A fragment of Autobiography

By Selma Carvalho

On October 9, 2014, at a Dominic Winter auction, a Goan antiquarian made quiet history; not the sort which is immediately celebrated but whose significance grows with time, and will become particularly relevant when Goa decides to honour its greatest modernist artist with a museum. He purchased Souza’s original typed notes and two accompanying drawings, which were eventually published as Words and Lines (A Fragment of Autobiography)by Villiers Publications (1959).

The dribs and drabs which exist as commentary on Souza’s life is lamentable. Even more lamentable, is that ‘A Fragment of Autobiography’, is almost always taken as the starting point when reconstructing Souza. Autobiographical content is prone to all the licenses one takes, when writing about oneself and, a critical analysis, is essential when trying to make sense of an artist’s life.

On April 12, 1924, a smallish house on the hillocks between Arrarim and Sonarbhat of Saligao, groaned with the misery of Lilia-Maria’s birth pangs, and peeking his head into the world was Francis Newton Souza. Lilia-Maria Cecilia Antunes came from a family hovering between poverty and aspiration. Her mother, Leopoldinha Saldanha, widowed, took in lodgers, and one of her lodgers was Jose Victor Piedade de Souza, teaching at the nearby Mater Dei school.

Jose and Lilia, or Lily as she was known, became lovers, and possibly this had much to do with caste inhibitions, they became star-crossed lovers. In the early months of 1922, a twenty-three year old Jose and a nineteen year old Lilia got married.  Thanks to Souza’s biography, we remember his father’s family only as ‘chronic drunkards.’ Drunk or not, his grandfatherAntonio de Souza was a man of considerable merit. Originally from Siolim, he was the principal of a small school in Assolna, set up in 1893, by the Sociedade da Benevolencia e Instrucao.

Why had Souza condemned his grandparents as drunkards? Even before a close member of Souza’s family confirmed an estrangement between Lily and her husband’s family, it becomes fairly obvious upon examining Souza’s birth records. When on May 8, 1924, the family assembled at the Saligao Church, just as they had done fourteen months earlier for their daughter Zumera’s christening, what was glaringly noticeable was the absence of the Souza family. Not a single Souza is named godparent for either child. F N Souza’s maternal grandmother, Leopoldinha Saldanha, became his godmother.

According to Souza, his father died three months after his birth and his mother plunged into unimaginable despair when her eldest daughter, Zumera also died, a year later. ‘My mother, my grandmother, my aunts and all my relatives mourned bitterly,’ he wrote, and morbidly wished it was the boy, who had died instead. It is highly unlikely, in a Goan household, that they wished in earnest for the boy to have died, but his father’s death did have a detrimental effect on his mother; it left her destitute. The absence of a male figure gave rise to a complex relationship with his mother, which he raised to a form of divinity, alluding to it bordering on the unseemly. In the poem, ‘Mother of God’, he reflects on the relationship, writing ‘My body and mind took the shape of divinity but my act differed from the Mother-fucker Oedipus.’ Tragic loss of spouse replaced by a son, is a familiar mythological theme: the new replacing the old, winter and spring, death and resurrection, and Souza, a new comer to 1950s bohemian London, was in the business of creating myths.

Souza only hints at the abundance of women in childhood. Just how crowded had his life had been in those years? There was his uncle Cyril, studying to be a stenographer, but it was the women who loomed large; mother, grandmother (a fairly tall woman of ‘easy going’ disposition) and three aunts -Blanche, Matti and Bridgit. Elsewhere, Souza shows his frustration with this gaggle of women, when he writes, ‘there was nothing for me to do even among the women in Goa.’

‘Shortly after my sister’s death, I had a severe attack of smallpox,’ Souza wrote. This attack would give rise to the charming but entirely apocryphal story surrounding his name. The story goes that in childhood, a bout of smallpox nearly killed Souza, and his mother having propitiated St. Francis Xavier’s goodwill in saving her child, added Francis to his name. There is little doubt that the poxscarred him, as years later, he would sketch a self-portrait depicting those hollow pox marks as tiny crosses. But the name, Francisco was already on Souza’s baptismal records just days after his birth. It runs in the family, as in his paternal grandfather’s name, Antonio Francisco de Souza.

To his credit, Souza tried to set the record straight in a 1994 interview with his then mistress Srimati Lal, admitting that Francis was always on his birth certificate, but by then the public had become so enamoured with the almost biblical image of a desperate child, clinging to his mother, saved by divine intervention, that this clarification gained little traction. Souza went to his grave with the story intact. Christopher Wood wrote an eulogy in the Guardian insisting that it was smallpox which earned Souza the name of Goa’s most revered saint. (ENDS)


Source: The Goan, Published November 22, 2014

Indian penal system has failed to detect nationality law violators

By Teotonio R. de Souza

Formerly known as the Estado da Índia,  Goa  was regarded as an integral part of Portugal (as distinct from a colony) under Portugal’s Constitutional Amendment  of 1951. Earlier it was colony, under tutelage of a Ministry for Colonies. This ministry was later renamed as Ministry of Overseas Territories (Ministério do Ultramar).  This change was put in place when Portugal was asked by the UN General Assembly to provide a list of its colonies for the purpose of mandating its self-determination in keeping with the UN Charter. http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter1.shtml

On 19 December 1961 India invaded and annexed the territory. The annexation was not recognized by Portugal and by the United Nations until 1975, until Portugal re-established diplomatic relations with India in 1975. The recognition of Indian sovereignty over Goa was backdated to 19 December 1961. Portuguese nationality law allows therefore those who were Portuguese citizens connected with Goa before 1961 to retain Portuguese nationality, while the acquisition of Indian citizenship was determined to be non-voluntary at the time of Goa’s annexation by India.

Anyone interested in the ongoing debate about “foreign” legislators in Goa, should not fail to read carefully the Portuguese Nationality Law 37/81, of October 3 and its amendment by Organic Law 2/2006, of April 17 [ http://bit.ly/1iRXtRP ].   The article 28 of this law could benefit those who acquired Portuguese nationality and continue residing in Goa, but if Indian law considers its nationality as automatically revoked by the acquisition of any other nationality, its application seems to stand nullified.  The Article 28  refers  to Conflicts of foreign nationalities, and states that In positive conflicts of two or more foreign nationalities relevant is only the nationality of the State in whose territory the person has his or her habitual residence, or otherwise the nationality of the State with which he or she maintains a closer connection.

Obviously, Portuguese nationality law seeks to respect rights and wishes of its citizens, both present and the past ones through jus sanguinis, in cases where the jus soli  may have ceased to justify, as in the case of  Goa after the Indian occupation, legally recognized by mutual accord. It is now the exclusive responsibility of the Indian post-colonial authorities in Goa to enforce its laws. Penal laws are not moral laws, and the Goans may wish to circumvent them to suit their interests, unless they are effectively prevented from doing so.

What has failed apparently is the Indian penal system in its effectiveness to detect the violators of the Indian nationality law. In extreme cases, countries like the USA announce from time to time attractive capitation prizes to those who willing to denounce wanted “criminals”.  In the absence of a parallel procedure in India, Goa had to wait till very recently for other incentives to denunciations. These came from the political rivals who lost in the elections for the legislative assembly.  Now that the precedent has been set, the panchayat network could activate closer residential informants. We may be close to watching new developments.

To conclude, we might ask if Portugal has no legal obligation towards its citizens abroad, including those in Goa. Perhaps, it may be forced to rise to the occasion, if it finds over 40,000 (suggested to be concentrated in Salcete) dormant Portuguese nationals, many of them occupying  responsible public offices, forced to seek shelter in  Portugal, after being ferreted out by the Indian authorities.

A new wave of “retornados” may come as a shock to Portugal reeling under economic crisis. It is presently exporting nearly 10,000 citizens every month according to some public media reports.  Only then Portugal may cry out for the helping hand of India to regulate seriously its citizenship offer to Goa.  And Lusophile Goans may learn to stop living in post-colonial Goa with colonial minds. (ENDS)


Source: The Goan, Published November 30, 2013

How did the Goan migrant go from humble seafarer to clerical backbone of the British Empire?

By Selma Carvalho

'There is no phenomenon more permanent in the history of mankind than the migration of men from place to place in quest of easier labour and more abundant means of subsistence.’ An editor at The Times of London wrote that in 1864, when Europeans were heading en masse to North America. The reason why human beings migrate almost invariably boils down to simple economics. Yet more fascinating are the forces that enable and, indeed, empower certain societies to be particularly migratory, and create a mindset that lends itself to migration.

 

Goa is a unique laboratory in which to study migration. The Christian community of Goa is almost entirely migration-driven, a phenomenon expressed through its folkloric songs and literature. The Hindu community, on the other hand, until recently migrated only to nearby states to strengthen trade links – and, in earlier times, to escape religious persecution by the Portuguese, who conquered Goa in 1510 and embarked on an evangelising mission. Goa today is said to have one of the most dispersed diasporas in the world, predominantly settled in Canada, UK and the Gulf countries, though clusters can be found in regions as remote as the west coast of Africa, Iceland and Fiji. Interestingly, emigration is still skewed in favour of Catholic Goans, mostly from the south of Goa. Catholicism and a Western lifestyle facilitates an almost seamless assimilation into European and North American societies. The diaspora is now into its third and fourth generation in the UK and already into its second generation in Canada.

 

By the dawn of the 20th century, Goa had become a bon vivant, living on borrowed money. According to British records from 1908, Goa had imports of 6.1 million rupees, as against exports of less than 2.2 million. For a tiny colony that could boast of no more substantive exports than dried fish, betel nut, salt, manure, mango and small amounts of manganese, it nonetheless imported large quantities of wine, butter, silk, sugar, coffee, perfume and tobacco. But while a few Goans sat in the grandeur of chandeliered reception halls nursing an intellectual ennui, for vast sections of this agrarian society it was a very modest life. The lack of infrastructure and industry meant there were few employment opportunities besides basic trades such as tailoring, carpentry, masonry and baking.

 

By god and sea
What forces shape a society’s collective psyche? Among Goan Catholics, the most powerful agent is their religion. By the 1800s, the clergy in Goa was almost entirely made up of native Goans dominated by, curiously enough, the upper tiers of a hierarchical system inherited from the former Hindu caste-based structures of power. Although this might appear paradoxical, it was not particularly different from what prevailed in Europe, where the upper echelons of the Catholic Church were filled with sons of the nobility.

 

But however conservative the machinery of the Church was in upholding an inequitable social order, the central tenet of this religion was equity in the eyes of a monotheistic god. A relationship with a personal god meant the self was of the utmost importance, and a profound understanding of free will became part of the collective psyche. Christianity broke the stranglehold of the communal. Community would continue to be important; but at a very critical level the Goan understood the elevation of the individual above that of the collective, and this understanding placed him in a favourable position. The freedom led him to barter his services as he saw fit and enhanced his market value. The genesis of the wider Goan diaspora – the one that eventually sailed to Africa, the arid deserts of the Gulf and the bitter cold of England – belongs to that much caricatured Goan, the seaman, known in Goa as tarvotti (from the Sanskrit-Konkani word tarun, meaning boat). It gradually became apparent to the hitherto land-bound agrarian Goan that it was possible to travel long distances and return enriched by the experience. Men were no longer manacled to the existence into which they were born; rather, the sense of fatalism that accompanies agrarian societies subject to nature’s temperaments was dissipating, infused by the confidence of the seaman.

 

In 1916, a memorandum prepared by the British Ministry of Munitions states its intent to import Indian labour into Britain to help with the World War I effort. The only problem was, ‘When India is under consideration, [we have] always to reckon with the caste question but the following races which supply men to the engineering trades are likely to be available without serious religious and social difficulties.’ These ‘races’ included Parsees, Muslims and Goans, the last of which were deemed to be good ‘fitters and turners’, and of which there were at the time about 5000 to 6000 employed in railway workshops and dockyards in British India.

 

It is the expansion of the British Empire and its ascendancy as a sea power that mirrors the trajectory of Goan migration. Young, able-bodied men who came of age around the late 1800s found lucrative employment on board British India ships plying from Calcutta and Bombay round the Cape of Good Hope to Europe, and then setting sail again from Southampton to the Americas.

 

Ship manifests show that a Goan sailor by the name of C D Castelino, working on board the S S Croydon as a cook, landed in San Francisco in 1911. By the 1920s, Goans had become veteran seamen, having docked in far-flung ports and experienced the dangers and uncertainties of life at sea. Two of them, Domingos de Souza and Pedro Goenxende, arrived in Havana, Cuba, in June 1927, having set sail from Calcutta on board the S S Matoppo. (Domingo was perhaps the senior seafarer, for while his wage was GBP 5.12 per month, Pedro’s was just GBP 2.12, wages being tied to type of service and, more importantly, length of service.) Both men were jailed in Havana for some debatable infraction and discharged from their employment, abandoned by their shipmaster in Havana with nothing but a sea chest and a tin box between them. Eventually, the tarvottis were repatriated to Goa, after deducting their ‘expenses’ from wages due.

 

However precarious was life with the sea as an unpredictable mistress, it was an existence rife with excitement and possibility. The Goan had inadvertently become an intrepid explorer in his own right. His expeditions, unlike those of European explorers, were not funded by the government but rather by necessity and his own gumption. The English explorers Richard F Burton and Captain Hanning Speke had with them two Goans, Valentine and Caetano, when they set out on their second expedition into the interior of Central Africa in 1856. Although Burton typically describes the Goans as receiving exorbitant wages for doing a bit of everything and nothing well, he does commend Valentino for learning the Kiswahili language quickly, and for being able to read the chronometer and thermometer. Caetano, who suffered terrible fevers and near insanity from epileptic fits, was nonetheless a courageous man, who thought nothing of diving into crocodile-infested waters or throwing himself into the middle of a rowdy crowd.

 

A whole class of Goans previously struggling on the lower economic and social rungs of society found the means to improve their lot in life. Meanwhile, British captains and officers refused to sail without their favourite Goan butlers. These seafarers returned home with larger-than-life stories of strange sightings at sea, smooth sails and storms, of jungles and cities, some embellished beyond recognition. This generated in humble Goans an even deeper desire to travel beyond the confines of their villages, and engage in a beckoning world that seemed endlessly wide and open.

 

Clifford Pereira, a scholar of historical geography has established that Goan sailors settled around London’s dockland areas. There is every possibility, he says, that some of those who plied the busy route between Bombay and Zanzibar (and onwards) settled around Zanzibar port, operating liquor shops and ice factories. Indeed, wherever a port of call gained prominence, fledging Goan communities could be found, be it in Mozambique and Mombasa on the east coast of Africa or Cabo Verde on the west coast. These pioneering souls laid the foundation for what would become the worldwide diaspora. A 1937 report compiled by the British Royal Navy offers insight into just how valuable Goans had become as seamen. ‘It has long been recognised that the Goans as a race are particularly well adapted to these trades [stewards and cooks],’ it states, ‘and are generally accepted as being more efficient than other Indian races. A further advantage is that, being Christians, no religious difficulties arise in regard to handling food and wine.’

 

In service of empire
There is a common perception that it was Goa’s educated middle class that was prone to migration. But anecdotal evidence suggests that it was initially tailors, cooks and carpenters that travelled on to East Africa – as evidenced by the Saint Francis Xavier Goan Tailors Society, formed in Mombasa as early as 1905. The second phase of out-migration to Africa was from the literate class, not necessarily college-educated but with enough schooling to be adept at clerical and administrative jobs. They applied for jobs as clerks in the administration of the railways being built from the interiors of Uganda to the port of Mombasa on the east coast of Kenya. At least initially, the railway proved to be a bad investment, and the colonisation of Kenya by the British was in part to make the railway financially viable. As Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika (now Tanzania) came under British control, Goans thronged the British Civil Services. A 1921 census puts the number of Goans in Kenya at 2000; a 1931 census puts the count in Tanganyika at 1722.

 

By 1900, a Goan cook could hope to earn between GBP 2 and 3 per month, commanding twice the rate of his African counterpart. By 1920, Goan clerks were earning between GBP 17 and 30 per month in East Africa. Indeed, such clerks were so numerous in the administration of the British Empire in East Africa that public opinion back in England eventually enquired as to why so many ‘Portuguese nationals’ were needed in the services of the empire. But such was their fondness for Goans that district officers in remote outposts relied almost entirely on them, often leaving the running of the offices in their hands when they were out on tour. This gave rise to the saying, ‘The keys of all the safes in East Africa are in the hands of the Goans.’

 

The British relationship with Goans was ambivalent; subjecting them to all the prejudice they felt towards non-white populations. They never absolved Goans from the indignity of residential segregation, segregated public washrooms and the tacit prohibition against miscegenation and a ceiling on upward mobility on the work-front. Yet the British valued Goans tremendously, forming relationships based on genuine mutual respect and trust. They were unfailingly described by British colonial officers as the backbone of the Civil Services, people of ‘high quality’, meticulous in their work and devotedly loyal to the Empire.

 

The Goan became a prominent member of colonial Africa, not through a process of legislative power but rather through a partnership based on work and social contacts. As the relationship grew, Goans inevitably became intermediaries between the British and the indigenous populations in many African colonies, in a world where upholding racial hegemony required unequal partners. Goans were considered Portuguese nationals, and as such distinct from Indians. For purposes of census records, tax and revenue collection and government correspondence, they were diligently accorded a separate notation.

The Catholic Goan often comes in for criticism for being so intensely emigration driven that it creates a vacuum back in Goa. But though we might judge the motives of those who move away from the motherland, at another level we all understand that primal need in human beings to migrate for survival and sustenance. (ENDS)

 

 

Selma Carvalho is a writer based in London.

 

Source: Himal, Issue: December 2010

Symphony in Blues

Symphony in Blues
by Vivek Menezes


June 11th 2010, and a bright midsummer evening in Moscow. We’re in one of the iconic buildings of the Russian capital, the opulent Hall of Columns, with its spectacular crystal chandeliers ablaze with light for Russia Day, that country’s equivalent of the American 4th of July. This year, there’s more reason to celebrate – it’s the finale of the Festival of the World’s Symphony Orchestra’s and the audience of tuxedoed sophisticates is hushed, rapt with attention and focused on the familiar music ringing in their ears.

It’s Beethoven’s ultimate masterpiece, the 9th Symphony, so central to music history that the original format of the compact disc was expanded from 10cm to 12cm specifically to fit it. The audience sighs almost imperceptibly when the ‘Ode to Joy’ rings out, the rousing chorus on which the official Anthem of Europe is played. It’s undoubtedly the most familiar and famous single piece of music ever written.

But zoom in closer, and you realize there is something decidedly unusal about this symphony orchestra that’s deep into Beethoven’s magnum opus. They’re not Russians, or Germans. In fact, they’re not from any of the cultures that sustain western music, or even from the Far East which has embraced it so successfully in recent generations. In fact, we are looking on at the international debut of the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI), a four-year-old operation that’s sponsored by the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai, the “fulfillment of a dream” of Khushroo Suntook, the NCPA chairman.

“I grew up listening to the ‘Ode to Joy’, and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony” smiles Ashley Rego, a 25-year-old violinist who has been with the SOI since its inception. “Moscow is known for producing the best string players in the world, so playing there is just a great honour.” Rego is one of several Goans who play full-time for the SOI, but a close look at the rest of the players reveals that Indians constitute just a handful of 109 members. In fact, the SOI is a grab-bag of musicians from 14 different countries, with a particularly large contingent representing Kazakhstan, the home country of the SOI’s music director, Marat Bisengaliev.

The Kazakh came to the attention of Suntook in London, where he impressed the NCPA official at a concert he happened to attend. He was invited to visit Mumbai with his orchestra, and eventually to set up the SOI in 2006. When this ambitious new venture was launched, there were only 10 Indians recruited to play in a crowd of musicians from the ex-Soviet Union. After four years, there are now 15 Indian regular players, so a bit more than ten per cent of the total contingent, but still a considerable distance from constituting a “national” orchestra worth the name.

The Moscow concert does constitute a milestone for the SOI, and bodes well for the future development of a classical music culture in the subcontinent But forgotten in all the hoopla about this “pioneering Indian orchestra” is that it comes after long decades of purposeful stifling of western classical music in India, and a full 52 years after the first proper symphony orchestra in India was founded, and then disbanded. What’s more, the Indian Symphony Orchestra that performed several times in 1951 and 1952 under the baton of the visionary Anthony Gonsalves was constituted entirely of Indians, and even played a repertoire of “raga-based symphonies” that remains completely unique in the history of western classical music.

**

Most people don’t realize that so-called “western music” was being played by Indians in India, and already well-established hundreds of years before the sitar was invented, or tablas made an appearance in what would much later become enshrined as Hindustani music. Wrong-headed nationalists like to trump the credentials of the music that emerged from post-Mughal north India as somehow more “Indian” than, say, a violin concerto. It’s an absurd and ahistorical argument, completely ignorant of the history of India’s western coastline.

For thousands of years, the Konkan and Malabar coasts have been engaged in trade and cultural exchange across the Arabian Sea. Every discrete trading community from the Meditteranean all the way down the East African coastline came and went from the ports of this spice coast. Christianity had established permanent roots in India before it arrived in Europe, there were significant Christian communities all along the Konkan and Malabar coastline many centuries before England, Spain or Portugal even saw their first convert.

So there must have been so-called “western” music played in this part of India long before Alfonso da Albuquerque seized Goa in 1510 (many years before the first Mughal set foot in India). However, it is the spate of church-building that he set off that really gave the music Indian roots. The Portuguese proved indifferent to most kinds of education, for themselves and for their subjects as well. However, they did see a need for many musicians to play church music in the wake of the coerced conversions that created hundreds of thousands of Konkani Catholics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Within months of his conquest of Goa, Albuquerque was already beseeching the King of Portugal to furnish organs for the churches that were coming up at full speed all over the new Estado da India. Within a generation, western instruments were rooted in Konkan catholic practice, church services were accompanied by the same mix of instruments as Europe: cornettos, violas, harpsichords.

By the seventeenth century, the native Goan’s expertise in church music had already become legendary. In 1683, the Italian traveler Sebastiani attended a mass in the Basilica of Bom Jesus, and marveled “it was celebrated by seven choirs with the sweetest instrumental interludes. I felt I was in Rome. I could not believe how proficient these Canarese are in this music, how well they perform it, and with what facility.”

The centrality of music to the distinctly Goan mode of churchgoing was underlined by an historic 17th century decree by the Vatican. Rome declared that unlike the rest of the entire world, only the diocese of Goa would be allowed to use instruments (violin, clarinet and bass were specifically named) in their religious ceremonies which commemorated the three days of great mourning that culminate in Easter Sunday. These instruments and their practice had become that ingrained in the Goan way of life – a full hundred years before the first sitar is recorded to make an appearance in history.

The musical history of the Goans was again dramatically influenced in another direction when the British occupied the territory during the Napoleonic Wars that culminated in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. In that period, the British were delighted to encounter the Goans. They had no dietary taboos, so many became cooks to the colonialists. They were familiar with western clothing, so many became tailors across the Empire. And there were very many who could play western instruments, so thousands of men picked up their violins and trumpets, learned to play ‘God Save the Queen’, and trooped out of Goa to become professional musicians in Rangoon and Karachi, Aden and Singapore and all across the British Empire even to London’s famous Ritz Hotel (where a Goan pianist still tinkles away at teatime each Sunday).

Via the prism of this history, it seems extremely ironic that the Symphony Orchestra of India in 2010 has just a handful of Indian musicians scattered among a host of foreigners. It didn’t have to come to this – there was a Goan orchestra playing at the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai as far back as 1916 and another in the 20’s called the Bombay Chamber Orchestra (led by the German, Edward Behr) which received huge acclaim from foreign visitors. Later, Dominic Pereira became the concertmaster of another promising fledgling orchestra full of Goans, the Bombay Philharmonic. Without interference, these musical shoots would have certainly flowered into a first-rate indigenous classical orchestra. But politics stifled the opportunity, and generation after generation of piano and violin and trumpet players from India were silenced, or forced to migrate to the West.

Some became subsumed into Bollywood. The Bandra-based editor and brilliant researcher, Naresh Fernandes has brought that period to life in a series of landmark essays. He writes, “until the 1980’s, India had no pop music save for Hindi film songs. Millions memorized and hummed the compositions of C. Ramachandra. Shankar and Jaikishan, Laxmikant and Pyarelal and SD Burman, whose names rolled by in large letters at the beginning of the movies. But the Sound of India was actually created by Goan musicians, men whose names flickered by in small type under the designation “arranger”. It’s clear. The Hindi film classics that resound across the subcontinent and in Indian homes around the world wouldn’t have been made without Goans.”

The last serious attempt to form an indigenous orchestra in India was also the most promising. It came from this world of Goans in Hindi cinema, the brainchild of Anthony Gonsalves, revered teacher of a generation of Bollywood composers, whose name was later immortalized in ‘Amar Akbar Anthony’ by his grateful student, Pyarelal.

Gonsalves, an acknowledged musical genius, developed an abiding love for Raga-based music. “It struck me very hard in my heart and mind,” he is reported to have said. He became impassioned with creating symphonic music from ragas, and wrote several pioneering pieces of music in this vein including ‘Sonatina Indiana’ and ‘Concerto in Raag Sarang’. In 1958, Gonsalves paid all the bills to constitute 110 musicians into the Indian Symphony Orchestra. They made their debut in the quadrangle of St. Xaviers College in South Bombay.

The photographs from that day are extremely impressive, but also heart-breaking when seen in hindsight. 110 beautifully dressed Indian musicians playing symphonic music with tremendous gusto, with an impossibly young-looking Lata Mangueshkar and Manna Dey singing along with great intensity. Standing majestically atop his lectern, baton in action, Gonsalves is poised and leonine. He looks very very happy.

But right there is where the story ends, and a giant door was slammed on the future of symphonic music in India. Idiotic nationalistic paranoia held that Goan musicians like Gonsalves were suspect because they had “foreign names” and played “foreign music.” Walt Disney came calling for this brilliant composer and asked him to score a movie for them with Indian governmental involvement. But ministerial clearance never came: the I&B minister told the shocked young Goan point-blank, “Christian musicians cannot represent India.”

Anthony Gonsalves was crushed, and bewildered by this questioning of his Indianness. He disbanded his orchestra, and went abroad for a lost decade before returning to retirement in total isolation in a Goan village by the sea. His unique raga-based symphonies have never been performed again, and the musicians in his orchestra scattered into obscurity. One day, his symphonies are certain to be rediscovered, championed as great pioneering works, and played in India, perhaps even by Bisengaliev and his crew of Kazakhs and other nationalities in the SOI.

**

It was a combination of historical ignorance, juvenile vindictiveness and cultural insecurity that killed off Anthony Gonsalves’s brave attempt to root symphonies in the Indian musical lexicon, and the same forced conspired to exert the absurd blanket ban on all imports of western musical instruments that held sway for a sold 40 years, before being relaxed in 1995. “The import restrictions severely hampered the growth of music in this country,” says Christopher Gomes, the managing partner of Furtado’s Music, which has remained in the vanguard of music education in India since 1865, and is by far the largest distributor of imported instruments in the country, with 15 showrooms and outlets from Mangalore to Nagaland.

“Demand for the music never went away. There were always many students who wanted to play the piano or violin,” Gomes says, “but there simply weren’t enough instruments remaining after 1947 to allow the music to spread naturally Since the rules began tio change in 1995, he says the demand has rapidly accelerated with each passing year, “liberalization has meant that supply can start to catch up to demand, and now it’s obvious that this music has a very bright future in India.”

Just a few days before the SOI performed in Moscow, Furtado’s joined with the NCPA to organize the John Gomes Memorial All India Piano Competition (named after his father) which was judged by two eminent international pianists, the Canadian Paul Stewart and the Vienna-based Goan, Marialena Fernandes. Gomes says “Paul and Marialena were both really impressed by the young talent that’s now beginning to come out of India. It’s significantly better than just a few years ago. Now we’re seeing that young people envision their future in music. It’s only going to get better from here. My company is going to support these positive developments in every way that we can.”

Like Marialena Fernandes, the London-based soprano Patricia Rozario is another Bombay-born musical prodigy with Goan roots. Rozario persevered to study western classical music in the difficult days of the instrument ban, and eventually made her way to the Guildhall School of Music where she excelled, winning a Gold medal and many other prizes. She’s now established as one of the leading operatic singers in the UK, with a unique style (she often wears a sari on stage) that has inspired a host of the best contemporary composers to write works especially for her. With Sir John Tavener, it has become a unique collaboration - he has written more than thirty pieces of music exclusively for Rozario to bring to life.

In 2009, Rozario decided to nourish her roots. Along with her husband, the pianist Mark Troop, she toured Mumbai, Delhi, Pune and Goa to identify young singers with potential. Rozario spent days in auditions, listening to scores of singers, and picked out those who could benefit from her mentoring, and perhaps make it to an international standard. She agrees that “there is a great deal of promising talent in India now. And there is also much more interest in this kind of music, which can only grow with exposure.” Rozario she promises to return each year to continue training singers, and has also promised to help them seek training abroad when merited.

**

Across the subcontinent, in the hillside cities and towns of Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland, there’s another hotbed of vocal talent that’s quietly developing to critical mass, and making the classical music world sit up and pay attention. Like Goa, the roots of this movement can be traced back to the church.

The North-East’s tryst with Christianity tracks back to the rainy June day that the paradoxical figure of Thomas Jones walked into Cherrapunjee, and immediately set Khasi history on its ear. A carpenter’s son from Wales, Jones was an avowed evangelist, but didn’t actually convert a single person while he was in India, and was eventually kicked out of his own church for conduct “derogatory to the character and calling of a missionary.” Yet, on the 150th anniversary of his death (in 1991), more than 250,000 Khasi Presbyterians gathered to celebrate his life. Meanwhile his “mother church” back in Wales boasted less than 5000 adherents in the whole country.

Thomas Jones distinguished himself – and aggravated colonial authorities– by tirelessly dedicating himself to the material improvement of the Khasis. He taught them modern carpentry. He taught them accounting. He taught them how to compute their almanac to the seven-day week. Above all, Jones learned the unwritten Khasi language and transcribed it into Roman script (with Welsh orthography!) All the tribes of the North –East believe Jones saved the Khasi language – and culture - from certain extinction. And so they repaid the Welshman by joining his church in droves. The next 100 years saw the Khasis, Garos, the Mizos and Nagas turn to Christianity in a huge wave, and right alongside the religion came the music.

The biggest city of the North East, Shillong has been called “India’s rock capital” for many years, and famously comes to a near-standstill every 24th of May when the local legend, and Khasi icon, Lou Majaw celebrates Bob Dylan’s birthday. But the choral tradition of the city is still virtually unknown, even though the Shillong Chamber Choir has toured all over the world, and won a series of prestigious awards. Right alongside Neil Nongkynrih’s sophisticated ensemble are literally thousands of other wonderful singers all across the region who have gone unrecognized up to now. All across the North-East, there are now serious choirs, which feature incredible singers with world-class talent. With a little recognition and support, the future could be limitlessly bright.

Earlier this year, the whole region saw what could lie ahead when the young Naga singer, Sentirenla Lucia Panicker was awarded the highest grade of her graduating class at the Berklee College of Music, the finest institution of its kind in the USA, and brought the audience at her graduation to its feet with a soul-stirring vocal performance. She intends on returning to Nagaland, to pass on what she’s learned to another generation. Without the kind of interference and meddling that destroyed the best hopes of generations that came before her, it is young musicians with her kind of drive who signify a hopeful future for serious music in India, and allow us to dream of a day when the Symphony Orchestra of India actually has more than a handful of Indians in it. (ENDS)


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An edited version of this article was published in the July 2010
edition of the Himal Magazine
http://www.himalmag.com/Indigenous-symphonies_nw4600.html

Through the Looking Glass: Art Appreciation 101

Through the Looking Glass
Art Appreciation 101

Margaret Mascarenhas

I’m filling in for abstract artist and art critic Swatee Kotwal who is on leave this month, with a subject she and I have been discussing for some time: what differentiates good art from bad art? What is the criteria? Who decides?

In 1995, Keio University professor Shigeru Watanabe, and two colleagues published a paper showing that pigeons could learn to distinguish between Picasso paintings and Monets – a study that earned him a Nobel prize. More recently, he trained pigeons in art appreciation, teaching them to differentiate between 'good' paintings and 'bad' paintings, using colour, texture and pattern cues to predefine an aesthetic set of values. In the study, watercolour and pastel paintings by children were first categorised by a panel as either 'good' or 'bad'. The pigeons were put into a holding area where they could view a computer monitor displaying the images, and taught to recognise pre-selected 'good' art through food rewards. Recognising 'bad' art was not rewarded. The birds were then shown a combination of new and old, 'good' and 'bad' painting images. According to Watanabe, “The results suggest that the pigeons used both colour and pattern cues for the discrimination and show that non-human animals, such as pigeons, can be trained to discriminate abstract visual stimuli, such as pictures and may also have the ability to learn the concept of ‘beauty’ as defined by humans.”

The idea that your children could be learning art appreciation from pigeons is surely a disturbing one, but these next stories turn the whole raison d’etre of art criticism on its head.

In 2005, the following news item appeared in The Australian:

“MORITZBURG, Saxony: A German art expert was fooled into believing a painting done by a chimpanzee was the work of a master. The director of the State Art Museum of Moritzburg in Saxony-Anhalt, Katja Schneider, suggested the painting was by the Guggenheim Prize-winning artist Ernst Wilhelm Nay. ‘It looks like an Ernst Wilhelm Nay. He was famous for using such blotches of colour,’ Dr Schneider confidently asserted.”

It turns out the painting was actually the work of Banghi, a 31-year-old female chimp at the local zoo. But this wasn’t the first time the hallowed practitioners of art criticism were comically exposed as emperors with no clothes. The most notorious case occurred in 1964 when Ake Axelsson, a Swedish newspaperman from the Göteborgs-Tidningen, installed several paintings at the Gallerie Christinae, claiming they were the oeuvre of avant-garde artist Pierre Brassau. Almost immediately the work began to draw critical attention. Critic Rolf Anderberg wrote this eulogy: "Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer." (Time.com) Pierre Brassau turned out to be a four-year-old chimp named Peter from the local zoo.

Excuse me while I roll my eyes and laugh hysterically.

Toward the end of his life Picasso was putting his name on ashtrays, a number of which were proudly collected by Richard Attenborough. But is it art?

The infamously subversive Marcel Duchamp, as Kotwal wrote in a previous column, initiated the use of “ready-mades” in his art installations, the best known of which was a prank submission of a urinal called “Fountain,” under the pseudonym R Mutt. In response to this article and the pictorial depiction of “Fountain”, one horrified reader heatedly objected to the publishing of such an image, deeming it inappropriate for family viewing. Though this image is one of the most well-known in modern art, and though the traumatised reader entirely missed the point of the article, which was to draw attention to the bizarre arbitrariness of critics who would define such work as “art”, his visceral response to the visual representation exemplifies my own contention: that occasionally the ordinary viewer, without benefit of an education in art history or aesthetics, can be the more reliable critic. (Though I will not endorse the notion that the right to critique includes the right to suppress, as we have seen in the case of MF Husain)

What is art? And what is the role of an art critic?

I was taught, and still am inclined to generally accept the view, that fine art (like literature) is essentially a deliberate arrangement of elements in ways that affect emotions, senses, perspectives, in ways that provide a new insight and/or experience, and in ways that transcend the limitations of the chosen medium and strike a universal chord. To elaborate, I would say that for something to be called art (or literature), it should have goals besides pure self-expression, and should do at least one, but preferably some or all, of the following through the use of skills and ability in handling the building blocks :

• communicate ideas

• explore the nature of perception

• generate strong emotion

• stimulate insight

• possess an aesthetic value

• possess a cognitive value

• facilitate intuitive rather than rational understanding of something

What then to make of Damien Hirst? Perhaps the most recognised bad-boy in the global artist community, his celebrity is entirely dependent, not on any traditionally recognised set of manual or even intellectual skills, but on his capacity to generate shocking and provocative concepts—concepts, which are in fact executed by a swarm of employed artisans, a practice now being employed by a number of our own home-grown artists of repute. Add to that the blurring of the line between artist, curator, gallery owner, collector, auction house, and critic, and the nexus between all, some of whom play two or three of these roles simultaneously and quite actively.

Confused?

If we define the role of art criticism as defining a rationale for art appreciation, making art accessible, and highlighting emerging talent, this blurring of the line can be dangerous, in a way that undermines artists, corrupts the creative process, and hoodwinks the public. It is not a secret that international elite coteries comprised of established artists, curators, collectors, gallery owners, auctioneers, and critics exist, whose primary objective has less to do with aesthetics or the discovery of emerging talent and its nurturing, and more to do with helping each other to stay on top of a frighteningly recessive market. In such a market turf war it is no wonder so many nay-sayers and newcomers are either summarily ignored or beaten back with sticks.

Of course, there is nothing new about art becoming the cultural capital of the wealthy, both as status symbol and commodity. And to be fair, most art education programmes and private museums are gifts to the public domain by the super-rich. Traditionally artists have required the patronage of the elite in order to work, which of course has generally been subject to certain biases, tastes and preferences of whomever is paying. But lately patronage by the big names in the international art world has assumed a circling shark quality. A number of shark observers have applauded New York-based Tino Sehgal’s successful manoeuvre to take the “ownership” of art away from the purchaser, by creating performance artworks that can be sold at phenomenal prices but leave nothing behind, not even a receipt, as a veritable coup d’etat. But though he has managed to raise his personal bank balance in an ingenious way, he hasn’t exactly contributed in any way to the democratization of art, the mantra of the street artist.

Closer to home, an especially depressing development for the emerging artist and ordinary viewer alike is the burgeoning of facile “art” critics with neither the credentials or the appropriate analytic ability, much less the honesty to actually “critique”, in the Indian press. In one of his recent blogs, Abhay Maskara, collector and owner of an up-and-coming gallery in Mumbai, ridicules in particular the latest propensity for listing “top artists” in the media. He says, and I agree with him:

“The real danger of these prophecies is that the reading public is left with too many ‘invisible gaps’ to fill and s/he is never really sure of why the artists selected actually deserve a place on some infamous list that has been thrust in their face.(sic) I think ‘list-makers’ have a certain kind of responsibility to articulate more clearly the criteria (as loose as it may be) that informs any such selection… Throwing a list of names together and seasoning it with one example each from a variety of sub-categories such as ‘modern artists’, ‘contemporary artists’, ‘women artists’, ‘diasporic artists’, ‘video-artist’, ‘performance artist’. ‘curator-artists’ may be convenient but it is certainly not convincing. Even if one were to condone the generation of such lists and look for parallel examples from the world of music or cinema, we will see that even a ‘greatest hits’ chartbuster or a box office generated ‘top films’ blockbusters is based on some logic that is not gravity defying.”

We shouldn’t actually rely on the event pages of the daily news for informing ourselves about art. And newsmedia that truly want to inform the reading public, as opposed to merely titillate, should hire art writers who actually know what they are talking about, or at the very least are prepared to do their homework. As for the general public, unless buying exclusively for investment purposes, I would say, take a class, visit galleries, read art books and art magazines, and even top ten lists, if you so choose. But when you buy, always choose an artwork that moves you, even if you’ve never heard of the artist before.  (ENDS)

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First published in Goa Today, Goa - April 2010