On arriving at the next home, the most prized possession to be unloaded first was always the family bookcase. While the bulk of the family library remained in the ancestral home in Porvorim, the books that were most prized travelled with us.
—Victor Rangel-Ribeiro
By Victor Rangel-Ribeiro
The following is an extract from the foreword for The Brave New World of Goan Writing and Art 2020.
What was the state of literature in Goa, a hundred years ago? With no radio or TV, and only one movie theatre in distant Panjim, surely people spent a lot of time reading? Yes, they read a lot of newspapers, that sprouted like mushrooms, and died almost as quickly. And what about books? Seventy-three long years had passed between the publication of Os Brahmanes and Chord and Discords. What were people reading in the intervening years? Perhaps a peek at my father’s library might help.
My father, Oscar Rangel-Ribeiro, was born in 1881, and developed an extraordinary resume. While still in his late teens he joined his mother, Aramita Rangel, in a canning venture whose products won medals at European exhibitions. Migrating to Bombay during the First World War, he was invited around 1918 (I believe by Dorab Tata) to start and lead a classical music orchestra at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay, and so became the very first Indian musician to lead a group there. From there, he went to Calcutta to manage a canning factory in that city, coming back to Goa at the end of his contract. In Porvorim he almost died in a world-wide influenza pandemic, and on recovery was offered a position teaching Portuguese at the newly established Mater Dei Institution in Saligao. There, we lived in nine different homes in just over nine years, not because we liked to move, but because my mother had come up with a master plan to cope with the economic straits we found ourselves in. Through the social grapevine she would find out which families were moving out of Saligao for extended periods of time, usually a year or so, and strike a deal with them: in return for looking after the property and making any needed repairs, we would live there rent free, and would also be given two large sacks of rice and two large kerosene tins as compensation for our trouble.
The annual move was always exciting. The family carriage would be summoned from Porvorim; it was a large box-like contraption mounted on two very large steel-rimmed wooden wheels, the driver Laximon sat perched high up on a wooden shelf, and it trundled along the rutted mud roads not propelled by an engine, not pulled by horses, but drawn by two sturdy and very energetic bulls. The seven of us would all clamber in, the family cats would be snuggled in our laps, and a dog always seemed to be lying at our feet. The furniture would be moved separately by bullock cart.
On arriving at the next home, the most prized possession to be unloaded first was always the family bookcase. While the bulk of the family library remained in the ancestral home in Porvorim, the books that were most prized travelled with us. There were several novels in English (Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, Thackeray, Jane Austen), in Portuguese (Júlio Dinis and Eça de Queirós), and in French (Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, Balzac, Zola, Flaubert).
In the 1920s and early 1930s, the only book we had by a Goan author was a tattered, much-thumbed copy of Jacob e Dulce. In 1936 and 1940, we added the two volumes of poetry in English by Armando Menezes. They were a much-loved addition to our repertoire of literature.
Two solitary novels in thirty years do not a literature make; what was going on here? Several factors were at work to create a situation that led Naipaul to describe Goa and its language as ‘without a literature.’ First, Portuguese was the language read and spoken only by the elite in Goa, and by members of the upper middle class, so potential readers and buyers were limited in number. Second, no book publishing house had yet been set up, because the potential readership was so small. For that reason, Goa had no commercial publishing house, and for lack of a publisher no books were waiting to be published. This should not be taken to mean that no works were being written; some manuscripts may have just been stashed away in a drawer or a cupboard because of the futility involved in trying to get it into print.
Victor Rangel-Ribeiro was born in Goa in 1925. He is among the 136 authors listed in the South Asian Literature in English: An Encyclopaedia and the 53 in South Asian Novelists in English. RangelRibeiro’s debut novel Tivolem (Milkweed Editions, 1998) was named one of the twenty notable first novels to be published in America, in 1998, and won him the Milkweed National Fiction Prize. The New York Foundation for the Arts awarded him its Fiction Fellowship in 1991. He is also a trained musician, at one time, the director of the Beethoven Society of New York and a member of MENSA since 1988. He spends his time between New York and Goa.
The Brave New World of Goan Writing & Art 2020 can be purchase at Cinnamon Teal, Goa.
The banner image is by Kevin Laminto and is downloaded from unsplash.com