Daily Telegraph:India with more than a touch of Portugal

[Marlon Menezes <marlon@bjt.net>]

From: Eddie Fernandes <e.fernandes@ucl.ac.uk>

Headline: India with more than a touch of Portugal.  
Byline: Stay on the beaches in a brochure idyll if you must. But for Goa at
its fascinating best, says Pankaj Mishra, venture into the hinterlands.
The Daily Telegraph, (UK) 12 Sept. 1998

Flying into Goa, setting eyes on its brilliantly sunlit greenness and
white-sand beaches, it is easy to be persuaded that you are landing in a
holiday brochure idyll. For most people the illusion persists throughout
their holiday. But the resort areas catering for the package tourists and
the hippies are only a small part of this tiny Indian state. Venture beyond
them and you discover a different Goa.

The coastal sprawl of villages, backwaters and rivers that goes under the
name of Goa is some 60 miles long and 30 miles wide. What surprises one
most about the place is that the usual dereliction and squalor of the
Indian countryside seems not to have touched it.

It is sparsely populated and has few traces of the modern world. So few
that it is not unusual to come across sights that might have appeared in
The Lusiads, a poem by the Portuguese poet Luis Vaz de Camoes, who was
banished to Goa in the mid-16th century.

Here, on a Sunday morning down a sun-shot country road, you might run into
men in suits and women in bright vermilion and pink dresses returning happy
from church. The sound of trumpets might precede a wedding procession - the
village band playing Portuguese serenades. Travelling on a ramshackle
country bus, you are likely to glimpse large families sitting out on
balustraded balconies of ochre-washed, houses with red roofs.

Narrow roads wriggle through densely wooded hills; and baroque churches,
white and defiant-looking on their lonely promontories, seem to date the
surrounding landscape - the bright-green paddy-fields that have been worked
over for centuries, the lakes and backwaters still plied by ferries and
rusty coal-fuelled steamers.

At the 400-year-old seminary in Rachol, alma mater to some of Goa' s most
distinguished citizens, white-clad students clutching theological texts
walk with swift silent steps down long pillared arcades, their robes
swishing around their ankles. In Old Goa, the colonial capital, young nuns
emerging from Mass gasp in disbelief at the sight of men in the visitors'
lobby of the convent of St Monica.

Goa was part of the Muslim state of Bijapur when in 1510 an intrepid
Portuguese soldier, Afonso de Albuquerque, arrived with 20 ships and 1,200
troops and turned it into the first Portuguese colony in Asia, ushering in
a programme of forced conversion to Christianity. The Portuguese stayed on
until 1962, when they were driven out by the Indian army.

Over the centuries, a local nobility evolved, consisting mostly of Hindu
Brahmins who had converted to Christianity. It was they who built the grand
Goan mansions with their wide verandas, panelled ceilings, ornate private
chapels with sculpted saints and cherubs, and window- shutters decorated
with oyster shells. Adventurously painted, they glow red and blue and
yellow behind the tropical foliage of banana and jackfruit trees.

One famous house is in the village of Loutolim. It is owned by an old,
gentle-mannered Goan-Portuguese woman called Dona Rosa. She was born here,
the eldest of several daughters, but spent many years with her husband in
Angola and Portugal. In 1966, she returned as a widow, and now spends her
days sitting on a carved rosewood armchair, reading newspapers from Lisbon
and embroidering cushion covers.

A few yards away is another mansion, one of Goa's oldest and finest stately
homes, which has been in the Miranda family since it was built in the 18th
century. The occupant, the Goan artist Mario Miranda, remembers the
grandeur of colonial times, and how as a shy child he would watch from the
sanctuary of the staircase the ballroom dances held in mansions even larger
than his: the orchestras, the swirl of dancers, the shining faces, the
clink of glasses.

As always, feudal hedonism was accompanied by religious faith, the fierce
Catholicism that is Portugal's most successful export. Worshippers still
fill the aisles of Old Goa's magnificent religious buildings - the Basilica
of Bom Jesus, the Chapel of St Catherine, the Church of St Francis of Assisi.

In the countryside, it is rare to travel more than a few miles without
encountering an old church with a simple baroque faade (often with a typed
notice on the door announcing some important-sounding meeting).

These days Goa's hinterland is also full of Catholic cultists. Hundreds of
ailing women can be seen every Friday enacting bizarre rituals which, to
Western eyes at least, look distinctly unChristian.

Last January, thousands of devotees waited all night in a small clearing in
the middle of paddy-fields to see Christ appear in the starlit sky. It
wasn't clear whether he showed up or not; it all depended on who you were
talking to.