By Selma Carvalho
I’ve long been appreciative of Jason K. Fernandes’ seminal thinking and in the introduction to Vimala Devi’s book Monsoon (Seagull, 2020) as translated by Paul Melo e Castro, he doesn’t disappoint. With his granular interrogation of Devi’s writing, Fernandes puts Devi on the defensive, questioning the validity of a Goa as portrayed by her, calling into question the role of the mid-century anti-clerical, anti-colonial, highly-charged nationalist Goan, who in retrospect, was a creature fed by Indian upper-caste rhetoric. He puts forth that this Gandhian Ram Raj politics with its undertones of Hindutva would eventually shape post-colonial India, setting the course for the country to be defined by majoritarian nationalism, reducing geographical, cultural and caste outliers to little more than neo-colonial subjects.
In fact, this edition of Devi’s Monsoon, and there have been other editions, would be incomplete without Fernandes’ introduction. He brings to it that much needed perspective which distance alone makes possible. Given that Fernandes’ introduction came before Devi’s work was presented, it became difficult to read her without judgement. Nonetheless, I was determined to do so. Devi had genuinely sought a new world order, one more egalitarian and devoid of caste injustice. Her writing is not fragmentary, in the sense of being in the slightest distracted from what she hopes to achieve. To this end, it’s brutally honest and sincere, but was it prescient?
In the interest of transparency, I’ve not read Devi in the source language, Portuguese, but I have read a significant number of works as translated by Paul Melo e Castro. He is rather a magician with the deftness to transform works of mediocre literary merit into classics and so the fluidity with which the narrative unspools may well be credited to him. The one quibble I had was with the twice repeated phrase ‘how’s tricks?’ in the target language. This expression, so closely associated with prostitution, does not translate accurately into anything remotely Goan. A better and simpler translation of a Goan greeting, would have been ‘how’s things?’.
Given some amount of fidelity to the source language, Monsoon is an extraordinary capture of mid-century Goan society, mores and landscape. The detailed descriptions of the houses and households in particular are of interest for the sheer opulence they conjure up, a gilded age indeed which faded far too soon, and it is easy to see why for so many Goans, there persists a saudade for a paradise lost. From the story ‘The House Husband,’ ‘Happiness in his case was a mansion the size of an abbey stuffed with ancient china, inlaid cabinets, ivories, jewels, gemstones, thick gold bracelets, a well-stocked larder and acres of productive land.’ This grandeur may well have been aspirational rather than real, but even as aspiration it points to a certain lifestyle. From the story, ‘Decline,’ ‘In a flash, Grandmother returned to life. Once more we could see her in the dining room, confidently and serenely directing the servants from her armchair, or out on the land, overseeing the harvest, watching on as the mundcars, heads bowed, stocked coconuts in our godown.’
Doubtless this extravagance was restricted to very few and even then, it barely disguised the fact that the landed gentry were mostly impoverished, the land had little value, the harvests yielded little profit, manufacturing and agricultural reform were non-existent. The grand families became agents of the colonial administration, heavily reliant on government jobs. The struggling classes either departed for Bombay or eked out an existence tilling the paddy fields. This is the liminal space that Devi inhabits between a struggling modernity and a collapsing past.
The composition of the book defies form. It’s a collection of sixteen short stories but loosely, Monsoon could well be a novel. The stories are at once disparate and composite, they don’t follow an order, nor do they adhere to a traditional arc with a beginning, middle and end. Instead they meander without intent and purpose, without definitive endings, they dip in and out of themselves, catching up on their character’s lives or misfortunes—but the action is anchored by a deep sense of place and season. In fact, so specific is the emphasis on the season, the coming monsoon, that it acts as the leitmotif which interlinks the stories.
Quite apart from the nationalist third eye that Devi so obviously employs, there is an emphasis on the centrality of women. Just as the 1960s civil rights movement spurred on women’s rights activists in America, nationalists movements empowered women in Asia and Africa. Devi’s contemporaries would have been progressives such as Bertha Menezes-Braganza standing shoulder-to-shoulder with T B Cunha in challenging the Portuguese, or the Azorean Edila Gaitonde, who defied race, religion and in the end, country, in marrying the freedom-fighter Dr Pundalik Gaitonde. But, even though women are emergent in her fiction, this emergence occurs almost by accident, as if the transformation of gender rights in Goa had been accidental.
In the story ‘The House Husband’ for instance, we find four unmarried sisters clucking about a potential husband. They are at first projected as feckless and powerless, but once a brother-in-law is acquired, the power shifts back to them. A ghor-zavoim, a situation where the husband lives in the wife’s ancestral house, a most coveted position, has a rich social history in Goa, partly because it legitimised women’s position as equals. It is precisely this point that Devi is trying to make in this excellent story, the agency the four unmarried sisters draw on, articulated aptly by the chief sister, Soledad, when she says, ‘I’m in-charge of this house.’
To view the women’s movement entirely through the prism of a western lens betrays the myopia of Eurocentric narratives. The lives of Goan women, both in Goa and in the diaspora of Bombay and East Africa, is a fine example of how Asian women gained access to men’s spaces. Particularly in British East Africa, where Goan women were frequently widowed young, they took over the running of households and thriving businesses. If in reality, the businesses were run by male members of the family, they nonetheless retained their legal claim over them.
Again and again, the Catholic women in Devi’s writing are positioned at the apex, directing estates, sitting at the head of tables, prodding the conscience of men. At times, so great is the power exerted by women, that men, passive and ineffectual, obscure into oblivion. From the story ‘Decline’: ‘The first year after our father’s death brought no alteration to our family routine. All the changes began when, immediately after the monsoon, death bore off the one irreplaceable member of our family—Grandmother passed away.’
The empowered role of Goan women can be credited to the singular Portuguese law (Uniform Civil Code) which gave women the right of succession allowing them to inherit. This upended the grave injustice, a solely patrilineal line of succession caused elsewhere in contemporaneous Asian societies and gave Goan women a degree of latitude in their otherwise powerless lives.
By contrast, the Hindu Goan women in Devi’s fiction derive their agency through stealth, through the gaze of those more powerful, through the acknowledgement of men: ‘Padmini’ who we see only through the covetous eyes of Joao Fidalgo, the invisibilised ‘Dhruva’ who moves through her household silently and unobserved, dependent on the benevolence of her in-laws, needing permission to ‘look directly upon her husband.’ It’s entirely possible that this contrast was unintended and almost certainly not contrived. Devi does not mean to be unkind to her Hindu protagonists, on the contrary, she wants to sympathetically make visible their lives. But she is creating characters from the weft and weave of everyday life, and had she been conscious of how large a gap existed in the power differentials between Catholic and Hindu women, she might had jigged them to allow for a correction. A robust enquiry into colonialism must allow for an honest interrogation of how it tangibly altered lives, how perhaps quite inadvertently and however peripherally, the least among Goan society became empowered.
Persistently, Devi prioritises India over Goa, as the more progressive and aspirational nation state. In ‘Nattak’, the theatre actor protagonist, Tukaram is advised to get himself to Bombay, because, ‘Here in Goa sprout seeds that out there can grow into great talents.’ From ‘Tiatr,’ ‘Anytime a barefaced Bombaicar showed up all hoity-toity, dressed in coat and trousers, ashamed to wear a langotim, his hair all slicked back, out he went. The bhatkar wasn’t standing for that nonsense.’ And then in ‘Job’s Children,’ ‘At Mapuca market she could chat with the young men who came back from Bombay…Carminha liked them. They were stylish. They had a different way about them…’
Writing in the 1950s, Devi could not have anticipated the other benchmarks which would define progress. Indeed by the turn of the twentieth century, Goa would become a model state, leading in almost every indicator which measures well-being: per capita income, gender equality, falling birth and death rates, communal tolerance, low crime rate, and an environmentally conscious citizenry. Devi left Goa in 1957. Although she does mention in ‘Job’s Children,’ sons going off to the ‘Persian Gulf from where they sent home a generous monthly allowance,’ she had no way of knowing, that the mundcars, on whose behalf she advocates, would make their way to the Gulf region and bring about the most bloodless of reformations through their new found prosperity. That coupled with the Mundkars Act which solidified the rights of land tenants, would dismantle the bhatcari system as it existed then.
Devi’s assertion in ‘Natak,’ that in the amorphous vastness of India, the stigma of caste would dwindle and provide an equality of opportunity, now in hindsight proves the extent to which nationalist propaganda had made India aspirational to Goa’s elite nationalists. In reality, it was in Goa, that caste receded socially, if not politically, while in India, caste remains a strong and unyielding barrier to social and economic mobility.
Jason Fernandes is spot on, when he notes that the very structure Devi attacked, Brahmanism, had already been transformed by Catholicism, its worst excess ameliorated by ideologies of equality, so inherent in the very ethos of European theology. It is entirely possible in human societies that two contradictory forces can occur concurrently. And so while the church hierarchy tacitly upheld the caste hierarchies within its clergy, it also dismantled them by empowering the least of its parish.
There is much truth in Fernandes’ assertion that the bhatcari-mundkari relationship was underpinned with a sense of noblesse oblige, something I’ve written about myself. It may come across as an apologia, but it is this sense of noblesse oblige, with its shades of European socialism, that would shape the Goan zeitgeist, and ultimately collapse caste structures.
The stories in Monsoon tend to be short, without a plot, and at times one wonders what to make of them. Their coherence and consistency becomes obvious as one reads the collection as a composite whole. Plots are irrelevant to Devi, what’s important is thematic unity—and the themes most relevant to her are a society on the cusp of dissolution. That perforation between the present and the future, that liminality that change heralds, is all captured exquisitely by her—men who’d hoped to find their fortunes in East Africa returning to a world in rack and ruin, mundkars rising above their station, aspiring for things they shouldn’t, bhaktars uneasy about their own displacement in this changing world. For anyone born to the Goan milieu, all this is achingly familiar which makes Devi’s work so important to social anthropologists and a must-read for those who wish to visit an earlier time.
Monsoon can be ordered here.
Selma Carvalho is editor at Joao Roque Literary Journal. Her latest publication Sisterhood of Swans (Speaking Tiger, 2022) was shortlisted for the Women Writers Prize (India) and can be ordered from Dogears Bookstore or Amazon.
Image by Sora Sagano and is downloaded from unsplash.com