Portugal Left a Mark on India

GOA, India—The weekend of King Charles III’s coronation was marked with good-humored outrage by some among the youthful population of Goa, who wondered why on earth their government would even contemplate sending representatives to the archaic and arcane festivities that captivated monarchists everywhere in the lead-up to May 5. Wasn’t it bad enough, asked historian Amreen Shaikh, that India marked the death of Queen Elizabeth II last September with a day of national mourning?

“It was a Sunday, but I worked twice as hard as I would on any day, perhaps harder,” she said with a laugh. “After all that we endured, why were we honoring the person who represented hundreds of years of India’s cruel colonization?”

For Shaikh and other Goans, the history of colonialism is a double whammy. Now they are Indian. But for 451 years they were Portuguese. Goa, seized not long after explorer Vasco da Gama sailed into the Indian Ocean, became the capital region of Portugal’s eastern empire, civically and ecclesiastically as important as Lisbon. Its rule, under a governor-general and archbishop, respectively, stretched as far as Macao on the South China Sea and to Timor in the Malay archipelago.

It’s hard to envision now, with Portugal reduced to just a fingerhold on the Atlantic coast of Iberia, with a smattering of colonial legacies on both coasts of southern Africa (and, of course, Brazil). But there was a time in the 16th and early 17th centuries when Portugal was the Empire, and Goa was its beating heart. In many ways, Goa still thrums to a Portuguese beat. The pastéis de natas, here called natal, and the chouriços are as good as in the home country, and India’s favorite mango variety, the alphonso, is named after Afonso de Albuquerque, first Duke of Goa. (“Ironic,” said Shaikh, “the sweetest mangoes are named after the most cruel Portuguese general.”) Fado is still sung here. And Portuguese is still spoken.

May 5 was also Portuguese Language Day in Goa. Many still speak Portuguese at home, and most can understand it. The long coastline and the lush hillsides are dotted with centuries-old white churches and chapels, which, far from being monuments to a bitter history, are thronged every Sunday and on regular festival days with the faithful who made Goa an important outpost of Catholicism throughout those centuries. Nuns in orange saris drive into the market towns to do their shopping; the undertakers prop up corpses in open coffins so that passersby can show their respect by making the sign of the cross.

The body of St. Francis Xavier, who evangelized widely in Portuguese India and especially in Goa, is interred in the Basilica of Bom Jesus in Old Goa, the former capital. His body is almost as fresh, the locals swear, as the day he died in 1552. Despite being the man who brought the horrors of the Inquisition here, with at least 16,000 charged in its train, St. Francis is revered with an annual festival. Until recently, the faithful queued to kiss his miraculously un-decomposed feet.

There are temples and mosques here, too, of course, though they are less obvious to the visitor’s eye. Crosses tower over every hill, and statues to the colonial great and good stand in every public garden. The Portuguese may have brought cannons and colonization, and Xavier the Inquisition, but locals are proud of their past. Shaikh, 24, is a professional storyteller and tour guide with a local company called Make It Happen. She says that in her home, she has a Quran, a Bible, and the Vedas. A university professor challenged her to uncover just one religious riot that took place in Goa in all its history, with a promise of full marks if she could find one.

“I looked my hardest, determined to get full points, but I couldn’t find even one sectarian riot. It’s never happened here in Goa,” she said, a claim that cannot be made in many places across India.

Many Goans have Portuguese names, taken from the priest who converted them or their ancestors back in the day. All that made the place feel more like home and more bearable for the colonizers. As did intermarriage, of which there was a lot. Few Portuguese women came to Goa, and mixing with the locals was positively encouraged for the sailors and traders of the empire, at least for several hundred years.

Francisco Fonseca, known as Chico, is a famous fado artist who has been performing the traditional Portuguese music for more than half a century. Yet he has never been to Portugal. The walls of his home, on the outskirts of the Latin Quarter in Goa’s capital of Panjim, are a nod, conscious or otherwise, to Portugal’s vanished Asian empire: They are adorned with Chinese ceramics that were brought to Goa from Macao several hundred years ago. Like Shaikh, he feels he is Goan first, and sings in Portuguese, English, and the local Konkani language.

Goa was the crown jewel for Portugal in Asia, but it wasn’t exactly shiny—it was filthy, overcrowded, and diseased. That’s one reason Goa lays claim to one of Asia’s earliest medical colleges, which dates back to 1691. The capital was abandoned in the late 18th century after most of the population had been killed off in preceding centuries by plague, malaria, cholera, and other endemic diseases. Those who refused orders to move out were burned out, which is why there are no homes, only churches and other religious structures, in Old Goa. The college later became part of Goa University and the building was converted to a hospital, where Shaikh was born. It is now an arts center that hosts an annual film festival. Goans fought for the preservation of the building, which is painted bright yellow, as they have done for many of the pockets of their Portuguese heritage that remain. The tropical climate isn’t kind to the old stone and lime buildings, and their pre-monsoon maintenance is constant and costly.

Perched on India’s Arabian Sea coast, Goa was long a magnet for traders and later a lure for hippies, drawn here by a concept known as susegad, derived from the Portuguese word sossegado, which describes the laid-back beachside lifestyle that came to be associated with the place. Aging, mahogany-hued Europeans (many these days Russian) still make appearances at the northern beaches, flea markets, and yoga retreats but have largely been displaced by the middle-class indigenous holiday-goers who come to spend their money at the swelling number of upscale hotels, restaurants, and bars. The traffic is bad, especially on weekends when people flock in from Mumbai and New Delhi; the wandering cows chow down on plastic bags that blow multicolored across the sugarcane and coconut fields. Bollywood stars come to film music videos and movies, turning ordinary roads into selfie spots for fans. Development appears haphazard and hurried.

Unlike the food, which, as in other former Portuguese outposts, is an exquisite mix of colonial influences. It was the Portuguese, after all, who brought chiles, tomatoes, potatoes, and guavas to India. Cashews, a major Goan cash crop, make the local feni liquor that forms the base for many a tangy modern cocktail. The seafood—sea bream, pomfret, kingfish, crab, lobster, squid, tuna, mussel, clam, and oyster—comes morning-fresh off the trawlers that line up opposite the casinos dotted along the Mandovi River, another reminder of Macao, the Portuguese colony that reverted to China in 1999, with the legacy of a faded colonial administration propped up by gamblers’ losses.

The coronation weekend was a good time to spend among like-minded people of a former colony. In 1961, after a half-hearted fight from Lisbon, Goa was absorbed into a now-independent India, itself a former British colony, and much later became the country’s 25th state. We Australians seem to like the pomp and glamor of royalty too much to declare ourselves free, at last, of the old country. Charles is now the head of state of two of the three countries of which I’m a citizen. Young Goans just can’t understand what it is we’re hanging on to.

They understand the politics and protocol that require an official presence at a big party like the coronation of a new king of their old overlords. They know, too, that India does colorful pomp and modern royalty just as well. Here in Goa, they have their food, fado, and sossegado, the holy crosses and the holy cows, and the rotting body of a flawed saint who gave up an arm for the Vatican (which is now reluctant to give it back). In this laid-back corner of an emerging power, they are preparing to reclaim their place in the world. This time, they’ll be doing it on their own terms.