Viva Victor! (Mumbai Mirror, 19/10/2025)
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V M
Oct 19, 2025, 9:20:20 AM (8 days ago) Oct 19
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https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/others/sunday-read/viva-victor/articleshow/124669918.html
Nirad Chaudhuri started Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse — his very last book, published in 1997 — with the implicit boast that it was “being written by a man in his 99th year (the date of his birth being November 23, 1897, the year of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria). I have never read or heard of any author, however great or productive in his heyday, doing that.”
But now there is one better in Victor Rangel-Ribeiro, the Goan writer in New York who was born in 1925 (the same year Nirad Babu initiated his infuriating Anglophilic oeuvre) and began his own writing life in Bombay in the 1940s. He is still going strong and working steadily, after celebrating his 100th birthday earlier this month.
Rangel-Ribeiro has piled up an astonishing writer’s resume spanning eras, cultures, genres and continents, beginning at just 16 in 1941 at Xavier’s College, when he co-founded an aspiring writers’ group — another member was the distinguished future novelist Violet Dias Lannoy. His journalism career took off at the old National Standard newspaper, which Ramnath Goenka eventually bought and merged into what became The Indian Express, and moved through to The Times of India and Illustrated Weekly to the New York Times in the 1950s, where his first big break came as a reviewer of classical music concerts.
In those difficult years prior to the Civil Rights movement in the USA, like so many migrants, Rangel-Ribeiro switched jobs to help support the family (while his late wife Lea remained an adored fixture on the faculty of the United Nations International School for almost four decades), but writing always continued alongside. His daughter Eva says, “my dad always wrote at the kitchen table on his IBM Selectric typewriter and I would be lying on the floor near the doorway into the kitchen, doing my homework very close to where he was writing. The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson would be on in the background. This continued for at least 10 years.” All of those efforts became the 1981 book Baroque Music: A Practical Guide for the Performer, praised by the great Yehudi Menuhin for its “readable and engaging style, free from the pedantic, overly scholarly approach.”
Then, in 1998, Rangel-Ribeiro came out with Tivolem, an excellent debut novel that Booklist ranked amongst the best first books in America that year. At 73, Rangel-Ribero launched into another serious and ongoing literary innings. When we connected over video call earlier this week, the distinctly twinkling-eyed centenarian told me he’s hard at it on The Fires of Gangapur, “a work in progress set in Bombay and Calcutta.”
Until the pandemic, the preternaturally genial Rangel-Ribeiro — he strongly reminds me of Paddington from the recent movies — would return for long stretches each year to Porvorim, his ancestral village in North Goa, where he conducted concerts by ensembles like the Goa State Strings Orchestra, and constantly evangelised for literature, including kick-starting the now-vibrant Goa Writers group (of which I am also a member) almost two decades ago. Nonetheless, what is truly notable about this remarkable anniversary is his living link to the nascent Independence-minded media of the 1940s and ’50s, and an even earlier cultural history. In the foreword to a 2020 anthology edited by Selma Carvalho, he recalls how “my father, Oscar [who migrated] to Bombay during the First World War, was invited around 1918 (I believe by Dorab Tata) to start a classical music orchestra at the Taj Mahal Hotel, and so became the very first Indian to lead a group there.”
Many years later — just imagine the scene — Rangel-Ribeiro and his young family arrived in New York harbour on the transatlantic ocean liner RMS Queen Elizabeth on August 15,1956.
However, when asked about his most unforgettable memory after his 100th birthday, he said it was “my first sight of Bombay. We were coming from Goa by ship when I was about seven years old, and my father woke me up early, to take me up on deck. The sky was cloudy and dark, and so was the sea, but in the far distance I could see a fantastic sight: Bombay, with its streetlights on. For me, Bombay then became the city of light.”
Nirad Chaudhuri started Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse — his very last book, published in 1997 — with the implicit boast that it was “being written by a man in his 99th year (the date of his birth being November 23, 1897, the year of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria). I have never read or heard of any author, however great or productive in his heyday, doing that.”
But now there is one better in Victor Rangel-Ribeiro, the Goan writer in New York who was born in 1925 (the same year Nirad Babu initiated his infuriating Anglophilic oeuvre) and began his own writing life in Bombay in the 1940s. He is still going strong and working steadily, after celebrating his 100th birthday earlier this month.
Rangel-Ribeiro has piled up an astonishing writer’s resume spanning eras, cultures, genres and continents, beginning at just 16 in 1941 at Xavier’s College, when he co-founded an aspiring writers’ group — another member was the distinguished future novelist Violet Dias Lannoy. His journalism career took off at the old National Standard newspaper, which Ramnath Goenka eventually bought and merged into what became The Indian Express, and moved through to The Times of India and Illustrated Weekly to the New York Times in the 1950s, where his first big break came as a reviewer of classical music concerts.
In those difficult years prior to the Civil Rights movement in the USA, like so many migrants, Rangel-Ribeiro switched jobs to help support the family (while his late wife Lea remained an adored fixture on the faculty of the United Nations International School for almost four decades), but writing always continued alongside. His daughter Eva says, “my dad always wrote at the kitchen table on his IBM Selectric typewriter and I would be lying on the floor near the doorway into the kitchen, doing my homework very close to where he was writing. The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson would be on in the background. This continued for at least 10 years.” All of those efforts became the 1981 book Baroque Music: A Practical Guide for the Performer, praised by the great Yehudi Menuhin for its “readable and engaging style, free from the pedantic, overly scholarly approach.”
Then, in 1998, Rangel-Ribeiro came out with Tivolem, an excellent debut novel that Booklist ranked amongst the best first books in America that year. At 73, Rangel-Ribero launched into another serious and ongoing literary innings. When we connected over video call earlier this week, the distinctly twinkling-eyed centenarian told me he’s hard at it on The Fires of Gangapur, “a work in progress set in Bombay and Calcutta.”
Until the pandemic, the preternaturally genial Rangel-Ribeiro — he strongly reminds me of Paddington from the recent movies — would return for long stretches each year to Porvorim, his ancestral village in North Goa, where he conducted concerts by ensembles like the Goa State Strings Orchestra, and constantly evangelised for literature, including kick-starting the now-vibrant Goa Writers group (of which I am also a member) almost two decades ago. Nonetheless, what is truly notable about this remarkable anniversary is his living link to the nascent Independence-minded media of the 1940s and ’50s, and an even earlier cultural history. In the foreword to a 2020 anthology edited by Selma Carvalho, he recalls how “my father, Oscar [who migrated] to Bombay during the First World War, was invited around 1918 (I believe by Dorab Tata) to start a classical music orchestra at the Taj Mahal Hotel, and so became the very first Indian to lead a group there.”
Many years later — just imagine the scene — Rangel-Ribeiro and his young family arrived in New York harbour on the transatlantic ocean liner RMS Queen Elizabeth on August 15,1956.
However, when asked about his most unforgettable memory after his 100th birthday, he said it was “my first sight of Bombay. We were coming from Goa by ship when I was about seven years old, and my father woke me up early, to take me up on deck. The sky was cloudy and dark, and so was the sea, but in the far distance I could see a fantastic sight: Bombay, with its streetlights on. For me, Bombay then became the city of light.”
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