Book Review: Goa Travels- Being the accounts of travellers from the 16th to the 21st century

Book: Goa Travels: Being the accounts of travellers from the 16th to the 21st century

Author: Manohar Shetty

Publisher: Rupa & Co

Pages: 324

Price: Rs250

When it was published in 1851, Goa and the Blue Mountains immediately courted controversy. Sir Richard Burton's inglorious tales of deceitful, treacherous black Christians with a fondness for drink and wife-beating, a race "decidedly the lowest in the scale of civilised humanity", was panned by reviewers. The Bombay Quarterly dismissed it as doing "violence to good taste" and The Calcutta Review felt that there was so much to repel and even to disgust that they "eventually threw it aside". An indignant Burton pointed to the "ignorance crasse which besets the mind of the home-reader". And here was the crux of the matter; while Empire stretched across oceans, the audiences at home rarely travelled past the Adriatic sea, beyond which lay expanses occupied by Turks, heathens and barbarians. These much sought-after travelogues became their window into the alien lives of unknown people.

An extract from Burton's Goa and the Blue Mountains is part of a newly-released anthology of travelogues, concisely edited by acclaimed poet and writer Manohar Shetty, going back, as the title informs, to the 16th century. The anthology begins with an extract from interpreter, writer and influential political intermediary Duarte Barbosa. His account of the region dates back to the early 1500s, reflecting on the precarious and grim position of women ("when the King dies four or five hundred women burn themselves".)

The book adheres to a loose chronology and is divided into three parts: the early traveller, the Inquisition in Goa, and the contemporary traveller. The discerning reader would do well to bear in mind that the travellers' accounts are as much a reflection on the moors of local populations as they are on their own prejudices and political affiliations. Cottin eau de Kloguen's glowing account of Goa, for instance, is hardly surprising. The French missionary was a guest of the Archbishop's palace while in Goa and was convinced the Catholicising experiment had borne fruit, particularly in mitigating the caste system. Richard Burton's relentlessly uncharitable views were coloured by his inherent belief in the superiority of the British Empire, and his lifelong disdain of the mixed race, the cultural hodgepodge or in his own words, "neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring".

Shetty's superb prose comes to the fore when he narrates Claude Gabriel Dellon's account of the Goa Inquisition. Dellon was a French physician, residing in Daman, who had the misfortune of sharing the Goa governor's mistress. Undoubtedly, he was arrested on trumped up charges of heresy and condemned to endure the rigours of the Inquisition. Dellon's account happens to be the only first-person account of the proceedings of the tribunal convened in Goa. There is no reason to discredit it but there is reason to hold it up to scrutiny. Recent scholarship on the Inquisition, particularly after the Vatican in 1998 allowed public access to its files, has shed an entirely new light on the subject. Although its arbitrary process was deeply resented wherever tribunals were set up, the public's imagination was further fuelled by manufactured stories of its excesses.

From the writings of Gonsalvius Montanus (pseudonym) grew the Spanish black legend with its exaggerated details of ceremonies shrouded in secrecy and horrific use of torture. Dellon's account, when it appeared in 1687, greatly fed into the black legend, which had much to do with Protestant propagandists from France, Germany, Holland and Britain churning out pamphlets to discredit Southern European Catholicism. Shetty does not mention the black legend but contemporary views on the Inquisition were echoed almost two centuries earlier by Cottineau de Kloguen, which have been included in the anthology.

Of no less note is Shetty's own contributing essay entitled The Shady Invasion of the Beach Umbrella, which smoothly takes us from the near medieval to the contemporary. Having first arrived in Goa in the early seventies as a long-haired young man, floating almost on a smoke cloud of smooth Afghani hashish, he returned a decade later with his wife, "an ineffably beautiful Goan Catholic", whom he endearingly calls V. Xenophobia existed in 1985 as it does now, Shetty writes. This is true, Goans are unapologetically protective about their tiny state and feel overwhelmed by "outsiders". Yet for centuries Goans have been welcoming visitors which lends much to its hybridity. This beautifully produced and bountiful anthology is as much essential reading for the would-be visitor as it is for the arm-chair anthropologist.