Songs of the Survivors, ed. Yvonne Vaz Ezdani,
Broadway Book Centre, Panjim, 2007, pp. 289
by
Teotónio R. de Souza
Oral testimony is one of the most valuable but challenging sources
for the study of modern history, providing access to knowledge and
experience unavailable to historians of earlier periods. However, it
implies methodological problems of collection and interpretation,
including the risk of re-enacting the role of the proverbial blind
men of India who described an elephant after touching one single part
of elephant's body. The British empire is in this book an elephant to
contend with, and the goodies served to the imperial subjects,
including the grateful ex-Burma Goans, constitute a serious challenge
to the interpretation of the oral testimonies and record of lived
experiences.
Yvonne Vaz Ezdani, the editor of this volume is not unaware of the
pitfalls. Her introduction sets Burma pretty well (in her
perspective) and briefly in its geographical, cultural and historical
context, but probably logistical difficulties did not permit her to
ask her contributors some questions that could have elicited their
responses about intra-community relationships, or about their day-to-
day dealings with the Burmese population. This was essential when we
are told that " this is not just a story of Goans in Burma, or Goans
alone… It is a wider story of human determination to fight the odds,
and also a story of yet another insightful chapter of the little-
understood reality of Goan migration worldwide… Stories in the book
also reveal other aspects of the Goan diaspora in Burma: why and when
they went to Burma, how they earned their living there, how they
adapted to the culture and lifestyles, what they felt about the land
and the local people, and much more."
We can see in these personal reminiscences of ex-Burma Goans how
their traditional piety did not fail them through life's ordeals
during the trek and during the difficult years that followed. Salman
Rushdie may not have overstated in *The Moor's Last Sigh* the
devotion of the Indo-Portuguese families for kababed saints and
tandooried martyrs. In 1932 many of them came faithfully all the way
to the feet of St. Francis Xavier. And with so many ex-Burma Goans in
the *Songs of the Survivors* (Sunny Siqueira, Anthony John D'Cruz,
Alex C. Fernandes, Patricia Carmen Therese (née Duarte), Francis
Siqueira, Antoinette née Selkirk, Anthony Xavier Rego, L.C. Saldanha,
Cajetan Bernard Silgardo, John Menezes, José Cordeiro, Alex de Souza)
who made their living and brought cheer to others with music, Salman
Rushdie's *The Ground Beneath her Feet* could once again convey
fitting homage to these musical children of Goa who had learnt to
rock and roll despite the ground cracking beneath their feet time and
again.
The editor tells us also that "this book aims at capturing the
memories of a generation that is advancing in age. It hopes to help
Goans understand another aspect of their own histories. It also seeks
to record tales of determination and survival that are relevant to
people everywhere. While aimed at the general reader, one hopes the
scholar or historian may also find some useful information in the
narratives of oral histories put down in print." But for being "a
generation that is advanced in age" and closely related as family and
friends, there could be little excuse for justifying opportunism as
a very human tendency to want a good life. It may be true that when
you don't get the opportunities in your home country you look for it
elsewhere, and feel some gratitude and loyalty to whoever provides
you with prosperity and status. But this is also a unique occasion to
leave a question, that may appear crude and cruel: How do such simple
and good people compare with other simple and equally good people who
stayed put, struggled and even died in their resistance to the
imperial-colonial logic in order to gain freedom for their
countrymen?
We have seen some other earlier Goan efforts at reaching catharsis
after similar exit-ential tragedies, such as the one lived by Goan
survivors of Idi Amin's expulsion of Indians from Uganda, in Peter
Nazareth's scholarly fictional tale The General Is Up (Calcutta,
Writer's Workshop, 1984) or in less scholarly edition of A
Collection of Goan Voices by Susan Rodrigues. Such narratives,
including the present one, whatever their literary form or academic
quality, they are valuable records of human pathos. Even when some of
them reflect faded memories as regards some details, they reveal by
that very fact the human capacity to empty the debris of their past
life-constructions and to look ahead with fresh hopes kindled and
sustained by younger generation, as when Donald Menezes recalls in
this book : "For ten days, we stayed at Kokine Lakes, bathing and
swimming in the lake, singing, dancing, dallying with the girls,
playing with the kids, joking with the elders and dashing for the
trenches when the sirens went out. Our cheerfulness and helpfulness
buoyed up the elderly".
These and other, more or less heart-renting and comforting accounts
raise long-term existential doubts. My critical comments are not
intended here as discordant notes in the midst of so much music that
resonates in this book, but as calls for greater self-consciousness
of Goans as a community that needs to construct its own future,
ceasing to be a play-thing of alien interests in exchange of short-
term satisfactions. From time to time, tragedies have joined the
Goans as Goans, or as relatives and friends from Goa into a
fellowship of sufferers? However, Goans need to look frontally and
question themselves as to how many of their fellow-Goans and
countrymen they exclude from their fellowship and concern,
consciously or unwittingly in good times. The differentiated caste-
clubs in Uganda make me raise this question. The narratives in this
book seem to be restricted to Goans of one caste, and curiously
limited to Saligão and some surrounding villages, with a couple of
exceptions of Benaulim and Divar.
Beyond the village and family links, church celebrations and love for
music it is difficult to perceive the "Goanness" in this book. From
my private queries I got some responses, including thankfully from
the editor herself, pointing to the existence of a Goan Club in Burma
that was known as Portuguese Club, or about Goans who chose to
distance themselves from Indians, who were seen in Burma either as
exploiting money-lenders or as coolies working for half an anna.
Goans preferred to be identified with the Anglo-Indians or with the
Portuguese. We are also told that the Burma trek included a "White
Route" for the Europeans, Anglo-Indians and Goans, and a "Black
Route" for the other Indians.
These colonial-racial biases could have merited some soul-searching
or at least some passing criticism in these narratives. Contrarily,
Gerard Lobo expresses unqualified gratefulness of Goans to Pax
Britannica that permitted many to leave their motherland for parts of
British India (what is now Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Burma) at
times when there was little gainful employment under Portuguese. The
editor herself presents a reading of the Burmese history and the
behavior of her last kings from a British imperial perspective. We
are told that the last king of Burma was "weak and arrogant", unlike
his father who was a "shrewd diplomat" and maintained "correct
relations" with the British by refusing to side with the Indians
during the 1857 mutiny and even gave a big donation to the British
victims of the Mutiny! Such a reading is a far cry, for instance,
from *The Glass Palace* of Amitav Gosh, who handles Burma experiences
of Indians very differently.
For a historian born in India after 1947 this book represents a
vintage of Goan nostalgia, blissfully unaware of the logic of the
empires, be they British, Portuguese or Japanese. Though many
contributors in this book refer frequently and gratefully to the
Loretto Convent in Calcutta, where they were welcomed at the end of
the grueling trek, while others made their way through Madras, or
chose to rebuild their lives in places like Belgaum, where the cost
of living was cheaper and had good schools and colleges, or in
Bangalore, Bombay, Pune, Lucknow and Allahabad, where they found
easy employment and supportive environment, these are all
destinations that seem to be taken for granted, without questioning
if it was Mother India, or Queen of England, or both that made them
feel safe. Isa Vaz tells us that her family moved from Goa to
Calcutta, and when the Allied forces announced victory in June 1944,
she along with other children marched joyously on Chowringee Maidan
to the tune of 'God Save the King'. Her family returned to Burma, but
was back in India a few years later due to the Karen uprising. The
bulk of these ex-Burma Goans lives happily today in India, and not in
U.K. or Portugal.
The publication of a book like this can provide a wonderful
opportunity to the Goan writers and readers alike to go beyond
reminiscences and to find some answers to the historical complicity
of Goans, willingly or unwittingly, with the colonial powers and to
their lack of national consciousness. Instead of stopping with the
judgement of the rulers of Burma, past and present, we should be able
to ask: What right did the British have to re-locate even the worst
king of Burma to Ratnagiri? Or to deport Indian nationalist leaders,
including the renowned Bal Gangadhar Tilak, to Mandalay? Does not the
British exile of the King Thebaw remind anyone here of the present
day Burmese Junta trying to erase the memory of Aung San Suu Kyi by
placing her under house arrest? At least they have not yet exiled her
from her country! If S.N. Bose and his INA were challenging the
British in alliance with the Japanese in Burma, why is there so
little appreciation for his efforts, even after Martin could
improvise some music for celebrating Bose's triumphant entry in
Manipur, following the fall of Imphal? It is curious that Goans play
tunes for all masters; a recorded tradition that goes back to
Albuquerque's military band following the Portuguese capture of Goa.
The "Songs of the Survivors" has brought to life and to light one more little known
chapter of Goa's history. Yvonne Vaz Eznadi deserves credit for the trouble such a venture involves. If "comfortable and serene lives were shattered and they (contributors to this volume) were plunged into chaos and fear...as refugees who fled to India", it is our common
wish that true and lasting "comfort and serenity in life" may be forever theirs and ours, and may the ground never again slip from under our feet as a result of forgetfulness or insufficient
consciousness of our collective responsibilities and destiny as Goans.
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