[Reader-list] goan migrants in bomay

[rochelle pinto]

In 1848, a letter sent from the British police in Bombay to the Portuguese government in Goa, complained that Manoel Marie Britto, a butler, was wanted in Bombay because he had absconded from his master�s service, with a bag containing 1000 rupees. He had, according to their report, a copper complexion, had lost one of his front teeth, was rather stout, and �had on black trousers and a black silk waistcoat with flowers on it, a white jacket and a dark blue cloth cap� and he was �rather dirty in appearance�. This description of one among the many migrant Goans moving to Bombay to find work in the nineteenth century is an example of the criminalised representations through which their lives can be recovered. 

 

This proposal for a semi-fictionalised illustrated book, of arrival and absorption into the growing city, draws on various other voices and moments, narrated through a range of characters. Goan migrants, who constituted nearly ten percent of the population of Goa by the end of the nineteenth century, were not merely absorbed into a homogenising urban machine. Their institutions and practices in fact were and are a distinct element of Bombay�s urban culture. Their volatile newspapers, cookbooks, hymnbooks and popular novels are evidence of a sophisticated acclimitisation process through which migrants from scarcely monetised villages in Goa were eased through structures which prepared them to appear as salaried and wage labour in Bombay�s offices, restaurants, and dockyards. 

 

The narrative in English will weave together excerpts from the various kinds of Konkani print through which migrant Goans made their acquaintance with Bombay. This draws on research conducted for my PhD. thesis for which I consulted texts stored in the Central Library, Goa, as well as the the Oriental and India Office Library, London. The introduction to the book may outline some of the theoretical arguments and conclusions that are suggested in the thesis. The primary intention in producing a fictionalised form of these accounts, however, is to engage the interest of a wider audience particularly within Goa and Bombay. This is an attempt to emphasise the significance of this historical moment which is not otherwise considered a part of literary or print history.

 

A secondary aim is to bolster another process that I have already begun to appeal for the preservation of newsprint and popular books produced by Goans through the nineteenth and early twentieth century.  The appearance of a narrativised history will lend credence to my argument that these are valuable resources, which are in a state of neglect and may soon be entirely unavailable to the Goan public. 

 

This text may take several forms. The possibility of including visual elements, particularly advertisements, maps and illustrations from old newspapers as a part of the narrative suggests itself. 

 

The narrative may be a non-fictional but descriptive account, or a fictionalised narration that develops details about two or three protagonists. 

 

Some initial challenges that need to be faced are the differences between the academic and fictional modes of writing � in what way can the material at hand be worked on, given that many of these are already narratives. The primary audience, or at least the one always hovering at the edges of one�s mind as one thinks this through, is the Goan migrant and her descendants. What does such a text have to offer to this reader? 

 

Currently I have begun to extract segments of my research that I thought would be ideal for such a text, and am reworking them in a variety of ways for a while until I finalise a definite form for the text. 

 

In the coming months I will try and secure some visual documents from newspapers and books in Goa that may form the basis of some sections of this work.

 

 




__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20050126/65f1d2b9/attachment.html