By Michelle Mendonça Bambawale
I encountered Maria Aurora Couto through her two earlier works. In Goa: A Daughter's Story, I marvelled at the grandeur of the life she described in the palatial houses of Salcette, with their colonial connections through the Portuguese language, music, food, and lifestyle. Filomena’s Journeys: A Portrait of a Marriage, a Family, and a Culture, was heartbreaking. She writes of her mother’s story with honesty, the unravelling of a once-grand Goan family, their love of music, their Indo-Portuguese lifestyle, and their eventual decline brought on by a lack of practical skills and alcohol addiction. Her mother, Filomena was strong, stoic, and suffered in silence. Couto found this book so difficult to write that she refers to herself in the third person.
When I learned that Couto’s essays were published posthumously in At Home in Two Worlds (Speaking Tiger, 2024), I could not wait to read it. I devoured the book in two sittings. Couto writes with authority on Goa’s history, language and literature, with scholarly rigour and yet remaining profoundly personal. At Home in Two Worlds resonated closely with my own beliefs about homecoming and belonging. It explores the Goan’s deep connection to the land, our syncretic history, her shock at the many Goan stereotypes that have emerged since the 1960s, and her horror at the state’s divisive politics today.
In the chapter titled “Gaunkari," Couto posits that the system is responsible for the Goans' deep sense of self, rooted in the land and its imagery. She says “the whole community participated, benefited, felt protected and had a sense of community well-being.” She quotes poet Bakibab Borkar’s Veglench Munxaponn, unique humanism, as our special characteristic. The book has plenty of examples of our syncretic roots and our shared love for community, including the celebrations of Saibin Mai, Ganesh (Chovoth), and Christmas.
Couto shares her personal insight into Goa of the early 1960s, describing Goa Dourada and Goa Indica. She refers to Goa Dourada—the imagined “Golden Goa" of the colonial past—a product of Lusitanisation, a place of special beauty, beaches and churches. In contrast, Goa Indica identifies with Mother India and portrays Goa as an integral part of India. Through this book you are constantly taken from one Goa to the other. Couto confesses she identifies more with Goa Indica, as do I. Her saree wearing was testament to this identity.
In all three books, her husband Alban is an important character. In At Home in Two Worlds, you can sense how much she misses him as she recounts his connection to his village Aldona, describing fishing at the sluice gates and a morning blessing of dipping his hand in the water. The absence of her dear friend, sociologist Alito Sequeira, is palpable; the book is dedicated to him, with “whom the conversation never ended.” He is frequently quoted on the need for inclusion and reservations in Goa, and she liberally references Rochelle Pinto’s Between Empires: Print and Politics in Goa.
You can sense her discomfort with the Inquisition as she details Goa’s complicated class, caste, religion, and language paradigms, the different scripts prevalent in Goa— Portuguese, Konkani and Marathi. She offers deeper insights into the Konkani language struggle and the ensuing divisions drawn along lines of class and religion. Today, in 2024, Goa continues to witness script and language protests.
She credits the Portuguese civil code with Goan women being confident and independent and Goan society having a sense of equality and respect. Many of Couto’s essays resonate with my own book Becoming Goan: A Contemporary Coming Home Story. She too experienced the “otherness” issue. In her “Insider-Outsider” essay she calls herself fifty-fifty. She dissects this dichotomy by suggesting both Portugal and Goa as being othered, Portugal in Europe and Goa in India. In her essay, “When Space Becomes Place,” she debates politics, migration, globalisation and liberalisation in Goa post-independence and ends by quoting a friend, “do Goans want to be rich or preserve their soul?”
The two Goan stereotypes that particularly bother her are the current perception of a “Party Goa" and the “Goan ayah" of the Bombay Goan diaspora. She cites Graham Greene’s “Goa the Unique” essay in the Sunday Times from December 1963, which predicted the emergence of Goa as a party destination and how drugs became part of that narrative. I loved the part where she confronts Rushdie about Saleem Sinai’s ayah in Midnight’s Children being Goan. In contrast, she highlights a little known fact that from the first batch of six doctors to graduate from Grant Medical College in 1851, four were Goan: JC Lisboa, AC Dukle, A. Carvalho, and Bhau Daji Lad (the founder of the museum in Bombay that bears his name).
Through the book we experience her different lives and lifestyles in Goa—as a young child in Salcette growing up in a Portuguese speaking household, as the wife of a civil servant coming to Goa right after Liberation when both sides were suspicious of her allegiances, and then in a changing Aldona and Goa of the 2000s, after her retirement in Alban’s village. Through every essay in At Home in Two Worlds, her love for the land is visible. She often circles back to Goa historically exemplifying communal harmony, but in contemporary Goa she laments the divisions along religious lines. In her epilogue, Couto expresses cautious optimism for Goa’s future. It is her reminder to us to remain hopeful as we witness Goa being destroyed, both physically and culturally, through the erosion of our land, language, and lifestyle.
At Home in Two Worlds can be purchased in leading bookshops in India and on Amazon.
Michelle Mendonça Bambawale’s book Becoming Goan – A Contemporary Coming Home Story was published by Penguin Random House in 2023.
Photo of Fontainhas, Goa, credit Prathamesh More, downloaded from Unspash.com