Ravan and Eddie

by Kiran Nagarkar

  We have jumped the gun. Commerce was the last stage of the Portuguese King’s title. What preceded it was conquest and navigation. By 1511, the Portuguese had taken Malacca in southeast Asia. Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf followed in 1515. At various points in time the Portuguese had outposts in Mombassa and Mozambique in Africa, Macao, Macassar in the South China Sea and as far as Nagasaki in Japan, not to mention Brazil in the Americas, to name only a few. On the western littoral of India they had forts at Diu, Surat, Daman, Bassein, Bombay, Goa, Honavar, Bhatkal, Mangalore, Cannanore, Calicut, Cochin, Quilon and in Colombo in Ceylon. A remarkable spread by any standards, but extraordinary considering the times and the fact that Portugal was such a poor and small country and that its exchequer was almost always broke.

  There could of course be no exploration or conquest without navigation. Portuguese ships were among the finest in the world. In the early 1640s, John Chandler, the British Consul at Lisbon wrote: ‘As for the nine Portuguese galleons they are well appointed ships, as hardly cannot be seen better, the less of them about 800 tons, and three of them about 1,000—all exceedingly well mounted with artillery.’ Both Lisbon and Goa, as also Bassein and Cochin, were major shipbuilding centres. King John IV of Portugal was so impressed with ships built in Indo-Portuguese shipyards, he considered using the Sao Laurenco as the flagship of the High Seas Fleet. While the master shipwrights were Portuguese, the carpenters, dock-workers and ordinary shipwrights were all Indian.

  The Portuguese landed in Bombay in 1509. Like many an invader they felt compelled to make a show of strength at the outset. ‘Our men captured many cows and some blacks who were hiding among the bushes, and of whom the good were kept and the rest were killed.’ What happened to these good black Bombayites? Were they kept as indentured labourers or turned into slaves? The second seems unlikely but the question is not irrelevant. In 1434, the Portuguese imported the first African slaves to Lisbon. By 1448, they had grasped the economic dimensions of this branch of trade and set up a slaving centre on the African coast. But it was only in the 18th century that the slave-trade became a major growth industry. By then the initiative had passed from the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch to the French and English.

  But to get back to India: In the sixteenth century, the seven islands of Bombay were nominally under the Sultans of Gujarat. It was Sultan Bahadur Shah who made over the islands, and Bassein on the mainland, to the Portuguese king in return for Portuguese aid against the Mughals. It is suspected that the only help he may have received was a push off a Portuguese ship at Surat that drowned him.

  You could rent an island in Bombay from the King of Portugal for eighty-five pounds per year. The first man to rent an island in Bombay from the King of Portugal was a fine botanist and honorary court physician called Garcia da Orta. Mazagaon, where Ravan and Eddie were born, was one of the seven islands acquired by the Portuguese. Mazagaon, scholars would have us believe, is a mutation of ‘machha-gram’ or fishing village. Try thinking of an island that does not go in for fishing. Perhaps the simple Marathi translation of Mazagaon tells us more about the pride that the early inhabitants felt for the place: my village. As a Portuguese settlement, Mazagaon was famed for its mango orchards. They must have been truly magic trees for they bore fruit twice a year, once at the height of summer in May which is the normal mango season on the west coast of India, and once in late December. In 1572, the King of Portugal gifted the district of Mazagaon in perpetuity to the de Souza e Lima family who built a house known in its various incarnations as Belvedere, Mazagaon House or Mark House. White-washed regularly, the house served as a landmark for vessels coming into the harbour.

  Bombay remained a Portuguese colony for over a hundred years. Then, in 1662, hoping for a major political and military alliance, the Portuguese royal house arranged the marriage of Catherine of Braganza to Charles II of England. Part of her dowry was Bombay, which the British East India Company had been eyeing for a while. The contract notwithstanding, the Portuguese in India were loath to let go of Bombay. A month before it was finally ceded to the British, the Viceroy of Goa, Antonio de Mello de Castro wrote to the Portuguese monarch in astonishingly clairvoyant words: ‘I confess at the feet of your majesty that only the obedience I owe to your majesty as a vassal could have forced me to this deed.… I foresee the great trouble that from this neighbourhood will result to the Portuguese and that India will be lost on the same day on which the English nation is settled in Bombay.’

  It is difficult to keep nostalgia and yearning at bay when talking of Bombay a bare twenty or thirty years ago. Extend that to fifty or seventy years and one has entered a time-warp when the romance and beauty of Bombay were at par with that of any city that has grown up next to the sea. If you looked east from Mazagaon Hill where Ravan sat listening to Prakash’s tirade against his father, you could have seen Portuguese merchantmen from a hundred and fifty years ago proceeding in a leisurely fashion to Elephanta island. (The Portuguese named the island after the stone elephant outside the caves. They also indulged in some exuberant target practice on the magnificent Maheshmurti and other carvings inside.) Mazagaon Hill itself is said to be the site where the first Portuguese to settle in Mazagaon, the Jesuits, built a chapel and a monastery. Perhaps that is the reason why the Mazagaon-Byculla belt has a heavier concentration of Roman Catholics and more parochial schools per square foot than anywhere.else in Bombay.

  The green and the woods of Mazagaon have long since disappeared. The rich and the chic abandoned Mazagaon close to a hundred years ago and moved to Peddar Road, Breach Candy and to Malabar Hill, a sibling of the hills at Mazagaon and Cumballa. The port and the docks of Bombay have crowded out both the land and the easy and leisurely pace of Mazagaon. You can glimpse the older island culture in some of the by-lanes but the Mazagaon of Eddie and Ravan was a dusty, hectic and grey place of warehouses, shipping godowns and round-the-clock trucks moving newly arrived cargo into the hinterland. Mazagaon Hill was partially knocked down in 1864 by British railway engineers to make room for the harbour railway line, the fish market and the Electricity Board.

  In 1530, Goa was formally declared the capital of not just Portuguese India but of its entire eastern empire, and became the focal point for Portuguese commercial, political and missionary forays into the East. On paper and by letters-patent the Viceroy of ‘Golden Goa’ was omnipotent, second only to the King himself. He had the power to make war and peace with ‘the kings and rulers of India and of other regions outside it’. The King promised ‘to confirm and fulfil exactly’ any truce or peace treaty the Viceroy may negotiate ‘as if it had been done by myself in person, and agreed and signed in my presence’. The Viceroy however was aware that, notwithstanding the royal sanction for all his acts, the Crown was capable of overruling him and there was, in theory at least, the possibility of a judicial investigation at the end of his tenure.

  Apart from monetary, commercial and territorial gains, colonial India and the empire had other uses. Illegitimate sons and second, third, fourth and fifth sons whom primogeniture made redundant and jobless saw a future and a fortune in the colonies. Poor relations, needy friends and servants all tagged along with viceroys, governors and other overseas officials in the hope of a government post. The only ones who got left behind were wives. From 1505 to 1961, Portuguese India had 128 governors and viceroys. Of these only a handful brought their wives with them. There was as a matter of fact a good deal of intermarrying between the colonizers and the conquered.

  Rivalry between those who married and stayed in India and those who returned to Portugal was often sharp and acrimonious. The former, known as Indiaticos, came lower than the latter, called Reinos, in the pecking order in the colonies. Barring some exceptions, most governors and viceroys were chosen from Portuguese nobility in Portugal.

  The rivalry between Reinos and Indiaticos was just as strongly operative in the religious orders as in the laity. Dom Alfonso Mendes of the Society of Jesus was of the view that ‘ver
y few individuals should be admitted to the Society here, because all our ills originate with this rabble, since they have very little learning and a great deal of envy and hatred against those of us who come from Europe.’ The sentiment, needless to say, was strongly reciprocated.

  Everybody starting from the viceroy to the lowliest Portuguese official traded on the side or openly. Their salaries could not support them and there were often fortunes to be made by overseas as well as interport trade. The goods and destinations changed, what remained constant was commerce. Textiles, beads, pepper, cinnamon, saltpetre, rice and other foodstuffs from India were exchanged for ivory, gold-dust, ebony, hardwoods, silver, seed-pearls, horses, dates and anything for which there was a market. Often the Portuguese went into partnership with local merchants. The Goa economy, it is said, was dominated by Gujarati vanias and Saraswat brahmins.

  The history of Portuguese settlements, it is often remarked, is the history of Jesuit settlements. This is obviously an exaggeration—there were other dedicated orders like the Franciscans and Dominicans, besides the Jesuits, not to mention the work of fine and intrepid sailors, admirals and great governors and bureaucrats—but there is a grain of truth in the statement. The Church Militant did not just battle and convert the heretic Hindu, Muslim and pagan countries and peoples which it colonized, it helped preserve Portuguese authority in India when it was seriously threatened.

  God and Mammon were, if not the same, at least interchangeable. The brotherhood of Jesuits often interpreted the care of souls to mean an engagement with the full spectrum of life to promote the faith. They were custodians of Crown funds, ran the Royal Hospital in Goa, became moneylenders, supervised the minting of coins and looked after the fortifications at Diu, Chaul and other places, traded in sugar, slaves, livestock from their own plantations in Brazil, and even cast cannons at a pinch. To quote C.R. Boxer: ‘Their economic activities were therefore far greater than those of either the Dutch or the English East India Companies, which are sometimes termed the first multinationals.’

  The Portuguese left India many years ago. But one of their legacies continues to be among the most powerful agents moulding young minds in the country: the hundreds of schools and colleges run by Jesuits, Franciscans and other clerical orders, including the school Eddie went to.

  Within two hundred years of their arrival, the Portuguese had lost most of their colonies in Asia and Africa to the Dutch and the British. There were numerous reasons for this but the most important was that the Portuguese were hopelessly overextended. The wonder is not that such a far-flung empire petered out, but that it survived for so long when at no time were there more than 10,000 Portuguese in the colonies, including Brazil. Why did the British not throw out the Portuguese from Goa and the French from Pondicherry? Was there much profit left for the Portuguese in staying on in Goa? Salazar, the Portuguese strong man and dictator, must have seen the writing on the wall in 1947 when the British left India. But he hung on to Goa and painted Nehru into a villain when the Indian Prime Minister decided to liberate it.

  Strange word, liberation. Did the majority of the people of Goa want to be liberated? They had not asked the Portuguese to occupy their land and rule over them 400 years ago. But they were realists and they had invested three to four centuries in the service of the new masters. A great many had converted to the colonizer’s religion and married Portuguese soldiers, bureaucrats, traders and professionals. The Portuguese were ‘family’. The language of business and the medium of instruction in schools was Portuguese. Now overnight they were being asked to disown family, sever connections with their patrons, give up their distinctive identity and lose themselves in a landmass a hundred times the size of Portugal and among 350 million Hindus and Muslims, and were told that this was liberation. They felt a sense of loss, nostalgia, upheaval … something that the rest of India was oblivious of.

  And yet there were many staunch freedom fighters, both Catholic and Hindu, in the colonies of Goa, Diu and Daman. They wanted to be united with their motherland and often went to jail for it. In 1961 they got what they had fought for.

  Now, thirty-five years after the departure of the Portuguese, there’s talk of setting up a Portuguese TV channel in Goa. The new colonizers, as we are all learning, are not countries but multinationals and satellite TV.

  ‘Will you take me to Elephanta?’

  ‘Now?’ Ravan’s aunt asked a bit alarmed.

  ‘No, one of these days, to see the carvings in the caves.’

  ‘I don’t care for carvings and such stuff. I have a better idea. Let’s have a picnic there.’

  ‘Really?’ Wasn’t his aunt amazing?

  ‘What’s so special about a picnic? Stick with me, Mr Ravan Pawar, and I’ll take you to Kashmir on a fifteen-day picnic.’

  ‘Kashmir,’ Ravan gasped and almost fell into the water. All the boys from the chawls including the ones from the top floors went to their ‘native place’ in the summer holidays. All except Ravan, that is, since he did not have grandparents. Of course, any other relatives would have done too. Parvati had a sister and a couple of cousins whom they could have visited. She refused to have anything to do with them. She did not want her sister and cousins to know that she had a good-for-nothing husband and secondly, once you visited someone, they had the right to pay you a return visit and Parvati had neither the money nor the time to look after them. When Ravan was young, one of the cousins had written to say that he and his family of seven were planning to come across to Bombay during the Diwali vacation and could they stay with Shankar-rao and her? She had written back in some haste to say that it would have been wonderful to have them but what a pity they hadn’t come during the last Diwali holidays as next week they were moving to Jamshedpur since her husband Shankar-rao had got a job there.

  ‘Sure. I’ve been to Kashmir. Dal Lake and Nishat Baag in Jammu and Pahalgam. What’s Kashmir, we’ll travel all over India.’

  Ravan looked at his aunt with awe. Two men were staring at her with eyes that seemed to be unbuttoning her blouse. She smiled back, Ravan wasn’t quite sure whether it was at them or at him. He didn’t care. He was going to make up for all those years of deprivation. And he was not about to go to some piddling town like Sawantwadi or Roha or even Poona but to that paradise which they called the Switzerland of India.

  Aunt Lalee might want a hundred things from him but he had nothing to give her. So there was nothing to worry about. And yet he was ill at ease in her presence. He could not get rid of the feeling that he had become the battleground where the two women in his home fought a pitched but silent war.

  ‘I would like to have either mutton or fish from tomorrow at least once a day,’ Aunt Lalee told his mother. It had escaped him that the two women had hardly exchanged a word till now. His mother had not even realized that Aunt Lalee was addressing her. ‘I said I would like to have mutton or fish at meals from tomorrow.’

  ‘You talking to me?’ Parvati asked bewildered.

  ‘Who else? Does that dolt of a husband of yours do the cooking here that I should ask him?’

  Parvatibai smiled self-deprecatingly. ‘We would all like to eat mutton and fish once in a while but where’s the money to come from?’

  This time around Parvatibai took care not to advise her husband to take up a job to keep his sister happy nor did she tell Ravan to stay where he was when Aunt Lalee got up in a huff and said, ‘Let’s go, Ravan. We’ll go and have an omelette at the Light of Iran Cafe.’

  The same thought seemed to have struck mother and son: had another stove disappeared from the home or was it the fan? It couldn’t be Parvatibai’s eight gold bangles or her grandmother’s gold necklace which for reasons unknown to her was traditionally called a garland of shoes in Marathi, since she had left both these items with one of her most trusted friends at the Byculla market. The fan was whirring away and all three stoves were cooking the evening meal.

  ‘Are you coming, Ravan Pawar, or shall I go and eat the omelette on
my own?’

  Ravan had seen the Light of Iran Cafe almost since the day he first opened his eyes but had never been inside. How could he? You needed money to enter these places and he never had any, not even to go to the dingy fish place called Kal Bhairav. Seeing a place from outside and sitting inside ordering some preternatural delicacy were experiences that had nothing in common. It was an exquisite moment of heightened superciliousness. Within seconds Ravan had become a cad and a snob. He looked at people walking past on the road and felt infinite pity for them.

  The tables had heavy wooden legs and marble tops yellowed from the tannin of millions of cups of tea. The wooden chairs had spindly legs and backs and plywood bottoms painted deep black going on chocolate. The walls were covered with glass paintings interspersed with mirrors. A morose king of Iran with heavy moustaches and even heavier crown and a cape that reached to his ankles sat on a throne while his plump queen stood behind him with a thin smile, one hand resting on the back of the throne and the other on the shoulder of the erect and prissily sour-faced crown prince. There were sylvan scenes of harrowingly beautiful damsels with fair complexions and flowing robes filling pitchers of water at the stream; forests with gentle waterfalls and peacocks; finally a princess with long golden tresses leaning over to kiss the forehead of a scantily dressed prince lying either dead or unconscious. The paint behind the glass in some of the paintings had begun to peel and it was disconcerting to see a hole in the queen’s fur or the discoloration in the princess’s hair, which made it look as if rats had been nibbling at it. Under the mirrors were instructions to the customers in English. They were arranged in pairs. ‘Don’t put feet on chair or table. Trust in God.’; ‘Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t comb hair in front of mirror.’; ‘Beware of pickpockets. No outside eatables allowed.’; ‘I lent money and made a friend, I asked for it back and won an enemy. No credit.’ But Ravan was not about to quibble about strange juxtapositions or a little worn paint when the place was magnificent.