Portuguese in the East : a Cultural History of a Maritime Trading Empire
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THE PORTUGUESE IN THE EAST Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya is Senior Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. She is an Elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, Great Britain and Ireland, and is also associated with the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, King’s College London. She obtained her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Westminster, London. She is the author of Tagus to Taprobane, An Anthology of Indo-Portuguese Verse, Indo-Portuguese of Ceylon and African Identity in Asia, and editor of Sounds of Identity, The African Diaspora in Asia: Historical Gleanings, Invisible Africans: Hidden Communities in Asia, Uncovering the History of Africans in Asia and The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean (co-edited with Richard Pankhurst). THE PORTUGUESE IN THE EAST A Cultural History of a Maritime Trading Empire SHIHAN DE SILVA JAYASURIYA Tauris Academic Studies LONDON • NEW YORK Published in 2008 by Tauris Academic Studies, an imprint of I.B.Tauris and Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com In the United States of America and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © 2008 Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya The right of Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. International Library of Colonial History 11 ISBN: 978 1 84511 585 2 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available Printed and bound in India by Thomson Press from camera-ready copy supplied by Oxford Publishing Services To My Grandparents Gate Mudaliyar Samson Perera Abeyasekera Disanayake Wijetunge and Sophia Elwina Wijetunge (née Wickremasinghe), who introduced me to Eastern and Western cultural traditions without which this book would not have been written. Contents List of Illustrations viii List of Abbreviations ix Acknowledgements xi Preface xiii 1. The Portuguese and the Indian Ocean 1 2. Luso-Asian Literature 12 3. Music and Postcolonial Identity 39 4. Portuguese Expansion and Language Contact 71 5. Cultural Interactions and Linguistic Innovations in an Indo-Portuguese 100 6. Portuguese in Malacca and Sri Lanka 125 7. Language Change in Portuguese Space 152 8. Twilight of the Estado da India 170 Bibliography 195 Glossary 208 Index 209 Illustrations Map of Asia showing languages influenced by Portuguese (cartography by Clifford Pereira) 2 Map of Southeast Asia showing languages influenced by Portuguese (cartography by Clifford Pereira) 5 Mara Nutem Fundu Score of an Indo-Portuguese of Ceylon ballad (arranged by Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya and notated by Simon Proctor) 27 Surya-Noketranche Porim Porzoletta Score of a Goan Mando Song (arranged and notated by Anthony Noronha) 44 Musicians and dancers at a Sri Lankan Baila party depicted on a gramaphone record sleeve (collection of Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya) 48 Kaffrinha Arranged by Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya, scored by Simon Proctor and computer transcription by João Paulo Cota 58 A Sinhalese couple on their wedding day dressed in clothing influenced by the Portuguese (Source: J. Ferguson (1903). Ceylon in 1903. Colombo: A. M. and J. Ferguson) 59 Façade of St Paul’s church, Macau (collection of Clifford Pereira) 83 Fort Jalali, Oman (collection of Clifford Pereira) 96 Map of the Indian sub-continent showing languages influenced by Portuguese (cartography by Clifford Pereira) 137 Vimaladharmasuriya, King of the Kandyan kingdom (Sri Lanka) and Portuguese admiral (collection of Shihan de Silva Jaysuriya) 140 Abbreviations Ø absence of TMA marking 3s third person singular A Adjective ACC Accusative ADV Adverb ANT Anterior Ap Adposition ART article ASP aspect AUX auxiliary COMP completive CON consensus particle DAT dative DESC descriptive EMPH emphasis EXISTbe existential be G/GEN genitive GO goal relator IPA International Phonetic Alphabet KOR Indo-Portuguese of Korlai LOC locative MAC Macao Portuguese Creole MAL Malacca Portuguese Creole MANG Indo-Portuguese of Mangalore MOD modality N noun NEG negative NOR Indo-Portuguese of Norte NP noun phrase NPM Indo-Portuguese of Negapatnam O object OBJ MKR object marker -P non-punctual aspect particle x ABBREVIATIONS PF perfective aspect particle PFC perfective -P ASP nonpunctual aspect POST postposition PP possessive pronoun PREP preposition QUOT quotative R recipient relator RP relative pronoun S subject SIN Sinhala SLMC Sri Lankan Malay Creole SLPC Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole SOV Subject Object Verb SP Standard Portuguese SR di in the function of possessive or source relator SVO Subject Verb Object TNS tense V verb VOC Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie Acknowledgements I am obliged to Mr Sonny Ockersz (President, Catholic Burgher Union, Batticaloa, Sri Lanka) who has acted as the liaison to the Burgher community in Batticaloa, the people who have kept the Indo-Portuguese of Ceylon alive for so long. I am grateful to the Afro-Sri Lankans in Puttalama who showed me how their music and dance had been transmitted from generation to generation without any formal training. I am obliged to Marshall Wambeck and Gerald Wickremasuriya for providing me with valuable information about Wellington Bastianz, the composer of Chorus Baila, the genre of cross-cultural music that caught the pulse of independent Sri Lanka. I wish to thank the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Fundação Oriente for funding my field work. I should like to thank Mr K. D. Somadasa, the Curator of the Hugh Nevill Collection at the British Library, London for making the largest collection of nineteenth-century Asian Portuguese folk verse available to me. I also thank the University of Graz, Austria, for granting me per- mission to work on the Hugo Schuchardt manuscript ‘Zum Indo- portugiesischen von Ceylon’. Thanks are also due to those who have constructively commented on my works throughout the years: Professor Ratna Wijetunge, Professor Clive Willis, Professor Theodora Bynon and Professor Philip Baker. I would like to thank Simon Proctor for arranging my notation of the Sri Lankan song. I am grateful to Anthony Noronha for writing the score of a Goan Mando and to Clifford Pereira for drawing the maps for this book. Some years ago, I spent a day with Professor Charles Boxer and his wife, in their charming country house, discussing informally the Portuguese explorations in the East. He was enthusiastic about my work on cross- cultural interactions and I am thankful for his guidance on works to consult. I am grateful to my parents, Dr Fairlye de Silva and Mrs Pearl de Silva for encouraging me to train up to the Trinity College of Music (London) diploma in western classical music on the piano and also to perform Sri Lankan Kandyan dancing which gave me a balanced outlook on cultural expressions from the two hemispheres. I thank my husband, Dr Hemal xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Jayasuriya, for critical and constructive comments on the script. This book would not have been written, however, without the patience of my son, Johan Heshan. Preface The Portuguese expansion in the Orient following Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India in the late fifteenth century led to prolonged contact between diverse cultures. The activities of Afonso de Albuquerque and da Gama encouraged miscegenation between the Portuguese and the Asians which resulted in generations of mother-tongue speakers of Luso-Asian languages which were used in negotiating oriental commerce. These languages outlasted Portuguese presence in Asia and are now becoming moribund, due to the sociopolitical changes that followed when the Portuguese presence ended. Nevertheless, the Portuguese stamp is evident in the words that have been adopted by several indigenous languages. Portuguese became the language of colonisation in sundry places in the Indian sub-continent, and also in Malacca, Macau and Timor. Portuguese is now an official language in East Timor. Chapter 1 sets the scene for a hypothesis that a Portuguese lingua franca served as the link language in Portuguese Asia. This language outlasted Portuguese rule in certain parts of Asia and also became the bridging tongue between other European powers who followed the Portuguese into the Indian Ocean. Contact languages result from contact of cultures. By taking the case of the Indo-Portuguese of Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole), which has both a voluminous recorded literature and contemporary communities who speak this language, I demonstrate the importance of language in trading and empire building. Indo-Portuguese of Ceylon and Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole are synonymous. Ceylon is the name given to the Island by the British administrators. The name changed to Sri Lanka when it became a republic in 1972. The next chapter draws attention to both secular and religious literature in former Portuguese Asia which is a hybrid of European and Oriental imagery. It includes a nineteenth-century manuscript of Indo- Portuguese ballads which I transcribed, edited and translated into Standard Portuguese and English, together with my interpretations of the stanzas through my knowledge of both Portuguese and Sri Lankan cultures. I resisted the temptation to embellish them and remained faithful xiv PREFACE to the original compositions of the anonymous poets. Hugo Schuchardt, the distinguished German linguist, took a keen interest in contact languages and these ballads are among his collection of manuscripts at the University of Graz, Austria.