DEATH: Professor Eusebio L. Rodrigues, former professor at Georgetown Univ, author of the historical novel *Love and Samsara* set in 16th century India...
Frederick FN Noronha * फ्रेड्रिक नोरोन्या * فريدريك نورونيا
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March 1, 1927 - November 13, 2014
Resided in Potomac, MD
Obituary
Professor Eusebio L. Rodrigues died in Bethesda on November 13, at the age of 87. Long a valued member of the Georgetown University English Department, he taught courses in Modern American Fiction and in Indian Culture and Literature.
A native of Goa, Professor Rodrigues took his undergraduate degree at the University of Bombay, and two M. A. degrees, one at the University of Bristol (UK), the other at Columbia. He came to Georgetown in 1970, having completed his Ph.D. in American literature at the University of Pennsylvania as a Fulbright Scholar.
During his years at Georgetown, Euseb taught and published on many current American novels, producing an important study of the Nobel Prize winning novelist Saul Bellow, Quest For The Human, in 1981, and a wide range of studies on other contemporary writers, including an often-anthologized study of Toni Morrison, "Experiencing Jazz." He continued writing fiction following his 1996 retirement, and a historical novel titled Love and Samsara, set in 16th century India, appeared in 2007. The product of many years' research and writing, it recounted the aftermath of the Portuguese arrival in India.
Preceded in death by his wife, Elizabeth, he is survived by his wife of 47 years of Dr. Merlyn Rodrigues, Emeritus Professor of Pathology and Ophthalmology at the University of Maryland and International Policy Analyst at the National Institute of Health, and two daughters, Esme Abedin, a former operations officer and analyst at the World Bank, and Usha Rodrigues, Kilpatrick Professor of Corporate Finance and Securities Law at the University of Georgia. He was a devoted grandfather of Roshni, Shanti, and Ariana Abedin, and Cara, Anna, and Ethan Flath. A Mass of Christian Burial will be offered at St. Jane Frances de Chantal Catholic Church, 9601 Old Georgetown Rd. Bethesda, MD on Wednesday, December 3rd at 11 am. In lieu of flowers donations may be made in Dr. Rodrigues' name to Georgetown University, http://giving.georgetown.edu/.
- See more at: http://www.pumphreyfuneralhome.com/obituary/Eusebio-Leo-Rodrigues/Potomac-MD/1454486#sthash.sZnTN4ty.dpuf
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http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-literaryreview/reversed-narrative/article1438063.ece
Reversed narrative
ROCHELLE PINTO
With Ahmad bin Madjid, the legendary pilot of the Indian Ocean as the narrator, this tale is the other side of the many narratives of the journey of the Portuguese into the Indian Ocean.
Love and Samsara by Eusebio L. Rodrigues, New Academia Publishing, 2007, p.611, price not stated.
It may be best not to read Eusebio Rodrigues’ Love and Samsara as if it were a modern novel, though the blurbs tell us it is. This narrative, set at the cusp of the 15th and 16th centuries, is written in the manner of a chronicle and a memoir of the time, traversing from courtly intrigue and personal memory to the perils facing the seafarer near the western Indian coastline. Those approaching it with the expectations of a modern reader may get impatient. For others who like historical novels anyway, for aficionados of sea stories and for anyone with an interest in the Indian Ocean, this is a fascinatingly informative read.
It is in fact a narrative reversed, a tale that is the other side of the many narratives of the journey of the Portuguese into the Indian Ocean. This is the account of Shihab al-Din Ahmad bin Madjid, the legendary pilot of Arab stock, known for his mastery of the Indian ocean and his ship manuals that circulated his wisdom among mariners and pilots. The historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama has a comment on this figure who is the narrator of Love and Samsara. Historians, according to Subrahmanyam, rather liked the idea that Ahmad Ibn Majid, a veritable celebrity in the Indian Ocean, found himself guiding Vasco da Gama’s ship, as this brought together two figures of historical importance, at a moment that saw the world of the pilot give way to the world of the Portuguese trader. While Subrahmanyam’s text painstakingly establishes that Vasco da Gama’s allegedly Gujarati pilot was not in fact Ahmed Ibn Majid, the novel under discussion is not hemmed in by the obligations of the historian. Rodrigues deftly papers over the Arab origins and Gujarati identity of this figure by locating him primarily in Diu, and reconstructing a personal story that takes him from Diu to Malindi, Champaner, Vijaynagar, and eventually, Goa.
Immense erudition
It has taken immense erudition to recover the world of Ahmad bin Madjid not only through historical detail, but through the world of those texts, a minute knowledge of tides and seasons, of the perils of coastlines to ships and perhaps considerably more information about the sea than one wants at times (this is where it is good to remember not to expect a novel). Nonetheless, even if you are not a reader of sea stories, and find the erudition a little heavy going, you are drawn bit by bit into the life-world of someone whose visual life and worldly and spiritual knowledge are shaped around the world of the sea; who finds himself stifled when in a land-locked place, and who has to learn the ways of non-seafaring groups as though he were a foreigner among them. Since there was no absolute literary norm that separated the world of verse from that of prose, this account of pilots, traders, hakims, convicts, and priests is infused with the cadence of literary forms that were an instrinsic part of all writing, whether of ship manuals or politicised plays.
One of the main preoccupations of the novel is how the singular force of gun power and the political idea of nation bolstered the onslaught of the Portuguese, such that all the worlds of the Indian Ocean — the courtesans and spies of Champaner, the markets and by-lanes of Malindi on the coast of East Africa and the blackrock promontory of Diu — were caught in the puzzle of how to outdo this patently simpler but powerful culture.
A premonition that the entry of Portuguese ships into the waters linking Aden, Africa and India was going to transform the region haunts the narrator; that his knowledge of the sea will be made redundant, just as the unwritten norms governing trade until this moment are flouted with the threat of gun power. Yet, the narrator’s own involvement with the Portuguese as healer and guide suggests that if the patterns of power and of knowledge were being successfully rewritten in the domain of trade and seafaring, in the domain of faith and medicine, it would take much longer.
The memorable segments of this large text are the intricate whorls of spies and conspiracies that are unravelled only retrospectively. The narrator, out of his depth in the world of land-bound polities can only comprehend the meaning of these intrigues after the fact. He acts through impulse, through an instinct of self- protection, and through opportune and sudden moments of comprehension. Strings of time are drawn and redrawn in the narrative, as the tale of personal love gets entwined with that of courtly intrigue and the fortunes of colonial trade.
The one aspect of the narrator that ties the reader to the persona is the gentle elusiveness of the vision of Ahmad, certain in his ethics and in his love, but uncertain about what he has propelled as he aids the Portuguese towards Calicut. In fact, he pulls away from the certainty of action in exactly those times when his role is politically and historically significant. In this account of that historical journey he is barely well enough to guide the ships beyond the first turn, and contrary to all the retrospective accounts of this trip, which would make him traitor or pawn from a simplistic nationalist perspective, he and his knowledge are virtually erased from the start. The Portuguese find that their own seafaring knowledge based on different systems can guide them through uncharted waters without local help. If Ahmad impresses them occasionally with the accuracy of his measurements, these are incidental to the actual business of finding safe passage from Africa to India. In an act of self-erasure, Ahmad seems to inscribe the disturbing sensation of being made redundant in a single sea voyage into his narrative style.
This diffident narrator often relinquishes his role to someone else; sometimes to the voices of the letter-writers whose missives he finds in a collection of spy letters lying in an agent’s wooden box. Mid-way through this first person account, his account is stolen from him by a friend, leaving us as readers in a peculiar state of having known that part of the narrative we have read was in fact purloined. And as though the theft had taken his voice, the narrative is authoratively taken up by the inquistive friend-thief for part of the way, revealing truths and explaining aspects of that world that the gentle naiveté of our original narrator would not allow within the scope of his perception.
Narrative flaw
At times the historical and moral lessons are overdrawn for us, with slightly forced conversations between natives and sympathetic foreign settlers such as João, who provides elaborate explanations of the philosophy of the Crusades in answer to the question why Christians seemed so barbaric. It is at these moments that this narrative fails to be both a novel and a 16th century chronicle. Contemporary concerns are thrust back into the 16th century world through slightly laboured narrative strategies.
Sometimes the narrative quite engagingly conveys a sense of the mutual incomprehension that must have occurred at several points during this time. Ambassador Vascodagamama, a vowelised Malayali rendition of the captain’s name, provides one such moment, when the otherwise imposing figure diminishes in stature on his first arrival on Indian land, evidenced by the derisive scorn with which the people of Calicut discuss the paltry gifts brought by him for the Samorin. Another is the moment when the figure of the Madonna is taken by Indian fisher people to be a form of their mother goddess, just as Portuguese convicts who touch land after arduous months at sea, assume that an icon of Garuda is a localised representation of Christ and break into ecstatic cries of recognition.
Though the plaintive note caused by a love lost is carried on for too long in this novel, this is on the whole, a riveting text. It captures in sometimes exoticised detail the perceptions and practices of what we know through hindsight as a tentative moment, a world on the brink of disruption, prior to the capture of Goa with which the novel ends.
augusto pinto
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Rochelle Pinto
Frederick FN Noronha * फ्रेड्रिक नोरोन्या * فريدريك نورونيا
This is sad news and a big loss. Was there anything else he wrote related to the literary history of Goa? Unfortunately, I never corresponded with him.
It is not too much to say that Euseb was one of the most highly esteemed members of The English Department throughput his 26 years at Georgetown. Throughout that time, he taught and published on many current American novels, producing an important study of the Nobel Prize winning novelist Saul Bellow, QUEST FOR THE HUMAN. AN EXPLORATION OF SAUL BELLOW’S FICTION in 1981, and a wide range of studies on other contemporary writers, including an often-anthologized study of Tony Morrison, “Experiencing Jazz.”
As all his friends know, he continued writing fiction following his 1996 retirement, and his novel LOVE AND SAMSARA, which included a fictional treatment of the coming and the development of Christianity in the sub-continent, and the role of the Jesuits therein, appeared in 2007, the product of many years research and writing.
Widely and deeply read, a circumstance that added much to
his
work, over many years, advising the library, Euseb was known among his
friends and colleagues for the warmth and generosity of his personality,
and for his intellectual sophistication, which had a decidedly
empirical stripe. As a teacher he was at once sympathetic and
demanding, famous for his practice of specifying the exact number of
words a course paper should contain, and occasionally for baiting a
class by dismissing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel THE GREAT GATSBY (1925)
as the sort of thing only
an American critic could take seriously. He loved it when students then rose to its defense.
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