[Reader-list] police records on Goan migrants

[rochelle pinto]

This month has been devoted to weaving together records in government documents on Goan prisoners. Though these are terse statements of the nature of the crime, or personal details of absentee accused, they provide necessary traces through which to construct characters and lives in this narrative. Female domestic labour in both Goa and Bombay, for instance, fled to the other city/ region once they had committed a theft, to start a new life. As always, there is such little detailed information, in this case, even about the lives of the relatively mobile Catholic Goan women, that these police records become precious sources.  It is through these that we hear of �a negress from Mozambique�, who stole money and gold from her employer�s house to begin a life with her lover in Bombay, but confessed that she had been duped by him, as he had taken her loot and abandoned her. 

 Police records of thieves had to provide a thumbnail sketch of the absconding accused. The pointlessly generic nature of description in these can be amusing, and in fact, the exchange of records invariably allows one to elicit a potential character for a narrative from among police officers as well as prisoners. Whether confronted with the cunning of thieves or peasant rebels, policemen and government officials always seem the least resourceful and least imaginative. In the face of the audacity, originality and facetiousness of criminals, it would appear from a reading of original documents, that the duller, the less imaginative, the slower-on-the-uptake of the two opposed sides were the policemen. 

 A short aside from thieves is provided by records of drummers and buglers deserting their posts in the military band of the British army to return to Goa. No other detail throws light on this apparently whimsical move. Why would drummers abandon a regular job? One is tempted to imagine that there may have been aesthetic reasons for their desertion. Perhaps their sensibilities were wounded by military marches. Perhaps the hours were too long, perhaps they were biding their time until the Bombay film industry picked up business.

 This begins a thread that is taken up by a series of commissions and reports on the state of migrants (read lower class) in Bombay. These committees and reports, instituted by prominent Goans in Bombay, as well as the Portuguese government in Goa appear to have picked up where the police left off. Alarmed at being clubbed with working-class and lower-caste migrants, the Goan elite took pains to distance themselves from them. The inquiry commission of the 1930s and the survey conducted by a Dr. Noronha were mechanisms of surveillance to ensure that the working-class did not disgrace and jeopardise community interests under the British. 

 What Dr. Noronha did not bargain for, however, was the fact that those who appeared as thieves and domestic labour in police reports, reappeared after access to education and white-collar employment as verbose and volatile newspaper columnists.

 The narrative then has the capacity to build towards a confrontation between Dr. Noronha and his opponents through newsprint, pamphlets and meetings of the Goan Union and Goan Congress in Bombay.




		
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