[Reader-list] Re:inhabiting the city

[rochelle pinto]

While earlier postings emphasise an oppositional
relationship between elite and non-elite migrants in
Bombay, a distinctive facet of the Konkani print
sphere in Bombay was its use as a means of
assimilation of rural migrants to an urban space.
Salaried jobs, and access to Bombay’s affordable print
market gave Goan migrants a voice that they lacked as
a non-monetised society in Goa. The pamphlets and
leaflets they produced brought them frequently into
the public eye as audacious participants in a realm
from which they had formerly been excluded. Within
Bombay, print helped rearticulate the relationship
migrants had to each other outside of the familiar
structures of the village and its linked institutions.

Print did not always have such a specifically
utilitarian function. Texts without an overt use had
subtler offerings to make to readers. Love stories for
example, suggested how an urban neighbourhood and a
religious or ethnic community were formed
simultaneously in Bombay, and how the structure of the
city in turn altered individual relationships. The
following is an excerpt from the short story ‘Chukicho
Guneam Jose ani Elvinacho’:  
‘All of the people in Cavel knew that Elvina and I
liked each other’, claimed the narrator in the opening
line of the story: 
Elvina and I lived in Cavel. I lived in Athaide's
house and Elvina lived in the bungalow directly in
front of it; and if the reader thinks I'm lying, he
can go ask someone if Sr. Jose Fernandes, 
a
journalist in around 189- stayed in Athaide's house
during this year, and if you don't get a reply, then
Maussi (aunt) de Pincenez, whom the whole of Cavel
knows and who she knows, won't rest until she's told
you.  

The use of a French name, ‘Pince-nez’, to suggest the
nosiness of the universal neighbourhood aunt seems to
have drawn from norms typical to comedy of manners,
which survived through the century in Konkani plays.
Authenticity and familiarity with the city were
established through statements which delivered to
their readers a city which was already knit into a
range of relations which made it known and familiar,
and inextricable from the romances and enmities which
unfolded through novels. A detailed description of
what the narrator saw from his balcony as he hoped for
a sight of his paramour established the daily routine
of Cavel, with people combing their hair, going to
church, drinking tea, and wishing the local notary a
good morning. J. Godinho’s, ‘Antonio Arab or the
Exploits of a Goan seaman’, a story of crime and
adventure located in the byways of central Bombay,
similarly laid a claim to the city through the naming
of streets inhabited by protagonists.

These emotive claims on urban space helped make Bombay
home to migrants who could return only when finances
permitted. This sphere of print and reading was almost
exclusively limited to the non-elite. In the 1890s,
Portuguese, English and Konkani texts continued to
have largely divided readerships. The Portuguese
cookbook, Recipes for Confectionery and Household
Dishes prepared by the Portuguese Community in the
Bombay Presidency by Maria Luiza Garcez e Mello was
therefore probably intended for elite Goans, while The
Goan Cook’s Guide was explicitly intended for another
audience. Pedro Dias’ The Goan Cook’s Guide seems to
have had a unifying effect on readers. The title of a
1915 publication, Goan Cuzneracho Sangat, the
Association of Goan Cooks, suggests it. Another
edition of the Guide emerged in Bangalore in 1905.
Dias himself was stationed in Quetta, but used the
Bombay print market and the sagacity of his brother
who worked there, to get an appropriate introduction
written to his text.

The Goan Cook’s Guide must have been invaluable to
cooks as it had interest tables, salary charts,
glossaries, menus, and a vocabulary in English,
French, Hindustani and Konkani, apart from recipes in
Konkani for, among other things, the Half-pay Pudding,
Conservative Pudding, Nurse Hannah’s Pudding and
Mysterious Pudding. Similarly, the recipes in João
Manuel de Souza’s The Goan Barman’s Guide for the
Byculla Cocktail, Cholera Cocktail, Corpse Reviver,
India Cocktail, Stars and Stripes and American
lemonade, suggests that an ease with Anglo-American
drinking habits among barmen employed on ships, in
clubs, and in restaurants, had to be swiftly acquired.



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