Travelers' Tales India

by James O'Reilly

  Goa is marked out from its surroundings by its striking religious tolerance. While the rest of India becomes sporadically caught up in the waves of Hindu-Muslim hatred ripping outward from the ghettos of the labyrinthine cities of the north, Goa remains a rare haven of peace, sense, and proportion. The driver who took me to the state capital of Panaji on my first day discreetly crossed himself each time we passed a church. It was only later that I discovered that far from being a Roman Catholic, he wasn’t even a Christian: He was a Hindu. I asked why he bothered to cross himself. His reply: “It is good to show respect to all gods.”

  But undoubtedly the biggest distinction between Goa and the rest of the subcontinent (just as Perceval Narona had indicated) is the Mediterranean douceur that hangs—palpably, almost visibly—over the state, the result of nearly half a millennium of Portuguese colonial rule. The Portuguese had been in Goa for two and a half centuries before the British conquered a single inch of Indian soil; they were still there in 1961, fourteen years after the British had gone home again.

  The Portuguese first visited Goa in the last days of the Middle Ages, when in 1498 Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route to the Indies. Only twelve years later, Alfonso de Albuquerque, “the Caesar of the East,” arrived off the coast of Goa with a vast fleet of war barks. He massacred the Muslim defenders of the local fort, then carved out for himself a small crescent-shaped enclave clinging to the western seaboard of the Indian subcontinent.

  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 its cool sea breezes. The state has always considered itself a place apart: a cultured Mediterranean island, quite distinct from the rest of India. As the Goans will quickly tell you, they eat bread, not chapatis ; they drink in tavernas, not tea shops; a great many of them are Roman Catholic, not Hindu; and their musicians play guitars and sing fados. None of them, they will tell you, can stand sitars or ragas.

  The history—some four hundred fifty years of intermingling and intermarriage—has forged uniquely close bonds between the Portuguese and the Goans, many of whom still talk 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.

  Moreover, as I quickly discovered on my first day in Goa, the state is still full of rather grand Indo-Portuguese donas who are liable to burst into tears if you remind them that since the “liberation” of Goa in 1961, they now owe allegiance not to Lisbon but to New Delhi.

  “Liberation?” said Dona Georgina Figueiredo when I went to see her in her eighteenth-century ancestral mansion near Lutolim. “Did you say liberation? Botheration, more like!”

  Dona Georgina clapped, and her 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. As he went, his mistress clasped her hands and raised her eyes to heaven: “Now where was I? Ah, yes. Now understand this, young man: when the Indians came to Goa in 1961, it was one hundred percent 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 security.”

  Dona Georgina had fearsome beady black eyes, and her hair was arranged with a tight quiff. She wore a flowery Portuguese blouse bought in Lisbon, offset by a severe black skirt. She nodded her head vigorously.

  “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. Disgusting. All that nudity. And sexual acts: on the beach, on the roads—even in Panaji! Of course, it was because of the drugs that their behavior was like it was. Disgusting people. Drugs and I-don’t-know-what-else.”

  The history of Goa is written most eloquently in the portraits of the viceroys that line the great colonial museum in the state’s ancient capital, Old Goa.

  Typical of early Portuguese viceroys is Pedro da Alem Castro. He is a vast bull of a man with great mutton-chop whiskers. He wears knee-length leather boots that terminate in a pair of finely turned golden spurs; his plate-metal doublet is bursting to contain his beef-cake physique. Around him are others of his ilk: big men with puritanical hanging-judge eyes and thick growths of facial hair; each is pictured holding a long steel rapier.

  Then, sometime late in the eighteenth century, an air of moral ambiguity suddenly sets in. Fernando Martins Mascarenhas was the governor of Goa only two decades after Castro had returned to Portugal, but he could have been from another millennium. Mascarenhas is a foppish 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, as if on his way into a brothel. Just as in contemporary North India a couple of generations in the heat of the Indian plains turned the Moguls from hardy central Asian warlords into pale princes in petticoats, so by the end of the eighteenth century the fanatical Portuguese conquistadors had become effeminate fops in bows and laces.

  The state of Goa is known throughout the world for its beautiful beaches and inexpensive beer—and for the first time in my travels in India, I felt hostility. The people staring at me all had scowls on their faces and foreign passports in their pockets. They were Europeans who had found their beach paradise and were obviously reluctant to share it with anyone. The few people who would speak to me had two things in common—they were in India because it was cheap and they disliked Indians. “They never stop staring,” said one man. I suggested this might be due to the fact he was naked and half of his head was shaved. He didn’t respond.

  —Willie Weir, “Cycling India: Letters from the Road”

  This transition completely changed the course of Goa’s history. In its earliest incarnation, Old Goa was a grim fortress city, the headquarters of a string of fifty heavily armed forts stretching the length of the Indian littoral. From it, a vast fleet of Portuguese war barks enforced their monopoly of the spice trade. The Portuguese decreed that every ship in Asia would have to carry a Portuguese permit and call in at the Portuguese forts to pay customs duties. Any boat traveling without a permit, or which had neglected to pay its customs duties, was immediately confiscated.

  The arrogance and the sheer audacity of the conquistadors was astonishing, but while the Portuguese remained strong, they were able to back up their decrees with force. By 1600, Old Goa, rich from its limitless customs duties, had grown from nothing to a metropolis of seventy-five thousand people: It was larger than contemporary Madrid and very nearly as populous as Lisbon. The mangrove swamps were cleared, and in their place rose vast viceregal palaces, elegant town houses, austere monasteries, and towering Baroque cathedrals.

  But with this easy wealth came a softening of the hard edges. The second generation of Portuguese colonists were not the men their fathers had been. The fops and dandies lost interest in war and concentrated instead on their harems. Old Goa became more famous for its whores and brothels than for its cathedrals. According to the records of the Goan Royal Hospital, by the first quarter of the seventeenth century at least five hundred Portuguese a year were dying from syphilis and “the effects of profligacy.” The ecclesiastical authorities condemned not only the concubinage (which was practiced on a vast scale) but also the sexual “laxity” of the married women who “drugged their husbands, the better to enjoy their lovers.”

  As quickly as Old Goa had sprung up, it went into decline. The Portuguese monopoly of the Indian spice trade lasted less than a century. By the 1590s the first Dutch galleons were defying the Portuguese monopoly; by 1638 the Portuguese had lost control of t
he sea lanes, and Goa itself was being blockaded by Dutch warships. Overnight, the city became a forgotten backwater. By 1700, according to a Scottish sea captain, it was a “place of small Trade and most of its Riches ly in the Hands of indolent Country Gentlemen, who loiter away their days in Ease, Luxury, and Pride.”

  The best view of the old metropolis can be had from the Chapel of Our Lady of the Mount. To get there, you must leave your taxi and climb a half-mile-long flight of steps. What was once a fashionable evening walk for the Goan gentry is now a deserted forest path frequented only by babbler birds, peacocks, and monkeys. Scarlet, flamboyant trees corkscrew out of the cobbles. Bushes block the magnificent gateways into now collapsed convents and lost aristocratic palaces. The architrave of a perfect Renaissance arch is rotted to the texture of old peach stone. Roots spiral over corniches, tubers grip the armorial shields of long-forgotten Goan families. As you near the chapel, its façade 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 step is astonishing. The odd spire, a vault, a cupola, a broken pediment can be seen poking out of the forest canopy. Other than the churches, the entire Renaissance city has disappeared: palaces, shops, theaters, circuses, tavernas, houses. Everything has been submerged by the jungle, and only the energetic rearguard action of the Roman Catholic Church has managed to save the larger monasteries and cathedrals.

  The most magnificent of these is Bom Jesus, the church that now houses the remains of Goa’s great saint, the sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary Saint Francis Xavier. (At least what remains of his remains. In 1554, one Portuguese lady was so overcome with devotional fervor that she bit off the little toe of the saint’s left foot and tried to smuggle her relic out of the church in her mouth. Part of the right hand was sent to Rome in 1615, and the remainder of the hand wound up with the Japanese Jesuits four years later.)

  To modern tastes, Saint Francis seems to have been rather 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 dreaded Inquisition from Europe—but strangely, this does not stop Goans of all faiths from revering his memory four hundred years later. The reputed healing powers of the saint are today particularly sought after by the very “pagan” Hindus he sought to prosecute. Outside Bom Jesus stand the usual lines of postcard and trinket sellers that you can find around any of the great churches of Europe. But among the men selling effigies of the Virgin and pictures of the Pope, if you look carefully you will see one Hindu gentleman squatting on the pavement selling wax models of legs, arms, heads and ribs. When I first came across him, I asked him what the models were for.

  “To put on the tomb of Saint Francis,” replied the man.“If you have a broken leg, you put one of these wax legs on Mr. Xavier’s tomb. If you have a 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. “The pain will be finished in a jiffy, double quick, no problem.”

  After the fall of Old Goa, the Portuguese did not leave. Despite the collapse of their trading system and the end of their days as a world-class sea power, the Portuguese still clung to their precious Indian colony for three long centuries, adjusting their way of life to the new realities and moving their capital from the rotting grandeur of Old Goa to the less pretentious town of nearby Panaji.

  Panaji is still the capital, and despite the recent changes brought about by the new Indian authorities—the rickshaws and the pan sellers, the garish new Hindu temples and the ugly high-rises—the town still remains quite unlike any other in India. It is distinguished by its red tile roofs and its ornate Art Nouveau balconies, its large stuccoed town houses and small but elegant piazzas.

  The most beautiful area remains the old quarter now known as Fontainhas. It is a little bit of Iberia in India: its haphazard, narrow, cobbled lanes could be anywhere in Spain or Portugal, and it is the last place in Goa where Portuguese is still spoken as the first language.

  The great town houses and palaces have all gone now: the mansion of the Count of Menem, the last of the great Panaji aristocratic town houses, was destroyed in 1986 to make way for a new six-story block of flats. Nevertheless, in many of the more humble houses of Fontainhas live the last impoverished survivors of the old Indo-Portuguese Goan aristocracy. Wandering through the old quarter of an evening, you come across scenes impossible to imagine anywhere else in India. Violinists practice in front of open windows; caged birds sit chirping on the windowsills; old boys in pressed linen trousers and homburgs spill out of the tavernas. With walking sticks in their hands, they make their way unsteadily across the cobbles of the piazzas and past the lines of black battered Volkswagen Beetles slowly rusting themselves into oblivion.…

  Goans remain proud about their own language, Konkani. Whatever you do, don’t call it a dialect. They see it as a distinct and separate language, well over a thousand years old, and once subject to ferocious persecution by their Portuguese overlords.

  “It is a perfect language for poetry,” I was informed by a man who ran a newsstand in Margao. “We have many literary prizes for Konkani and many fine writers like Bakibab Borkav, R.V. Pandit, Nagesh Karmali—and of course, Manohar Sardesai. But it is a struggle. The Indian government does not encourage its use so,” he laughed, “we use it even more.” He showed me a piece of yellowed paper with a finely inscribed print in Konkani. He translated:Into the realm unknown to man

  Into the heart unfound on earth

  Into the eternity unread in life

  “I keep this,” he said, and patted the pocket next to his heart.

  —David Yeadon, The Back of Beyond: Travels to the Wild Places of the Earth

  Meanwhile, only five miles away on the beach at Anjuna, a very different evening ritual is taking place. Instead of the rusting Volkswagens, a line of Enfield Bullet motorbikes is parked beneath the palm trees: the weekly hippie flea market is packing up; the German holy man is returning his stock of Hindu charms to his bag under the next palm tree; the Mexican bootlegger is putting his remaining cans of imported lager back into his knapsack. Only the French hippie who sells old Joni Mitchell cassettes remains in station, sitting cross-legged on a drape, humming “Blue” to herself as she watches the sun go down.

  On the dunes by the shore, a bonfire is roaring; what appear to be members of a topless six-per-side female football team—an odd sight anywhere in the world but an astonishing one in India—are kicking a ball around. To one side, another group of bangled backpackers—all bombed out of their minds—are cheering them on while passing a ten-inch joint from hand to hand.

  In the sixties, Anjuna was the goal of every self-respecting hippie in Asia. From Hampstead and Berlin, from the barricades of Paris to the opium dens of San Francisco, streams of bangled and tie-dyed teenagers crossed Asia to reach this beach and make love—to the horror of the Goans—on the breakers. Whole nomad communities formed around the beaches: Anjuna, Chapora, Colva, and Calangute, previously backwaters barely known even to the sophisticates in Panaji, became mantras on the lips of hipsters across Europe and the United States. The Stones were always about to appear to give a free concert at Anjuna; the Beatles were always on the next flight.

  But they never came. The sixties turned into the long hangover of the seventies, and the hangover into the Decade of Greed. Most of the hippies either died of overdoses or went home. The young who come today are mostly students, generally a pretty affluent bunch who in due course will go home, cut off their ponytails, and become investment bankers. But a few of the genuine die-hard flower children of 1967 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 the stayers-on are good-natured old freaks who grow their own, flop aro
und in flared denim, hold forth on world harmony, and get by by selling chocolate brownies and Indian waistcoats to the backpackers.

  It’s an amusing little colony—an unlikely, fossilized relic of Haight-Ashbury—but its presence in Goa has had sad side effects. The young Goan bucks envy and admire the free-loving life of the neo-hippies and, in attempting to keep up, have jettisoned much of their own culture. There is a growing heroine problem in Panaji and, increasingly, a rejection of the straitlaced Catholic ways of old Portuguese Goa.

  This came home most clearly on my last day in the state, when I went to see Dona Rosa, an old Indo-Portuguese widow, in her beautiful house in Lutolim. To get there from Panaji I passed 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, to the other side the taverna, the Good Shepherd Bar. In it, appropriately enough, you could see the priest sitting at a table in a white cassock, reading the daily paper.

  Near the church stood the beautiful ancestral mansion of Mario Miranda, one of India’s most distinguished artists. The house was built in 1690 and centers on an arcaded courtyard. Around it, flagstone floors give onto the principal rooms: the library, the ballroom (now Mario’s own gallery), and the dining room with its wonderful collection of carved Indo-Portuguese furniture.

  Casa Dona Rosa is more modest. With its carved rosewood four-posters and wickerwork divans, it resembles nothing so much as an enlarged doll’s house. Dona Rosa herself is a small lady in Iberian widow’s weeds. Her hair is tied up in a bun, and a holy medal hangs around her neck. She lives alone, with only her two servants for company; every day, twice a day, the household meets to say the rosary in front of Dona Rosa’s ancient oratorio. The cupboard-like object opens up like a tabernacle to reveal its ranks of devotional images, crucifixes, icons, and flickering candles.