By Selma Carvalho
Victor Rangel-Ribeiro was born on 3 October 1925, in Goa, what was then Portuguese-India. Victor’s earliest memory is of a family car, on a dark moonlit night, fording a river in a desperate attempt to get to Vengurla and avail of medical help for his mother. It the distance he could hear jackals howling and beside him his mother’s anguish. Victor must have been very young because he’s unsure whether this fragile memory is real or constructed. His sisters have assured him, it’s real. Victor grew up in and around Porvorim and Saligao, surrounded by music, listening to the quartet from Verdi’s “Rigoletto” a story of love and despair, and duets from Puccini’s “La Boheme.” Here, Victor describes his childhood in his own words, extracted from “Goan Literature Then and Now,” The Brave New World of Goan Writing 2020, Cinnamon Teal.
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 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.
A glimpse of Victor Rangel-Ribeiro’s house in Porvorim.
Mater Dei Institution, Saligao, where Victor began his scholatic life.
Victor began his scholastic life at the Mater Dei Institution, Saligão. Most of us remember with blinding clarity, the moment our lives changed for ever. For Victor, this momentous change was a move to Bombay at the age of fourteen. Here, he discovered a totally new world. Thrust into a neighbourhood of Goans, Anglo-Indians, Bene-Israelities, Hindus, Muslims and Parsis, this was a world of anonymity and infinite potential, British India’s port-city of teeming millions and a beacon of Empire’s nationalist pride. Art, music, every sort of intellectual stimulation oozed from the pleasure palaces of the rich into the narrow, ill-defined gullies criss-crossing the city, transforming the population into a modern, progressive India.
While at St. Xavier’s College, Bombay, he formed a writing group called the ChesterBelloc Club, which published a type-written fortnightly magazine. ChesterBelloc, of course, was Bernard Shaw’s mythical creature parodying Hilaire Pierre Belloc and Gilbert Keith Chesterton. It is no coincidence perhaps that members of this club—John Correia Alfonso, Carmon de Souza, Gerson da Cunha and Violet Dias Lannoy—would all go on to achieve success.
By 1950, Victor had established a career in writing and journalism, holding editorial positions at the National Standard, Times of India and Illustrated weekly. Later, he changed direction and joined J. Walter Thompson Co., a mammoth advertising agency, breaking the racial barrier and rising to the post of Head of the Copy Department. Regardless, he still found himself less of an equal than he wanted to be. Victor describes this success, extracted from Into the Diaspora Wilderness (2010, Goa, 1556).
I had great success at J. Walter Thompson Co., and had been appointed Head of the Copy Department, a post previously reserved for Englishmen. With the appointment came the realization that Indians were still expected to work for less pay even after Independence. Though I won that fight, it left a bitter taste in my mouth. My sister in New York had gifted us a trip to the city, as a wedding present. My wife had been admitted to the Juilliard School of Music at Lincoln Center, New York. It was the chance of a lifetime. I applied for a six month leave of absence and we left.
Thirty-one year old Victor, his wife Lea and eleven month old daughter arrived in America on August 15, 1956. Victor had bid farewell to post-colonial India of the fifties but what sort of country had he adopted? The ban on Asian immigrants had only been fully repealed in 1952. America of the fifties was still a deeply segregated world rent asunder by racial tension. Victor describes his early experiences, extracted from Into the Diaspora Wilderness.
America treated me as it treats most immigrants – very well and very roughly. When I applied for jobs, I was told either that I was under-qualified and could not be offered anything or that I was over-qualified. I finally got a break writing on music for the New York Times, which meant a lot to me. I left the Times in 1956 to become a copy chief at a small advertising agency just off Fifth Avenue.
During those years, Victor never lost sight of the fact that he was first and foremost a story-teller. His short stories were successfully published in US literary journals such as the North American Review and the Literary Review. In 1990, the renowned Iowa Review published “The Miscreant,” and in 1998, Milkweed Publications published his novel Tivolem which brought him world-wide acclaim. Victor describes that achievement, extracted from The Brave New World of Goan Writing 2020.
My own first novel, Tivolem, was published simultaneously in the United States as a hardcover book by Milkweed Editions and by Penguin India in New Delhi as a paperback. Well-received by press and public, it was compared favourably to the work of Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. Narayan, and Booklist, a magazine for booklovers, called Tivolem one of the twenty best first novels of 1998. It took me seven years to write; I was 73 when I held the first copy in my hands.
Victor’s impressive career and ensuing accolades include being among the 136 authors listed in the South Asian Literature in English: An Encyclopaedia and the 53 in South Asian Novelists in English. Tivolem (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.
Photo copyright of Selma Carvalho.