I was asked to review Manohar Shetty's Goa Travels recently. Read the review in the magazine section of The New Indian Express today, here, or see below for a slightly unedited version. It is a delightful book, one I'm hoping to pick up again for some non-work reading.
A CHRONICLE OF GOAN SHORES
It is hard sometimes not to perpetuate
a cliché and not frame the entirety of Goan culture within the lassitude and
indulgent idea of susegad, the
concept of kicking back the flip-flops, hoisting feet up on the sun lounger and
indulging in a slow, laid-back attitude to life. Goa in the mind is still where
being relaxed about the pace of a day is expected, almost demanded. It is a
patch of translucent blues with a string of adjective-laden clichés unavoidably
attached to its beaches, to its old quarters and on its many shaped and sized
beach bodies. Within this time tested imagery comes, sticking out like tweeds
in the tropics, an older idea, that of Goa as an El Dorado where trade in
"Persian and Arabian horses, spices, all sorts of aromatic gums, alcatifs,
porcelain, vessels of agate, several things made of lacque..." made it
Portugal's fabled jewel and the 'metropolis of India. Goa Travels: Being the Accounts of Travellers from the 16th to the
21st Century, edited by Manohar Shetty, draws from the writings of visitors
of many nationalities and professions to portray why Goan shores have continued
to appeal for centuries.
Arranged in near chronological order,
the writings range from those of Fernao Mendes Pinto's evocative account of
when the body of St Francis Xavier was brought to shore in such grand splendour
that the "native gentiles and Moors stuck their fingers in their mouths to
show how deeply amazed they were as is their custom" to Francois Pyrard de
Laval, "a talkative and observant Frenchman of the seaman class" who
frowns upon the decadence into which the Portuuese had fell into to Richard F
Burton's disdain for pagan Hindoos and the mongrel men. Dutchman John Huyghen
Van Linschoten's observations, translated into quaint old world English, describes
"very luxurious and unchaste" women who did not hesitate to drug
husbands with the Deutroa (Dhattura) herb, rendering them senseless for nearly
four and twenty hours, while they took their pleasures with one or two lovers.
Ralph Fitch, among the first Englishmen on this land, calls Goa "a fine
city and very handsome for an Indian town," whetting the appetite of the
Europeans to start setting up trade links with India.
Nearly all the early travellers write
in detail of the women being most jealous of infidelities of lovers and of the lives
and excesses of the mesticas of Goa,
mixed breed women born of Portuguese fathers and native mothers. Francesco
Carletti finds them the "most desirous creatures imaginable",
remarking on the ardour these women would go to, to get their men and how this amorousness
pervaded their waking hours. Many travellers write on the practice of Sati as
well, some having seen it first hand in neighbouring Narsyngua (the kingdom of
Vijayanagar).
The book traces beautifully the rise
and fall of the power of Portugal in Goa, from the economics of extensive trade
to the moral degradation that travellers and priests found had affected Goan
society. The Inquisition, Goa's darkest years, is brought to life again in
Gabriel Dellon's account of his trial and eventual grant of freedom. From this
account from the late 1600s, the book jumps to the mid-20th century, to the
tail end of Portuguese rule in Goa. After Homes A Jack's report on the Goa
liberation movement, the anthology veers towards adjective-laden descriptions
of the sea and skies in the manner of modern day travel writings. Present day
Goan holiday imagery begins to take shape with Graham Greene "lying on the
verandah of a village house in Anjuna, watching the constellations wheel out of
view...", the hippie Anjuna that in 1976, David Tomory describes as having
"an aggrieved air, like an artists' colony suddenly chosen to host a beer
festival." Katharina Kakar's interviews with the beach boys about their
sexual excesses with white women and the editor's reminiscences of his first
visit to Goa, eventual relocation to Dona Paula and the poetry it has only
recently begun to impart to him tidily tie up this anthology.
Goa
Travels
is a fascinating constellation of accounts that adds an older, much different
view of a place where Europeans made and unmade their fortunes to the ever popular
sentiment of Goa Dourada, the Golden
Goa of blue-green beaches and its many indulgences.
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