Book Excerpt: At Home in Two Worlds- Essays on Goa by Maria Aurora Couto

Read an exclusive excerpt from At Home in Two Worlds: Essays on Goa by Maria Aurora Couto (Speaking Tiger, 2024)

I had grown up hearing from my mother about the dazzling Maria Aurora Figueiredo—as she had then been. They had been students together at Karnatak College, Dharwad, in the early 1950s. Meeting her in person, years later, marked both a reunion and the beginning of a new friendship across generations. Aurora would graciously introduce me to friends and colleagues in Goa as ‘my friend Chandra’s son’. This beautiful gesture brought back to mind the place and institution that had shaped these young women at the dawn of Independence and their fellow students at Karnatak College, among whom were Girish Karnad and Shashi Deshpande (née Adya).

During that time and place of extraordinary intellectual ferment, idealistic young people were nurtured by inspiring teachers such as the literary scholars Armando Menezes and VK Gokak, the novelist VM Inamdar, and the philosopher KJ Shah; students and faculty alike contributed to a vibrant atmosphere of creativity and debate. To me, Aurora was the last link to that ethos of the Dharwad of seven decades ago. She carried with her the liberal values of that ethos—its emphasis on intellectual inquiry and moral courage—throughout her life. Her appetite for inquiry, her engagement with the intricacies of a history that is being flattened out and erased as we speak, and her belief in the vital importance of common ground that is respectful of difference remained undimmed to the very end. If she embodied the ideals of a confluent and transcultural Goa, she also subscribed in full measure to those of an inclusive, confidently pluralist Nehruvian India, now regarded by its influential detractors with baneful hatred.

Those early, formative years left a fine impress on Aurora’s prose, which combined a historian’s attention to fact, nuance and detail with a storyteller’s feeling for the emotional temperature of a narrative, the rhythm of the everyday and the epiphanic that carries us through life. While she wrote in English, her multilingual upbringing gave her access, also, to the cadences and reserves of Konkani and Portuguese, as well as, by extension and through translation, the Kannada and Marathi in which the litterateurs of polyglot Dharwad wrote. This multilingualism brought an exquisite versatility and a robust elegance to her prose, which could shift registers, within a matter of sentences, from historiography to folklore to autobiography, never losing sight of the subject at hand, and indeed, bringing it alive in multiple dimensions.

III.

The ‘two worlds’ of Aurora’s title recur in these essays, allowing readers to appreciate how the dominant Indian notion of Goa is underwritten by stereotype and misinformation, while the Goan perspective—as evinced in the writings of Goan writers like the historian DD Kosambi, the poet Bakibab Borkar and the sociologist Alito Siqueira—draws on a richly kaleidoscopic understanding of the state’s palimpsest history of civilisation, diaspora, empire and colonialism, and the continual articulation of its veglench munxaponn, ‘unique humanism’.

As I have written elsewhere, this unique humanism of Goa is closely aligned with the lived ideal of an ‘anchored cosmopolitanism’ that has been nourished by a Konkani and Lusophone route to modernity, distinct in origin, temperament and emphasis from the route that British-ruled India took towards modernity. Let us remember that Goa’s public sphere has long been sustained—even during phases of oppression, especially during the Salazar dictatorship—by active discourse and irrepressible publication, carried on through the circulation of pamphlets and broadsides, journals and lampoons.

Let us remember, too, that it was Goa where the first printing press in Asia arrived in 1556 CE, and that, between 1910 and 1926—during the First Portuguese Republic—the people of Goa and the rest of Estado da Índia were citizens of a republic several decades before their compatriots in British India came to enjoy that democratic privilege. This privilege was, of course, snatched away from Goa’s people by the military regime that took charge of Portugal in 1926, and under the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar which succeeded it.

The collision between the dominant Indian notion of Goa and the Goan perspective was nowhere more dramatically or tragically in evidence than during the events of December 1961 when the Republic of India ‘liberated’ Goa from the Portuguese Empire. The brusque treatment of Goans by some members of the incoming Indian ascendancy—the colonised re-visiting colonialism on their own people—is the subject of one of the most eloquent essays in this collection, a rare eyewitness account by one who experienced this transition in the demanding role of spouse to a young Goan-origin IAS officer deputed to Goa.

Aurora was justifiably critical of the lenses of misunderstanding and cliché, ignorance and arrogance, through which many Indians regard Goa’s history and culture. And yet, proud as she was of Goa’s syncretic traditions, its gift for straddling historically fraught differences and dissonances, she was also critical of the Goan tendency towards exceptionalism and insularity; she deplored the propensity of Goa’s intellectuals to retreat into a resentful parochialism instead of assuming a larger role in the subcontinent’s collective life.

And Goa has much to teach India. Goa’s strengths, as seen through Aurora’s lens, reside in such locale-specific features as the traditional gaunkari or comunidade system of shared community rights to agrarian land; in the confluent interplay between Hinduism and Christianity, with layers of the Buddhist and Sufi past informing the textures of Goa’s religious life; and in the liberal Pombaline legal reforms, which gave Goa’s women, irrespective of religion and caste, rights of succession and inheritance, making them confident and self-assured in a manner unusual in South Asia.

Excerpted with permission of the author and publishers, Speaking Tiger from At Home in Two Worlds- Essays on Goa by Maria Aurora Couto

About the Book

In this collection of posthumously published writings, Maria Aurora Couto, celebrated for her literary prowess and cultural advocacy, offers an unparalleled exploration of Goa. The distinguished memoirist’s lifelong dedication to understanding her homeland’s multifaceted identity shines through in each essay in At Home in Two Worlds.

A central theme in these reflections is the author’s upbringing in Konkani, Marathi and Kannada-speaking Dharwad, alongside both Catholic and Hindu communities, before she moved to Delhi, London, and Goa, enabling her to embody insider and outsider perspectives on the place of her birth. She interweaves her extraordinary personal experiences, interwoven with critical discussions on colonialism, Christianity, and the numerous dualities—of language, region, religion—that make Goa unique.

Each piece in this collection is an exploration into Goa from diverse viewpoints, including those of visitors like Graham Greene and Umberto Eco, as well as sociologists, historians, poets, and everyday individuals— family, friends, neighbours, and those who have adopted Goa as home.

About the Author

Maria Aurora Couto, a renowned Goan writer and cultural critic and Padma Shri recipient, left an indelible mark on the literary landscape of Goa. Best known for her books Goa: A Daughter’s Story (2004) and Filomena’s Journeys: A portrait of a family, a marriage & a culture (2013), Couto is celebrated for her insights into Goan culture, navigating the intersections of memoir, history, culture, and social change. She died in Aldona, her husband’s ancestral home in Goa, on January 14, 2022, aged eighty-five.