At Donna Georginas... William Dalrymple
Frederick Noronha (FN)
At Donna Georginas
By William Dalrymple
Most Goans still consider their state a place apart: a cultured
Mediterranean island, quite distinct from the rest of India. As they quickly
let you know, they eat bread, not chapattis; drink in tavernas, not tea
shops; many of them were Roman Catholic, not Hindu; and their musicians
played guitars and sang fados. None of them, they assured you, could stand
the sound of sitars or shenai.
The history of Goa is written most succinctly in the portraits of the
Portuguese Viceroys that still line the corridors of the abandoned convent
of St. Francis of Assisi in Old Goa.
The early Portuguese Viceroys are giants among men: chain-mailed warlords
like Pedro da Alem Castro, a vast bull of a man with great mutton chop
whiskers and knee-high leather boots. The boots terminate in a pair of
sparkling golden spurs; his plate-metal doublet is bursting to contain his
massive physique. All around Castro are others of his ilk: big men with
hanging-judge eyes and thick bird's nest beards. Each is pictured holding a
long steel rapier.
Then, sometime late in the eighteenth century, an air of ambiguity suddenly
sets in. Fernando Martins Mascarenhas was the Governor of Goa only a few
decades after Castro had returned to Portugal, but he could have been from
another millennium. Mascarenhas is a powdered dandy in silk stockings; a
fluffy lace ruff brushes his chin. He is pictured leaning on a stick, his
lips pursed and his tunic half-unbuttoned; it is as if he is depicted on his
way out of a brothel. In contemporary North India, a couple of generations
in the withering heat of the Gangetic plains turned the Great Moguls from
hardy Turkic warlords into pale princes in petticoats. In the same way, by
the end of the eighteenth century, the fanatical Portuguese conquistadors
had somehow been transformed into effeminate fops in bows and laces.
The Portuguese had first visited Goa in the last days of the Middle Ages. In
1498 Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route to the Indies, and he
immediately began planning ways of wresting control of the Indian Ocean from
the Muslims, and so diverting the spice trade to Portugal. By August 1507
Afonso de Albuquerque, 'the Caesar of the East', had built a fortress on the
island of Socotra to block the mouth of the Red Sea and cut off Arab traders
from India, and in March 1510, Albuquerque arrived off the coast of Goa.
With him came fleet of 23 caravels, galleons and war barks. Albuquerque
massacred the Muslim defenders of the local fort, then carved out for
himself a small crescent-shaped enclave clinging onto the Western seaboard
of the Deccan. From this fortified enclave, the Portuguese planned to
control the Maritime routes of the East.
The conquistador chose his kingdom well. Goa is an area of great natural
abundance and the state is envied throughout India for its rich red soils
and fertile paddy fields, its excellent mangoes and cool sea breezes. From
its harbours, Albuquerque's fleet brutally enforced the Portuguese monopoly
of the spice trade.
In its earliest incarnation Old Goa was a grim fortress city, the
headquarters of a string of fifty heavily armed artillery bastions
stretching the length of the Indian littoral. But by 1600, the same
transition that had transformed the conquistadors into dandies turned Old
Goa from a fortified barracks into a vast metropolis of 75,000 people, the
swaggering capital of the Portuguese Empire in the East. It was larger than
contemporary Madrid and virtually as populous as Lisbon whose civic
privileges it shared. The mangrove swamps were cleared and in their place
rose the walls and towers of Viceregal palaces, elegant townhouses, austere
monasteries and elaborate baroque cathedrals.
With easy wealth had come a softening of the hard edges. The fops and
dandies had no interest in war and concentrated instead on their seraglios.
Old Goa became more famous for its whores than for its canons or cathedrals.
According to the records of the Goan Royal Hospital, by the first quarter of
the seventeenth century at least 500 Portuguese a year were dying from
syphilis and "the effects of profligacy". Although the ecclesiastical
authorities issued edicts condemning the sexual 'laxity' of the married
women who 'drugged their husbands the better to enjoy their lovers,' this
did not stop the clerics themselves keeping whole harems of black slave
girls for their pleasure. In the 1590's the first Dutch galleons began
defying the Portuguese monopoly; by 1638 Goa was being blockaded by Dutch
warships. Sixty years later in 1700, according to a Scottish sea captain, it
was a "place of small Trade and most of its Riches lay in the Hands of
indolent Country Gentlemen, who loiter away their days in Ease, Luxury and
Pride."
So it was to remain. The jungle crept back, leaving only a litter of superb
baroque churches - none of which would look out of place on the streets of
Lisbon, Madrid or Rome - half strangled by the mangrove swamps.
The most magnificent of the surviving buildings is Bom Jesus, the church
which now acts as the enormous vaulted mausoleum of Goa's great saint, the
sixteenth century Jesuit missionary St. Francis Xavier. To modern tastes,
Xavier seems to have been a brute - when he visited Goa he was so shocked by
the lingering pagan practices performed by the colony's converted Hindus
that he successfully petitioned for the import of the Inquisition - but this
does not stop Goans of all faiths revering his memory four hundred years
later. Indeed a decade ago when the miraculously undecayed body of St.
Francis was last put on public display on the altar of Bom Jesus, one Hindu
lady was so overcome with devotional fervour that she bit off the little toe
of the saint's left foot and smuggled her relic out of the church in her
mouth. She was only apprehended when removing the mummified toe from her
mouth at the queue for the ferry.
Ironically, the healing powers of St. Francis are today particularly sought
after by the very 'pagan' Hindus Xavier sought to convert or persecute.
Outside Bom Jesus stand the usual lines of postcard and trinket sellers. But
among the Catholics selling effigies of the Virgin and pictures of the Pope,
are a group of Hindus who squat on the pavement and sell wax models of legs,
arms, heads and ribs. I asked them what the models were for:
"To put on the tomb of St. Francis," replied one of the vendors. "If you
have a broken leg you put one of these wax legs on the Mr. Xavier's tomb. If
you have headache then you put one wax head, and so on."
"How does that help?" I asked.
"This model will remind the saint to cure your problem," replied the fetish
salesman. "Then pain will be finished double quick, no problem."
Today the best view of the old metropolis can be had from the Chapel of Our
Lady of the Mount. To get there you must climb a kilometre long flight of
steps, once a passeggiata for the Goan gentry, now a deserted forest path
frequented only by babbler birds, peacocks and monkeys.
Scarlet flamboya trees corkscrew out of the cobbles. Bushes block the
magnificent gateways into now collapsed convents and overgrown aristocratic
palaces. The architrave of a perfect Renaissance arch has rotted to the
texture of old peach stone. Roots spiral over corniches; tubers grip the
armorial shields of long-forgotten grand Goan families. As you near the
chapel, its facade now half-submerged under a web of vines and creepers,
there is no sound but for the eerie creek of old timber and the rustle of
palms.
The panorama from the chapel's front steps is astonishing. The odd spire, a
vault, a cupula, a broken pediment can be seen poking out of the forest
canopy. You look down past the domes and spires of the churches and
monasteries and see the evening light pick out the wandering course of the
Mandovi River beyond.
The river is empty now: the docks are deserted; the galleons long sunk. Of
the one of the greatest cities of the Renaissance world, almost nothing now
remains.
"But of course despite everything they hung on," said Donna Georgina,
leaning back on her wickerwork divan. "Despite the loss of the trading
Empire they ruled us for another three hundred years. They were in Goa for a
full two and a half centuries before you British conquered a single inch of
Indian soil; and they were still here in 1960, more than a decade after you
all went home again."
"Until Nehru threw them out at the liberation of Goa in 1961." "Liberation?"
said Donna Georgina, her face clouding over as quickly as a Goan sky at the
height of the monsoon. "Did you say liberation? Botheration more like!"
I had clearly said the wrong thing, and Donna Georgina Figueiredo was now
sitting bolt upright on her divan, rigid with indignation. We were talking
in her eighteenth century ancestral mansion, not from the outside the
largest of the Indo-Portuguese colonial estancias that still dot Goa, but
from the inside certainly one of the most perfectly preserved. I had driven
to Donna Georgina's village, Lutolim, along a lagoon edged in coconut
groves, breadfruit trees and flowering hibiscus. The village revolved around
the large white baroque church. In front of it stood a small piazza; to one
side was the school, on the other side, the taverna, The Good Shepherd Bar.
In it, appropriately enough, you could see the village priest sitting at a
table in a white cassock, reading the daily paper. Scattered around the
vicinity were the grand houses of the village, and at the grandest of them
all was the Estancia Donna Georgina.
Inside, a servant had showed me to a divan. On one side, next to an
eighteenth century Indo-Portuguese tallboy, stood a superb tall Satsuma
vase. From the walls hung dark ancestral portraits. Other treasures- Macau
porcelain, superb statuary, Mannerist devotional images- were dotted
carelessly around the wooden galleries. On entering the room, Donna Georgina
had clapped her hands. Within seconds another barefoot servant came running
down the passage from the kitchen:
"Francis, bring Mr. Dalrymple a glass of chilled mango juice. I will have a
cup of tea."
The servant padded off down the bare wooden floorboards. It was then that I
had made my gaffe about the liberation. Donna Georgina clasped her hands and
raised her eyes to heaven:
"Now understand thees, young man," she said in an accent heavy with Southern
European vowels. "When the Indians came to Goa in 1961 it was 100% an
invasion. From what were they supposed to be liberating us? Not the
Portuguese because the Portuguese never oppressed us. Let me tell you
exactly what it was the Indians were freeing us from. They were kindly
liberating us from peace and from security."
Donna Georgina had fearsome beady black eyes and her hair was arranged in a
tight quiff. She wore a flowery Portuguese blouse bought in Lisbon, offset
by a severe black skirt. She nodded her head vigorously:
"We were ruled from Portugal for exactly 451 years and 23 days!" she said.
"The result of this is that we are completely different from Indians-
completely different! We Goans have a different mentality, a different
language, a different culture. Although we are now under Indian occupation,
I feel awkward when I cross the border into India... everything changes: the
food, the landscape, the buildings, the people, the way of life..."
Donna Georgina stared over my shoulder towards the open window: "In the
Portuguese days we never had to lock our houses at night. Now we can never
be sure we are safe even during the day. And you know who we fear most? The
Indian politicians. Absolutely unscrupulous people. They have cut our
forests, ransacked our properties. They have made life impossible for
everyone - particularly all us landowners. They offer our land to the people
in their election promises: never give anything that belongs to them- oh no,
not even a pin- but they never think twice about offering people what
belongs to others. Oh yes. That's very easy for them."
What Donna Georgina said reflected stories I had heard repeated all over
Goa. The sheer length of time that the Portuguese had hung on in their
little Indian colony- some four hundred and fifty years of intermingling and
intermarriage- had forged uniquely close bonds between the colonisers and
colonised. As a result most Goans still considered their state a place
apart: a cultured Mediterranean island, quite distinct from the rest of
India. As they quickly let you know, they ate bread not chapattis; drank in
tavernas not tea shops; many of them were Roman Catholic not Hindu; and
their musicians played guitars and sang fados. None of them, they assured
you, could stand the sound of sitars or shenai.
Moreover, like Donna Georgina, most educated Goans still talked about "those
Indians" and "crossing the border to India", while happily describing their
last visit to their cousins in the Algarve as if they had been revisiting
some much-loved childhood home. Absorption into a wider India, they would
admit, had certainly brought prosperity to the previously stagnant colony,
but at a price. Public life has become corrupted, and the distinct identity
of Goa was being forcibly and deliberately eroded.
Portuguese, for example, was no longer taught in the Goan schools;
Portuguese places names were everywhere being Sankritised; the superb
colonial buildings in Panjim were being deliberately pulled down to make way
for anonymous Indian concrete: the Mansion of the Count of Menem, the last
of the great Panjim aristocratic town houses, was destroyed only in 1986 to
make way for a six storey block of flats. There were, it was true, still
some last remaining corners left: the haphazard, narrow cobbled lanes of
Fontainhas, for example, the oldest quarter of Panjim. Fontainhas still
looks like a small chunk of Portugal washed up on the shores of the Indian
Ocean. Here old spinsters in flowery dresses sit on their verandas reading
the evening papers, chatting to each other in Portuguese. Wandering through
them of an evening you come across scenes impossible to imagine anywhere
else in India: violinists practice Vila Lobos in front of open windows;
caged birds sit chirping on ornate art nouveau balconies looking out over
small red-tiled piazzas. As you watch, old men in pressed linen trousers and
Homburg hats spill out of the tavernas: with walking sticks in their hands,
they make their way unsteadily across the cobbles, past the lines of
battered 1940's Volkswagen Beatles slowly rusting themselves into oblivion.
A Mediterranean douceur hangs palpably, almost visibly, over its streets.
But such corners, insisted Donna Georgina, were becoming harder and harder
to find. For twenty minutes my hostess listed the now familiar litany of
complaints:
"We could not fight the Indians in 1961," she said. "They were too many. Goa
was a small place and could not defend itself. Even today we are only one
million people. What can we do against 900 million Indians? But their
seizure of Goa was an act of force. The majority here were opposed to the
Indian invasion. That was why they had to come with their army, their air
force and their navy. That day we all cried bitterly. It was the end of the
good old days." Donna Georgina brought out a small handkerchief and dabbed
her eyes.
"In fact, since 1961 we've had two invasions. First it was the Indians. They
plundered Goa: cut down our forests and took away our woods. Their
politicians created havoc. Then after that it was the turn of the hippies.
Disgusting. That's what those people were. Dees-gusting. All that nudism.
And sexual acts: on the beach, on the roads- even in Panjim. Panjim!
Imagine: kissing in public and I don't know what else. Disgusting."
The previous afternoon I had seen what remained of Goa's once vibrant hippy
community. Here instead of the rusting Volkswagens of Fontainhas, a line of
Enfield Bullet motorbikes were parked beneath the palm trees. The weekly
hippy flea market was packing up as I arrived: the German Holy Man was
returning his stock of Hindu charms to his bag while under the next palm
tree a Mexican bootlegger was putting his remaining cans of imported lager
back into his knapsack. On the dunes by the shore, a bonfire was roaring,
and what appeared to be a topless six-a-side female football team- an odd
sight anywhere in the world, but an astonishing one in India- were kicking a
ball around. To one side another group of bangled backpackers were cheering
them on while passing a 10-inch joint from hand to hand:
"Shoot!"
"Intergalactic!"
"Cos-mic!"
In the sixties, Anjuna Beach had been the goal of every self-respecting
hippy in Asia. From Hampstead and Berlin, from the barricades of Paris to
the opium dens of San Francisco, streams of tie-dyed teenagers crossed Asia
to reach this shore and make love on the breakers. Whole nomad communities
formed around the beaches: Anjuna, Chapora, Colva and Calangute, previously
backwaters barely known even to the sophisticates in Panjim, became mantras
on the lips of fashion-conscious acid-heads across Europe and the U.S.
But in time, as the Sixties turned into the long hangover of the Seventies,
most of the hippies either died of overdoses or went home. The young who
come today are mostly students, generally a pretty affluent middle-class
bunch who in due course will no doubt go home, cut off their pig tails and
become merchant bankers and commodity brokers. Only very few of the genuine
die-hard flower children of '67 still remain. Some have become very rich- it
doesn't take much imagination to work out what trade their fortunes have
come from- but most of these Stayer's On are good natured old freaks who
grow their own, flap around in flared denim, hold forth on dragon lines, the
Gaia theory and world harmony, and make ends meet by selling chocolate hash
brownies, aromatherapy oils and Indian waistcoats to the backpackers. This
fossilised relic of Haight Ashbury is pretty tame stuff, but you would never
guess this talking to Donna Georgina:
"Of course its because of drugs that their behaviour is like it is," hissed
my hostess. "Disgusting people. Drugs and sexual acts and I don't know what
else. I don't know which is worse: those hippies or our modern Indian
politicians. The Portuguese wouldn't have allowed either."
Donna Georgina sipped her tea defiantly: "Mr. Salazar would have known what
to do with those hippies. He wouldn't have let them behave the way they did."
The old lady took me around the house. She showed me the great ballroom
where they held the last ball in 1936 and the sunken cloister where she grew
all the essential ingredients for her kitchen- chillies and asparagus,
coconut and lemon grass, tea rose, papaya and balsam. "Despite the hippies
and the politicians you seem at least to have maintained your house," I said
looking around at the succession of perfectly preserved colonial Portuguese
rooms surrounding us.
"Thanks to hard work," said Donna Georgina. "Hard labour I might call it.
I'm currently fighting twenty-five law suits in an effort to keep the family
property intact. That's right: twenty-five of them. Then there are the
monkeys: big monkeys who jump on the roof and try to tear it apart. And as
for preparing for the Monsoon rains: its worse than a wedding. The amount of
work: checking the drains, making sure nothing leaks... But let me tell you
this: it is my duty so to do. It is my duty to my ancestors, to myself and
to society."
We ended up in front of the ancient oratoria: a cupboard-like object which
opened up like a tabernacle to reveal ranks of devotional images,
crucifixes, icons and flickering candles. There every day, twice a day, the
household met up to say a decade of the rosary. On the wall beside it, Donna
Georgina had hung a pen and ink drawing of the Holy Family.
"I drew it myself," she explained, seeing where I was looking. "The baby is
Jesus and the lamb that he is feeding symbolises Humanity. The old lady is
St. Anne, Jesus grandmamma. All the ancient families of Goa have St. Anne as
their patron saint."
Donna Georgina paused, leaving the last phrase hanging in the air: "It's
entirely through St. Anne's intercession and God's protection that this
house is standing and that I am still alive. People always ask me: 'Living
alone you must have someone to look after you. Who is it?' To which I reply:
'God Almighty, Jesus Christ and St. Anne.' "And young man. Let me tell you
this. Between them they are doing a very good job."
--
William Dalrymple was born in Scotland and brought up on the shores of the
Firth of Forth. He wrote the highly acclaimed bestseller In Xanadu when he
was twenty-two. The book won the 1990 Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award
and a Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award. In 1989 Dalrymple moved to
Delhi where he lived for four and a half years researching his second book,
City of Djinns, which won the 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the
Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. His third book, From
the Holy Mountain, was awarded the Scottish Arts Council Autumn Book Award
for 1997, and was shortlisted for the 1998 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.
The Age of Kali: Indian Travels & Encounters, a collection Dalrymple's
essays on India written over the last ten years, was published in 1998.
Dalrymple was recently elected the youngest Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature and the Royal Asiatic Society. He is married and has a baby son
and daughter. other features by this writer
--
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Frederick Noronha (FN) | http://www.fredericknoronha.net
Freelance Journalist | http://www.bytesforall.org
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