips are often been celebrated for reason of the bitter sweet memories of the past that they deliver, this emotion has for some time now come under critical attack. Nostalgia is attacked because all too often it is an unabashed reminiscing about the past engaged in by former elites who mourn the existence of more egalitarian present. More recently, however, literary critics have pointed out that nostalgia can also be engaged in by persons who were oppressed in the past, and their nostalgia should be read, not as a validation of the past, but as the critique of the present, where they continue to be the butt of oppression.

I believe the charge of nostalgia that is leveled against Couto’s books was very effectively dealt by Ranjit Hoskote, the art critic and literary theorist. Speaking at the release of Filomena’s Journeys Hoskote suggested that Couto’s books were not in fact about nostalgia but were in fact of a prescriptive nature. The books were prescribing a route for the future of Goan society. Couto’s response was sadly disappointing given that she brushed off the suggestion, perhaps embarrassed by the idea that she was presuming to prescribe for Goa. Hoskote, however, may have been on to something.

There is an edge along which Filomena’s Journey walks. On the one hand it does indulge in an exercise that one may call nostalgic. There is a loving detailing of the lives of the bhatcar class and a lament for the loss of this past. At some point, one gets the feeling that Couto is engaging in that fond exercise of the South Asian upper caste, of asserting that the well born are never poor, they have only fallen onto bad days. Left to itself this nostalgia and what Dale Luis Menezes calls “The Lament for ‘Bhatcarponn’” is definitely problematic. On the other hand, however, given that she is speaking about the alcoholism of her father and the way it impinged on the otherwise privileged background of his wife, his children and himself, this personal narrative is definitely not engaging in a nostalgic romp into the past. It is seeking to figure out what went wrong and brings out into the open the fact that the lives of Goa’s elite were not merely charming stories. This text points out that the bhatcar was not necessarily the personification of benevolence. Indeed, it suggests that this benevolence may have been the exception rather than the rule.

The question before us, then, is how do we read this edge along which Couto’s narrative travels? I believe that Hoskote’s suggestion that this book is a prescription for the Goan future is an ideal way to interpret her narrative. In exploring the dark side of her family’s history Couto is laying bare the problems that underlay Goan society. She may not be evaluating the story entirely, and indeed there is no need for her to do so. In collecting the narrative from various members of her family and the segment of society that she belongs to, she is offering a personal memory for public scrutiny. Future scholars of Goan society will be able to read her text and offer the kind of reading that her proximity to the narrative and her social location prevent her from offering. They will be able to ask if the problems that underlay this family, that is representative of other families that have not had a similar courage to come out, was not the result of living a life of leisure sustained by the hard labours of others. And it is on this question that Couto’s questions have relevance for even though Goa’s bhatcarial system has become a thing of the past, the rentier lifestyles of the Goan elite continue.  The youth from this background in particular are happy to merely live off the income from the family name and assets, and whether we like it or not, the bhatcar seems to be a cultural model for most upwardly mobile Goans.

The Dr. Francisco Luis Gomes District Library, Margão

It is to the pernicious effect of this lifestyle that Couto offers prescription, especially in her earlier book Goa: A Daughter’s Story. One of the aspects of Goan society that Couto does seek to lionize is the impact of the intellectuals from the very same bhatcar class on Goan society.  The point she seeks to make is that these men were able to impact on the political lives and imaginations of all Goans precisely because they used their incomes to read. In so doing, they engaged with a larger world and lived, what she calls, “a life of the mind”. If there is one call that resounds through both books, then it is the call to Goan society to live the life of the mind. Where libraries in Goa were once available only to a privileged few, the public library is an asset available to every growing numbers of Goans. Couto’s silent prescription is to call for more Goans to exploit these resources, expand the boundaries of what we think is possible, and increase the list of social relations that we think are unacceptable. Couto’s book, therefore, is not merely about her father’s ailment and the consequent suffering of her family. It is also a tale about the value of an investment in education and the support that social networks can provide.  It is a suggestion as to the manner in which the material wealth generated can be spent. To this extent the narrative pays equal attention to both the individual as well as to society. One is only as strong as the other and asks that we turn towards investment in the social not merely on the conspicuous consumption that marks our days.

In sum then, Filomena’s Journey is a cautionary tale to Goans of the present. This is a tale of caution that is not directed merely to the Goan upper castes and traditional elite groups. It contains a warning to a society that has amassed a sizable amount of material wealth, but has not as yet begun investing in a robust life of the mind. It suggests that should we not learn from the bitter memories of our immediate past, we may well be forced to repeat them.

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo dated 9 May 2014)

Wandering through halls with a hundred doors: Book Review of Let Me Tell You About Quinta

Ever since the Indian army marched in and annexed the Portuguese State of India to the Union, Goan society has been involved in an incredibly intense churning. This churning has occurred as Goans sought, and continue to seek, their location within the larger Indian polity; as they sought to make sense of the rapid changes that overturned the social structures of a highly stratified society held in place through late Portuguese imperialism; as new elites emerged and waves of, until-then, foreigners landed up to radically transform the Goan landscape. A churning that has been on for some decades now, it would not be wrong to say that this process reached a particularly intense moment in the past couple of years. It is within this context that Let me tell you about Quinta should be read, evaluated and appreciated. A good number of Goan, and non-Goan artists, musicians and writers have attempted to grapple with the upheavals that have beset Goan society, and it must be said that Let me tell you is clearly one of the finer products of that churning.

Set in the village of Carmona, Let me tell you about Quinta is narrative that spans three generations (including an illegitimate one) of a Catholic bhatcar (i.e. landed Goan) family and its multiple Others. Weaving between time-periods, pre-colonial, colonial and the post-colonial, the narrative is punctuated by the voice of the initial narrator of the epic, and the figure closest in time to us; the readers. Indeed, the delicate texture of time that this narrative produces is one of the finer features of this book, fine-grained in its attention to detail, yet never leaving one exhausted from the burdens of history. And yet, the central protagonist of the narrative is clearly Quinta do Santo Antonio the highly contested property that, like so many Goan homes and properties of the late-colonial epoch, framed the emergence, lifestyles and the eventual dissolution of one class and the burgeoning of another. This grand Goan home, like others in the territory, measured carefully the lives its owners would lead, and mapped the relationships they would enjoy or suffer with their relatives and minions; living on, even as the eaves of these homes eventually come crashing down. It should be said, that one could use this one book as a fairly effective way into getting into a broad and yet sensitive understanding of Goan society and its history.

Let me tell you however, does not limit itself to merely weaving its tale via reference to the quotidian. On the contrary, the magical or the enchanted trespass quite frequently into the tale, be it in the form of birthing fluids that deluge automobiles, women who speak quite casually to spirits that tattle tales of buried wealth, and curses that eventually ruin families. If it were just this however, Let me tell you would fall well into the realm of fantasy, or magical realism. However, because the fantastic that the narrative presents are from well within the vernacular traditions of Goa, this book is poised quite comfortably within the realm of contemporary mythology. The most exciting feature of this book therefore is not the deft weaving of Goan history, or its sociological insight, but the manner in which it has done both of these while integrating the same into the spiritual traditions of the land. Most efforts on this front, especially by Goan Catholic authors tend to tumble headlong into an embrace of brahmanical myth, as they thrash about seeking to recreate the history of a Hindu past that they believe they have lost. Not so Let me tell you, that catholically embraces the fluid movements of Goan history while simultaneously rooting itself in a living and breathing mythological traditions of village Goa, or perhaps more appropriately village Salcette (the taluka within which the novel is so firmly set.)

Because Let me tell you emerges from out of this great Goan soul-searching, because it is located within the mythos of the Goan space, and because it is cognizant of the nuances that time has wrought on this space, it is an intensely political text. Like the time-frame of the narrative, this commentary is pronounced upon various locations of Goan time, not restricting itself merely to the contemporary moment. However, because it is Quinta that is the central figure of the book, the most fundamental comment is the lament for the loss of the Goan homes and the families that built them. Take for example this hugely evocative “‘What a life’ wrote Preciosa to Sun, ‘this was a land of open door, now we have to lock ourselves in to avoid people.’”  And yet, while the narrative mourns the passing of an age, because it reflects on the morality of the actions that built and sustained those home, and eventually came to pass, it is a cathartic lament, creating through this narrative the legitimate space for those former subalterns, the minions of homes like Quinta do Santo Antonio who have now come to succeeded to the Goan earth that they were so long disinherited from.

For the dexterity with which Savia Viegas weaves these many projects together, for its breathless and graphic storytelling, the book is an intellectual delight even if one is not interested in Goa, its politics or its history. Indeed, because of the manner in which it involves itself with the genealogies of a creole society, a number of readers have commented on, and drawn parallels with the works of Marquez and Allende. However, those unfamiliar with the nuances of Goan cuisine, language, hierarchies and idiosyncrasies may at times find it difficult to navigate and make sense of the narrative. Viegas, or the publishers Penguin, would have been well advised to include a glossary along with the narrative. However, one could also perhaps simultaneously discern from this lack of a glossary, the decision to pluck Goa away from its location as an aberration, where it is merely ‘a small part of India’ and return to it its universal significance. While on the subject of language, it should also be said that the few forays that the narrative makes into other languages, be it Hindi, Konkani or Portuguese detract from the breathless beauty of the narrative. One can understand the temptation to invoke the vernaculars to give a flavor of the land, but given Viegas’ skills that have thus far been acclaimed, these little flourishes serve only a cloying flavor that could have well be dropped. Introducing the vernacular tongue into a text written in a different idiom is seldom easy, and this attempt is not Viegas’ brightest moment. There is another grumble associated with language and this one involves the dropping of the accents that communicate the sounds of the Portuguese language used in the book. This, along with spelling errors, is often a ‘mistake’ committed by Anglophone publishers of texts that invoke languages other than English. For a text that seeks to weave the Portuguese language convincingly into its narrative however, this is an appalling oversight. 

The last of the grumbles associated with the production of this book involves the images located in the text. Five in number, Viegas commences each part of this four-fold narrative with a pictograph assumedly crafted by her hand. These images share an interesting relationship with the text. Not quite a show-and-tell, it is as if these images are the remnants of the dreams from which the narrative was born. Given that these images would been executed in colour, and given their association with the text, it is a shame that they appear in the book not in the lavish colour or Viegas’ no doubt technicolour dreams, but in muted and disappointing shades of greys.

Savia Viegas’s book is a delight at so many levels; so do, do let her tell you about Quinta.

Let Me Tell You About Quinta
By Savia Viegas
Penguin Books India, New Delhi, 2011, 254 pp., Rs 299
ISBN 0143415220

(This review was first published in Biblio: A Review of Books Sept-Oct 2012 as Land of Open Doors)