AT HOME IN TWO WORLDS - Essays on Goa by Maria Aurora Couto

I owe Aurora the idea that I should have my own home in Goa. “Why only write about other peoples’ houses? Is it because you don’t have a house of your own?” she asked me once, in her characteristic blunt manner. [She obviously did not know of the four heritage homes my family had in Surat, Panchgani, and Mumbai]. But that was Aurora for you - brusque, brilliant, open-minded, never the one to leave a conversation open-ended. 

But this is not about me or my house in Saligao. This is about Aurora, about the Goa she knew, observed, noted with wonder, with perception and perspective and a degree of trepidation. If there is one work on Goa that touches your heart and has the power to unite thought with that beating heart, it is this. 

Ranjit Hoskote is spot on (as always) when he writes in the Introduction to the book that, “few writers could offer as authoritative or as emphatic a view of Goa - its glorious yet turbulent past, its vexed present, its precarious future - as Maria Aurora Couto did.”

The beauty of the first chapter, An Ideal Duality, is in the simple, lucid, almost fluid description of Aurora’s life, an osmosis of various cultures, languages and influences. In telling us about who she is, Aurora is also telling us about who we are.

In Otherness, Aurora does something that no writer on Goa has ever done. She compares how, “Both the streams, English and Portuguese, brought in a distinctive culture.” “The former,” she writes, “inducted late modernity: utilitarianism, liberalism, and democracy, though in collusion with an untenable colonialism. And the latter brought early modernity to Goa: the inheritance of Europe and the French Revolution, the humanism of equality, and the Rights of Man as inherent and intrinsic in nature.”

Virgin Territory is an essay on self-examination and honesty. In this chapter, Aurora bares her horror of her first exposure to life in a Goan village. “... (she lived) in luxury,” she writes, “but they did not erase the childhood joys and fears I had collected in Margao.” “... as a result, the sites I once cherished or feared lurk in the shadows of memory, occasionally startling me even when I am engaged in spirited conversation with a companion.”

Should any of you want to know more about the khazans, the comunidade or gaunkari systems but were afraid to ask, the chapter on Gaunkari is a lucid, succinct, easy to read essay, written with a sympathetic eye (and ear) compared with other writers on the subject.

In A Firsthand Account, Aurora does not spare her neighbours, fellow villagers, herself or us. “My interaction was limited - at Mass, some celebrations, brief chats on my morning walk - so I was spared the tensions of any animosity that prevailed, the petty rivalries and gossip that degenerated into real and imaginary scandals.”

In When Space becomes a Place, Aurora echoes the sentiment that rings true (and loud) for some of us. “ I confess I have always identified with Goa Indica for most of my life. But my Goa has a culture born of four and a half centuries of interaction with various religions and cultural influences from Europe, too, which are intrinsic to my Goan self and as important as those formative years I spent in Dharwad.” Replace Dharwad with Vadodara, Pune, Panchgani, Mumbai, Dar e Salaam and Munnar and you know what she means, I mean.

In Mapping Modernities we see a startling theory of the legendary Goan Abade or Abbé Faria. “The Abbé’s roots in Indian tradition fascinated Alban, who wrote a short note on his sleep/hypnotism technique,” writes Aurora, mentioning her husband, the erudite Alban Couto. “He explains that Faria, far from being a quack, was, in fact, annotating and taking forward ideas in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. His practices of auto-suggestion and visualisation have their origins in meditation practices common to yogic and Buddhist traditions; his concept of lucid sleep, the deepest level of sleep, is precisely yoga-nidra or the turiya state, prized by yogic practitioners as that replenishing part of the spectrum of consciousness where various psychic forces are in mutual harmony and at rest.” 

This book is also a book of revelations at some levels. Take, for instance, “since women from even the upper classes did not speak Portuguese until the late 19th and early 20th century, their malapropisms are ridiculed by Gip in Jacob and Dulce: Sketches from Indo-Portuguese Life, published by the Sahitya Akademi in 2004, in which Francisco Joao da Costa satirises the mannerisms of his class as it attempts to adopt the Portuguese language and mores of what they perceive as high culture.” Imagine that! I feel validated in a way! For I have been maintaining that most of the heritage houses that we see today are dated to the late 19th and early 20th century, very few from an earlier period.

While it is true that we are the sum total of our experiences, the accident of our birth and the many geographical, physical, spiritual spaces that we inhabit, it is also true that we rely on all of this summation (or summations) to write our memoirs, our perceptions and perspectives. To read Insider-Outsider is to understand Maria Aurora Couto inside and outside.

You feel for Aurora when she says, “Going home was more complicated than I had imagined it would be.” This post-liberation, or rather Goa-in-transit Goa, a 6 month old baby and, as she says, “when I entered, sari-clad, my hair in a bun, the government driver escorting me clearly visible, the assistants or owners as the case may be, smiled stiffly, then stared.”

Later, ‘Who are you?’ some of them asked. I was an oddity in those days.”

Aurora’s version of the liberation of Goa is a proverbial elephant in the room. I suggest you read Two Worlds along with Ralph de Sousa’s Change of Guard and Valimiki Faleiro’s Goa 1961 alongside. The elephant will still be an elephant, of course.

Aurora’s writing is sharp, akin to a surgeon’s scalpel but at the end of the surgical opening of the mind, you will also see the seamless sewing up, in the final sentence. “All one can hope for the future is that we unite as a cohesive whole to achieve both lasting progress and harmony.” Amen to that, Aurora.