Goa, Through the Traveller’s Lens Nina Caldeira Editor 2019 Goa, Through the Traveller’s Lens 2019 Nina Caldeira, Ph.D. Copyright of individual chapters is vested in the respective authors. Copyright for the collection is vested in the editor. The role of the Goa University in organising the event which generated the papers included in this book is gratefully acknowledged. Front cover photo: Fontainhas by Bina Nayak, Road to Anjuna (front cover), mando group and temple (back cover) by Frederick Noronha. First published in 2018 and reprinted in 2019 by Goa,1556, Sonarbhat, Saligão 403511 Goa, India. http://goa1556.in, [email protected] +91-832-2409490 1098765432 Typeset in Saligão, Goa with LYX, http://www.lyx.org. Printed and bound in India by Brilliant Printers, Bengaluru www.brilliantprinters.com Text: Bitstream Charter, 9.7/12.8 pt. See Goa,1556’s catalogue at: http://goa1556.in ISBN 9788193814093 2 Contents Nina Caldeira 5 By way of an introduction Isabel de Santa Rita Vás 12 As kingfishers catch fire: scholarship as travel through inscape Sushila Sawant Mendes 31 Assolna, Velim, Cuncolim: an insider’s view of Robert S. Newman’s oeuvre Xavier M. Martins 45 Seventeenth-century maritime Goa as viewed by de Laval Maria de Lourdes Bravo da Costa 52 French travellers on Goan food habits Prema Rocha 60 Veni Vidi Amavi: writing Goa from the outside-in Sunita Mesquita 68 Sifting sands: a search for stability and sustenance of Goan culture through travel narratives Glenis Maria Mendonça 77 Goa through the prism of contemporary travel blogs 3 CONTENTS Brian Mendonça 85 Through the eyes of a traveller-poet: Goa... Irene Silveira 94 Goa through the lens of Europeans: a revisiting Akshata Bhatt, Nafisa Oliveira 115 Reconstructing Goa through travel narratives: a study of select writings from Manohar Shetty’s Goa Travels Natasha Maria Gomes 125 Anne Bonneau’s radio travelogues: A portrayal of the archetypal and stereotypical Goan Palia Gaonkar 142 Footprints of the colonial past: Goa in V.S. Naipaul’s A Million Mutinies Now Ambika Kamat 148 An object of the Occidental gaze: analyzing Tomé Pires’ description of Goa in Suma Oriental Frederick Noronha 156 In fact, this is only fiction: unusual ‘visitors’ who came Goa’s way 4 By way of an introduction NINA CALDEIRA1 RAVEL is a universal human experience. It is the innate nature of T man to explore new terrains. The exploration is most often fol- lowed by explication for, as the American author Pat Conroy affirms, “Once you have travelled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” What is significant in this explication is the travel ex- perience. In the wake of cultural studies, the contemporary world has seen a re- newed interest in travel writing. Various factors have contributed to this awakening. Cultural encounters and the rise of postcolonial studies and globalisation gave an impetus to travel writing in relation to power. In ad- dition, the fact that travel writing crosses not merely geographicaland cul- tural borders but, more importantly, disciplinary boundaries, got various disciplines interested. Historians, geographers, sociologists, littérateurs, all began to regard travel writing as the indispensable aid for their study. Moreover, as the very nature of travel writing draws from different writing styles and blends together descriptions, reflections, narrations, dialogues and arguments, travel writing began to draw attention. As such, its relev- ance began to be widened. The corpus of travel writing is extensive and its appeal ranges from an interest in interrogating imperial discourse to the colonial, racial and tourist gaze, to cross-cultural and transcultural analysis. Themes of multiculturalism, diaspora, hybridity, ethnography coupled with imaginative and hyper-real travel, make the genre of travel writing irresistibly fascinating. The chroniclingand exploration of travel have always been quite pop- ular in historical writing. Merchants forged new routes and returned with reports about fantastic places and cultures. These early entrepreneurs propelled travellers to undertake a journey. The Venetian explorer Marco 1 Professor and Head of the Department of English, Goa University. nina@ unigoa.ac.in / [email protected] GOA, THROUGH THE TRAVELLER’S LENS Polo (1254-1324) spent many years travelling to China, India and the Middle East which is recorded in the thirteenth century travelogue The Travels of Marco Polo. The book got many Europeans interested in trad- ing with China and the Middle East. The travelogue describes in great details the silk route and the great wealth and power of China. So fas- cinating was the travelogue that it propelled Europeans to visit China, India and the Middle East and to trade with these splendid places. The seventeenth-century Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Hiuen Tsang (Xuanzang) travelled to Central and South Asia, as recorded in his travel account Xiyu Ji. The history of seventh century Bengal can best be unfolded in the travelogue. Likewise, the Moroccan Islamic scholar Ibn Battuta often called the world’s greatest traveller, travelled the entire Islamic world for thirty years of his life. His travels are recorded in Rihla (The Journey). The period from mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century can roughly be said to be the epoch of scientific voyages. During this period the European seafarers were able to plot longitude with accuracy and were able to locate the Pacific Islands. The British explorer and navigator Captain James Cook (1728-1779) remains the model and ideal for sailing expeditions. The expeditions or voyages of this period were patronised by monarchs and statesmen who invested much in the voyages. The possib- ility of wealth, coupled with the desire for power and knowledge, made voyaging and patronages of voyages very competitive. Travels of this period need to be situated in the economic and polit- ical history of the time, at times related to the political and economic expansion of Europe. As such, these travels had very serious socio-poli- tical consequences. The travellers of the period documented places, cul- tures and people, most often critiquing and categorising by European standards and in a position quite distanced from the cultures and lives of the people they described. In taking on the authoritarian position in describing ‘others’,travel writing of this period was complicit in the imper- ial project. New York University professor Mary Louise Pratt, in Imperial Eyes (1992), is interested in showing just how the European visual imagin- ation fixed and subordinated non-European people. In fact, postcolonial studies influenced by Edward Said’s Orientalism often explores the rela- tionship between travel writing and imperialism. Most of the travel writ- 6 By way of an introduction | Nina Caldeira ings of the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century are subject to a postcolonial enquiry as they construct a picture of the non-European world for the European readership. The end of Imperialismwould logicallyspell out the end of travel writ- ing. However, the popularity of travel writings persists in the twenty-first century. It is observed that with increased communication and connectiv- ity across the globe, travel has become the predicament of the twenty- first century and travel writing of the century has taken on a different tone from the conventional documentary writings of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The focus has at this time shifted to the inward self from the earlier outward-looking travelogues. The subject positioning of the self vis-à-vis the outward geographical and cultural terrain is but the logical consequence of the contemporary focus on subjectivity and self- reflexivity. Travel writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries infuse in their writings their own dreams and memories alongside the geograph- ical and historical data. This is not to state that the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century travelogues were purely objective observations for travel writing has always been a blend of fact and fiction. The focus might have changed. The travelogues of V.S. Naipaul are more a search for self-identity. However, Naipaul’s travelogues are also critiqued for their Orientalist leanings. Debbie Lisle politicises travelogues by revealing their connection to serious world affairs and their significance to the study and practice of global politics. She argues that the quasi-fictional genre of travel writing is at least as useful for understanding issues of international importance as policy documents, government press releases, parliamentary debates and media stories. Many critics find it difficult to place travel writing outside the frame of postcolonialism. Lisle interrogates the popularity of travel writing in present times, despite the decline of imperial rule. “If the Em- pire that sustained travel writing was dismantled with the various decol- onisation movements of the twentieth century, why hasn’t travel writing itself disappeared?” (Lisle 2). Lisle attributes the popularity of present day travel writing to the extension of the colonial vision in the more troub- ling cosmopolitan vision. She argues that contemporary travel writing en- gages most profoundly in the wider debates of global politics through its 7 GOA, THROUGH THE TRAVELLER’S LENS structuring tension between colonial and cosmopolitan visions – “they re- veal moments of empathy, recognition of difference, realisations of equal- ity and insights into shared values” (4). However, at the heart of this re- lationship is the production of difference: “It requires the author to dis- criminate between what is familiar and what is exotic so that readers are satisfied that they are encountering people and places that are sufficiently foreign”(71) and “they smuggle in equally judgemental accounts of other- ness under the guise of equality, tolerance and respect for difference” (10). They actually form new forms of power. As such, the cosmopolitan vis- ion is not really separated from the logic of Colonialism, Orientalism, or Empire.