Ethnography of Goa, Daman and Diu , livre ebook

A. B. DE BRAGAN A PEREIRA
Ethnography of Goa, Daman and Diu
Translated by Maria Aurora Couto
Contents
About the Author
INTRODUCTION BY MARIA AURORA COUTO
I LOCATION
II CASTES
III MATERIAL LIFE
HYGIENE AND BODY CARE
FOOD AND NOURISHMENT
CLOTHING
HOUSING AND FURNITURE
MODES OF TRANSPORT
TRANSPORT ON LAND
TRANSPORT BY SEA
MEANS OF EXISTENCE
PASTORAL LIFE
FISHING
AGRICULTURE
INDUSTRY
TRADE AND COMMERCE
MILITIA AND WEAPONS
IV SPIRITUAL LIFE
LANGUAGE
THE HINDU SCHOOL
HINDU MEDICINE
THE HINDU RELIGION
THE MUSLIM RELIGION: ISLAM
INDIAN MUSIC
V SOCIAL LIFE
THE FAMILY
THE JOINT FAMILY
BIRTH
MARRIAGE
DEATH
PROPERTY
THE VILLAGE COMMUNIDADE
BHATKARS AND MUNDKARS
DESSAI LANDHOLDINGS
INHERITANCE AND PROPERTY RIGHTS
SUCCESSION
EVIDENCE
REFERENCES
TRANSLATOR S NOTES
APPENDIX 1: TREES, PLANTS AND SHRUBS
APPENDIX 2: PLACE NAMES
Illustrations
Footnotes
Indroduction
Appendix 1: Trees, Plants and Shrubs
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
Ethnography of Goa, Daman and Diu
Antonio Bernardo de Bragan a Pereira (1883-1956) inherited a family tradition of scholarship and public service. He was sent to the prestigious University of Coimbra in Portugal to study law, returning from there to pursue a career in the judiciary which led him to the highest offices in Goa as well as Mozambique. As a jurist he was known for his impartiality and the vigour and brilliance of his exposition. He maintained his independent spirit during the period of Salazar s dictatorship, refusing to accept the office of Presidente de Rela o (chief justice) because it would have compromised his independence. He was fearless in his defence of Goans and Goan culture, protesting in the press against unfair sentences or offensive descriptions of Goans by Portuguese officials. Antonio Bernardo Bragan a Pereira died in Bangalore, where the family, who fought for Goa s liberation from Salazar s dictatorship, had taken refuge and had been living in exile since 1946.
Maria Aurora Couto has taught English literature in India, and has contributed to periodicals in India and England. She is the author of Goa: A Daughter s Story , published by Penguin (2004) and Graham Greene: On the Frontier-Politics and Religion in the Novels .
Ethnography of Goa, Daman and Diu
The intellectual and cultural efflorescence in Goa reached its apogee in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Antonio Bernardo de Bragan a Pereira was a product of this time, and Ethnography of Goa, Daman and Diu is an expression of the author s passionate interest in scholarship and research into various dimensions of Goan life. His intellectual curiosity and critical spirit led him to delve deep to understand the lan vital of the society of his ancestors and to catalogue the many dimensions of Goan life. In the book he describes the rituals, customs and manners of various castes and religions, their habitat, their artisanship, their environment and all aspects of Goa and Goan society.
Ethnography of Goa, Daman and Diu was published as a two-volume edition in 1940 in Portuguese. In making the second volume available to a larger readership, the publishers perform a dual role-of bringing this scholarly work to a new generation of readers and in a language that will be accessible. Its publication is a tribute to A.B. de Bragan a Pereira s passionate attachment to Goa and his pride in being a Goan.
Introduction
Ethnography as a science emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. Discarding the tendencies and fabulous tales of explorers and adventurers, and the misrepresentations of colonial perspectives, it relied on insight and empathy for a true description of the customs, manners and rites of the peoples of its study. Ethnography is at its best when experienced and written from inside the culture that is being researched-the ethnographer as one living with the people of his study, speaking their language and sharing their perceptions. Antonio Bernardo de Bragan a Pereira, the author of this book in Portuguese, succeeded to a great extent in meeting this rare criteria in his portrayal of Goan culture, its splendour, and its endearing tolerance and appreciation of the pluralisms of its society, comprehending every apparent inconsistency and peculiarity.
The cultural life of Goa, the manners and customs of Goans and the structure of their society provoke issues and questions which are of more than localized interest and significance. Descriptive accounts by travellers, missionaries and traders before the nineteenth century tended to dismiss the special features of Goan society as aberrations that did not conform to established patterns that were in vogue in the vast subcontinent of British India. The small enclave of Goa, Daman and Diu on the western coast of India, grandly called Estado da ndia , was all that remained of Portuguese-occupied territories when the British Empire in India was at its peak. British administrators had mapped and surveyed the almost boundless limits of their Indian empire and, in their gazetteers, they had, with professional thoroughness, classified the physical and human resources of the subcontinent in all its complexity and divisions-all done no doubt with the objective of more effectively administering this agglomeration of tribes, castes, classes and peoples. To them, the Portuguese colony of Goa, Daman and Diu presented a sorry spectacle. The East India Gazetteer of 1828 , purporting to contain particular descriptions of the empires, kingdoms, principalities, provinces, cities, towns, districts, fortresses, harbours, rivers and lakes, had this to say about Goa:
The once splendid and populous city of Goa is now a wilderness Goa was taken from the Hindu rajas of Vijayanagar by the Bahmani Mohammedan sovereign of the Deccan about ad 1469 and in 1510 was besieged and taken by Albuquerque [who] made it a capital of the Portuguese dominions in the East At present, excepting a very few of the highest classes, the great mass of Portuguese population are the spurious descendants of European settlers by native women and the numerous converts that have joined them, the last still retaining many pagan customs and predilections.
A degree of objectivity in descriptions of Goa was introduced by Jos Nicolau da Fonseca in Sketch of the City of Goa , written by authority of the British government and published in Bombay in 1878 in the Bombay Gazetteer and the Imperial Gazetteer. His sketch goes beyond Panjim, the capital of Goa, and the churches of Old Goa and does contain descriptions of customs and manners of the Goan people and its history from Puranic times. His description of classes and castes distinguishes Europeans from Eurasians and in turn from natives:
The natives are again subdivided into Christians and pagans. The former, who constitute about two-thirds of the entire population, are the descendants of Hindus converted to Christianity on the subjugation of the country by the Portuguese and can still trace the caste to which they originally belong.
Although well established among British and French scholars, anthropological studies were undertaken by Portuguese scholars fairly late. Initially, in the nineteenth century, Portuguese anthropologists worked, in the main, on making inventories of oral traditions, material culture and local or regional traditions in rural settings within Portugal. They were sent by the dictatorial regime of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar to overseas colonies from the 1930s. No Portuguese scholar, however, ever came to Goa until 1956 when Salazar sent the most eminent Portuguese geographer, Orlando Ribeiro, with a team to study Goan society. Till then, most of what had been published by the Portuguese government or ecclesiastical authorities related to matters of governance and details of proseletyzation, including detailed descriptions of conversions and the life of the missionaries themselves in Goa.
Ribeiro had visited most of the overseas Portuguese colonies. Rather ruefully he admits that he found Goa to be the least Portuguese in its cultural expressions, even less than Guin -Bissau, commenting that he found intelligent persons in Goa everywhere, with no trace of rudeness that was so common among the rural folk of Portugal. An independent spirit, he did not flinch from pointing out home truths. Goa, Ribeiro said, was only marginally influenced by Portugal. While there was strong evidence of Catholicism, the Portuguese language was not spoken by the common man-he had not heard Portuguese spoken on the streets. Nor did Ribeiro come across the kind of inculturation that Salazar propounded, except in a very small elite, but even here he found strong links with tradition. Clearly Ribeiro s investigations did not produce the kind of record that Salazar could accept. Salazar set aside the scientific report Ribeiro submitted, perhaps because it did not conform with the dictator s own vision of his colony. Proscribed by Salazar, Ribeiro s work, Goa em 1956: Relat rio ao Governo (Goa in 1956: Report to the Government), was only published after his death by Ribeiro s widow in 1999 during the commemoration of 500 years of Portuguese Discoveries. Antonio Bernardo de Bragan a Pereira, whose volumes on the ethnography of Goa, Daman and Diu were published much earlier than Ribeiro s, also clearly did not seek models within Portuguese scholarship at a time when the methodology of anthropology was complicit with the imperial state. (Portuguese social anthropology in its professional identity as it exists now is closely associated with political opposition to the authoritarian Salazar regime, known as Estado Novo, and came into its own only after 1974.)
While there were no models in Portugal for Goan scholars to emulate, they were exposed to French, German and British scholarship and hence began researching their own territory in terms of the