Colonial and Post-Colonial Goan Literature in Portuguese: Woven Palms

This collection of essays brings together established scholars of Lusophone Goan literature from India, Brazil, Portugal and Great Britain. For the first time in English, this volume traces the key narrative works, authors and themes of this small but significant territory. Goa, a Portuguese colony between 1510 and 1961, was the site of a particular and particularly intense meeting of West and East. The problematic yet productive encounter between Europe and India that has characterised Goa’s history is a major theme in its literature, which affords important insights and material for post-colonial thought. Goan literature in Portuguese is the only significant Indian literature to have been written in a European language other than English and, as such, provides both a challenging point of comparison with anglophone Indian literature and a space to examine post-colonial theory often implicitly embedded in a British Indian colonial experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781786833921

Book preview

cover.jpg

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Colonial and Post-Colonial

Goan Literature in Portuguese

Series Editors

Professor David George (Swansea University)

Professor Paul Garner (University of Leeds)

Editorial Board

David Frier (University of Leeds)

Lisa Shaw (University of Liverpool)

Gareth Walters (Swansea University)

Rob Stone (University of Birmingham)

David Gies (University of Virginia)

Catherine Davies (University of London)

Richard Cleminson (University of Leeds)

Duncan Wheeler (University of Leeds)

Jo Labanyi (New York University)

Roger Bartra (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)

Other titles in the series

Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes: On Brazil and Global Cinema

Maite Conde and Stephanie Dennison

The Tlatelolco Massacre, Mexico 1968, and the Emotional Triangle of Anger, Grief and Shame: Discourses of Truth(s)

Victoria Carpenter

The Darkening Nation: Race, Neoliberalism and Crisis in Argentina

Ignacio Aguiló

Catalan Culture: Experimentation, creative imagination and the relationship with Spain

Lloyd Hughes Davies, J. B. Hall and D. Gareth Walters

Catalan Cartoons: A Cultural and Political History

Rhiannon McGlade

Revolutionaries, Rebels and Robbers: The Golden Age of Banditry in Mexico, Latin America and the Chicano American southwest, 1850–1950

Pascale Baker

Teresa Margolles and the Aesthetics of Death

Julia Banwell

Galicia, A Sentimental Nation

Helena Miguelez-Carballeira

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Colonial and

Post-Colonial Goan

Literature in Portuguese

PAUL MELO E CASTRO

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

2019

© Paul Melo e Castro, 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN     978-1-78683-390-7

e-ISBN  978-1-78683-392-1

The right of Paul Melo e Castro to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image by permission iStock (Getty Images)

Contents

img2.jpg

Series Editors’ Foreword

Notes on Contributors

1  Introduction: The Cartography of Goan Literature in Portuguese: One Language in a Multilingual Social Landscape

Paul Melo e Castro

2  The Story of Goan Literature in Portuguese: A Question of Terminology

Hélder Garmes and Paul Melo e Castro

3  Against British Rule and Indian Castes: The First Portuguese-language Goan Novel, Os Brahmanes (1866) by Francisco Luís Gomes

Everton V. Machado

4  The Lives and Times of GIP and Francisco João da Costa

Sandra Ataíde Lobo

5  Echoes of Portuguese India in Goan Poets, 1893–1973

K. David Jackson

6  In the Land of ‘Advogadomania’: The Representation of the Goan Provisionário in José da Silva Coelho’s Contos Regionais

Luís Pedroso de Lima Cabral de Oliveira

7  ‘The Voice of Two Worlds’: Lusotropicalism in the Context and Reception of Vimala Devi’s Súria

Duarte Drumond Braga

8  Women without Men in Vimala Devi’s Monção

Cielo G. Festino

9  Women’s Worlds in Women’s Words: Poetry and Memory in Vimala Devi and Eunice de Souza

Joana Passos

10  Science over Superstition? The Representation of the Social World of the Novas Conquistas in Bodki (1962) by Agostinho Fernandes

Eufemiano Miranda and Paul Melo e Castro

11  Sem Flores Nem Coroas: Reflections on the Play by Orlando da Costa

M. Filomena de Brito Gomes Rodrigues

12  The Dregs Populating the Village of Santana: Rural Goa in Three Stories by Epitácio Pais

Paul Melo e Castro

13  Writing from within the Father’s House and beyond: Goan Women Writing in Different Historical Spaces

Edith Noronha Melo Furtado

Notes

Bibliography

Series Editors’ Foreword

img2.jpg

Over recent decades the traditional ‘languages and literatures’ model in Spanish departments in universities in the United Kingdom has been superseded by a contextual, interdisciplinary and ‘area studies’ approach to the study of the culture, history, society and politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds – categories that extend far beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula, not only in Latin America but also to Spanish-speaking and Lusophone Africa.

In response to these dynamic trends in research priorities and curriculum development, this series is designed to present both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research within the general field of Iberian and Latin American Studies, particularly studies that explore all aspects of Cultural Production (inter alia literature, film, music, dance, sport) in Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Catalan, Galician and indigenous languages of Latin America. The series also aims to publish research in the History and Politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, at the level of both the region and the nation-state, as well as on Cultural Studies that explore the shifting terrains of gender, sexual, racial and postcolonial identities in those same regions.

Notes on Contributors

img2.jpg

Paul Melo e Castro is a lecturer in Portuguese and Comparative Literature at the University of Glasgow. His current research looks at the Portuguese-language Goan short story, particularly in the post-1961 period. In 2016 he published an anthology of translated Portuguese-language Goan short stories entitled Lengthening Shadows.

Hélder Garmes is Assistant Professor of Portuguese at the University of São Paulo and a researcher for Brazil’s National Council for Scientific and Technological Development. He coordinates the project Thinking Goa: A Singular Archive in Portuguese (2015–19) funded by São Paulo Research Foundation.

Everton V. Machado is Senior Researcher at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, lecturer in Comparative Studies and Portuguese Language and Culture, vice-director of the Centre of Comparative Studies and coordinator of the research team ‘Portuguese Orientalism – 19th–20th centuries’.

Sandra Ataíde Lobo is a post-doctoral researcher at the Portuguese Centre for Global History at the New University of Lisbon, where her research focuses on relations between the cultural and the political in modernity. She is a founder member of the International Group for Studies of the Colonial Periodical Press in the Portuguese Empire.

Kenneth David Jackson is professor of Portuguese at Yale University. He specialises in Portuguese and Brazilian literatures, modernist movements in literature and other arts, Portuguese literature and culture in Asia, poetry, music, and ethnography. His book Machado de Assis: A Literary Life was released by Yale UP in May 2015.

Luís Pedrosa de Lima Cabral de Oliveira holds a PhD from the New University of Lisbon Law School. His thesis examined the role of the Goan Catholic elite between 1780 and 1880 focusing on law and politics. He lectures in Law at Leiria Polytechnic Institute and is a researcher at CEDIS/FDUNL. The primary focus of his research is colonial law with an emphasis on Goa.

Duarte Drumond Braga is a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of São Paulo. He is currently researching the Lusophone literatures of Goa and Macau, Portuguese Orientalist writing and nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry in Portuguese.

Cielo G. Festino currently lectures in English at Paulista University and teaches on the Master’s programme at the Federal University of Tocantins. Her current project looks at the representation of village life across Portuguese, English, Konkani and Marathi-language Goan Literature.

Joana Passos is an assistant researcher at CEHUM, University of Minho. She has published several papers on African literatures in Portuguese and on Indian Ocean Studies. In 2012, she published Literatura Goesa em Português nos Séculos XIX e XX: Perspetivas Pós-Coloniais e Revisão Crítica.

Eufemiano Miranda holds a PhD in Portuguese literature from the University of Goa. In 2012 he published a monograph on Goan literature entitled Oriente e Ocidente na Literatura Goesa: Realidade, Ficção, História e Imaginação.

M. Filomena de Brito Gomes Rodrigues is a PhD student at the Open University of Lisbon. Her thesis is entitled ‘A Ficção de Orlando da Costa num Estudo para o Conhecimento da Obra’ [The Fiction of Orlando da Costa: Towards Understanding his Oeuvre].

Edith Noronha Melo Furtado is former faculty member of the Department of French and Francophone Studies, Goa University. Her current research looks at Goan intellectual production in the twentieth century.

Introduction

The Cartography of Goan Literature in Portuguese: One Language in a Multilingual Social Landscape

img2.jpg

PAUL MELO E CASTRO

In India: A Million Mutinies Now, a book as much lauded for its style as censured for its polemics, V. S. Naipaul writes:

[t]he Portuguese had created in Goa something of a New-World emptiness, like the Spaniards in Mexico. They had created in India something not of India, a simplicity, something where the Indian past had been abolished. And after 450 years all they had left behind in this emptiness and simplicity was their religion, their language (without a literature), their names, a Latin-like colonial population, and this cult, from their cathedral, of the Image of the Infant Jesus. (1990, p. 142)

One aim of the essays in this volume is to probe the many ways in which this assertion, redolent of stereotypes about Goa peddled both in India and in Europe, is simply erroneous. Rather than any emptiness, Goa presents a highly complex mix of autochthonous and Portuguese elements, pre-Gama inheritances and British influences, and a population separated yet also conjoined by differences of caste and religion only characterisable as simple from an exterior position of ignorance or bias. In no way was the Indian past abolished, though perhaps calling it Indian in a national, as opposed to ethnic or civilisational, sense might be anachronistic. Instead Goa was and is a product of manifold influences on the ground from both East and West and a global history connected to the seaways of the Indian Ocean and beyond. As regards the other characteristics Naipaul seized upon: Portuguese-derived names and the Catholicism they indicate are commonplace in Goa today though among a steadily decreasing percentage of its inhabitants. The Portuguese language he believed to be general plays a relatively small role in the life of the territory at present, though the vast yet fragile written archive in that tongue is a rich resource that could be better known and utilised. To disclose some of it to an English-speaking audience constitutes a further objective here.

The status of the Portuguese language speaks volumes about the break in Goan history in 1961. If Portuguese is now a distant third language in schools and used only in a scattering of homes, such a reduced role is a post-colonial development. Lobo describes Portuguese as the only European tongue, under colonialism, to have become a vernacular among the Indian population (Lobo, 2014, p. 68), indeed some see its use as having penetrated more deeply into society than English during the Raj (Noronha, 2014, p. 19), an idea testified by its influence on the Konkani of Catholics whose families would never have been functionally Lusophone (cf. Sardessai, 2010, p. 256). Nevertheless, Portuguese never attained what Dilip Loundó calls a ‘self-reproducing linguistic structure’ (2011, p. 16; translation mine). Quickly disestablished after 1961, with the officialisation of Konkani in the nagari script in 1987 and the expansion in the use of India’s associate official language, English, Portuguese faded rapidly from public discourse.

This discontinuation of Portuguese has meant that Goan writing in that tongue has been little researched either in Goa, where few people have the language skills to do so, or in the Lusophone world, where the immediate focus has been the countries and territories that retained Portuguese as an official language. Today the situation appears to non-Portuguese speakers to be that Goan writing in Portuguese is limited to ‘a few turgid, unwieldy novels and some vacuous quasi-mythological poetry’ (Shetty, 1998, p. xvii). Given the hearsay upon which such an opinion must necessarily be based, there is a need to map out accurately and honestly the extent and import of Goan writing in Portuguese via means accessible to a modern Goan/Indian readership. One avenue is the translation of primary texts. Another way is the mobilisation of Portuguese-language writing to think through the cultural history and social development of Goa and Portuguese colonialism within the dynamics of the Indian subcontinent, to demonstrate its importance as a source of material with which to reflect on the roots of the present.

Yet scholars and readers in/of India are not the only audience that Goan writing in Portuguese might interest. For scholars of post-colonial Portuguese-language writing, the Goan archive presents significant particularities, many of which can help denaturalise, reframe or extend debates in the field. As Portuguese did not survive decolonisation as a hegemonic language, it did not become, as in Africa, a unifying tongue of post-colonial nation building. Instead it was left a minority concern, a sort of dwindling bhasha in families where it had been adopted as an intimate medium of communication, or for those whose educational and working life had been conducted exclusively in Portuguese until that point. Some of the peculiarity of post-1961 Goan literature can be attributed to this situation. This status as an outlying and sui generis example of what Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd term a minority discourse (1990) warns against the generalisations occasioned by the language’s hegemonic status elsewhere.

Unlike Lusophone Africa, yet similarly to Portugal’s other Asian enclaves – though the contrasts between Goa and Macau and Timor-Leste are perhaps greater than their likenesses – Goa’s decolonisation did not result in the immediate constitution of a new nation state. Rather Goa was absorbed into greater India, which meant that the traditions and institutions deriving from its colonial past, such as language, were largely overlaid and displaced by those of British India. One hegemonic construction gave way to another divergent vision of history and society, though it would be overly simple to conceptualise this shift as a rack focus between Goa Dourada, or Goa as a Europeanised outpost of Portugal, and Goa Indica, a pimple from which the colonial pus, to extend a metaphorical description of the Estado da Índia attributed to Jawarharlal Nehru, had finally been squeezed, leaving its fundamentally Indian culture to blend unblemished back into the face of Mother India. According to Rosa Maria Perez (2011, p. 31) these two discourses, first binarised in academic discourse by Caroline Ifeka (1984), actually coexist in different ways among the various stakeholders in Goa’s identity. Goan literature, with the dialogism inherent to this form, becomes a privileged site for mapping out these fractious connections. If, as Rochelle Pinto has argued, Goa (like Portugal in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) has had to measure itself by its deviation from the Imperial British Indian model (2007, p. 1), this disparity only grew with the engrossment of the former Estado da Índia to the so-called ‘Indian Union’. The essays contained here provide a discontinuous cartography of Goan attitudes to colonial rule and the possibility of escaping its bounds, European intellectual currents and changing autochthonous traditions, from the late nineteenth century to the post-1961 period.

Though 1961 impelled a dramatic shift in Goa, it should not be taken, however, that a familiarity with the English language and the institutions of India was previously absent. An irony of history is that as Portuguese citizens Goans played a prominent role in the British Empire. As shown by José da Silva Coelho in the 1920s (analysed here by Luís Cabral de Oliveira), from the nineteenth century English was a prominent language of education in Goa. Although language was tacitly encouraged by the Portuguese regime as an enabler of migration, and so of remittances, the role of English dismayed some senior Portuguese figures, such as the Patriarch of the East Indies, Dom José da Costa Nunes who, upon arriving in Goa in 1940, found himself having to resort to English to address school children (Bègue, 2007, p. 99). An examination of the Goan scene brings home the post-colonial fact that no society can be reduced to a single position on colonialism, language, decolonisation or hierarchy, whatever hegemonies are in operation. As Orlando Ribeiro puts it, in a rather Orientalist simile, ‘like some Hindu gods, who have three faces and six arms, the truth about Goa is… various and movable’ (1999, p. 134; translation mine). The works and writers analysed here provide ample testament to this fact.

The publication of this volume in English is meant, then, to reach both an audience interested in Goan writing in any language and a contemporary Lusitanist community whose centre of research is the Atlantic space where Portuguese is at its most dominant. For the latter, the sui generis colonisation and decolonisation of Goa, not to mention its current status as the phantom limb of Lusophony, provides a literary space wherein the key categories and terms of post-colonial theory – the ways in which ‘colonialism produced hierarchised states of being, staying, expressing feelings and thoughts, making political statements, defining identities, generating relationships’ (Bastos, 2007, p. 130) – can be compared, challenged and relativised. Again contrary to other Lusophone literary systems, Portuguese-language writing in Goa sits alongside three other major bodies of writing in Konkani, Marathi and English. Even when, as here, the focus is on Portuguese-language writing, the ultimate approach to Goan writing must be comparativist, albeit a comparativism challenging any traditional notion of the field as juxtaposing national traditions.

Helena Carvalhão Buescu has taken lusophone literatura-mundo to form ‘different observation points in Portuguese, according to the historical-symbolic, geographical and cultural dimensions that are illuminated’ (2014, p. 47; translation mine). For her this corpus should be ‘understood as the simultaneous experience of the shared and the distinct: an archive of possible similarities but also of differences and infinite variations’ (2014, p. 47; translation mine). Here I add the simple point that including literary production from Goa (and other Asian spaces where Portuguese has been used) enhances the ‘sphericity’ of this experiential world and allows us to view key issues in the round, even as Goa’s multilingual, intra-imperial literary history provides a compelling reminder of the critical need to transcend linguistic blocs calqued on colonial world divisions.

Though several articles here open out onto the comparative questions I have adumbrated above, the focus here will be on Portuguese-language works little discussed in English. Spanning literary production from the late nineteenth century through to the 1970s, this volume presents a detailed yet wide-ranging conspectus of the most notable Portuguese-language writers from Goa. In the first essay Hélder Garmes and I argue that, contrary to previous terminology, the most fitting term to describe Goan writing in Portuguese is exactly that. This shift away from the term Indo-Portuguese literature, as used for example in Vimala Devi and Manuel Seabra’s A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa (1971), the keystone upon which all contemporary research on this archive is built, has certain effects: to distance Portuguese-language Goan writing from any perceived alignment with colonial ideology (with which this body of writing rarely joined in any simple manner) and promote a comparative approach that reads this archive vis-à-vis both Goan and Indian literature in other languages and the other literatures of the Portuguese-language literary macrosystem. The term Goan literature in Portuguese underscores the fact that this writing engages with Goa’s intellectual, literary and socio-economic history and reiterates its potential as a key resource to think about how Goan society was envisioned in Goa with regard to long-standing images of the territory produced at home and abroad. Discussing Goan literature in comparison to ‘Indian literature in English’, and deciding that in Portuguese it is characterised by a series of ‘literary manifestations’, Garmes and I provide brief analyses of a number of key Goan novels: Os Brahmanes (1866) by Francisco Luís Gomes, Os Maharatas by Leopoldo Dias (1894), Jacob e Dulce (1896) by Francisco João Costa (better known as GIP), A Neta do Cozinheiro (1904) by Constantino José de Brito, Bodki (1962) by Agostinho Fernandes and O Signo da Ira (1963) by Orlando da Costa – as well as a discussion of feuilletons appearing in Goa’s press. In essence, the argument made is that to understand these texts the reader must engage with Goa’s socio-cultural context – and vice versa.

The second article, by Everton Machado, focuses on Os Brahmanes (1866) by Francisco Luís Gomes (1829–1869). Here Machado considers Gomes’s novel, which takes place not in Goa but British India, to be the first modern work of fiction to denounce the systematic abuses of colonialism in South Asia, suggesting the phasing out of European domination and endorsing racial intermixture. As such, Machado’s analysis opens up new perspectives on what ought to be considered a foundational narrative in Portuguese-language post-colonial literature. There is much of interest here for Anglophone scholars, as the novel’s representation of the notorious 1857 Indian Rebellion from an unfamiliar coign of vantage exemplifies. Ultimately, Machado argues, Gomes’s novel is deeply ambiguous: if anti-colonial on many levels, in accordance with the author’s liberal values, it also operates within a certain colonial discourse, showing traces of Orientalism and even a Lusotropicalist bent avant la lettre. Indeed, in a manner that resists any anachronistic reading through twentieth-century Indian nationalism, one might say that Os Brahmanes presents the solution to the wrongs of colonialism as even more thorough colonisation. To put it another way: for the elite Catholic Gomes – of the Chardó caste to boot, with all that this identity entailed as regards the inner jockeying for power in Goa’s nineteenth century – affirming the proselytising, putatively absorbent Portuguese model of colonial rule, which technically put such individuals on an equal footing with metropolitans, the best solution to the problems of India would be the Goanisation of the subcontinent.

In the third article, Sandra Ataíde Lobo looks at Francisco João da Costa (1859–1900), known as GIP, under which name he authored Jacob e Dulce (serialised between 1894 and 1895, put out in book form in 1896), the second major work of Goan fiction in Portuguese. Lobo extends current debates on what she describes as the most translated and debated work of Goan fiction by contributing elements towards the author’s intellectual biography, illuminating lesser-known details that crucially shaped his attitudes and positions in the heated debates of his day. Of particular interest is Lobo’s argument that the relationship between creature and creator is not one of mere pseudonymy, but that GIP might be best understood, after Pessoa, as a semi-heteronym. She argues for a complex divergence and confluence of biographical elements between the two figures that any critical reckoning must take into account; GIP is not simply Costa disguised, just as Costa is not merely GIP unmasked.

The final section of Lobo’s essay deals with GIPs journalistic writings on a series of prominent themes in Jacob e Dulce, namely his views on luxury and language. His interventions on luxury concern the increasing adoption of a costly European lifestyle by the Catholic elite to which Costa belonged, and represent a discussion that continues to date as to how Goa should cut its cultural coat according to its socio-economic cloth, a metaphor far from innocent here given the crucial symbolic role played by modes of dress. Importantly here, as Lobo argues, Costa posited no hard-and-fast binary between Europe and Asia, but rather saw a cline between the two determined on the native Goan side by caste and class. His ideas on language concern the relationship between Konkani and Portuguese, the indigenous tongue of the elites and the medium incompletely adopted from a subordinated colonial power, still an important means of access to critical debates on modernity and progress. Given that in today’s Goa, where Konkani is official but English hegemonic, strife continues over the medium of instruction for schooling, this grounded insight into the language debates of previous eras shows the historical roots of the issue.

The fourth article, by K. David Jackson, gives an overview of Goan poetry in Portuguese. Ranging from 1893 to 1973, and touching on Adeodato Barreto, Nascimento Mendonça, Mariano Gracias and Clara de Meneses, to cite but a few names, Jackson outlines key themes including responses to Goa’s landscape, customs, folklore, and colonial history. He stresses the influence of poets and movements from Brazil and Portugal, which demonstrates the circulation of ideas throughout the Portuguese-speaking world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The chapter concludes with a bibliography for scholars wishing to investigate further Goan poetry in Portuguese or equip their research facilities with the means for others to do so.

In the fifth article, Luís Cabral de Oliveira looks at the prolific short-story writer José da Silva Coelho, whose brief narratives present a panorama of Goan life under the First Republic (1910– 26), though from a discernibly slanted social perspective. The short but crucial period in Goa’s history preceding the advent of Salazar’s New State has not been sufficiently studied in Goan historiography. Here literary criticism helps flag up historical issues urgently in need of discussion and documentation. It is telling – about Goa’s later development, its current disconnect from aspects of its past, and the unevenness and asymmetry in contemporary relations with the Portuguese-speaking world – that a short-story writer of a prolificacy unmatched in the other territories of the Portuguese empire at the time is almost entirely unknown today both in Goa and in Lusophone circles.

Here Cabral focuses on the advogado provisionário, or licensed advocate, in Silva Coelho’s Contos Regionais (1923–9). On the premise that literature provides rich cultural representations of lived legal systems, Cabral argues that Silva Coelho’s principal concerns distinguishable in his advocate characters were: class relations within the Catholic community and across Goa more widely, the defects and marginalisation of colonial Goan society, which created the need for such ad hoc legal agents, and the establishment and demonstration of social and financial capital in a situation of limited local autonomy. In Cabral’s view, Silva Coelho’s mocking depiction of advocates outside Goa’s native Catholic elite is intended to undermine their claims to social mobility, indicating anxiety over the territory’s plight torn between deep change and stagnation, a paradoxical situation that continued until the end of Portuguese rule.

The next three articles focus on Vimala Devi (b. 1932), arguably both the most representative Goan writer in Portuguese and the one whose protean literary trajectory has led furthest from her native land. Together with her husband Manuel de Seabra, Devi was responsible for the preservation of key elements of the Portuguese-language archive between the end of Portuguese rule in Goa and the re-starting of Indo-Portuguese relations. Without A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa, much of Goa’s most recent Portuguese-language production would almost certainly have been lost. In the first essay on her work, Duarte Braga analyses the critical reception of Devi’s poetry collection Súria (1962) by Portuguese intellectuals linked to Lusotropicalist ideology and literatura ultramarina (a label which we might consider parallel, if not identical given the differences in colonial situation between Portugal and the United Kingdom, to the coeval idea of Commonwealth literature). He argues that Devi’s art and criticism espouse an ‘Indo-Portuguese’ Goa while displaying subtle ambivalence regarding colonial rule, a distance that critics linked to the Salazar regime tried to erase. Here we see how, if Goan literature must be read in connection with its context of reference, in cases such as Devi’s the context of production and publication in the metropole is also a conditioning factor in the tenor and reception of the work, a bifocal requirement common to postcolonial literatures yet possessing specific features and effects here.

For her part, Cielo G. Festino reads Devi’s 1963 collection Monção in the light of Piglia’s thesis that the short story always narrates two stories: one explicit, one implied. According to Festino, the overt level consists in narratives of manners representing late-colonial Goa, while the implicit level concerns the great changes convulsing the territory at the moment the collection was written, the end of a certain lifeworld developed under colonialism and on its last legs at the time the stories are set, but which falls outside the timeframe of the diegeses themselves. In particular, Festino focuses on Devi’s representation of female experience in a context where Goan women were ‘held back by… poverty, history, customs and traditions’ (Gracias 2007, p. 144), a strong theme in post-1961 Portuguese-language writing in Goa. She notes that while male characters in Monção are either absent abroad for professional reasons or thinking about entering the diaspora, paradoxically to uphold a status quo at home that their leaving ultimately disrupts, the female characters are struggling to keep family and home together, often at the cost of their own well-being. In fine, Festino contends, Monção shows both the stagnation