Why more Goan Catholics than Hindus…
Valmiki Faleiro
Why more Goan Catholics than Hindus…
We have seen so far twenty-nine Goan-origin military officers who rose to the top three ranks in their respective arm of the defence services of India. They are:
Army – one COAS (Gen SF Rodrigues), one Vice Chief (Lt Gen Stanley Menezes), two Army Commanders (Lt Gen Eric Vas and Lt Gen Walter Pinto), four Lieutenant Generals (Lt Gen CA Barretto, Lt Gen FT Dias, Lt Gen KL D’Souza and Lt Gen MA Fernandez) and twelve Major Generals (Maj Gen Krishnarao Rane, Maj Gen Sydney Pinto, Maj Gen Benjamin Gonsalves, Maj Gen Eustace D’Souza, Maj Gen Antonio D’Silva, Maj Gen Ian Cardozo, Maj Gen Ivan D’Cunha, Maj Gen Eustace Fernandez, Maj Gen Anil Raikar, Maj Gen Dinesh Merchant, Maj Gen Christopher Fernandes and Maj Gen Sumer D’Cunha).
Navy – one Vice Admiral (Vice Adm John DeSilva) and one Rear Admiral (Surg Rear Adm DRF Pinto).
Air Force – one CAS (Air Chief Mshl H Moolgavkar), two Air Marshals/AOC-in-C (Air Mshl Terence deSa and Air Mshl Yeshwantrao Rane), two Air Marshals (Air Mshl Loreto Pereira and Air Mshl Sandesh Wagle) and two Air Vice Marshals (Air Vice Mshl Erlic Pinto and Air Vice Mshl Giles Gomez).
Hardly had I finished writing about the Lieutenant Generals when some Goan Hindu friends asked why I wrote only of Catholics and not of Goan Hindus. Though there is no such thing as a Hindu Officer or Muslim Officer or Sikh Officer or Catholic Officer in India’s defence services – all religions are at par and the only ‘religion’ of the fauji is the defence of his motherland, her honour and her flag – it was true that all eight Generals written about up to that stage happened to be Goan Catholic without exception.
In fact, 23 in the above list of 29 top officers are Catholic, only six are Hindu. The disproportion drastically accentuates (to about 9:1) when one considers all Commissioned ranks of Goan origin in India’s armed forces. To write about more Goan Hindu officers in the top three ranks, I would have to invent them – there are no more than six Goan officers of the Hindu religious persuasion in those ranks to my knowledge.
Questions arise.
Why were there fewer Goan Hindu officers in India’s armed forces? Why a preponderance of Catholics? For the answer, one must delve a little into Goa’s past.
The Portuguese were in definitive possession of Goa’s three talukas of Tiswadi, Bardez and Salcete (‘Old Conquests’) by the year 1543. By the end of that century, Old Conquest natives were converted to Christianity. Those who resisted were persecuted in a variety of ways, their lands confiscated and themselves eventually banished. The result was that almost cent per cent inhabitants of the Old Conquests were Christian.
More than 250 years later, in the second half of the 18th century, the Portuguese acquired the rest of Goa’s talukas – Canacona, Quepem, Sanguem, Ponda, Bicholim, Satari and Pernem (collectively called the ‘New Conquests’). Religious zeal of the colonial power had by then died down and most inhabitants of the New Conquests remained Hindu.
But there was an odd aspect to the Old and New Conquests. The seven New Conquest talukas accounted for 80% of Goa’s geographical area but housed only 27% of its population, mostly Hindu. The three Old Conquest talukas were only 20% of Goa’s landmass but had 62% of the population, mostly Christian. (Rest of the 11% population was in Daman and Diu.)
The result was that Goa was predominantly Christian (almost 70 per cent) at the dawn of the 19th century. Bulk of both Christian Goa and Hindu Goa was poor. The Dutch blockades in the first half of the 17th century had emasculated the Portuguese in Goa. Goa was left to languish. Subsistence living was the norm in the predominantly agrarian society. There were hardly any educational facilities and in any case, hardly any local jobs.
In this bleak scenario, two British gunboats – Arrogant and Suffolk – arrived under the command of Cmde. Rainier with troops that occupied the Cabo and Aguada forts in 1799. It was the era of Napoleonic wars in Europe. The British told the surprised Portuguese governor that the French in Pondicherry were conspiring with Tipu Sultan to attack Goa.
On 6 September 1799, Col. William Clarke arrived with three infantry and artillery battalions (1100 British troops, later shored up to 3,000 troops) and occupied, besides the forts at Cabo and Aguada, those at Gaspar Dias (Miramar), Dona Paula, Reis Magos and Mormugao. Col. Clarke told the Portuguese rulers in Goa that Napoleon had ordered 26 warships and 14 frigates at Brest to sail via the Suez Canal and capture Goa.
The Portuguese said they could deal with French threats themselves. It hardly mattered. The British stayed on for 14 years, intermittently, until 1813, when the plan of two brothers with the British East India Company – Richard Wellesley and the future Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley – to occupy Goa was called off after Lisbon-London talks.
During this time, the British noticed that Goan Christian natives had dress and diet like their own and – like their Goan Hindu counterparts – were hardworking and honest. The British also noticed that coastal Goans were given to sailing in country craft (all three Old Conquest talukas were coastal whereas, save Pernem, Canacona and a very tiny part of Quepem, all New Conquest talukas were hinterland). The British hired 3,300 Goans for the Royal Navy and more from the celebrated ‘Goan ABC’ – ayahs, butlers and cooks. Almost all were Goan Christian.
Directors of the British shipping company, Mackinnon Mackenzie, soon followed. The company would recruit thousands of Goans for its ships, heralding the institution called the Goan tarvotti (seamen). Bulk of the recruitment was of Christians from the Old Conquests.
The great Goan emigration had begun. This was not restricted only to the depressed classes. Middle class families began migrating to British India for jobs for themselves and a better education for their children.
Despite initial migration in the first half of the 19th century, Goa still was 64% Christian and 36% Hindu in 1850. Between 1880 and 1910 – in just 30 years – 3.21 lakh Goans emigrated, according to a study by Dr. Remy Dias, Professor of History, researcher and Deputy Director, Higher Education, Government of Goa. More than half of Goa was outside Goa – in British India, British Africa, British Middle East and of course in ships across the seven seas. Bombay alone housed one-and-half lakh Goans by 1950.
Most of those who emigrated before 1961 were Catholics from the Old Conquests. Indo-Aryan Hindus were considered polluted if they crossed three hilltops in ancient times or the sea in medieval times. According to a joint study of Paulo de Matos of the ISCTE-Instituto Universitario de Lisboa and Jan Lucassen of Amsterdam, 90% of Goan emigrants were Christian, only 7% were Hindu.
Thanks to emigration, Goan Catholics dwindled to 38% while Hindus were 60% of Goa’s 5.90 lakh population in 1960. (Catholics were 25% in 2011 and are estimated at 20% today.)
Goan Catholic émigrés settled in places like Agra, Ahmedabad, Ahmednagar, Ajmer, Amravati, Bangalore, Baroda, Belgaum (city and district), Bellary, Bhopal, Bhusaval, Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Hyderabad, Jabalpur, Kanpur, Karachi, Kolhapur (city and district), Lonavala, Madras, Mysore, Nagpur, Poona and Sholapur – even Burma.
It is from such places that intelligent, young and educated Goans joined the defence services of India. They could not do that from Goa: they could only join the Portuguese military (and dream of rising to Tenente Coronel or Lieutenant Colonel – all higher ranks were held by whites).
Goans being admitted as Commissioned Officers in the British Indian forces itself is a story. Indians in general were not allowed in the executive commissioned ranks of the armed forces. They could be officers only in medical, dental, nursing and such support services. Then came the prestigious Aga Khan Hockey Tournament edition of 1913. Colonel Thomas Cadell, Commander of the Auxiliary Force of India (AFI), was chief guest at the finals. The Bombay-based Goan sports club, the Lusitanians, had reached the finals. The Goan lads, playing with their back to the wall, lifted the trophy.
Cadell was so impressed with the Goan lads that he invited the Lusitanians to join the AFI saying that a champion team would also make good soldiers. Twenty-five enlisted and a special Lusitanian Section was formed in the AFI. They indeed made exemplary officers. From the AFI they were absorbed under regular commission into the British India armed forces. Entry rules were relaxed, and Goans living in British India thereafter joined the services in droves, both sides of 1947.
Ninety percent of Goan emigration to India was Catholic. Barely ten percent was Hindu. That explains the preponderance of Goan Catholics in the Commissioned Officer ranks of India’s armed forces – and in about the same ratio, 9:1, of about a thousand Goan-origin Officers that this writer will identify in the revised edition of his 2010 book.
But one thing is clear: the Goan Officer, whether Hindu or Christian, proved he was second to none. Stay tuned over the next three Sundays for true stories of courage and bravery among other officer ranks of Goan Hindu origin. The column will continue thereafter in the Marathi language in Goa’s daily, Gomantak, but those who don’t read or access the Sunday edition of Gomantak, will have to await publication of the revised edition of the 2010 book, hopefully during calendar 2023.
(This first appeared in the Marathi language in Goa’s daily, Gomantak, 20 November 2022, and is excerpted from revised text of the book, Patriotism In Action: Goans in India’s Defence Services by Valmiki Faleiro, first published in 2010 by ‘Goa,1556', ISBN: 978-93-80739-06-9. Revised edition awaits publication.)