Revista da Casa de Goa - II Série - N12 - Setembro Outubro de 2021

ISSN - 2184-7045

REVISTA da Casa de Goa II Série - Número 12 - Set/Out 2021 II Series - Issue 12 - Sep/Oct 2021

Mário de Miranda

Ficha Técnica

Technical Datasheet

Diretor

Director

Conselho Editorial José Filipe Monteiro (Portugal) Luis Pereira da Silva (Portugal) Óscar de Noronha (Goa) Valentino Viegas (Portugal)

Editorial Board José Filipe Monteiro (Portugal) Luis Pereira da Silva (Portugal) Óscar de Noronha (Goa) Valentino Viegas (Portugal)

Colaboradores Residentes Armand Rodrigues (Canadá) Celina de Vieira Velho e Almeida (Goa) Francisco da Purificação Monteiro (Portugal) Joe D’Souza (Goa) Mário Viegas (Portugal)

Resident Contributors Armand Rodrigues (Canada) Celina de Vieira Velho e Almeida (Goa) Francisco da Purificação Monteiro (Portugal) Joe D’Souza (Goa) Mário Viegas (Portugal)

Colaboram neste número Adelino Rodrigues da Costa (Portugal) Ana de Miranda (Portugal) Andrew Miranda-G (Irlanda) António Colimão (Portugal) Aristides Álvares (Goa) Carmen Miranda (Reino Unido) Carolina Miranda Bordadágua (Portugal) Dino Miranda (Brasil) Erwin de Sá (Goa) Fátima Miranda Figueiredo (Goa) Francisco Colaço (Goa) Gayle Zulema de Miranda (EUA) Gerard da Cunha (Goa) Gerson da Cunha (Mumbai) Henriqueta de Brito (Damão) Joaquim de Loiola Pereira (Goa) Luis Pereira da Silva (Portugal) Luisa de Castro e Brito (Portugal) Magen Gilmore e Miranda (EUA) Margarida Távora (Goa) Maria Celina Velho e Almeida (Goa) Maria Helena Menezes Bravo (Portugal) Mário Viegas (Portugal) Miguel Cotta (Goa) Óscar de Noronha (Goa) Raphael de Miranda (Áustria) Raul de Miranda (Goa) Rishaad de Miranda (Goa) Robin Martin (Reino Unido) Sabine Frank e Miranda (Áustria) Samuel de Miranda (Áustria) Victor Rangel Ribeiro (EUA)

Contributors to this issue Adelino Rodrigues da Costa (Portugal) Ana de Miranda (Portugal) Andrew Miranda-G (Ireland) António Colimão (Portugal) Aristides Álvares (Goa) Carmen Miranda (UK) Carolina Miranda Bordadágua (Portugal) Dino Miranda (Brazil) Erwin de Sá (Goa) Fátima Miranda Figueiredo (Goa) Francisco Colaço (Goa) Gayle Zulema de Miranda (USA) Gerard da Cunha (Goa) Gerson da Cunha (Mumbai) Henriqueta de Brito (Damão) Joaquim de Loiola Pereira (Goa) Luis Pereira da Silva (Portugal) Luisa de Castro e Brito (Portugal) Magen Gilmore e Miranda (USA) Margarida Távora (Goa) Maria Celina Velho e Almeida (Goa) Maria Helena Menezes Bravo (Portugal) Mário Viegas (Portugal) Miguel Cotta (Goa) Óscar de Noronha (Goa) Raphael de Miranda (Austria) Raul de Miranda (Goa) Rishaad de Miranda (Goa) Robin Martin (UK) Sabine Frank e Miranda (Austria) Samuel de Miranda (Austria) Victor Rangel-Ribeiro (USA)

Publicação bimestral (seis números por ano), versão em PDF, disponível online

Bimonthly publication (six issues per year), PDF version, available online

Design/Diagramação Juliano Martins Mariano

Design/Layout Juliano Martins Mariano

Assistente Editorial Juliano Martins Mariano Calçada do Livramento, 17, 1350-188 Lisboa.

Tel. 21 393 00 78 / 915 057 477 E-mail: geral@casadegoa.pt www.casadegoa.org

Editorial Assistant Juliano Martins Mariano Calçada do Livramento, 17, 1350-188 Lisbon.

Tel. 21 393 00 78 / 915 057 477 E-mail: geral@casadegoa.pt www.casadegoa.org

@ Casa de Goa, Portugal ISSN 2184-7045

@ Casa de Goa, Portugal ISSN 2184-7045

Sucede aos números anteriores de (ordem alfabética) Boletim da Casa de Goa, Boletim Informativo, DEKH, Goa, Newsletter e Revista da Casa de Goa, publicados entre 1989 e 2019.

This publication follows previous issues of (alphabetic order) Boletim da Casa de Goa, Boletim Informativo, DEKH, Goa, Newsletter, and Revista da Casa de Goa, published between 1989 and 2019.

Publicidade comercial e donativos – contato: geral@casadegoa.pt

Commercial advertising and donations – contact: geral@casadegoa.pt

Capa: Mário de Miranda (cortesia: Portrait Atelier - Goa)

Cover: Mário de Miranda (courtesy: Portrait Atelier - Goa)

II Série, Número 12, Setembro-Outubro 2021

Vasco Soares da Veiga (Portugal)

II Series, Issue 12, September-October 2021

Vasco Soares da Veiga (Portugal)

NORMAS EDITORIAIS

EDITORIAL INSTRUCTIONS

A Revista da Casa de Goa é o órgão oficial da Casa de Goa.

The Revista da Casa de Goa is the official magazine of Casa de Goa.

Contém secções regulares abaixo indicadas, nas quais os artigos podem ter limite máximo de palavras e figuras.

It contains regular sections as given below, in which articles may have a limit of words and illustrations.

1.Capa

1.Cover

2.Conteúdo

2.Content

2.1.Editorial

2.1.Editorial

2.2.Secções

2.2.Sections

2.2.1.

Artigo Original (limite de 4000 palavras e 8 figuras)

2.2.1.

Original Article (word limit 4000, maximum six ilustrations)

2.2.2.

Goeses ilustres (limite de 2500 palavras e 4 figuras)

2.2.2.

Outstanding Goans (word limit 2500, maximum four illustrations)

2.2.3.

Personalidade (limite de 2500 palavras e 4 figuras)

2.2.3.

Personality (word limit 2500, maximum four illustrations)

2.2.4.

Opinião ou Crónica (limite de 1500 palavras)

2.2.4.

Opinion or Feature (word limit 1500)

2.2.5.

Conto (limite de 1500 palavras e 1 figura)

2.2.5.

Short Story (word limit 1500, maximum one illustration)

2.2.6.

Ecologia e Ambiente (limite de 2000 palavras e 4 figuras)

2.2.6.

2.2.7.

Cantinho do Concani (limite de 2000 palavras)

Ecology and Environment (word limit 2000, maximum four illustrations) Konkani Corner (word limit 2000)

Entrevista (limite de 2500 palavras e 4 figuras)

2.2.7.

2.2.8.

2.2.8.

Interview (word limit 2500, maximum four illustrations)

2.2.9

Crítica de Livro (Limite de 1500 palavras e 1 figura)

2.2.9

Book review (word limit 1500, maximum one illustration)

2.2.10. Carta ao Diretor (limite de 400 palavras e 1 figura) 2.2.11. Noticiário (limite de 250 palavras e 1 figura por notícia)

2.2.10. Letter to the Director (word limit 400, maximum one illustration) 2.2.11. News (word limit 250, maximum one illustration per new)

Normas de publicação

Publication Norms

Os artigos submetidos devem versar temas relacionados com investigação, preservação e divulgação da identidade cultural de Goa, Damão e Diu.

Articles submitted for publication should address topics related to research, preservation and dissemination of the cultural identity of Goa, Damão and Diu.

Os artigos são submetidos à aprovação do Diretor, enviados por correio eletrónico para geral@casadegoa.pt

Articles are to be emailed to the Director at geral@casadegoa.pt for approval.

Língua de publicação: a revista é bilingue – são aceites artigos em português (novo acordo ortográfico é opcional) e inglês; o Conselho Editorial reserva-se o direito de rever aspetos formais, nomeadamente o português e o inglês. Exceção é feita ao Espaço do Concani, para artigos publicados em concani romano com a tradução para português.

Se algum artigo original exceder o limite de palavras, este poderá ser publicado em partes, em números consecutivos da Revista. Em casos excecionais e por decisão editorial, o limite de palavras figuradas pode exceder o acima referido.

Pontualmente poderão ser adicionadas outras secções, de acordo com o tipo específico dos artigos (depoimento, poema, etc).

Os artigos devem conter um Resumo (português) e Abstract (inglês) com limite de 150 palavras, respetivamente, não sendo obrigatório para artigos com menos de 1500 palavras e para artigos anteriormente publicados noutras revistas. Se o autor não estiver à vontade para escrever em ambos idiomas, a Revista compromete-se a traduzir no idioma diferente ao da versão integral do artigo.

Language of publication: The magazine is bilingual - articles are accepted in Portuguese (new spelling agreement is optional) and English; The Editorial Board reserves the right to review formal aspects, namely Portuguese and English. An exception is made for the Konkani Corner, dedicated to articles published in Konkani language in Roman script, with translation into Portuguese.

If an original article exceeds the word limit, it may be published in parts, in consecutive issues of the Revista da Casa de Goa. In exceptional cases and according to the editorial decision, the limit of words and illustrations may exceed the aforementioned.

Other sections may be added occasionally, according to the specific type of articles (testimony, poem, etc.).

Articles must contain Resumo (Portuguese) and Abstract (English) in up to 150 words, respectively, not mandatory for articles with less than 1500 words and for articles previously published in other magazines. If the author is not skilled in writing in both languages, the Revista da Casa de Goa undertakes to translate to the other language based on the full version of the article.

Todos os artigos submetidos são sujeitos à apreciação pelo Conselho Editorial, podendo ser aceites sem alterações, sujeitos a alterações sugeridas, ou não aceites.

Articles submitted for publication are subject to review by the Editorial Board and may be accepted without changes, or subject to suggested changes, or not accepted at all.

Distribuição e divulgação: distribuída por correio eletrónico aos sócios da Casa de Goa, associações de goeses da diáspora e jornais em Goa. A revista é de livre acesso e de divulgação livre.

Distribution and dissemination: distributed by e-mail to members of Casa de Goa, Goa Diaspora associations and newspapers in Goa. This is an open access magazine, free to share.

As opiniões expressas nesta Revista não traduzem as ideias e pontos de vista dos editores, mas sim a dos próprios autores

The opinions expressed in this magazine do not reflect the ideas and points of view of the editors, but rather those of the authors themselves.

ÍNDICE | TABLE OF CONTENTS

Página Page

EDITORIAL Mário de Miranda: um vulto de Goa, da Índia e do mundo | Mário de Miranda: an Outstanding Goan, Indian and World Citizen - Luis Pereira da Silva

1-2

ARTIGOS ORIGINAIS | ORIGINAL ARTICLES The Customs and the Excise Museum in Panjim: the only one of its kind in India | A Alfândega e o Museu da autoridade tributária em Panjim: único na Índia – Maria Celina Velho e Almeida

3-5

PERSONALIDADE | PERSONALITY Story of Mário, the Miranda | A história de Mário, o Miranda - Óscar de Noronha

6-16

TESTEMUNHOS | TESTIMONIES Curating Mario | Curador de Mário – Gerard da Cunha

17-22

Mário de Miranda: Um homem de cultura e um criador de talento | Mário de Miranda: A man of culture and promoter of talent - Adelino Rodrigues da Costa

23-27

Mário de Miranda: A Índia Latina | Mário de Miranda: Latin India - Ana de Miranda

28-33

Testemunhos vários | Various testimonies - Andrew Miranda-G, António Colimão, Aristides Álvares, Carmen Miranda, Carolina Miranda Bordadágua, Dino Miranda, Erwin de Sá, Fátima Miranda Figueiredo, Francisco Colaço, Gayle Zulema de Miranda, Gerson da Cunha, Henriqueta de Brito, Joaquim de Loiola Pereira, Luisa de Castro e Brito, Magen Gilmore e Miranda, Margarida de Noronha e Távora, Maria Helena Bravo, Miguel Cotta, Raphael de Miranda, Raul de Miranda, Rishaad de Miranda, Robin Martin, Sabine Frank e Miranda, Samuel de Miranda, Victor Rangel-Ribeiro

34-42

CRÓNICA | FEATURE Vagueando por Tiswadi | Wandering through Tiswadi – Mário Viegas

43-45

CANTINHO DO CONCANI | KONCANI CORNER “Bekaryanc”: Adeodato Barreto-hachi Kovita | “Aos desempregados”: poema de Adeodato Barreto – Óscar de Noronha

46-48

ENTREVISTA | INTERVIEW Interview with Narana Sinai Dumó | Entrevista a Narana Sinai Dumó – Óscar de Noronha

49-52

CRÍTICA DE VIDEOCLIPE | VIDEO CLIP REVIEW Tudo isto é fado: criatividade e excelência | It’s All Fate: creativity and excellence – Luís Pereira da Silva

53-55

NOTÍCIAS | NEWS Gayle Zulema de Miranda no Campeonato Mundial de Remo de Mar 2021 | Gayle Zulema de Miranda in the 2021 World Coastal Rowing Championship

56

Jazz Goa celebra o Dia Mundial de Goa homenageando Mário de Miranda | Jazz Goa celebrates World Goa Day with a tribute to Mário de Miranda

57

Revista da Casa de Goa

II Série - Nº 12 - 2021

I

THE GLOBAL GOAN Números de Agosto e Setembro 2021 | August and September issues

59

ERRATA Artigo de | Article by J.M. Pacheco de Figueiredo. Revista da Casa de Goa 2021, II, nº 11, pp. 22-24.

60

PRÓXIMOS NÚMEROS | UPCOMING ISSUES ARTIGOS ORIGINAIS | ORIGINAL ARTICLES A história da imprensa portuguesa em Goa (1831-1963) – Parte I | The history of Portuguese press in Goa (18311963) Part I - Francisco da Purificação Monteiro A história da imprensa portuguesa em Goa (1831-1963) – Parte II | The history of Portuguese press in Goa (18311963) Part II - Francisco da Purificação Monteiro The other apostle to India | O outro apóstolo da Índia - Philomena Lawrence and Gilbert Lawrence The ‘Save Goa’ rhapsody: rising to feverish pitch | A rapsódia ‘Salve Goa’: atingindo o ponto febril - Leslie St. Anne Cry my beloved Goa | Chora minha Goa amada - Leslie St. Anne Paradise lost? | Paraíso perdido? - Leslie St. Anne Inhabitants of Goa’s ‘treasured’ island face extinction through ‘faulty’ draft coastal zone mangagement plan | Os habitantes da ilha “preciosa” enfrentam a extinção pelo desenho “defeituoso” do plano de gestão da zona costeira - Leslie St. Anne Goa numa exposição do Museu do Oriente | Goa at an exhibition of the Museu do Oriente - Valentino Viegas CRÓNICAS | FEATURES A spice of life in India | Um tempero da vida na Índia - Marilyn Rodrigues The chemistry of Goa in transition | A química de Goa em transição - Armand Rodrigues Helter skelter before the monsoons in Goa | “Aviar-se em terra” antes das monções em Goa - Armand Rodrigues How Colva weathered a tidal wave | Como Colvá resistiu a um maremoto - Armand Rodrigues The doomed tigers of Betul | Os tigres condenados de Betul - Armand Rodrigues Of bus buzz and hot roads | O buzinar dos autocarros e as ruas escaldantes - Ralph de Sousa Mil palavras | Tousand words – Valentino Viegas PERSONALIDADE | PERSONALITY Lúcio Augusto da Silva, um médico goês em Macau | Lúcio Augusto da Silva, a Goan doctor in Macau – António Aresta Vithal Nagesh Shirodkar, an internationally renowned Goan obstetrician | Vithal Nagesh Shirodkar, obstetra goês de renome internacional - Sanjiv Verenkar Revista da Casa de Goa

II Série - Nº 12 - 2021

II

ENSAIO | ESSAY A Aldeia – ensaio de Sanjiv Verenkar, traduções de Chinmay Ghaisas e Dhruv Usgaonkar | The Village – essay by Sanjiv Verenkar, translations by Chinmay Ghaisas and Dhruv Usgaonkar CRÍTICA DE LIVRO | BOOK REVIEW Goa and the Great Mughal, by Jorge Manuel Flores & Nuno Vassallo e Silva | Goa e o Grande Mongol, por Jorge Manuel Flores & Nuno Vassallo e Silva – José Filipe Monteiro ENTREVISTA | INTERVIEW Interview with Manohar Usgãocar | Entrevista a Manohar Usgãocar – Óscar de Noronha

Comentário

Feedback

Pelo compromisso e dedicação na divulgação da nossa história e identidade cultural às comunidades goesas na diáspora, saúdo a Revista da Casa de Goa.

For all the commitment and dedication in the disclosure of our history, and cultural identity to all Goan communities in the diaspora, I welcome the Revista da Casa de Goa. Aires Barreto (Toronto, Canada)

Mário na Austrália (cortesia: Azulejos de Goa, Pangim) | Mario in Australia (courtesy: Azulejos de Goa, Panjim)

Revista da Casa de Goa

II Série - Nº 12 - 2021

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Editorial

MÁRIO DE MIRANDA: UM VULTO DE GOA, DA ÍNDIA E DO MUINDO MÁRIO DE MIRANDA: AN OUTSTANDING GOAN, INDIAN AND WORLD CITIZEN

Luís Pereira da Silva (Portugal) Editor Associado Associate Editor

M

ário de Miranda foi um artista plástico multifacetado, mas a caricatura é que o distinguiu. É preciso ter-se talento para que um retrato distorcido seja reconhecido e ao mesmo tempo venha condimentado com ironia e humor. Mário não teve rival ao capturar a alma dos visados e o espírito da atmosfera envolvente, o que torna as suas obras intemporais. Ao apreciar um seu cartoon, transformamo-nos, como que por magia, em figurantes e conseguimos ouvir os sons e as vozes, sentimos os cheiros e o bulício do cenário. Como filho de Goa, pela sua mão mostrounos como ninguém o modo de estar e de ser do Goês.

Na caricatura, usou mais o afeto e a subtileza do que o sarcasmo. Mário de Miranda deixou-nos um legado vasto de enorme valor. No 10.º aniversário do seu falecimento, a Revista da Casa de Goa decidiu, num gesto singelo, dedicar-lhe este número. Óscar de Noronha, por uma cuidada pesquisa, oferece-nos em “Story of Mário, the Miranda” uma biografia que viaja da infância à sua obra, aflorando aspetos desconhecidos pela maioria.

Gerard da Cunha, no seu depoimento “Curating Mario”, conta-nos como se tornou curador do artista e dá-nos uma panorâmica singular da sua extensa obra.

Adelino Rodrigues da Costa, ex-Delegado da Fundação Oriente na Índia, privou com Mário durante

Revista da Casa de Goa

Mário de Miranda was a multifaceted fine artist better known as a caricaturist. For a distorted portrait to be recognized and at the same time be peppered with irony and humour calls for special talent. Mário was unrivaled in capturing the soul of his target persona and ambience, and that makes his works timeless. When enjoying one of his cartoons, we turn into extras, as if by magic, hearing the sounds and voices, feeling the smells and the hustle and bustle of the scene. As a son of Goa, he conveyed to us, by his own hand, the Goan way of being and of living, as no other could. His caricatures were marked by affection and subtlety rather than sarcasm. Mário de Miranda has left us a vast legacy of enormous value.

On the 10th anniversary of his death, the Revista da Casa de Goa decided, as a simple gesture, to dedicate this issue to him. Óscar de Noronha, in a carefully researched sketch titled “Story of Mário, the Miranda”, traverses the artist’s life and work, touching on aspects unknown to most.

Gerard da Cunha in his testimony “Curating Mario” tells us how he became the artist’s curator and gives us a rare overview of his extensive work.

Adelino Rodrigues da Costa, former Delegate of Fundação Oriente in India, who was associated with

II Série - Nº 12 - 2021

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Editorial

a sua missão em Goa e, em “Mário de Miranda: um homem de cultura e um criador de talento”, contanos o seu percurso de criador, fazendo referência às condecorações e distinções nacionais e internacionais com que foi agraciado, assim como a algumas importantes exposições.

Ana de Miranda, no seu depoimento “Mário de Miranda: a Índia Latina”, relata-nos a singular experiência da sua lua de mel, quando visitou Goa pela primeira vez e foi adotada afetuosamente e com nobreza genuína pelo Primo Mário e sua esposa Habiba. Inclui um interessante apontamento sobre os pergaminhos desta família antiga e aristocrática. Em suma, uma descrição com cheiro a canela e pimenta verde, como a autora bem adjetiva.

Um agradecimento muito especial aos familiares de Mário, seus amigos próximos e outros artistas, que se prontificaram a dar o precioso contributo.

Em “Testemunhos vários”, estão coligidos 25 depoimentos de quem com ele privou. Destes, sobressai a imagem unânime de um cavalheiro gentil, de nobres sentimentos, de poucas falas mas excelente ouvinte, artista genial, amante de outras expressões artísticas e o seu gosto especial pela vida.

Por feliz coincidência, dois eventos que decorrem em Setembro-Outubro, relacionados com o homenageado, preenchem o noticiário: a participação da sua neta Gayle Zulema de Miranda no Campeonato Mundial de Remo de Mar 2021 que se realiza em Oeiras e o Jazz Goa que lhe presta uma homenagem especial. São noticiadas duas recentes peças legislativas – Bhumiputra e Nacionalização dos Rios – que têm originado legítimo protesto pelos Goeses.

Este número da Revista não deixa de diversificar.

Inclui: a interessante crónica de Mário Viegas “Vagueando por Tiswadi”, a viagem por uma deliciosa rota da herança cultural e gastronómica de Goa; no Cantinho do Concani, o único poema de Adeodato Barreto em concani, com tradução e crítica por Óscar de Noronha; a transcrição em inglês da entrevista concedida em português pelo prestigiado Dr. Narana Sinai Dumó à Renascença Goa; e a crítica à excelência de um videoclipe recentemente lançado, em que cantores e músicos de Goa homenageiam Amália Rodrigues pelo seu 101º aniversário natalício.

Recomendamos, por fim, a leitura dos números de Agosto e Setembro da The Global Goan, a nossa revista parceira.

Boa leitura!

Revista da Casa de Goa

Mário during his mission in Goa, tells us about the artist as a creator, in “Mário de Miranda: a man of culture and promoter of talent”, and mentions some of Mário’s national and international awards and distinctions, as well as some important exhibitions.

Ana de Miranda, in her testimony “Mário de Miranda: a Latina India”, recounts the unique experience of her first visit to Goa, when on her honeymoon, and how she was affectionately adopted with genuine nobility by Primo Mário and his wife Habiba. She includes an interesting historical note on this ancient and aristocratic family. In short, a description with a scent of cinnamon and green pepper, as the author very aptly calls it.

A very special thank-you to Mário’s family, close friends and fellow artists, who readily extended their precious contribution in “Various Testimonies”, reports from twenty-five individuals who knew him closely. The image that comes across is that of a kind gentleman with noble feelings, a man of few words but an excellent listener, a brilliant artist, lover of other artistic expressions, and with zest for life.

By a happy coincidence, two Mário-related events taking place in September-October fill our news section: the participation of his granddaughter Gayle Zulema de Miranda in the 2021 World Coastal Rowing Championship in Oeiras, and Jazz Goa’s special tribute to Mário. There is also a report about two recent pieces of legislation – Bhumiputra and Nationalisation of Rivers – which have rightly caused a protest by Goans.

And this issue has much more: an interesting feature

by Mário Viegas titled “Wandering around Tiswadi”, a trip along an enchanting route of Goa’s cultural and gastronomic heritage; in the Konkani Corner, Adeodato Barreto’s only poem in Konkani, translated and reviewed by Óscar de Noronha; an English translation of the esteemed Dr Narana Sinai Dumó’s interview in Portuguese to Renascença Goa; and the review of an excellent video clip released recently, in which singers and musicians from Goa pay tribute to Amália Rodrigues on her 101st birthday.

Finally, we recommend the August and September issues of The Global Goan, our partner magazine.

Happy reading!

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Artigos Originais | Original Articles

THE CUSTOMS AND THE EXCISE MUSEUM IN PANJIM: THE ONLY ONE OF ITS KIND IN INDIA A ALFÂNDEGA E O MUSEU DA AUTORIDADE TRIBUTÁRIA EM PANJIM: ÚNICO NA ÍNDIA Celina de Vieira Velho e Almeida Master’s of arts and Education. Goa and Bombay/Mumbai Universities, Goa. Bacharel em Pedagogia e Letras, Mestre em Português e Pedagogia, pelas Universidades de Goa e Bombaim/ Mumbai, Goa.

Resumo Goa Customs was located on the left bank of the Mandovi in the ​​ reign of Adil Shah. It was a city with splendid buildings comparable to the Paris palaces of that time. The plague in the Old City forced the Portuguese Government to transfer the house of Alfandega to Pangin. Today, the Museum occupies the space of Customs House. It is worth visiting the museum as you will leave it richer in your knowledge.

Abstract A alfândega de Goa situava-se na margem esquerda do Mandovi no reinado de Adil Shah. Era uma cidade com esplêndidos edifícios comparáveis aos palácios de Paris daquela época. A peste na Velha Cidade obrigou o Governo português a transferir a casa de Alfândega para Pangim. Hoje, o Museu ocupa o espaço da Casa de Alfândega. Vale a pena visitar o museu, pois vai sair de lá mais rico no seu conhecimento.

P

anjim, the capital of Goa, is the proud owner of a museum that is the only one of its kind in India, the Customs, and the Excise Museum. The Monument, situated in the Avenida Dom João de Castro, is a patrimony of Portuguese architecture. It is a veritable school of learning about the contribution of Customs and Excise to the country. But, before we enter the Museum, I would like to take the readers on a journey to a long past so that the visit to the Museum could be a more interesting and fruitful accomplishment.

From the past to the present The Mohamedans, under the rule of Adil Shah of Bijapur, were the lords and the masters of all the maritime trade of the Arabian Sea. The House of Customs in Old Goa situated on the banks of the River Mandovi was known as mandvi by the Muslims.

Revista da Casa de Goa

The word mandvi is derived from the sanskrit word mandpa, and it could mean a hall surrounded by pillars that could be used for various purposes. It could also connote a dockyard. Before 1510, all the merchandise from Old Goa to the Arabian Sea was carried through the river Mandovi and probably the name of the river was originated from the word mandvi.

The Custom House of Old Goa was situated near the vicinity of the Arch of Viceroys, behind the convent of Saint Cajetan, where we can see at present the Institute of Pope Pious the Tenth. Pyrard, a French man with great knowledge and culture had visited the city of Old Goa in the XVII century and he was amazed at the refined and graceful architecture of the House of Customs and compared it to Royal Palace of Paris .Goa was an important emporium where merchants from the countries situated in the

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Artigos Originais | Original Articles seafront of the Indian Ocean in the Bay of Bengal, in Mecca and in Aden, in Ormuz in west Asia travelled by galleys with their merchandise: horses, spices, tobacco, chilies, carpets, silk, gold, slaves and many other commodities.

But the port of Old Goa, before 1510, was also the meeting point of caravans that traveled from the interior of India and brought and abundant stock of products from the land. Afonso de Albuquerque after the conquest of Goa allowed the Muslims to continue the maritime trade of horses, because the cavalry was elemental to his governance in this small piece of land. Goa was catapulted to fame as one of the richest centers in the World, thanks to the taxes that the merchants paid to the Customs of Goa till the XVII century.

Unfortunately, one cannot find any trace of that splendor of Old Goa, unless one decides to read historical accounts of Pyrard, of Tomé Pires and others.

Old Goa, in 1759 was plague-ridden and this forced the government to transfer all the public offices to Panjim. In the beginning of the of XIX century, huge sheds of wood covered by zinc sheets served as Custom’s House and they were situated on the banks

of the Mandovi, on the opposite side where one finds the present Museum. In 1834, when the Viceroy Dom Manuel De Portugal e Castro, considered as the real creator of the city of Panjim, was governing Goa, an edifice was built with a ground floor and a first floor to be used as the Customs House. Years later, the building was expanded as the trade near the harbor continued to increase. The ground floor had nine arches that permitted the entrance of bullock carts and hand carts to unload the merchandise.

Goa was getting ready to celebrate the fourth centenary of the death of Saint Francis Xavier in 1952.

The capital of Goa was transformed into an attractive and grandiose city thanks to the modernization plan of the Viceroy. A new road was built in front of the Palace of Adil Shah connecting it to the erstwhile Avenue of Brasil, today Avenue of D. Bandorkar.

Like the Sleeping Beauty, the Museum also fell asleep and silent for 150 years. In 1997, the Central Government entrusted the Central PWD of New Delhi with the restoration of the building due to its intrinsic value. However, the renovation of the façade was delegated to the Fundação Oriente in India. The Museum was painted in dark blue color or the indigo color, which was obtained in the olden times from a

Figure 1. The Customs’ Museum in Pangim

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Artigos Originais | Original Articles

Figure 2. Alfândega | Customs. A. Lopes Mendes. A India Portuguesa, ed. Impresna Nacional, 1886

plant that grew in the Valley of Indus. It was an item of enormous export value in that epoch.

The Museum was inaugurated and thrown open to the public in 2009. We enter the Monument through a large arch shaped door that overlooks the Mandovi.

To the right, one sees a small and old chapel dedicated to Saint Anthony. The impressive halls, the outsized walls of the corridors, the wide wooden staircase help the visitor to assimilate a flake of Portuguese culture.

The Museum has four main galleries on the ground floor.

The Introductory Gallery where the visitor can appreciate photos, maps, clippings of newspapers and magazines, charts all affixed on the walls so that the sightseer can understand the organization and the activities and the achievements of the Customs and Excise of India.

The Heritage Gallery displays seals, semi-precious stones, measuring instruments among many items exposed. Also, the visitant who is interested in taxation can enrich his knowledge about the system of taxes in India through the centuries. An item of great historical interest is the handwritten document of taxes during the rule of Emperor Akbar. A yet more fascinating display is the diorama of Lothal Dockyard, a port town of the Harappa Civilization (2450-1900 BCE). This Dockyard was witness to an intense trade between India and the countries of the West Asia.

The Battle of Wits Gallery The name aptly describes the war between the

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custom authorities and the ever-inventive minds of the smugglers. Here, on display are items used to smuggle: cycle tubes, wrist watches concealed in the cars, rubber sandals, soaps, gold and diamonds in walking sticks and a massive amount of articles brought illegally by the smugglers. A visit to the Museum will satisfy your curiosity about the ingenious methods used by the contrabandists.

The Seizure Gallery displays material of great historical, artistic and sentimental value confiscated by the authorities: stone and bronze images like that of Nataraja, and the gold-plated image of Jhambala, the God of wealth, taken from Nepal to India, the pillars of Amin that were returned by the United Kingdom, replicas of coins. Today the items are seen in the National Museum in New Delhi and in the Museum at Kolkata. What one sees in Panjim are facsimiles of those images.

The Government has plans to open an auditorium and a center where one can buy items related to the Customs and an interactive section with some of the objects displayed in the Museum.

As we climb the large wooden staircase to reach the first floor, we can see panels hanging on the walls with paintings of various Custom Houses along the coast of India. In future, this unique Museum will house the Excise Museum, a laboratory, a coffee house, and a sports hall.

The Panjimites are yearning to visit such a long due and enriching endeavor.

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Personalidade | Personality

STORY OF MÁRIO, THE MIRANDA A HISTÓRIA DE MÁRIO, O MIRANDA Óscar de Noronha Editor Associado Goa Associate Editor, Goa

Abstract Life sketch of one of Goa’s most versatile self-trained artists: a visual diarist, painter, cartoonist, illustrator and muralist; lover of music, cinema, travel, and of life. He was born in Damão and spent his childhood in Goa before becoming a sensation in Bombay. He was at home in the most exuberant art capitals of the world but remained at heart a humorous interpreter of Goan themes, whose universal nature he captured with great ease.

Resumo Esboço biográfico de um dos mais versáteis artistas autodidatas de Goa: diarista visual, pintor, caricaturista, ilustrador e muralista; amante da música, do cinema, das viagens e da vida. Nasceu em Damão e passou a infância em Goa antes de criar grande sensação em Bombaim. Sentia-se à vontade nas mais exuberantes capitais de arte do mundo, mas continuou a ser no fundo um intérprete humorístico de temas goeses, cuja universalidade captou com grande facilidade.

O

ver the past century and a half, Goa has produced an array of artists.1 Nearly all of them went to art school in Bombay, joined art movements, and flourished at home or abroad. While recognition of their contribution is long overdue, there is also the curious case of the self-trained artist Mário Carlos do Rosário Brito Miranda (1926-2011), or Mário de Miranda, whom the same fraternity has only grudgingly given credit. He worked in different styles, in different mediums, even across the media; and apparently no frame has been able to encompass his versatility. He was known simply as ‘Mário’, but he was equally Miranda, that is, ‘worthy of admiration’.

Early Life Mário was born in Damão, to Constâncio do Rosário Miranda2 and Maria Zulema de Brito.3 Miranda was a civil administrator in the then Portuguese enclave

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where he got engaged to pretty Zulema, twenty years his junior. Her family hailed from Assonorá (in north Goa) and was prominent in that town on the Gujarat coast. They married in the groom’s native village, Loutulim (south Goa), in the year 1923, and had their first two children in Damão: Pedro in 1924, and Mário in 1926 (Figure 1).

By 1929, the family was back to their splendid manor house that still flaunts a coat-of-arms.4 Mário wore his heritage lightly but took delight in the oldworld ambience marked by wit and humour, music and mirth.5 He was as much attracted to reading as he was to the piano, sports and pets.6 But sketching was undoubtedly his first love; so, if not playing records on the wind-up gramophone, he would be doodling Goan celebrities, village bumpkins and animals on the house walls, much to his grandmother’s annoyance. He once said, tongue in cheek: ‘In those

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Personalidade | Personality school buddies lapped up his naughty pencil strokes, his mother dreamt lofty dreams. In the following year, she enrolled him at the J. J. School of Art, Bombay, in preparation for the Beaux-Arts de Paris.

But the teenager, feeling trapped rather than freed by formal art education, left the school in a day’s time and joined St Xavier’s College instead. He graduated in English Literature in 1949, and briefly considered joining the Indian Civil Services. Not surprisingly, he later said he was better off as a cartoonist than he would have been as a bureaucrat!10

Figure 1. The Brito and Miranda families. Seated at the extreme right, Zulema and Constâncio, parents of Mário (squatted on the right)

days I visualised I would be another Michelangelo… but it didn’t work that way.’7 Little Genius Mário’s mother quick to spot his talent gifted him blank diaries; he feverishly filled them out with bright, breezy colour sketches and a few jottings in Portuguese. They were virtually his confessions; but relatives and friends happily leafed through those pages, which unwittingly froze a microcosm of midtwentieth-century Goa. In fact, Goan characters so populate his work that one can safely say, ‘Here is Goa’s plenty!’

On closer examination, Mário’s chronicles transcend Goa and mirror universal human nature.

The little genius notices everything and everyone, and spares none. The serious and the pompous come very especially under his scanner. According to him, ‘when people take themselves too seriously, they tend to be funny.’8 While his drawings embody that insightful observation, they don’t merely distort a person’s features; they perceptively bring to light things invisible to the naked eye.9 Thus, more than just ‘Goa’s plenty’, we may say of Mário’s diaries what Dryden has said of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: ‘Here is God’s plenty!’

Mário, perhaps one of the world’s youngest visual diarists, was in his final year at St Joseph’s Boys’ High School, Bangalore, in 1942, when his last sibling, Fátima, was born in that garden city. And while his

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The Artist as a Young Man It was during his college days in Bombay that Mário’s characters first strutted out of his diaries; he drew pocket cartoons and peddled them at Flora Fountain for pin money.11 And at a medical ball held at Clube Vasco da Gama, Panjim, couples dancing the night away delighted in the frisky sketches of the faculty members that Mário kept drawing on the wall mirrors lining the ballroom.12 It is not that Mário always passed uncensured. One day, a priest from the village, whom he had depicted outside the local fish market, showed up at his house.

Mário’s mother, after doing her best to placate the visitor, ended up going to see archbishop Dom José da Costa Nunes, who had once expressed his wish to meet the young artist. Mário was hesitant but once there, was relieved to see his diaries spark guffaws rather than a controversy. ‘That was the first time I was appreciated by someone I didn’t know,’ he said.13 Mário maintained a diary right through his years spent in British India with intermittent stays in Goa and Damão (Figure 2). The last three logbooks (1949-51),14 now available in print, are a shrine of frolicky pictures of relatives and friends in Loutulim, Panjim and Margão.15 To quote Nissim Ezekiel, ‘the buffoonery of his human figures is redeemed from grossness by their verve, their inner urge towards going places, getting somewhere. It is not always their fault that there is no place to go, nowhere to get except through the corridors of illusion.’16 That was Mário’s equivalent of the dark night of the soul! His lifestyle was a cause of concern to his by now widowed mother struggling to manage the household while at the same time providing for Pedro at Princeton University.17 But then Mário had a change of heart: was it the showcasing of his watercolours

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Personalidade | Personality

Figure 2. A page from Mário’s diary (May 1947) with a sketch of a party he had attended.

and drawings by the 1950 Souvenir of the Bombaybased Loutulenses League18 that did the trick?

In 1951, seeing a bleak future for himself in Goa, Mário moved to Bombay. Though creative possibilities seemed unlimited here, he was jobless and quite badly off at first. That’s precisely when Policarpo (Polly) Vaz, a fellow hosteller at Rockville,19 famously suggested to him to hand-craft picture postcards depicting the city monuments, offering to sell them at the hotel where he worked the night shift. Needless to say, the two became fast friends; and they had even thought of migrating to Brazil,20 when Mário got a call from D. F. Karaka of The Current. The redoubtable editor, riveted by Mário’s diaries, commissioned him to cover a can-can dance scene at the Taj Hotel, and received such a rib-tickler that he promptly took him on as the tabloid’s regular cartoonist.

The young Goan created a stir in Bombay's journalistic circles when his cartoons first appeared in the press. Editor C. R. Mandy and art director Walter Langhammer soon invited him to The Illustrated Weekly of India. Before long, other Times Group publications,21 too, began to use Mário’s drawings;

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they skilfully portrayed movement and sound, and often featured the cartoonist’s trademark dog.

Art of Cartooning That was the year 1952. Mário had virtually stumbled into the profession of cartooning.22 To an onlooker the job seemed easy, and everything grist to the mill – from the bureaucracy, fashions, business, and people’s habits, to the animal world, environment, music, society, and even politics – but really, finding humour was no mean task. ‘There are times when you don’t feel funny, or may not feel like laughing, but still have to produce a funny cartoon – like a clown who has got to make people laugh all the time, although he doesn’t feel like laughing.’23 Elaborating on his predicament, Mário said, ‘People expect me to come up with jokes and anecdotes to make others laugh. I can’t do that. I enjoy humour if it comes from someone else who knows how to tell a good joke…. I am not a naturally funny person; I may look funny, but I am not funny.’24 And if a cartoonist’s defining quality it is ‘to detect funniness in people’s behaviour or physical features and draw

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Personalidade | Personality it, it is equally important to be able to laugh with someone, not at someone, without being cruel,’ said Mário, adding: ‘Humour is something very personal, individual. What’s funny to me may not be funny to you. Sometimes I do something which I think is very funny – and it flops! And people asking you to explain a cartoon flattens it completely.’25 Past the initial scramble for work, Mário began to yearn for the blissful spontaneity of his diary sketching. Add to this the fact that political bigwigs were breathing down his neck, and Mário had a sure recipe for disenchantment. Bombay Presidency’s Home Minister Morarji Desai was among the first ones to let his irritation show – something that taught Mário early on that lampooning political animals involved high risk. When he toned down the humour to appease the readers, cartooning quite paradoxically became a ‘serious business’. ‘Cartoonists are very serious people, and cartoons, no laughing matter,’26 he quipped.

Finally, Mário stopped pursuing individual politicians; he began to see himself as a social caricaturist more than anything else. He is on record as saying, ‘I am not even a cartoonist; I draw… give me a pen and blank paper and I will draw. I just love to draw.’27 Welcome Break Mário’s diaries were sacrificed on the altar of newspaper cartooning. In 1959, the caricaturist flew to Lisbon on a Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian scholarship.28 He toured the length and breadth of Portugal, distilling the essence of the Portuguese soul into his sketches and drawings. The experience brought a fresh perspective to his profession:29 it whetted his appetite for travel and charted a path that would reveal itself with time.

It is unlikely that Mário would go out of his way to confer with the Portuguese cartoonists reeling under an authoritarian regime at the time. In London, later that year, he met with Ronald Giles, Raymond Jackson (Jak), Victor Weisz (Vicky), and memorably bumped into his all-time favourite Ronald Searle at a pub on Fleet Street! He was happy to do cartoons for the classic humour magazine Lilliput and for ITV, but featuring in Punch, the flag-bearer of humour magazines, really was the icing on the cake.

Mário’s passage to England was a turning point

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in his career. He earned money and friends; more importantly, Searle’s injunction – ‘Stay on in England, but stop copying me!’30 – infused him with the confidence to go it alone. But then again, the dramatic regime change in Goa, on 19 December 1961, made him turn on his heels. He returned to Bombay on an Indian passport and rejoined the Times Group; but this time around, R. K. Laxman, the reigning deity of The Times of India, ‘subtly ensured that the pedestal was not for sharing,’ says journalist Bachi Karkaria.31 Appreciating the steady stream of cartoons that Mário had sent home while on his working holiday abroad, Bombay’s Cocktail magazine commented: ‘Mario is so well known that it’s difficult to say things about him that will not be superfluous. A man who can draw and depict the funniest in the most convincing manner, his Shammu has won the laughing interest of everyone. Every cartoon of his is a refreshing experience. He lampoons the frailties, foibles and social shortcomings of us all. His hilarious work is packed with characters from the contemporary scene and his greatest gift is that he makes us laugh at ourselves. His illustrations too have polished perfection and have been such a success that all our writers want Mario to illustrate their work.’32 In Mário’s absence, Jean de Lemos, an artist born in the Nilgiri heights, handled the bulk of illustration; they had a soft spot for each other and even exchanged sketches (Figure 3).33 On his return,

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Figure 3. Mário, as seen by Jean de Lemos

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Figure 4. A town in Portugal, so well captured by Mário

though, Jean learnt that Mário was getting engaged to Habiba Hydari,34 a 24-year-old fine arts studentturned-air hostess whose ‘teenage gang’ had once been part of his circle.35 Jean exited, but remained friends with Mário’s family.

On 10 November 1963, Mário and Habiba36 got married in a civil ceremony, and set up home at Rockville. Their children, Raul,37 a hairstylist, and Rishaad,38 a designer-decorator, who live in Loutulim, remember their mother as ‘the boss’ and their father as a calm, liberal, and generous man.39 Mário for his part rued the fact that he was usually too absorbed in his work to resolve pressing domestic issues with a firm hand.40 Versatile Artist In 1964, Mário brought out a book of sketches, Goa

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with Love,41 dedicating it to Habiba. His visibility was on the rise – in school textbooks, corporate calendars, advertisements and trendy magazines.

Successive editors of the Weekly42 held Mário in high esteem; and humourist Behram Contractor (alias Busybee), political commentator Vinod Mehta, poets Dom Moraes and Nissim Ezekiel, and admen Gerson da Cunha, Frank Simões, Bal Mundkur and Alyque Padamsee were among his closest friends.

They churned out reams of prose and loads of ad copy; Mário read between the lines and came up with charming visuals.

Mário’s reading, now restricted to periodicals, stood him in good stead.43 Victor Rangel-Ribeiro believes that the cartoonist’s stays overseas, ‘particularly the long months he spent in London, plus the fact that he was very well read in Portuguese as well as English literature, did give him a broader outlook than one normally found in members of the local press.’44 But Mário wore none of that on his sleeve; in fact, he abhorred ‘intellectual talk’, his forte being ‘the accumulation of trivia judiciously and harmoniously composed,’45 as Vinod Mehta puts it.

That is evident from Mário’s daily cartoon strips, some of which drew upon people he met in daily life: the archetypal secretary, Miss Fonseca; the Boss and his hapless minion Godbole; the fat, corrupt politician Bundaldass with his sidekick Moonswamy, and the bosomy Bollywood star Rajani Nimbupani.46 Millions across generations grew up on those cartoon characters that were all the rage; they are now etched in the collective memory, even if the world’s everchanging sensibilities tend to put a negative spin on some of them.47 Nineteen seventy-two was a landmark year: the United States Information Service (USIS) flew Mário to America, and Tel Aviv invited him to stop en route.

He met Israeli cartoonists Kariel Gardosh, Shemuel Katz and Friedel Stern; and in the US he interacted with Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts; Herblock, editorial cartoonist of the Washington Post, Pat Oliphant of the Denver Post, Ed Fisher of The New Yorker and freelancer Al Jaffee. Mad magazine featured him, and back home Mário wrote a piece titled ‘Cartoons – American Style’48 – a pointer to his writing talent49 lost in the rough-and-tumble of editorial cartooning.

As India was beginning to see him in a new light,

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Personalidade | Personality Mário lamented the tendency to seek validation from agencies abroad50 and wept over his countrymen’s inability to laugh at themselves. He regularly discussed the state of the profession and, Alexyz recalls, he encouraged budding cartoonists. He inspired the formation of the Indian Institute of Cartoonists, Bangalore, and gifted them many of his priceless originals.51 Mário was among the handful of cartoonists52 that ruled the roost in India, but alas, long years of caricature art had left him with little leisure to pursue what he liked best: sketching. The reprinting of Goa with Love in 1982 was thus as much a celebration of the fast-fading world of his youth as it was an evocation of the line art that had grown on him.

Compulsive Traveller Mário was a persistent seeker of the funny side of life, as A Little World of Humour (1968) and Laugh It Off (1975) make it amply clear. He was never bored, even if stuck at an airport or a railway station; ‘watching people is an experience,’53 he said. Bombay’s hustle and bustle had brought him face to face with crowds all right, but he only loved watching them, not being in them!54 He enjoyed walking around, be it in the village or the city; to him, walks were ‘life’s minijourneys that could be turned into a movie’, says Rishaad.55 Mário drew from observation, from life, prompting Nissim Ezekiel to remark: ‘No escape if Mario is looking at you.’56 In his illustrations always teeming with human specimens, each had their own story to tell. However, sometime later, Mário began cherishing moments away from the madding crowd, say, by slipping into the anonymity of a movie hall.57 Was it plain overload or a midlife crisis that had suddenly brought on the feeling that ‘life is not funny as all that’58?

Fortunately, there was an upside to the behaviour change. Mário got less and less interested in cartooning and more and more excited about capturing moods and ambiences for his pictorial travelogues.59 He made no bones about his travel mania – ‘especially if someone else is footing the bill!’ as he would say in jest.60 In 1979, a year after a major trip to Germany, he quit the influential Times Group and joined a fledgling tabloid, Midday, under Contractor’s editorship. From

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1985 onwards, he was a freelancer with the same editor’s The Afternoon Despatch & Courier: not only did his cartoons gel with Busybee’s humour, the paper’s relaxed pace permitted him and wife to travel and draw at will. Sometimes, Habiba and the sons joined him on cross-country jaunts, which were truly memorable, says Raul.

Mário’s wanderlust brought forth the sublime artistry of his pencil and brush, ink and paper – fascinating enough to fill a book. Generally, after he had spotted his themes, his pen would scribble just a few hasty lines, later turning them into finely detailed and nuanced sketches, thanks to the artist’s photographic memory for faces and buildings61 (he especially loved old people and ruins). Mário’s traditional line art had by now got stylised into neat, black ink pen illustrations, sporting straight graphite lines with flat cross-hatching for tonal variations.62 Mário said, ‘If you see my early work and compare it, you’ll see I always enjoy experimenting.’63 Over a span of three decades, Mário put up more than thirty solo exhibitions across the country64 and the world.65 Vinod Mehta saw no contemporary illustrator or cartoonist in India coming close to Mário’s command over the grammar of drawing; the alleged ‘lack of venom’ in his repertoire spoke for his ‘objective perspective’.66 In the year 2000, Fundação Oriente in collaboration with the Indian Council for Cultural Relations organised a Mário retrospective titled Goa and Other Works67, honouring the man who for years had served as a cultural link between Portugal and India (Figure 4).68 Reinventing himself By his fiftieth year, Mário had developed an abiding interest in illustrating books. After Ruskin Bond’s The Room on the Roof, Uma Anand’s books for children,69 and several business publications; Dom Moraes’ The Open Eyes: a Journey through Karnataka and A Family in Goa (1976); Manohar Malgonkar’s Inside Goa (1983), Lambert Mascarenhas’ In the Womb of Saudade (1994) and Mário Cabral e Sá’s Legends of Goa (1998) confirmed him in the art of book illustration.

Now practically at the end of his career, doing illustrations for a book in Portuguese – Momentos do meu Passado (2002), by Fernando de Noronha – ‘brought back nostalgic memories of my youth spent in Goa,’ Mário said.70 Victor Rangel-Ribeiro for his

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Personalidade | Personality part recalls that when he proposed to the publishers that Mário be the illustrator for Loving Ayesha (2003), ‘first they said he would never agree; and when he agreed, they said he would be late with the drawings.

He surprised us all by delivering the drawings on schedule.’71 Interestingly, Goa-based projects marked the beginning of Mário’s homeward journey. In 1979, the movie buff of yesteryear acted as a creative assistant for Sea Wolves, a war film shot in Goa. In 1985, Shyam Benegal’s film Trikaal based itself on snippets of the Miranda family history; it was shot in their heritage home and village, the film director deeply appreciative of India’s Latin character available only on its west coast.72 The mansion, refurbished for the occasion, soon began to figure in coffee table books and glossy magazines.

Mário is possibly India’s only cartoonist whose sketches have been turned into murals. His first one came up in 1986, at Hotel Mayfair, in a quaint corner of Panjim. The next two locales were at Colaba: Café Mondegar, his favourite haunt, and Hotel Paradise.73 Mário also honoured Goa’s Krishnadas Shama Library74, Panjim’s municipal market complex,75 and other locations in the country with his murals. The adaptation of Mário’s characters by Air India and by the Charles Correa-designed Kala Academy in Goa was yet another feather in his cap.76 In 1996, the Mirandas gave up their rented place at 7A, Oyster Apartments, Navy Colony, Colaba, and returned with their dogs, turtles, parrot and all to the same sleepy little village of Loutulim that was frozen in time almost just as Mário had left it half a century earlier. The homecoming far from ended his love story with Bombay, though; he continued infusing The Afternoon and The Economic Times with his brand of humour. And in the evening of his life the inveterate cartoonist was a welcome presence in Goa’s social and cultural circles as well.

The Goan Cause Life had come full circle for Mário. ‘What I enjoy most is doing nothing, if I could… – back to the sossegado times!’ he said.77 Yet he was always brimming with ideas; and even if a wee bit mystified

by Goa’s half-hearted response to his work,78 or so he thought, the quintessential Goan gentleman had many dreams to fulfil and promises to keep.

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‘Goa has a different atmosphere from the rest of India. After all, Goa was with the Portuguese for 500 years…,’79 said Mário. He planned to do a series of drawings ‘on my Goa, the Goa that I grew in, the past; the Goa which lots of people did not know existed.’

Considering it critically endangered, he wished to preserve it in his own way.80 ‘Today, Goa is part of India, so naturally we will lose a lot and gain a lot,’ he said, hoping at the same time that ‘some of the heritage of the past remains and gives Goa this identity that I think it needs.’81 According to art critic Ranjit Hoskote, Mário’s confluential, Indic and Iberian heritage, ‘gives him an amplitude of cultural references [and] a historically informed sensibility.’82 As the convenor of the Goa chapter of INTACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage), Mário was instrumental in getting the Gulbenkian Foundation to sponsor the establishment of a Museum of Christian Art at the Seminary of Rachol. He also secured funding from Lady Hamlyn Trust, London, for the restoration of the iconic Reis Magos Fort.83 And even though daunted by politics and red tape, he lent his expertise to public institutions like Goa University, Kala Academy and Goa International Centre.84 It is ironic that the consummate Goan artist who could make light of just any situation found little reason to smile when it came to the State handling of tourism, environment, animal welfare and heritage issues.85 Meanwhile, Mário encouraged fashion designer Wendell Rodricks to document the Goan costume, through the Moda Goa project;86 and artist Victor Hugo Gomes to study Goa’s ethnography,87 an experiment that led to the creation of the Goa Chitra Museum. As regards his own oeuvre, Mário was fortunate to see part of it documented in a large-sized book titled Mário de Miranda as well as displayed at Mário Gallery, by architect Gerard da Cunha.

Legacy Money, power and fame meant little to Mário; he felt humbled by recognition coming his way. The Indian Government conferred two civilian honours upon him: the Padma Shri in 1988 and the Padma Bhushan in 2002. In 2007, he received the Goa State Cultural Award. In 2009, King Juan Carlos bestowed on him the Cross of the Order of Isabel the Catholic, Spain’s highest civilian honour; and Portugal knighted him as

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Personalidade | Personality Commander of the Order of Prince Henry.

Despite his celebrity status Mário was a selfeffacing person. Crafting a lighter finale to his twilight years, he returned to his watercolours and his piano. His sister Fátima notes that in his attempts at nature drawing, the dominant colour was a light grey, resembling clouds, interspersed with spots of light pink.88 But he gave it up when he fell victim to Parkinson’s – stopping short of that one brushstroke that might create a blob and spoil the painting!

Although a little dispirited, Mário ploughed on. He rarely missed a music show or dining out; a sporadic religious event at home or a chance meeting with an old acquaintance could easily moisten his eyes. He kept in touch with old friends and new, remaining his shy and wry self to the very end. The sad finish came but gently, in his sleep, on 11th December 2011. His earthly journey concluded with a requiem mass at the parish church of the Saviour of the World, Loutulim. He was cremated in Margão and his ashes strewn over the Zuari at Rachol.

Tributes kept pouring in. In 2012, Mário was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second highest civilian award. On his 90th birth anniversary, Bombay named a road junction after him and Google featured a doodle showcasing a typical Bombay neighbourhood scene in the rains.

In 2017, when Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa visited Goa, the country’s Medal of Cultural

Merit was handed to Habiba (d. 2021). This year, Jazz Goa is due to celebrate ‘World Goa Day’ with Mário’s iconic cartoons coming to life in song.

Mário was a man of few words; but no words will suffice to describe his ‘glocal’ art. Luckily, his creations speak for him; they are amusing, magical, even therapeutic, so to say, and of perennial relevance. ‘Whether he has drawn priest, poet, or peasant, he has revealed the innate Goanness in each.

Behind every creation of his there lies a hidden, mysterious, delicious, and sometimes malicious humour,’89 writes Vamona Navelcar. And, of course, beyond the Goanness lies the humaneness of a man who thought locally, acted globally.

Mário is undoubtedly Miranda, the highly regarded one: ‘Your name from hence immortal life shall have.’ In addition to efforts put in by private institutions in Goa,90 a permanent State-sponsored set-up91 is important, to ensure that Mário lives into the next generation. Goa owes it to the man whose work, according to José Pereira, is ‘the most accomplished interpretation yet’92 of the Goan ethos. His was a popular and powerful presentation to a global audience. Many still travel from far and wide in quest of Mário’s Goa; all being well, they will always find both Mário and Goa!

References 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

António Xavier da Trindade (1870-1935), António Piedade da Cruz (1895-1982), Ângelo da Fonseca (1902-1967), Raghuvir Chimulkar (1905-1958), Ângela Trindade (1909-1980), Vasudeo Gaitonde (1924-2011), Francis Newton Souza (1924-2002), Laxman Pai (1926-2021), Vamona Navelcar (1930-), and José Pereira (1931-2015), to name but a few.

Constâncio Teodósio do Rosário Miranda (1883-1946) was the son of João Baptista Miranda and Ermelinda Xavier Miranda.

Maria Zulema de Brito (1903-1988) was the daughter of Luís Diogo de Brito and Maria Francisca de Melo.

Mário’s great-grandfather Constâncio do Rosário Miranda (Sr.) was granted the coat-of-arms with the title ‘Fidalgo da Casa Real’, for capturing dreaded bandit Custobá Rane, in 1871.

Mário’s father and grandfather were witty gentlemen; his uncle Carlos, later a Supreme Court judge in Portugal, and brother Pedro were artists; and mother Zulema, a pianist. (Fátima Miranda Figueiredo, 23.5.2021) He was fond of classical literature and music, and played football, volleyball and badminton.

FTF Mario Miranda, 26.4.2003 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvUFUdp20MU Ibid.; Conversation with Shri Mario Miranda – 2 (Outtakes), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBmMiEqvTy0

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Personalidade | Personality 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

FTF Mario Miranda, op. cit.

Doordarshan National, Eminent Cartoonists of India, #04, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkFpyDlQb88 ‘Tale of Two Goans: Mario Miranda & Wendell Rodricks’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FDLGApfATc&t=5s Cf. Fernando de Noronha, Momentos do meu passado (Goa: Third Millennium, 2002), p. 146.

FTF Mario Miranda, op. cit. .

Cf. The Life of Mário (1949, 1950, 1951) ed. Gerard da Cunha (Goa: Architecture Autonomous), in 2016, 2012 and 2011, respectively. Fátima Miranda Figueiredo reckons that her brother’s diary sketches total up to about 6,750 over a period of 18 years (1934-1951).

He frequented the houses of his relatives, Judge António Miranda and Captain Adolfo Menezes, in Panjim, and Judge Eurico Santana da Silva, in Margão; and often stayed overnight with friends in their hostels.

Nissim Ezekiel, ‘No escape if Mario is looking at you,’ in Mário de Miranda, ed. Gerard da Cunha (Goa: Architecture Autonomous, 2005), p. 276.

As told by Fátima Miranda Figueiredo, 27.5.2021.

Souvenir of the Silver Jubilee of the Loutulenses League (Goa: Imprensa Nacional do Estado da Índia, 1950).

Curiously, in the chapter titled ‘The Rising Generation’, Mário figures as an Arts graduate, not as an Artist.

Polly was from Bastorá; other hostelites, Joe Albuquerque and Paulo Miranda, from Loutulim. Cf. Mário de Miranda, op. cit., p. 14.

Manohar Malgonkar, ‘Biography’, in Mário de Miranda, op. cit., p. 15.

Femina; Filmfare; The Evening News and The Economic Times.

Conversation with Shri Mario Miranda – 2 (Outtakes), op. cit.

FTF Mario Miranda, op. cit.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Manohar Malgonkar, ‘Biography’, in Mário de Miranda, op. cit., p. 24; Conversation with Shri Mario Miranda – 2 (Outtakes), op. cit.

The scholarship possibly came as a result of Maria Zulema’s letter to Minister Pedro Teotónio Pereiras. Mário lived in a rented room on Rua Actor Isidoro. (Fátima Miranda Figueiredo, 27.6.2021) Published in Diário Popular, cf. ‘M de Mário’, by Jorge Silva, in Macau, April 1993, II Series, No. 12, pp. 39-43.

‘The Last Interview’, op. cit.; FTF Mario Miranda, op. cit.; ‘Tale of Two Goans’, op. cit. https://indianjournalismreview.com/2011/12/12/did-r-k-laxman-subtly-stifle-marios-growth/ Retrieved on 8 August 2021.

Cocktail, January 1960, p. 5.

Mário called her Chips; she called him Popat (Fátima Miranda Figueiredo, 27.5.2021) Daughter of Iqbal Hydari, a senior executive of the Indian Railways and scion of the nobility of Hyderabad, and Rohaina Mohamedi, a painter.

Mário’s circle included Lúcio Miranda, a third cousin, and Sarto Almeida, both architects. Cf. Manohar Malgonkar, ‘Biography’, in Mário de Miranda, op. cit., p. 17.

He called her ‘Charlie’, and she called him ‘Joseph’.

Married Magen Gilmore, who lives in the US with their daughter Gayle Zulema.

Married to Sabine Frank, who lives with their children, Rafael and Samuel, in Austria.

Personal interview on 9.7.2021.

As told by Fátima Miranda Figueiredo, 27.5.2021.

There are at least three known editions of Goa with Love (1964, Times of India, Bombay; 1982, Goa Tours, Panjim; 2001, by M&M Publications, Reis Magos). In 1964, Mário also brought out ‘Goa Postcards’.

Khushwant Singh, M. V. Kamath and Pritish Nandy were the last three editors of the Weekly.

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Personalidade | Personality 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74 75 76

All India Radio, Bengaluru, interviewed by Shylaja Gangooly, 27 Nov 1993. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=kDDO3N4OVtA Email of 10.7.2021 Vinod Mehta, ‘Tomorrow is another day’, in Mário de Miranda, op. cit., p. 139.

Conversation with Shri Mario Miranda – 2 (Outtakes), op. cit. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/kerala-to-us-cartooning-is-in-the-crosshairs/ articleshow/69805457.cms Retrieved on 22 Aug 2021 The Illustrated Weekly of India, 2 January 1974.

Mário liked to write (B. Contractor and K. Singh encouraged him) but found it ‘a slow and irritating process’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zJB0u-_akA FTF Mario Miranda, op. cit. https://www.deccanherald.com/content/211335/cartoon-gallery-gets-mirandas-priceless.html K. Shankar Pillai, R. K. Laxman, O. V. Vijayan, Abu Abraham, Rajinder Puri, E. P. Unny.

FTF Mario Miranda, op. cit.

‘The Last Interview’, op. cit.

Personal interview, 9.7.2021.

Ibid.

Pritish Nandy, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/mario-miranda-the-man-who-made-miss-fonseca-famous/ articleshow/11075146.cms Conversation with Shri Mario Miranda – 3 (Outtakes), 26.6.1991, op. cit.

Germany in Wintertime (1980); Impressions of Paris (1985); Desenhos e Aguarelas (1987); Spain (2007), et al.

‘Tale of Two Goans’, op. cit.

‘The Last Interview’, op. cit.; for Mário sketching in loco, cf. Conversation with Shri Mario Miranda – 1 (Outtakes), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBTrDEU9gEQ ‘The Last Interview’, op. cit.; for Mário at work in Bassein cf. Conversation with Shri Mario Miranda – 2 (Outtakes), op. cit..

‘Tale of Two Goans’, op. cit.

His first countrywide tour, ‘American Sketchbook’ (1975), included Panjim, Calcutta, Madras and New Delhi.

In Paris, New York, Lisbon, East Berlin, Singapore, Muscat, Jerusalem and Macau, among others.

Vinod Mehta, ‘Tomorrow is another day’, in Mário de Miranda, op. cit., p. 140.

[Lisboa]: Fundação Oriente, 2000.

Mário was the local coordinator of Fadista Amália Rodrigues’ visit to Goa, in 1990, sponsored by Fundação Oriente, as a prelude to setting up office in Goa. Also cf. ‘From Lisbon with Love’, by Mário, in Goa Today, February 2001, pp. 18-19, describing his exhibition and stay in Portugal in the year 2000.

The Room on the Roof was first serialised in the Weekly, in 1956; and Anand’s Dul-Dul, The Magic Clay Horse, The Adventures of Pilla the Pup, and Lumbdoom, The Long-Tailed Langoor) were published in the 1960s. Mário also worked on films for children, sometimes for free, Cf. Conversation with Shri Mario Miranda – 2 (Outtakes), op .cit.

Mário’s statement to my father. Cf. Fernando de Noronha, op. cit.

Email of 25.6.2021.

Telephone conversation on 2.7.2021. https://www.thehindu.com/features/friday-review/art/his-drawings-had-a-special-quality-rk-laxman/ article2707166.ece Retrieved on 8 August 2021. Mário chose not to sign the mural, possibly because the artwork was put together by students of J.J. College. Others were done by one Shetty, cf. Conversation with Shri Mario Miranda – 2 (Outtakes), op. cit.

Façade mural and interior panels: project executed by Orlando de Noronha’s firm Azulejos de Goa, Panjim, in 2011.

Executed by Panjim-based Rajesh Salgaonkar, 2005.

Some undertaken by Deepak from Meerut, cf. Conversation with Shri Mario Miranda – 2 (Outtakes), op. cit.

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Personalidade | Personality 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

‘Tale of Two Goans’, op. cit.

FTF Mario Miranda, op. cit.

‘Tale of Two Goans’, op. cit.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ranjit Hoskote, ‘The Art of Mario Miranda’, in Mário de Miranda, op. cit., p. 81.

In both projects he had the support of Bal Mundkur; Bartand Singh and Smith Baig of INTACH. Mário was declared Goa Today’s Man of the Year. Cf. interview with Alexandre M. Barbosa and Alister Miranda, in Goa Today, December 1998, pp. 18-23.

Doordarshan National, Eminent Cartoonists of India, #04, op. cit.; Goa Today, ibid. https://www.firstpost.com/india/moda-goa-designer-wendell-rodricks-on-indias-first-costume-museum-and-hisvision-for-its-future-5510481.html Retrieved on 19 Aug 2021 https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/dont-call-me-sir-call-me-mario/articleshow/11456423.cms Retrieved on 19 Aug 2021 As told by Fátima Miranda Figueiredo, 22.5.2021.

‘The Flowering of Goan Art’, by Vamona Ananta Sinai Navelcar, in Goa: Aparanta – Land Beyond the End, ed.

Victor Rangel-Ribeiro (Vasco da Gama: Goa Publications Pvt Ltd, 2008), p. 126.

Private initiatives by Mário Gallery, Azulejos de Goa, Velha Goa and Sunaparanta Centre for the Arts.

Note the fiasco at Reis Magos Gallery, cf. https://www.heraldgoa.in/Cafe/Brushing-aside-MarioMiranda%E2%80%99s-works-at-Reis-Magos-Fort/123554 Retrieved on 22 Aug 2021 ‘Foreword’, by José Pereira, in Goa with Love (Goa: Goa Tours, 1982), p. 4.

Mário nos EUA (cortesia: Azulejos de Goa, Pangim) | Mario in USA (courtesy: Azulejos de Goa, Panjim)

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CURATING MÁRIO CURADOR DE MÁRIO Gerard da Cunha Architect | Arquiteto Biographical notes at the end Notas biográficas no fim

B

eing a passionate practising Architect, I never imagined that I would play the role of curating an Artist. It was by accident, and let me explain how it happened. I was bringing out a book on the IndoPortuguese house, called Houses of Goa, in the year 2000. I had asked Mário to do the release. It was a very nice function, held at Solar dos Colaços, Ribandar.

Houses of Goa was a great book, and all, including Mário, were suitably impressed with the content and the quality of production. After the release, as we sat on the magical verandah overlooking the river, Mário popped the question, “Would you do a book on me?” I replied that it would be a pleasure. After that exchange, whenever I broached the subject, he evaded it and then suddenly in November 2005, we signed an agreement and got down to the task.

Mário and Habiba handed me a collection but it was incomplete, and over a period of a year Bevinda Collaço (my co-editor) and I collected a great deal of his drawings from various sources. I would quiz Mário on his favourite drawings and where they could be found. He gave us many leads. One was a series of drawings on musicians he had sketched at the annual Jazz Yatra in Mumbai. It took me three visits to Mumbai and a lot of cajoling to get access to the pictures and finally photograph them. An interesting search was for his public art, which was in the form of murals in restaurants, malls and clubs. I visited Mumbai and many of the establishments had closed down and his art had been painted over.

There was a hilarious incident in this quest. Mário

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had mentioned that a Club in North Mumbai had commissioned a mural for a bowling alley. I managed to trace the club and called their office about a Mário Mural. They flatly denied it and said that my information was completely incorrect. Nevertheless, on my next visit to Mumbai, I visited the Club and, lo and behold, this masterpiece was staring at me, and the management looking very embarrassed.

Then, there was the wonderful collector Rafael Viegas from Curtorim who had all the issues of the Illustrated Weekly and Goa Today. We set up office in his home and scanned a treasure trove of Mário's drawings. We pursued, often harassing collectors and Mário's friends, and photographed pictures, collecting an impressive 8000 drawings. All these were digitized and hard copies of the drawings were put into folios.

Now was the time to curate the book and I was at a loss. There were so many wonderful pictures and so many different styles. Mário was an expert in penand-ink, water colour and flat colours. He could be realistic and also be abstract, and he often drew in sub-styles like pointillism and caricature. Then were the pen-and-ink drawings with a dash of colour; and there were the crowd scenes (Figure 1), which were closest to a Mário invention. I felt it was my duty to categorize all these styles of Mário separately. It was a great idea but I got into such a muddle and it suddenly struck me that, for the first book, it would be the best to organize it chronologically and for later books, to organize them subject-wise or stylistically.

The book Mário de Miranda was finally released

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Figure 1. Departure (1964).

in 2008 and was very successful. The book release was at the old Goa Medical College complex and the crowd was huge. I organized and took Habiba and Mário for secondary book releases in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore, drumming up publicity at each release.

Within two and a half years, the time had come to expand on the curation and I did a series of five books on different subjects. I chose Goa, Bombay, Travels, and two books of Cartoons. I divided each of these books into about ten-odd chapters, all subject-wise.

During my collection of drawings and editing Mário de Miranda, I acquired an in-depth knowledge of his work and the way his mind worked and his take on many subjects. Topics such as politicians, bosses or secretaries was common knowledge, but I had learnt his take on esoteric topics like the Mumbai bus conductor, the art critic or even hair styles and waiters; and I had a collection spanning 50 years to choose from.

The next step in curating began in 2011, when Mário agreed to publish his visual diaries. He had resisted for many years as they contained many of his secrets, where he made fun of some of his relatives, neighbours and public figures. Mário had begun penning these diaries as a teenager and the text was

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written in Portuguese. So I went about translating them and in the process got to know him intimately.

Through the diaries, I followed him over a six-year period, from when he was 18 till he was 24; and got to know his friends, his haunts, the movies he liked and how he was growing. It was through these diaries that I got the best understanding of his psyche.

After having published nine books, I thought that

Figure 2. Top: box bag (2018). Bottom: wrist band (2016).

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Testemunhos | Testimonies Mário Galleries in 5 locations in Goa and online at www.mariodemiranda.com I began a very different kind of curation in 2014.

This was in the form of a Mário blog which I sent out to fans every Thursday. They were usually organized in a series over five weeks. The themes of the series could be stylistic or on a particular subject.

An example would be Mário's “crowd scenes”, and each Thursday I would email Mário's famous crowd scenes of Bombay, Paris, New York, and so on.

An interesting series was Mário’s depiction of lowlife – strip parlours, peep shows and transvestite shows from all over the world. This blog has slowly Figure 3. Naked Faces at a Striptease (1962). grown and goes out to 5000 people each week (Figure my job of curating his work would be over. Strangely 3). Anybody can register and one has to email Joshua enough, the curating took a completely different turn. at www.josh@mariodemiranda.com During the process of this large and varying Mário had now got Parkinson's disease and it became curation, I have noticed many interesting facets of my duty to earn money for him and his family.

This meant that I had to find a commercial purpose Mário's work. He often draws a picture of a real life to his drawings. I had to design merchandise which incident which happened when he was a child (Figure would suit his drawings. For instance, if one was 3) or teenager and then over a period of time develops making a bag, I had to choose the drawings which newer versions which become stylized.

So, strangely enough, the Jazz Band which Mário were popular and fitted the bag in the right proportion, with the details clearly visible. If I was making a did in 1963 was redrawn, and in 1975, in a rather wristband, I would need to choose pictures which censored form (Figure 5).

Similarly, an incident of a drum rolling down would show clearly on such a small object (Figure 2).

For a wristband for dog lovers, I had to cut and paste the hillside, in 1949, becomes a stylized colourful drawing in 1975 (Figure 6). pictures of dogs taken from his larger pictures.

I don't think enough importance has been given to This kind of curation encompassed many different products, such as paperweights, lamps, key chains, Mário’s fine Art. He is often labelled by art critics as mugs, T-shirts, coasters, and so on. They are sold at a “cartoonist”, which for some reason is considered by many as a lower form of art. During his early life, Mário worked on a rigorous schedule, wherein he had to send a daily cartoon to the newspapers before it went to press, and on a weekly basis for magazines. Then, at the age of 50, he became a freelancer and was freed of much of daily pressure.

Then, he was taken to many exotic locations, such as Paris, New York, Germany, Israel, Japan, and given the freedom to draw exactly what Figure 4. Drawn by Mario when he was a child. caught his fancy, with rather

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Figure 5. Top: Jazz band (1963); bottom: Cool Jazz 1975.

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Figure 6. Top: drum rolling down the hillside during a procession, drawn in 1949; bottom: stylized colorful drawing in 1975.

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Figure 7. Flea Market Frankfurt (1979).

loose deadlines (Figure 7). It was at this stage that Mário spent much more time on a particular drawing.

He became very inventive in his illustrations, often abstract, but always capturing the spirit of the place.

Strangely enough, he never captured Mumbai in the same way as he captured Paris or London. I think this had to do with the fact that he was never commissioned to draw Bombay. Fortunately, he was commissioned to draw two books on Goa. One was Inside Goa and the other was A Family in Goa. For both these books, he travelled extensively and captured the spirit of Goa and also did historical drawings of what Goa must have been.

Curating Mário's cartoons has been a real pleasure.

There are pocket cartoons which appeared in the

daily papers and larger ones which featured in magazines. He has interesting insights on so many topics drawn over a long career. My job was to group them under different headings, for instance, rain, hair, newspapers, family life, eating out, etc. Mário could find humour in every situation and his greatest strength was to be very subtle and tongue-in-cheek.

It's been 15 years that I have been curating the work of Mário. The nature of my curation has been changing over time, and so also the scope. What began as a chance encounter over a book release has probably changed my life and made it much richer. I really wonder what is going to be the next phase of curating Mário, but surely it's going to be exhilarating.

About the Autor | Sobre o autor Gerard da Cunha is a practising Architect based in Goa, working in the field of sustainability. His projects range from individual homes to industrial towns, restorations and institutions which are located in various parts of India. He is the curator of the Mário Gallery, which is dedicated to preserve and propagate the art of Mário de Miranda and runs five outlets spread over Goa. He is also the curator of the ‘Museum Houses of Goa’ and is in the process of setting up a Museum of Indian Architecture.

Gerard da Cunha é arquitecto em exercício, residente em Goa, trabalhando na área da sustentabilidade. Os seus projetos variam de residências individuais a cidades industriais, restaurações e instituições localizadas em várias partes da Índia. É curador da Galeria Mário, que se dedica à preservação e divulgação da arte de Mário de Miranda; e dirige cinco pontos de venda espalhados por Goa. Ele também é o curador do Museu Houses of Goa e está em processo de criação de um Museu de Arquitectura Indiana.

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MÁRIO DE MIRANDA:

UM HOMEM DE CULTURA E UM CRIADOR DE TALENTO MÁRIO DE MIRANDA: A MAN OF CULTURE AND PROMOTER OF TALENT Adelino Rodrigues da Costa Oficial da Marinha (ref.)

Antigo Delegado da Fundação Oriente na Índia Naval Officer (rtd) Former Delegate of Fundação Oriente in India

M

ário Miranda foi um homem de cultura e um criador de talento, cujo reconhecimento saiu do limitado espaço geográfico de Goa e se afirmou como um grande artista em muitos países que conheceram a sua obra. Em 2009 foi condecorado com a Cruz da Ordem de Isabel a Católica, tornando-se o primeiro cidadão indiano a receber a mais alta condecoração civil espanhola e, no mesmo ano, foi condecorado pelo Presidente da República Portuguesa com a Comenda da Ordem do Infante D. Henrique. Depois de ter sido agraciado com o Padma Shri (1988) e com o Padma Bhushan (2002), no dia 4 de Abril de 2012 foi condecorado a título póstumo pelo Presidente da República da Índia com o Padma Vibhushan, a segunda mais alta condecoração civil do país.1 Mário Miranda faleceu no dia 11 de Dezembro de 2011 em Loutulim com 85 anos de idade e subiu muito justamente à galeria dos mais ilustres filhos de Goa. Mário Miranda, de seu nome completo Mário Carlos do Rosário de Brito Miranda, nasceu em Damão no dia 2 de Maio de 1926, quando o seu pai aí se encontrava destacado como funcionário público, mas passou a infância em Goa e estudou em Bangalore e Bombaim, onde concluiu o seu Bachelor of Arts Degree no St. Xavier’s College. Estava-se em 1947 e com a independência da India surgiram algumas incertezas relativas ao futuro dos goeses, pelo que Mário decidiu regressar a Goa e instalarse na sua casa de Loutulim, onde iniciou um famoso

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Mário Miranda was a man of culture and creative talent, whose recognition went beyond the limited geographic space of Goa and established him as a great artist in many countries that knew his work. In 2009 he was decorated with the Cross of the Order of Isabel a Católica, becoming the first Indian citizen to receive this highest Spanish civilian award, and in the same year, he was also decorated by the President of the Portuguese Republic with the Order of the Infante D. Henrique. After being awarded the Padma Shri (1988) and Padma Bhushan (2002), on April 4, 2012 he was a posthumously awarded the Padma Vibhushan1, the second highest civilian award in the country by the President of the Republic of India.

Mário Miranda died on December 11, 2011 in Loutolim (Goa) at the age of 85 and went right up to the gallery as one of the most illustrious sons of Goa. Mário Miranda, from his full name Mário João Carlos do Rosário de Brito Miranda, was born in Damão (Daman) on May 2, 1926, when his father was posted there as a civil servant. He spent his childhood in Goa and studied in Bangalore and Bombay, completing his Bachelor of Arts Degree at St. Xavier's College, Bombay. With the independence of India in 1947, there were some uncertainties regarding the future of Goans, so Mário decided to return to Goa and settle in his family home in Loutolim, where he started his famous diary that recorded his daily life through expressive illustrations. The following year he lost his father and, because he needed work, left

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Testemunhos | Testimonies diário que relata o seu quotidiano através das suas expressivas ilustrações. No ano seguinte perdeu o pai e, porque precisava de trabalho, partiu em 1951 para Bombaim onde começou a trabalhar como freelancer, até que lhe surgiu uma oportunidade quando o jornal The Current lhe encomendou um ou dois cartoons semanais para publicar. O seu nome tornouse rapidamente conhecido e não tardou que lhe chegasse um convite para integrar The Times of India Group. Durante muitos anos colaborou com o jornal The Times of India e com outros jornais indianos do mesmo grupo, nos quais os seus desenhos eram muito apreciados.

Viveu vários anos entre Bombaim e Goa, até que decidiu cumprir o sonho adiado de conhecer a Europa.

Partiu em 1959 e, naturalmente, começou por Lisboa onde tinha familiares e amigos, tendo sido nesta cidade que obteve uma bolsa artística da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, o que lhe permitiu permanecer em Portugal durante cerca de um ano e melhorar as suas técnicas. Em 1960 seguiu para Londres, tendo então viajado por alguns países europeus, mas em Janeiro de 1962 regressou a Goa pois soubera que a sua centenária casa de Loutulim tinha sido ocupada por uma unidade militar, na sequência dos acontecimentos de Dezembro de 1961.

Mário aceitou o novo contexto político da sua terra e a integração de Goa na Índia, mas nunca abdicou da sua matriz cultural portuguesa, nem de a expressar publicamente, enquanto marca da sua própria identidade.

Em 1963 casou com Habiba Hydari, com quem teve os seus filhos Raul e Rishaad.2 Em 1972 foi convidado pelo U.S. Information Services para visitar os Estados Unidos, o que lhe permitiu alargar os seus horizontes no campo das artes. Em 1975 realizou a sua primeira grande exposição que foi apresentada em Panjim, Calcutta, Madras e New Delhi, a que se seguiram outras exposições na Índia e fora da Índia.

Em 1996 regressou definitivamente a Goa, instalando-se na sua casa de Loutulim e foi aí que o conheci em 1998, tendo então iniciado um contacto frequente que cimentou entre nós uma boa amizade.

Mário era um homem de grande talento artístico e de requintado humor, um grande conversador e um amante do convívio, mas também um símbolo da amizade entre Goa e Portugal. Apesar de dominar vários idiomas, usava a língua portuguesa como a

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Figura 1. Mário Miranda e a sua casa em Loutolim, Salcete, Goa (Foto do autor)

in 1951 for Bombay where he started to work as a freelancer. An opportunity arose when the newspaper The Current commissioned him for one or two weekly cartoons to publish. His name quickly became known and he was soon invited to join The Times of India Group. For many years he collaborated with The Times of India and other Indian newspapers in the same group, in which his drawings were highly appreciated. He lived for several years between Bombay and Goa, until he decided to fulfill his pending dream of visiting Europe. He left in 1959 and, naturally, started in Lisbon where he had family and friends. It was in this city that he obtained an artistic scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, which allowed him to stay in Portugal for about a year and improve his techniques. In 1960 he went to London, having by then traveled to some European countries. But in January 1962 he returned to Goa because he had learned that his century old house in Loutolim had been occupied by a military unit, following the events of December 1961. Mário accepted the new political context of his land and the integration of Goa into India, but he never gave up on his Portuguese cultural matrix, nor expressed it publicly as a mark of his own identity.

In 1963 he married Habiba Hydari, with whom he had his sons Raul and Rishaad.2 In 1972 he was invited by the U.S. Information Services to visit the United States, which allowed him to broaden his horizons in the field of the arts.

In 1975 he held his first major exhibition which was presented in Goa, Calcutta, Madras and New Delhi,

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Testemunhos | Testimonies

Figura 2. Mário Miranda com Orlando da Costa (1999) e com o Arcebispo Filipe Neri Ferrão (2009). (Foto do autor)

sua língua mãe e mantinha um afecto muito intenso pela cultura portuguesa, que se reflectia nos desenhos que fazia, na música que se ouvia em sua casa e nas pinturas e nos cartazes que decoravam as paredes do seu estúdio.

No ano de 2000 proporcionou-se a realização de uma grande exposição da sua obra em Portugal, um projecto que a Fundação Oriente apoiou, organizou e financiou. Era uma apresentação necessária, mas não foi fácil convencer Mário para que reunisse as obras a apresentar em Lisboa, porque ele tinha tanto de talento como de humildade.

A exposição intitulou-se Goa e outros trabalhos e foi inaugurada no dia 6 de Dezembro de 2000 pelo presidente da Fundação Oriente e pela Embaixadora da Índia em Lisboa, com a presença do artista, tendo sido um acontecimento social em que compareceram algumas dezenas de amigos e admiradores da sua obra.

No respectivo catálogo encontra-se uma expressiva mensagem de K. R. Narayanan, o então Presidente da República da Índia.

A exposição, que esteve patente durante um mês nas salas da Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes, constituiu um evento marcante no quadro das relações culturais entre Goa e Portugal que então se reconstruiam, mas também foi uma homenagem a um dos maiores nomes da cultura goesa contemporânea e com largo reconhecimento fora de Goa, mas que também é um símbolo da amizade entre Goa e Portugal. Mário publicou depois um artigo na revista Goa Today com o título From Lisbon with love onde escreveu que “there is so much of India on view in Lisbon” e me agradece por ter sido “my guide and mentor during my sojourn in Lisbon”.3

Revista da Casa de Goa

which was followed by other exhibitions in India and outside India. In 1996 he returned to live permanently in Goa, settling in his house in Loutolim and that's where I first met him in 1998. Thereafter, keeping in frequent contact with him cemented a good friendship between us.

Mário was a man of great artistic talent and exquisite humor, a great conversationalist and a lover of conviviality. But, he was also a symbol of the friendship between Goa and Portugal. Despite mastering several languages, he used Portuguese as his mother tongue and maintained a very intense affection for Portuguese culture, which was reflected in the drawings he made, in the music that was heard in his house and in the paintings and posters that decorate your studio walls.

In 2000, a large exhibition of his work was presented in Portugal, a project that Fundação Oriente supported, organized and financed. It was a necessary presentation, but it was not easy to convince Mário to put together the works to be presented in Lisbon, because he had both talent and humility. The exhibition was entitled Goa and other works and was inaugurated on December 6, 2000 by the President of Fundação Oriente and the Ambassador of India in Lisbon, in the presence of the artist, becoming a social event attended by some dozens of friends and admirers of his work. The exhibition’s catalog contains an expressive message from K. R. Narayanan, the then President of the Republic of India.

The exhibition, which was open for a month in the rooms of the National Society of Fine Arts, was not only a landmark event in the context of the cultural relations between Goa and Portugal that were then

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Figura 3. Capa do Catálogo da Exposição Goa e outros trabalhos (Lisboa, SNBA, 2000), com a Capela de Nossa Senhora do Monte (Velha Goa), o Hotel República (Panjim) e o Templo de Saptakoteswar (Bicholim), que estão reproduzidos nesse catálogo.

Goa foi o berço de muita gente ilustre que se distinguiu em domínios tão diversos como a Medicina, o Direito, a Arquitectura, a Historiografia, a Música, a Literatura e as Artes, mas poucos terão tido tanto reconhecimento internacional como Mário Miranda.

Ao longo do seu percurso de criador, ele realizou exposições individuais em mais de duas dezenas de países, incluindo os Estados Unidos, Japão, Brasil, Austrália, Singapura, França, Macau e Portugal.

Hoje, muitos dos seus desenhos encontram-se em colecções particulares e os seus trabalhos podem ser vistos em muitas obras que ilustrou para autores como Uma Anand, Dom Moraes, Manohar Malgonkar, Mário Cabral e Sá, Heta Pandit, entre outros. Muitos lugares públicos, tanto em Bombaim como em Goa,

Revista da Casa de Goa

being rebuilt, but it was also a tribute to one of the greatest names in contemporary Goan culture with wide recognition outside Goa, thereby symbolizing the friendship between Goa and Portugal. Later, Mário published an article in Goa Today magazine with the title From Lisbon with love wherein he wrote “there is so much of India on view in Lisbon” and thanked me for being “my guide and mentor during my sojourn in Lisbon”.3 Goa was the birthplace of many illustrious people who distinguished themselves in fields as diverse as Medicine, Law, Architecture, Historiography, Music, Literature and the Arts, but few will have had as much international recognition as Mário Miranda. Throughout his career as a creative artist,

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Testemunhos | Testimonies estão decorados com painéis de azulejos ou pinturas de Mário Miranda, assim acontecendo, por exemplo, na fachada da nova Central Library ou no Mercado de Panjim.

Em 2008 houve a iniciativa de publicar em Goa um livro de referência sobre a obra de Mário Miranda, em que foram reproduzidas muitas centenas dos seus desenhos.4 Entretanto, o interesse pela sua obra aumentou após a sua morte e deu origem à reprodução em larga escala dos seus trabalhos em livros, cartazes, porcelanas, azulejos e outros objectos decorativos que estão disponíveis em muitas lojas de Panjim.

Hoje, Mário Miranda é muito mais do que uma boa memória, pois as suas criações tornaram-se icónicas no panorama cultural de Goa.

he has held solo exhibitions in more than two dozen countries, including the United States, Japan, Brazil, Australia, Singapore, France, Macau and Portugal.

Today, many of his drawings are found in private collections and can also be seen in the many books that he illustrated for authors such as Uma Anand, Dom Moraes, Manohar Malgaonkar, Mário Cabral e Sá, Heta Pandit, among others. Many public places, both in Bombay and in Goa, are decorated with tile panels or paintings by Mário Miranda, as is the case, for example, on the façade of the new Central Library or at the Panjim Market.

In 2008 there was an initiative to publish in Goa a reference book on the work of Mário Miranda, in which many hundreds of his drawings were reproduced.4 However, interest in his work increased after his death and gave rise to the large-scale reproduction of his works in books, posters, porcelain, tiles and other decorative objects that are available in many stores in Panjim.

Today, Mário Miranda is much more than a good memory, as his creations have become iconic in the cultural panorama of Goa.

References 1.

2.

3.

4.

A mais alta condecoração civil indiana é o Bharat Ratna que até agora só foi concedido a 48 personalidades, incluindo Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Nelson Mandela, Amartya Sen e outros; a segunda é o Padma Vibhushan que foi já atribuído a 314 personalidades nacionais e estrangeiras, mas apenas a um cidadão de Goa: Mário Miranda | The highest Indian civilian award is the Bharat Ratna, which has so far only been awarded to 48 personalities, including Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Nelson Mandela, Amartya Sen and others; the second is Padma Vibhushan, which has already been attributed to 314 national and foreign personalities, but only to a citizen of Goa: Mário Miranda.

Habiba Hydari de Miranda faleceu serenamente com 82 anos de idade na sua casa de Loutulim, no dia 23 de abril de 2021. Como alguém escreveu em sua homenagem e eu concordo, ela era a musa, a companheira e a esposa, mas foi isso tudo e muito mais. | Habiba Hyderi de Miranda passed away peacefully at the age of 82 at her Loutolim residence on 23 April 2021. As someone wrote in your honor and I agree, she was muse, companion, wife, she was all that and more.

Goa Today, Volume XXXV, Number 7, February 2001, pp. 18-19.

Gerard da Cunha and Architecture Autonomous, Mario de Miranda, Salvador do Mundo, Bardez, Goa, 2008.

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MÁRIO DE MIRANDA: A ÍNDIA LATINA MARIO DE MIRANDA: LATIN INDIA Ana de Miranda Advogada (Portugal) Lawyer (Portugal)

Sobre a autora | About the author Ana de Miranda1 nasceu em Lisboa,2 em 2 de Janeiro de 1971, é advogada, casada com Miguel Freitas. Têm dois filhos3 e vivem em Lisboa | Ana de Miranda was born in Lisbon, on the 2 January 1971, is a lawyer, married to Miguel Freitas. They have two children and live in Lisbon.

“Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower” William Wordsworth Goa, Índia, 2017 (janeiro)

Os templos falam todos a mesma linguagem. Séculos depois, estamos de volta. Mais uma vez, a um lugar mágico. Por entre as palmeiras que se inclinam sobre estradas muito estreitas e sinuosas existem, outra vez, ermidas brancas, misturadas com os templos das deusas, flores rosa, laranja e grinaldas de luzes. Como uma infusão de chá, exótico e precioso. As procissões misturam-se com os festivais hindus, cheira a canela, seda, açafrão e pimenta. Um forte antigo enfrenta o mar arábico, verde e baço, à espera das areias das monções. Num táxi, com uma Nossa Senhora de Fátima fluorescente, enfeitada com pétalas de rosa e guirlandas, passamos pela igreja da aldeia, no átrio onde se bebe chá doce, ao entardecer, antes das noites de verão, e viramos para a estrada de areia, cor de tijolo, antes do portão antigo que nos leva de volta a casa.

Revista da Casa de Goa

Goa, Índia, 1999 (outubro)

“Kisses are better faith than wisdom.” e.e. cummings Aterramos em Mumbai, antiga joia da coroa, com o Gateway of India a avistar-se do Taj, um dos mais icónicos hotéis do mundo. As águas do mar arábico são secretamente verdes. À superfície, apenas uma massa cinzenta que se confunde com o céu. O sol é desmaiado, por detrás das nuvens de respiração da grande cidade. O ar é quente, cheira a álcool e gasolina, um travo de algodão, seda, almíscar e açafrão que nos envolve e embala, bem como o som omnipresente dos corvos da cidade. Grandes e pequenas famílias de corvos, descrevendo círculos infinitos no céu.

Algures um pequeno mocho de âmbar, sábio e

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Testemunhos | Testimonies silencioso, espera-nos, no silêncio luxuoso do Taj. O mocho e um tecido cor de tempo, repleto de espelhos redondos, que refletem a luz.

O motorista do táxi não fala inglês e mergulhamos numa montanha russa de seis faixas de rodagem, carros, autocarros, riquexós, vacas. Sempre as vacas, indiferentes e sagradas, que se passeiam nas ruas, montanhas de gentes, homens e cabras, procissões hindus, lojas onde tudo se vende e existem grutas secretas, com pedras preciosas por detrás de portas falsas. Do visível e do invisível.

Nada do que parece é. Welcome to Mother India.

Numa ponte, o motorista para o carro e faznos um sinal: “come, come…”, diz no seu inglês rudimentar, acenando com a mão. De repente a visão enorme, gigantesca e labiríntica dos slums, enormes bairros, labirinto de gentes, tanques, saris, crianças. A água dos tanques brilha furtivamente na pedra e cola o tecido dos saris rosa choque, verde pistácio, roxo e amarelo açafrão aos corpos das mulheres, que tilintam pulseiras nas pulsos e tornozelos finos. Existe uma lógica própria no grande labirinto, cada um sabe o seu papel e a sua hierarquia. Castas. Imutáveis, tatuadas nos genes, transgeracionais, no eterno retorno, nos círculos da vida, pelos séculos dos séculos. Daqui a muitos anos os slums ficarão famosos num filme cheio de prémios, Slumdog Millionaire, uma banda sonora vibrante e várias coreografias de Bollywod, Índia contemporânea, como na Vogue.

Para já ainda estamos no fim dos anos noventa: as fotografias ainda são impressas e não temos i-phones. Não existem imagens instagramáveis, porque o mundo ainda não descobriu as redes sociais.

Estamos em lua de mel. Just married.

O aeroporto de Mumbai ainda vive na sua versão rudimentar. As malas são atiradas para o chão depois de rolar infinitamente em tapetes arcaicos.

Daqui a muitos anos, se quisermos espreitar o futuro, poderemos ver um aeroporto moderno e luxuoso, ornado de mil flores no teto, pontos de luz e sombra em arquitetura high-tech, com um perfume de exotismo. Para já, nos anos noventa, apenas a confusão e o barulho. Agarramos nas nossas mochilas neocoloniais e nas máquinas fotográficas e embarcamos no mini-voo de ligação Mumbai-Goa.

Revista da Casa de Goa

Goa, 1999 (outubro) – Mário e Habiba

“(I do not know what it is about you that closes and opens; only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands”. e.e. cummings O avião é pequeno e prateado. Depois de fechar os olhos, com o sol morno da manhã, optamos, o Miguel e eu pela versão vegetariana do pequeno almoço, wraps de legumes, perfumados com especiarias insondáveis. Orlas infinitas de praias e coqueiros, verão para além do outono. Estamos em outubro e a época das monções está a terminar.

No aeroporto, à nossa espera um casal notável – Mário de Miranda e Habiba Hydari de Miranda, que nos acenam com a sua elegância e flexibilidade felinas, tão próxima dos movimentos da cor e da respiração da arte e do verde-trópico da Índia latina. Descontraídos, modernos e cool, Mário e Habiba preparam-se para adotar o jovem casal, recém-casado, em busca das histórias de família, numa lua de mel com cheiro a canela e pimenta verde.

Para já o hotel Leela Palace, um palácio construído no meio de uma enorme reserva natural, com grandes varandas e sofás com almofadas de seda crua, onde podemos tomar chá em bules de prata e chávenas de porcelana, tão fina e transparente como casca de ovo, enquanto observamos o voo dos pequenos pássaros que posam, como bolas de algodão, nas cadeiras de pau santo. Respiramos fundo e aceitamos esta nova indulgência, a maneira goesa de estar.

Mário ri-se e deixa-nos a sós na nossa primeira noite em Goa, onde as cortinas de chuva torrencial das últimas monções deixam no chão pequenos rios de água iluminada pela luz dos relâmpagos.

Amanhã será uma nova manhã, com a praia particular de areia branca e fina e com as ondas do mar arábico, turvado pela areia, mas, ainda assim, quente e sedutor como uma promessa de evasão e de escape. “Cuidado com as promessas e enganos do mar, evitem os remoinhos pós-monção”. Bebemos água de coco e exploramos as orlas de vegetação, os barcos abandonados, os vendedores de pulseiras e conchas, as pinturas de henna e sabedoria antiga das massagens ayurvédicas junto da piscina cor de esmeralda, perfeitamente oval e rodeada de palmeiras

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Testemunhos | Testimonies e sumos naturais, manga e papaia. Os corvos continuam o seu voo circular, junto da praia.

Goa, 2017 (janeiro)

“E se voltássemos a Goa?”- a pergunta parece não fazer muito sentido, numa fria manhã de inverno, em Lisboa, no meio da azáfama da preparação matinal, chuveiros, crianças e torradas, tantos anos depois, assim de repente não pegamos nas malas e vamos para o outro lado dos equinócios, as viagens para a Índia sempre requereram muito planeamento, pelo menos desde os tempos de Vasco da Gama. Mas, assim mesmo de repente, a ideia é irresistível, voltar a casa, Mother India and so on. Ainda por cima para homenagear o tio (primo) Mário, é assim que lhe chamamos desde sempre, ou pelo menos desde a viagem de lua de mel.

As decisões às vezes têm mesmo de ser rápidas e precisas. Rumamos para Goa, via Paris e Mumbai.

Goa, 1999 (outubro) – Mário e Habiba

“Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it”Robert Dahl As luas de mel não têm, normalmente, muitas histórias. São feitas de praias luminosas, champagnes e hotéis em forma de resort.

No entanto, esta, a nossa, tem todas as histórias do mundo. É uma descoberta e um regresso a casa, à casa dos Miranda, em Loutulim, à aldeia ancestral da nossa família.

Mário e Habiba recebem-nos como perfeitos anfitriões, elegantes e descontraídos, com a sua ironia sweet and sour, sentamo-nos nas cadeiras da varanda a beber qualquer coisa, bonita e fria, e comemos juntos, na grande cozinha da casa, como se ali pertencêssemos, como se, de facto, não houvesse distância, como se o fogo antigo sempre ali estivesse estado a cozer o arroz, o naan e a ferver as lentilhas.

Uma estranha sensação de dejá vu, já estive aqui, aqui pertenço, estes claustros e estas portas encarnadas sempre aqui estiveram, dentro dos meus sonhos, na sintaxe obscura das coisas e dos espelhos, nas palmeiras inclinadas, nos sapos coloridos e venenosos, nos labirintos do inconsciente.

Pangim é uma cidade cheia de segredos. Com Mário e Habiba descobrimos verdadeiras joias, escondidas

Revista da Casa de Goa

em prédios obscuros, com elevadores antigos, com ascensoristas, como nos filmes, que abrem as suas portas para o atelier de um dos grandes amigos do tio Mário, o designer Wendell Rodricks. Entre sedas e cores deslumbrantes, numa antecipação de uma moda muito eco-friendly, descobrimos o lado moderno da Índia. Com o mesmo grupo, sempre com a organização perfeita dos “tios” experimentámos a Goa verdadeira, chique e boémia, cool e laid down, na sua vivência sossegada (sussegad).

A piscina oval do Leela Palace brilha como uma esmeralda, durante a noite, no intervalo do fim das chuvas. Cheira a terra molhada, mas é um perfume diferente, doce, uma névoa de algodão muito fino que nos envolve, constantemente, como uma pashmina, de ouro macio.

Vamos, com os “tios”, à inauguração de um restaurante francês, L’Aubergine, um oásis no meio das palmeiras, onde Lúcio de Miranda, mais um primo, arquiteto e trovador, encanta, com a sua guitarra, as top-models indianas, no after party de um desfile de moda da MTV India, onde todas acabam por se lançar no espaço, na estética dos trapézios tropicais, em modo de bunjee-jumping. Fenim e calor húmido, num cigar bar improvável.

Durante as nossas viagens noturnas, nos táxis, enquanto o Mário e o Miguel dormitam, nas estreitas estradas de curvas impossíveis (“please horn”), Habiba conta-me as pequenas histórias da família, os segredos, as anedotas. De como, Mário e Habiba, jovem casal em Mumbai, recebe a “casa” de Loutulim (“the House”, mais do que um personagem), e em como se lançam, num ato de fé, aceitando mudar toda a sua vida, reacender o fogo nas velhas cozinhas, guiados pelos pequenos sinais da deusa da família, cujo templo se encontra perdido, algures, na selva (“don’t try to get there alone, you will get lost”).

Aceitar os sinais, ser guiados pelas pequenas pedras brancas que indicam os caminhos, como nos contos de fadas, Hansel e Gretel, em versão tropical. A sorte constrói-se e dá muito trabalho. É preciso aceitar os desafios, as mudanças, erguê-las, desenhá-las.

Como os maravilhosos desenhos do Mário, as suas caricaturas repletas de humor doce, as suas aguarelas onde, por vezes, basta uma nota de cor, um pontinho de encarnado, para acender a magia.

Magia. É disso mesmo que se trata.

Como as esmeraldas dos Miranda, que encerram

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Testemunhos | Testimonies profecias e segredos, como os “frescos” do meu avô, Carlos de Miranda, juiz e “desenhador” (como todos os Miranda), que encheu o teto de um dos quartos vazios da casa com imagens dos navios que cruzavam os mares frios da Europa, durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial. Como o cartoon do Mário do tetravô, Constâncio do Rosário de Miranda, aquele que obteve, pelos favores prestados à Coroa Portuguesa (ainda que não da forma mais nobre, sussurra-se), o brasão que ainda brilha, na porta principal da casa de Loutulim.

De como o casamento dos meus avós, Carlos de Miranda e Olga Ferreira, primos não muito afastados, durou três dias, uma festa infinita, os salões de baile abertos e cintilantes, brilhando como escravas de ouro nos pulsos das raparigas.

Esta é a história de uma família brâmane, católica, que, ao longo dos séculos e de muitas aventuras e desventuras, soube escolher os caminhos traçados por Roberto de Nobili, jesuíta italiano que, no século XVII chegou à Costa do Malabar. Os Jesuítas, com a sua sabedoria prática, de acordo com os ensinamentos de Loyola, perceberam, rapidamente, que o melhor caminho para a “inculturação”4 seria chegar aos Brâmanes.5 De facto, quando os Jesuítas começaram as suas viagens de evangelização pelo Mundo, no século XVI, “civilizar” significava impor o padrão de cultura e de vida dos europeus e “missionar” significava impor o Cristianismo, moldado de acordo com os padrões culturais e civilizacionais do Ocidente. A Companhia de Jesus percebeu, desde muito cedo, que era essencial transmitir a “Mensagem de Cristo” de uma forma diferente, que respeitasse e incorporasse as culturas dos povos “recetores” dessa nova Mensagem. As “Constituições” (os princípios) da Companhia de Jesus são “um modelo de flexibilidade” – as prescrições (regras) devem adaptar-se no espaço e no tempo (“circunstâncias de tempo e lugar”).6 Assim, quando no início do século XVII o Padre Roberto de Nobili7 chega ao sul da Índia (Costa do Malabar) e verifica que a maior parte dos locais cristianizados pertenciam a “castas inferiores”.8 Era necessário chegar aos “brâmanes”, o topo da

Revista da Casa de Goa

Figura 1. Ana e Miguel com Mário e Habiba (1999)

hierarquia social indiana. Nobili, levando à letra as “instruções” de Santo Inácio, adota os hábitos e costumes dos Brâmanes – “rapa a cabeça, pinta a testa, pendura enormes argolas nas orelhas, enfia-se numa túnica alaranjada e retira-se para uma cabana onde viverá sozinho, comendo ervas e bebendo água: agora é um brâmane”. Os outros brâmanes, ao princípio intrigados com este comportamento, começam, entretanto, a aproximar-se e Nobili é tratado como o “brâmane romano”. Em pouco tempo, abre uma escola e inicia o processo de evangelização dos brâmanes. A estratégia seguida por Nobili no seu projeto de evangelização dos brâmanes gerou alguma inquietação nas autoridades portuguesas em Goa, nomeadamente na sinistra Inquisição9. Nobili defendia a tese segundo a qual os brâmanes não eram sacerdotes e os seus hábitos (vestuário, ritos) deveriam ser consideradas como simples “práticas sociais”, “isentas de qualquer forma de idolatria”10 11 .

A questão é discutida nos tribunais religiosos, chegando à Santa Sé, em Roma. No início do século XVIII, as “adaptações” e interpenetrações religiosas brâmanes-cristãs12 foram proibidas.

Mas, a “semente” estava lançada. Independentemente da discussão político-religiosa, na Índia portuguesa, em Goa, os novos brâmanes cristãos começaram a reivindicar certos privilégios dentro dos quadros da esfera colonial portuguesa, assumindo lugares de destaque na Administração, na hierarquia de Igreja Católica, recebendo títulos nobiliárquicos por parte

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Testemunhos | Testimonies dos reis portugueses, que foram reconhecendo o seu papel, também evangelizador.

Esta é a grande história. Mas a vida é feita de pequenas histórias, as particularidades de cada família, que a tornam única e especial.

Como por exemplo, o jantar que Mário e Habiba organizaram, na casa, para receber os primos recémcasados. Lembro-me de chegar num táxi, com um pequeno vestido encarnado. Mário, elegante, como sempre, recebe-nos na porta principal, também ele com um polo encarnado. “Great souls think alike” diz-me, com um pequeno sorriso, numa alusão à nossa sintonia cromática, que me deixa imediatamente à vontade.

Mais uma vez, a noite foi mágica, os salões reacenderam-se ao som do mandó e das baladas mágicas do primo Lúcio. Telma Santana da Silva / Lady Telma, do lado mais “conservador” da família, partilha mais um “mito” familiar. De facto, contase que, em tempos, o Diabo (sim, o próprio) foi convidado para uma festa. No entanto, ao saber que os Miranda iriam estar presentes, declinou o convite.

Entre música, fenim, Kingfisher e muitos risos, a noite transformou-se num encontro/reencontro improvável de muitos ramos e gerações, numa sintonia perfeita, notas perfeitamente almiscaradas de memórias em construção. Entre high teas, com sanduíches de pepino – com toda a formalidade da best china, na casa cintilante dos primos Santana da Silva – onde conhecemos o primo Joaquim, patologista e contador de histórias – e outras aventuras com os tios Mário e Habiba, a nossa viagem não terminou.

Porque, ao contrário dos viajantes, as viagens não acabam nunca.

Goa, 2017 (janeiro) – o regresso

Desta vez, vale a pena explicar porque decidimos voltar, repentinamente, admita-se, a Goa, numa manhã fria de nevoeiro, em janeiro de 2017. De facto, estava cheia de saudades e, aproveitando a minha proximidade com um amigo que trabalhava no Ministério da Cultura e que preparava a visita do nosso Primeiro Ministro, António Costa13, à Índia que incluía, uma passagem por Goa - lembrei-me de propor uma homenagem ao grande artista Mário de Miranda, que entretanto, nos havia deixado em 2011.

A ideia foi prontamente acolhida pelo então Ministro da Cultura, o Embaixador e poeta Luís Filipe Castro

Revista da Casa de Goa

Mendes e o Governo Português decidiu entregar uma “medalha de mérito cultural” a Mário de Miranda14, a “título póstumo”.

A decisão do regresso a casa (Loutulim) foi inevitável. “Arrastei” o Miguel (ainda agora e espero que sempre, meu marido), bem como os primos Brito de Miranda, que também vivem em Portugal, nas planícies do Alentejo (Baleizão). Assim, o grupo foi-se formando e, para além da prima Luisa (Bebé) de Brito de Miranda15, acompanharam-nos os nossos primos mais novos, Luisa e Manuel, bem como o marido da Luisa, o Daniel. De repente, estávamos de regresso, vinte anos depois.

Como antecipei, desta vez o aeroporto de Mumbai tinha sofrido uma metamorfose, declinada num milagre arquitetónico, onde centenas de flores de luz abrem as suas mágicas estruturas mecânicas sobre joias e produtos ayurvédicos, da marca “Forest Essentials”, uma mistura poética e quase literária entre os contos das mil e uma noites e as essências de rosa, jasmim e laranjas doces.

Desta vez, foi tudo muito rápido. Mas ainda houve tempo de conhecer a querida tia Fátima de Miranda Figueiredo16, irmã do tio Mário e o seu marido Anacleto, advogado, “enciclopédias” de histórias (mais histórias) que juro, um dia, vou contar com calma, no livro que ainda tenho que escrever sobre esta família e a sua saga, uma espécie de “Casa dos Espíritos”, em modo asiático e latino, com perfume do açafrão e grinaldas de jasmim. Ainda de conhecer os primos Maoshe (Rishaad), a sua mulher Sabine e os seus filhos, Raphael e Samuel, bem como Potkiss (Raul) de Miranda, que nos acompanharam nas aventuras de cinco dias intensamente mágicos, que incluíram batizados inesperados na Igreja de Loutulim e, sobretudo, reencontros.

Na nossa última visita à tia Habiba, verificámos que os claustros da Casa de Loutulim estavam exatamente no mesmo sítio, na quietude silenciosa do fim da tarde, rodeados dos sons e dos cheiros da selva. Porque há realidades imutáveis, construídas em pedra, com a doçura do chutney de coentros e as emoções contidas das despedidas inevitáveis, mas repletas de sentimentos. Guardo os sábios conselhos da Habiba – não procurar sozinha o templo da deusa da família, porque iria, com toda a certeza, perderme “in the jungle”. Guardo ainda o pequeno cinzeiro de prata, daqueles que se usavam nas festas dos anos

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Testemunhos | Testimonies cinquenta do século passado, e uns desenhos do tio Mário, sempre presente, com a sua elegância felina, o seu humor descontraído, o seu compromisso com a beleza.

Mário e Habiba reencontraram-se, nos céus, em 2021, mas deixaram para trás um legado precioso – arte, sabedoria, elegância. Obrigada por tudo o que

nos ensinaram e por toda a beleza que nos deixaram!

Como todos sabemos, as viagens não acabam nunca.

Apenas os viajantes acabam.17 Por tudo isso e por muito mais, o regresso destes viajantes a Goa é certo. Sabemos que, mais tarde ou mais cedo, voltaremos a casa.

Referências 1.

Ana Isabel Silva Pereira de Miranda2 Vieira de Freitas.

2.

Filha de João Batista Fausto Ferreira de Miranda , médico obstetra-ginecologista, no Hospital de Santa Maria, em Lisboa (primo direito de Mário de Miranda e filho do “tio Carlos de Miranda”, de Loutulim, Juiz Conselheiro do Supremo Tribunal de Justiça de Lisboa, casado com Maria Carlota Olga Ferreira de Miranda, de Corjuém) e de Izabel Maria Mascarenhas da Silva Pereira de Miranda, ribatejana, e professora da Literatura inglesa e portuguesa.

3.

Constança (Concha), de 19 anos e Afonso, de 16 anos.

4.

Ou “Interculturação”.

5.

ADONE AGNOLIN, in O Amplexo Político dos Costumes de um Jesuíta Brâmane na Índia: a acomodação de Roberto de Nobili em Madurai e a polêmica do Malabar (século XVII). Tese de Livre Docência, São Paulo (2017).

6.

As instruções de Santo Inácio de Loyola aos seus Missionários são muito claras e determinam que estes se devem acomodar “à terra”. Muitas vezes, os Jesuítas são aconselhados a apresentar-se “conformes com os costumes daqueles povos”.

7.

Padre Jesuíta, descendente de uma família nobre Toscana.

8.

O “sistema das castas” é forma específica de organização social que perdura, desde tempos milenares até aos dias de hoje, na Índia.

9.

Cf. ADONE AGNOLIN, in op. cit.

10.

Cf. ADONE AGNOLIN, op. cit., páginas 133/234 e ss.

11.

Italiano, humanista, Nobili aprende as línguas locais (sânscrito), traduz os Evangelhos, vive como os brâmanes e leva à letra os ensinamentos de Santo Inácio de Loyola que terá usado a expressão “entrar pela porta deles para sair pela nossa” – Cf. AGNOLIN, in op. cit.

12.

Para além das referências a esta questão constantes da tese de ADONE AGNOLI, poderia citar o exemplo concreto da minha família paterna, em Goa. Os “Miranda” eram brâmanes, Sardessai (proprietários) que foram convertidos no século XVII, tendo ocupado lugares de destaque na Administração Portuguesa da Índia e recebido um título nobiliárquico pelos serviços prestados ao Reino de Portugal. Sempre se mantiveram católicos, ao longo de gerações.

13.

Também ele, de origem brâmane, católica e goesa.

14.

O Despacho n.º 6824/2017, do Gabinete do Ministro da Cultura, atribui a Medalha de Mérito Cultural, a título póstumo, a Mário Miranda, “cartoonista e pintor goês de origem portuguesa, natural de Damão, República da Índia, com um percurso profissional realizado em vários países, pelo seu notável contributo para a divulgação das artes plásticas a título internacional, ao longo de mais de cinquenta anos, e por ocasião da visita oficial do Primeiro-Ministro António Costa à República da Índia em janeiro de 2017.”

15.

Luisa Brito de Miranda Castro e Brito.

16.

Que me desafiou, através do Óscar de Noronha para escrever este testemunho e com quem vou trocando WhatsApp, com muita frequência.

17.

Como nos recorda José Saramago, no seu livro Viagem a Portugal (1981).

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Testemunhos | Testimonies

TESTEMUNHOS VÁRIOS VARIOUS TESTIMONIES My dad produced a lot of highly praised art pieces, loved Goa, loved music, especially Fado and Emiliano from the village, enjoyed food, had incredible friends, and was a loyal friend, loved his animals and his family. All inspiring and the makings of a beautiful life but what really stood out was his work ethic and his ability to love. You didn’t go to him looking for an ‘I love you’ but when I had a difficult time in school he accepted it and worked incredibly hard to send me to London so I could train as a hairdresser. He moved mountains for his family and asked for nothing.

Raul Carlos Hydari de Miranda Filho | Son

Asked for nothing | Nunca pedia nada

Magen Gilmore e Miranda Nora | Daughter-in-law

Listened much, spoke little | Escutava muito, falava pouco

Gayle Zulema Gilmore Hydari de Miranda Neta | Granddaughter

Chaos and Utopia | Caos e Utopia

Revista da Casa de Goa

Raul and I would often see Mário drawing on the balcony after midnight in the suit he wore to an event a few hours earlier so he could meet a deadline. Twelve hours later we would see a scramble as the messenger arrived to pick up another drawing that was still wet.

He worked tirelessly, listened with intent, and spoke few words. If you complimented his work, he would often deflect the compliment and describe Rishaad’s mastery as an artist or Raul’s skills as a stylist. He loved his sons with his whole heart and was a devoted husband. He was also a fierce environmentalist and conservationist working tirelessly for causes that heaped large rewards. He also worked for social causes and animal rights with the same work ethic as his drawings and the world is a better place for it.

As a child, I spent a lot of time playing with Avô’s beloved Smurf collection at his feet while he drew in Loutulim. There was not a lot of talking but he would paint with almost no effort and pass sketches on scraps to keep me entertained. This could go on for hours. Everyone knows how much he loved Grandma, Maoshe and my dad but he was painstakingly engaged with his three grandchildren and the many animals in the house. It was managed chaos and utopia for all of us. There was no pressure to please; his love for his family was a talent even greater than his artistic skills.

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Testemunhos | Testimonies Rishaad Mario Hydari de Miranda Filho | Son

Best friend | O Pai, meu melhor amigo Caricature by Rishaad (Maoshe), dedicated to his father | Caricatura da autoria de Rishaad (Maoshe), dedicada ao pai

Sabine Frank e Miranda Nora | Daughter-in-law

My dear father-in-law, a peaceful gentleman, was always around for me and my sons, looking after us with patience and a smile. He trusted me enough to let me – when needed – support him at times with his needs, which I felt honoured to do. Always in our hearts!

Peaceful gentleman | Um cavalheiro da paz

Raphael de Miranda Neto | Grandson

When I was small I would always be allowed to sit on my grandfather’s lap while he would draw.

Occasionally we would even draw together. I will never forget the days when we sat together in his office, drawing for what seemed like endless hours. I will always miss him, and never forget him.

When I sat on your lap | Quando me sentei ao seu colo

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Testemunhos | Testimonies Samuel de Miranda

Dear Avô: too little time but great memories. You always made me smile and giggle. I loved watching you draw, while I was around your feet. You gave me my passion for details as well as your endless patience. I will always have you in my heart.

Neto | Grandson

Smiles and giggles | Sorrisos e gargalhadas

Fátima Miranda Figueiredo, Baizu, Biggle Irmã | Sister

Seus bichinhos de estimação | Mário’s pets “Errar é humano, perdoar é canino”, dizia o Mário numa pequena publicação comemorativa dum Canil, algures na Índia, por ele ilustrada.

Em Loutulim tínhamos um mini aviário, mormente para ovos. A maioria das galinhas eram batizadas pelo Mário. Uma delas, que aparecia sempre ao pequeno almoço, era a Madame Frufru. Quando uma dessas aves, ou um galo a mais, era transformado em caril de Goa ou dampaca de Damão, o Mário não tocava

Maria Carolina Miranda Bordadágua Parente | Relative

Carta ao Primo Mário | Letter to my cousin Mário Mário Miranda, meu primo e grande amigo, o que é que eu posso dizer a teu respeito que as pessoas

Revista da Casa de Goa

no prato. A desolação era também intensa quando algum dos nossos muitos caninos rendiam a alma ao Criador. Lembro-me vivamente quando o nosso altivo Rapaz Raposo Rodrigues e o ilustre Farrusco Santana Dentuça nos deixaram após bastantes anos de fiel e alegre companhia, incluindo nos passeios do Mário na aldeia. Recordo-me que naqueles dias tristes o Mário não fez nenhuma refeição, fechandose no quarto, que mais tarde viria a ser o seu estúdio de trabalho.

O último companheiro canino em Loutulim foi o Happy, nome dado pelo seu neto. Este, aliás sempre alegre, como o nome indicava, traumatizado com a imobilidade do Mário, tentava saltar para junto do seu corpo, gemendo. Olhando pela última vez aquelas bonitas e preciosas mãos, ora atadas como que em prece, fiz com que o fiel amigo dele me acompanhasse para um passeio junto à Natureza, tanto apreciada pelo Mário, cogitando que afinal tudo o que é bom dura tão pouco. ainda não saibam? Quando nos deixaste, já eras quase mundialmente conhecido, assim como os teus trabalhos de caricaturista e os outros mais sérios. Mas é essa tua faceta de caricaturista que eu quero recordar aqui nestas poucas linhas.

Eras um artista nato e, até um certo ponto, um autodidata. Tinhas o condão de nos fazer rir e soltar umas boas gargalhadas, mesmo sem escrever ou pronunciar uma única palavra! Bastava-nos olhar para as tuas caricaturas para desatarmos a rir e de cada vez que olhávamos para elas, encontrávamos sempre novos motivos de riso.

Sempre foste de poucas palavras, mas, em compensação, tinhas um poder de observação

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Testemunhos | Testimonies fotográfico que, mais tarde, transferias para os teus diários. Eu ficava admirada com este teu dom e perguntava-me como é que o Mário consegue reter na sua memória tanta coisa e com tantos detalhes que ele mostra nos seus desenhos? Só um génio ou uma pessoa privilegiada o consegue e tu eras um privilegiado nesse aspecto e eu sempre te admirei muito por isso.

As tuas caricaturas são de um realismo tal, que as pessoas por ti caricaturadas parecem seres vivos em miniatura, prontos a saltar do papel para o nosso colo! E a semelhança é de tal ordem, que podem ser facilmente reconhecidas e identificadas, mesmo tratando-se de desconhecidos…

A propósito vou contar um pequeno episódio passado comigo. Havia um senhor cujo nome não me ocorre agora, mas que podemos chamar o senhor ABC e que tu representavas nas tuas caricaturas com uma certa frequência. Um belo dia em que eu estava em Damão fui visitar a senhora Dona Bolina, a tua avó materna e, qual não foi o meu espanto, quando eu ia a entrar e vi sair de lá esse tal senhor, que para mim era um ilustre desconhecido! Não resisti à curiosidade e perguntei-lhe se ele era, por acaso, o senhor ABC. E ele respondeu-me: “Sou!” e, acto contínuo, com um ar muito espantado, perguntou-me de onde é que eu o conhecia ao que respondi-lhe que era do Diário do Mário!

Carmen (Carmita) Miranda

É um dom de nascença, é o tal génio. E a outra característica era a santíssima paciência com que ele desenhava algumas das caricaturas extremamente complexas e detalhadas. Esses trabalhos deramme sempre azo a muitas oportunidades de rir às gargalhadas cada vez que descobria mais cantos e recantos cómicos quando revia as caricaturas.

Mais tarde quando ele começou a captar os cenários e paisagens que o atraíram em vários países para onde foi oficialmente convidado para interagir com caricaturistas célebres, ele foi desenvolvendo um novo estilo e uma meticulosa técnica de desenhar, para a qual era preciso ter não só visão e precisão mas também muita paciência – o resultado foi uma grande e esplêndida colecção de ilustrações lindíssimas, que enriqueceram enormemente o património artístico do Mário.

Parente | Relative

Artista genial, primo e amigo | Brilliant Artist, Cousin and Friend Eu sempre tive uma grande admiração pelo génio da arte extraordinária do Mário, que tinha duas características que eu admirava em particular – uma era o imenso sentido do ridículo que ele captava nas situações que para o resto do mundo podiam passar despercebidas. E isso não se pode ensinar nem treinar.

Maria Helena Menezes Ribeiro Bravo Parente | Relative

De poucas falas e nobres sentimentos | Of few words and noble sentiments Mário era uma pessoa muito querida no seio da sua família, amigos e simpatizantes. Pessoa de poucas

Revista da Casa de Goa

falas mas de nobres sentimentos, de simples trato muito afetuoso, amigo do seu amigo e convivia com todos com sincera amizade. Recordo, com muitas saudades, as férias que passava com os meus irmãos no Solar dos Mirandas em Loutulim. Sendo ele muito mais velho que nós, partilhava nas nossas brincadeiras, organizava passeios proporcionando-nos umas férias maravilhosas. Era um bom observador, aparentemente ausente no seu mundo artístico, com grande sentido de humor, retratava nos seus cartoons todos os acontecimentos do quotidiano, festas familiares, casamentos e batizados. Estas informações eram ao mesmo tempo um entretenimento que se via com

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Testemunhos | Testimonies prazer nos seus diários. Mário era um grande homem que deixa um rico legado do qual nos podemos orgulhar.

Andrew Miranda-G. Parente | Relative

When I first met Mário | Primeiro encontro Mario captured an adventure in a cartoon form of me cycling in and out of the road blocks, fallen trees and burning vehicles, based on a particular event. I returned late from one of the hippie beaches, my head

Henriqueta (Iqueta) de Brito Parente | Relative

foggy; I lost sense of my direction cycling home at dusk. I was caught at the end of the Borim Bridge on the Zuari, wearing my red lip shorts and knotted handkerchief on head, and had to barge through the local mob, tooled up with burning torches, stones and projectiles. It wasn’t a religious festival either. I was tired and didn’t stop to ask questions, so I carried on cycling across the empty void along the littered bridge, to be greeted by police and soldiers at the other end, also armed, but with rifles and wielding batons aimed at me. They must have thought I was the mob’s secret weapon. I convinced them to let me through once I had established I was staying at the Miranda residence in Loutulim.

We remember Mario as a gentle, handsome man. He had a smirk, I remember, the only one in the world.

He was my hero! His pet name for me was “Fatty”; now you would call me Thinny!! And now that I am blessed with a son and two daughters, and becoming grandma to three grandkids is fun, oh Mario, I wish you could have shared my bliss! I miss you, Mário!

Missing Mário | Saudade

Maria Luisa Miranda de Castro e Brito Parente | Relative

Captava a Alma | He captured the soul O primeiro encontro ao vivo com o tio Mário foi para mim inesquecível. Quando o vi ali sentado na

Revista da Casa de Goa

sala ao lado do meu pai, fiquei desde logo encantada.

Parecia que já o conhecia, tantas foram as histórias contadas pelo meu pai, os cartoons e as fotografias que ele nos mostrava. Mas o que mais me impressionou foi o seu olhar sorridente e penetrante, que parecia ver mais além.

Era naturalmente com este olhar que o tio Mário olhava o mundo. Sem malícia e sem sarcasmo conseguia que as pessoas se rissem de si próprias e do que as rodeia. Como o ouvi afirmar numa entrevista “I don’t laugh at people, I laugh with people”.

Durante uma curta estadia em Baleizão, no Alentejo onde moro, deu um passeio a pé, à noite e, mais tarde,

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Testemunhos | Testimonies pintou o quadro que ele me ofereceu e apresento abaixo. Quem conhece Baleizão percebe que ele não só viu como sentiu Baleizão e captou a sua alma.

Dino Miranda, Advogado | Advocate

Amigo de infância | Childhood friend

Grandeza e simplicidade | Greatness and simplicity Padre Joaquim de Loiola Pereira Amigo | Friend

Cativantes | Captivating Poucos dias depois de entrar na Igreja de Loutulim, como novo vigário paroquial, fiquei sabendo que o

Padre António Colimão Amigo | Friend

Mário e Damão | Mário and Daman Damão soube sempre honrar os seus Artistas, em várias áreas!

Sendo Damão muito pequeno nas suas dimensões

Revista da Casa de Goa

Mário, não obstante toda a grandeza da sua arte, era de uma simpatia e simplicidade cativantes; dava-se com todos os rapazes da aldeia, desde o mais humilde até o mais rico, embora ele próprio pertencesse a uma família aristocrática, de antigas tradições.

Mário foi um grande homem, em todos os sentidos, e que muito honrou Damão, a terra de seu berço, e sobretudo Goa, Índia, e a nossa bela aldeia de Loutulim.

grande Mário de Miranda voltara, de vez, para sua casa paterna, que fica pertinho da Igreja. Fui visitá-lo um dia, ansioso por conhecer pessoalmente alguém que vinha admirando ao longo dos anos como um artista sem rival. Uma hora depois, deixei a companhia de Mário e de Habiba como se os tivesse conhecido desde sempre. Voltei conquistado! E durante os seis anos que vivi em Loutulim, eles permaneceram meus amigos de todas as horas. Lamento só que nunca tivesse pedido ao Mário para esboçar um retrato meu.

Tê-lo-ia guardado como uma relíquia de raríssimo valor!

geográficas, nesse “oceano do sub-Continente Indiano”, naturalmente as pessoas importantes da terra eram, largamente, conhecidas e faladas! Mário, damanense, era um dos grandes vultos, e ouso dizer, estrela da primeira grandeza, da nossa era. Falou-se com justo orgulho desse filho da Terra!

Meus contactos com o Artista Mário Miranda foram escassos, ao longo de todos estes anos! Além de ver a sua emblemática fotografia nas revistas e jornais, curiosamente a primeira vez que o vi, foi na Televisão, em Lisboa, numa reportagem da RTP, o Mário a fazer-se de cicerone e a apresentar, nesse programa, Damão Praça do seu tempo de criança, o Palácio do Governador, a Sé Catedral de Damão, etc.

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Testemunhos | Testimonies Francisco Colaço, Médico | Physician Amigo | Friend

Apaixonado na música | Passionate about music Poucos devem saber que Mário Miranda, além de famoso caricaturista, era um grande apaixonado da música clássica, ligeira, latina e pop.

Uma vez quando estávamos sentados lado a lado, a orquestra sinfónica do Kala Academy, depois de um repertório pesado, resolveu tocar uma peça mais

Gerson da Cunha Amigo | Friend

In Goa, with Mário | Em Goa, com Mário

Aristides Álvares Amigo | Friend

Exceptional human being | Ser humano excecional

Revista da Casa de Goa

ligeira cujo nome só Mário conhecia: “Harry Lime Theme”.

Apesar dos meus fracos préstimos, Mário gostava muito de me ouvir cantar, especialmente em dueto com a minha mulher. Dizia: “Francisco, vocês cada dia cantam melhor e eu gosto imenso das vossas vozes!”

Conheci mais de perto o Mário quando um stroke, quase no fim da sua jornada, o deixou alquebrado.

Sempre que precisasse dos meus cuidados médicos eu ia pressuroso a Loutulim. Fazia muita rabugice em face do seu sofrimento mas era sempre cortês e aprumado. Ainda me lembro do lindíssimo bouquet de rosas que Habiba veio oferecer-me em minha casa, em gratidão pelos serviços prestados.

Pouco depois, já trôpego e avelhentado, voou como uma andorinha para a mansão celeste donde ninguém volta. Paz à sua bela alma!

There was an essential strain in Mário and his work: his Goan-ness. He never stopped being the lad from Loutulim in South Goa who soaked in Goa, its culture, its ways like a blotter takes to water.

Half a century ago, a group of us would walk down Campal, Pangim, along the Mandovi, every evening of college holidays. We were united in an eagerness to see which of us figured in Mário Miranda’s visual diary of the previous evening…

I first met Mr Mário de Miranda at the German National Day celebrations, 30 years ago. Over the years my association blossomed into deep friendship, admiration and love for him – for the beautiful, gentle and most exceptionally talented human being that I’d ever met.

Mário de Miranda’s life is to be celebrated. I published the second edition of his book Germany in Wintertime; Impressions of Paris, and Spain. It is now my dream to open a museum in Mário’s honour, so that his work can live on for posterity.

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Testemunhos | Testimonies Margarida de Noronha e Távora Amiga | Friend

A true Goenkar | Goês de gema

Erwin de Sá, Professor universitário jubilado | Retired University professor Amigo | Friend

A Reminiscence | Uma reminiscência Mário was indeed a very serious student of people and that all of his works evolved from a concerted effort at understanding the people and the scenes that

Victor Rangel-Ribeiro, escritor | writer Amiga | Friend

Of genial temperament | De temperamento afável

Revista da Casa de Goa

A true friend, sincere guide and lover of all things Goan!

If Gavana represented India at the International Folk Festival in China, for one and a half months, as Ambassadors through the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), it was because of his referral…

If Fernando’s Nostalgia lives on, it is for his sincere and well-meaning love for Goa and its cultural heritage encompassing music, cuisine, our way of life, and more…. That for me today, in my twilight years, is true Goenkarponn!

he depicted – with a generous helping of humour thrown in.

When Mário was asked to present his work to my father – he did so with his characteristic quiet humility.

He preferred to un-wrap his work and hand it directly to my father with a smile, a warm handshake and no further ado. To this day, though neither Mário Miranda nor Bailon de Sá are of this world, his highly insightful depiction remains in my father’s study in its pride of place – a special and eloquent reminder of two men of genuine talent who enjoyed a true friendship.

May Mário always continue to speak to us all through his prodigious work and delightful insight into human nature!

Mario illustrated some of my short stories for the Illustrated Weekly in 1953, when he began his career, and he provided all of the illustrations for my short story collection, Loving Ayesha, in 2002, at the end of his career. So we had a long professional association.

He was blessed with a very genial temperament; I enjoyed talking to him. Culturally he had an open mind, which made him a citizen of the world; he could fit seamlessly into whatever country he happened to be in at the moment.

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Testemunhos | Testimonies Miguel Cotta, músico | musician Amigo | Friend

Humble, kind and jovial | Modesto, gentil e jovial I met Mário at the launch party of my family’s first audio album ‘Só Nós’ way back in 2000. This marked the beginning of a new relationship with him, given that he was related to my wife, Lisette. Before he departed that evening, he told her that my son should learn the Guitarra Portuguesa and thus apply for a scholarship for the same. He followed up regularly

Robin Martin, escultor | sculptor Amiga | Friend

World less colorful without Mário | O mundo menos radiante sem Mário It was Lucio de Miranda who introduced me to Mario and Habiba at their family home at Loutulim.

Mario and I instantly connected, possibly because we were both artists, and our very long friendship began.

I am indebted to Mario for introducing me to the

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even when in Portugal until Franz Schubert finally got the opportunity to learn the same through Fundação Oriente.

I could say with pride that he was one of our biggest fans. He would often recount how he heard our album being played in a café during one of his trips somewhere in Europe. He had undoubtedly a great love for the Goan culture and music and our encounters were never complete without a request for his favourite fado ‘Igreja de Santa Cruz’ sung by me.

I can fondly remember how he, along with Habiba, were the last guests to leave our residence at 2 am after a musical soirée in 2008 and looked forward to attending another one soon. In 2009, he graciously welcomed the idea of having an evening of Mandó at his residence in Loutulim. Despite his failing health, he attended a ‘Noite de Fado’ at Alfama restaurant of Cidade de Goa Beach Resort a few months before he passed away.

maritime history of Goa. I remember completing a series of sketches on one of my visits to Mario, some of which he collected.

It was a great pleasure to have Mario and Habiba as our house guest in Wales. During their stay Mario painted a very fine study of our four hundred year old house which I believe is in the British Council Collection. My wife Morag had recently given birth to our son Iain and I recall Habiba taking charge of nappy duty.

We stayed with Mario and Habiba at Atlantic Drive apartments overlooking the shipping approaches into the harbour of Bombay Docks. And for a short time Raul came to live with us here in Wales.

The world is a less colourful place with the passing of Mario and Habiba.

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Crónica | Feature

VAGUEANDO POR TISWADI WANDERING THROUGH TISWADI Mário Viegas Foi diretor, cofundador e/ou redator das revistas | Former director, co-founder, and/or editor of the magazines: Elo (Lourenço Marques), Voz da Zambezia (Quelimane), and Ecos do Oriente (Lisboa)

P

angim rodeia-se de aldeias sedutoras, territórios habitados por gente pacífica, que transparece a vida bucólica e tranquila deste éden, um convite à valorização das coisas simples onde, por vezes, sem esperar podemos encontrar a felicidade.

Para saborear os encantos escondidos e a linguagem própria da natureza, os fins-de-semana são os nossos dias prediletos. É nesses momentos que aproveitamos para vaguear aleatoriamente, para procurar ilhas e lugares do interior, enchendo os olhos e reverenciando o chamamento telúrico da nossa herança mais primitiva, a terra na sua origem e no que nos aproxima de Deus.

Rumamos para montante, a caminho do interior, tranquilo e agradável, ultrapassado Ribandar (“porto real” em concani), à beira da estrada, e paramos em Azossim, a cerca de 11 km de Pangim. Elegemos uma taverna, como os goeses batizaram, léxico herdado de outros tempos. Fundada há 25 anos, limpa, arejada, fresca, luminosa, com lotação para 24 pessoas, esta taverna é propriedade de Aleixo Fernandes, atencioso, serve-nos, a nosso pedido, uma urraca, aromática, terna, macia, enquanto conversamos em português com o Sr. Navelkar, um assíduo cliente, sobre a vida em Goa e a marcha irreversível do tempo que chegou para marcar presença. Abordaram-se as questões ecológicas, os esforços realizados para preservar os santuários ecológicos, desde iniciativas de despoluição, manutenção de florestas, criação de parques naturais e o nascimento de lagos de água

Revista da Casa de Goa

doce que irrigam campos os legumes e as frutas que se expõem nos bazares e nas feiras e que por outro lado são refúgio de diversa avifauna.

Metemo-nos num ferry a caminho da maior reserva de vida selvagem de Goa, abrigo seguro de aves locais assim como das de migração, o Santuário de Aves Dr. Salim Ali, nome dum conceituado ornitólogo e naturalista indiano.

Confortavelmente, o ferry desliza nas águas verdes e quietas no estuário do Mandovi, no canal intitulado de Naroá, viagem de 10 minutos e a 4 km de Pangim.

Com um grande historial, a Ilha de Chorão começou a ser frequentada pelos portugueses no séc. XVI, depois da conquista, e pelos jesuítas na conversão; testemunhos desses tempos são as casas à volta de igreja brancas.

Chorão é o sítio ideal para preguiçar, gozar a ociosidade de estar em silêncio a ouvir a sinfonia das aves, a consagração da natureza, num espaço que a todos pertence. Rendemo-nos.

Regressamos a Ribandar e subimos à Capela de Nossa Senhora do Monte (promessa histórica de Afonso de Albuquerque), pousada no alto duma colina com acesso por uma longa escadaria. Visita concluída, rodopiamos a caminho do Arco dos Vicereis. Ao lado, a Igreja da Nossa Senhora da Divina Providência (séc. XVII), que faz parte do património da Humanidade de Igrejas e Conventos de Goa. No cais do Arco, embarcamos noutro ferry para a Ilha de Divar, e entramos numa pista envolta em duas

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Crónica | Feature rico em mariscos, ostras, lulas, mexilhões, o vistoso «pomfret», o «peixe referência» de Goa. Torradinho e delicioso.

No fim, depois de interiorizar o tempo goês e perceber que aqui funciona-se a outro ritmo abrandamos e assumimos que as férias são sinónimo de desacelerar. As iguarias souberam-nos melhor e o último lanço da bebinca foi o prolongar desta deliciosa filosofia. Saímos daqui com a consciência que a nossa identidade está bem defendida. Descemos à Penha de França, a terra de Vimala Figura 1. Um almoço confecionado de modo a garantir a herança culinária goesa.

Devi e Aleixo Manuel da Costa. extensas planícies findas as quais desponta a vetusta O turismo impõe-se e as infraestruturas turísticas aldeia de Piedade, no sopé duma colina, alinhavada nascem para agradar aos mais exigentes.

Fechamos a rota pela margem direita do Mandovi de vivendas alvas, airosas, muitas das quais com com visita imperativa ao Forte de Aguada, em inscrições lusas na fachada.

Depois… retorno à Goa Velha e, na passagem, as cuja fortaleza estiveram detidos, entre outros, ruínas da torre da igreja de Nossa Senhora da Graça muitos intelectuais. Construída no século XVI por dos Agostinhos (séc. XVII); do outro lado da estrada, portugueses na barra do rio Mandovi, como uma o mítico Convento de Santa Mónica (séc.- XVII), das defesas de Goa contra corsários e piratas que primeiro mosteiro feminino da Ásia, onde as suas assolavam a região, Aguada, remodelado, hoje é um religiosas elaboraram receitas que muito enriqueceram Taj Fort Aguada - hotel 5 estrelas.

Reservamos para uma sexta-feira a nossa ida a a culinária goesa, destacando-se o requintado bolo, único, dividido por mais de 10 camadas, adornado de Bardez, para visitarmos aldeias com história, e mais particularmente a famosa Feira de Mapuçá. Por cores e sabores – a célebre bebinca.

Na semana seguinte, atravessamos o Mandovi e recomendação, ficamos alojados noutro extremo, na aldeia de Parrá, no sítio denominado Cancan, desembocamos em Porvorim.

Embora rejuvenescida, esta nova cidade conta com numa mansão branca, paredes de pedra grossa, salas o frenesim da velha Índia. O Sol deteve-se e, nas espaçosas e acolhedor. Informa-nos o residente, João vias, entre um trânsito infernal, turistas, mulheres Lourenço Bragança, que a mesma foi construída em a circularem em “aceleras” com os bebés nas suas 1442 (número gravado acima da entrada principal), antes, portanto, da chegada dos portugueses (1510). costas, deixando para trás as regras das suas origens.

Almoçamos no emblemático Coqueiro, fundado Pertenceu sempre a esta família (Bragança), grandes em 1968, galardoado com prémio internacional. proprietários a Norte de Goa. A poucos quilómetros de Mapuçá, visitamos a Mantém um menu clássico, preenchido com caris, xacuti, sarapatel, ambotic e vindalho, entre outros, sua Feira, mostruário daquilo que Goa produz e confecionados de modo a garantirem a verdadeira vende numa área coberta de 8.000 m2, desenhada herança goesa. Alumiam a mesa cores e aromas e executada por arquitetos goeses. A mercadoria é aliciantes, servidos em salas confortáveis, decoradas exposta ao ar livre e em pavilhões, em sacos, cestas ou pendurada nas portas e contempla desde tecidos e com fotografias e pinturas antigas de Goa. Defronte dos olhos chickenlolli pops, o saboroso eletrodomésticos, a produtos alimentares.

No intervalo para o almoço, escolhemos outro pedaço de frango embrulhado em papel-prata, frito, dos sobreviventes da nossa inigualável gastronomia muito em uso nos muitos restaurantes locais.

Veio então, desse litoral mágico da costa do Malabar, - o Café Aurora, hoje sob orientação de um jovem

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Crónica | Feature

Figura 2. Homenagem de Aldonã ao Prof. Edward Joseph Soares (Cortesia: Sávio Figueiredo)

de 23 anos, Peter de seu nome, filho do fundador (Aleixinho Fernandes) tendo, na cozinha, sua mãe, Agnés Fernandes. Ali, numa ampla sala, sobre a mesa, Peter arrumou entradas maravilhosas como croquetes, bojás, paparis, empadinhas, pedaços de peixe panados…

Ao almoço, congratulamo-nos com um arroz branco solto regado por um empolgante caril de raia enriquecido ainda com o tradicional “toca-boca”: cavalas recheadas, apas (puris, chapatis, sannas), xec-xec de caranguejo, balchão de camarão, chetnins, achares, miscutis, parás com o tamarindo a puxar.

Reconfortados, passamos por Moirá, a 4 km de Mapuçá, terra fértil, produz legumes e verduras, que o povo expõe nas feiras semanais da capital de Bardez. Mas Moirá é distinguida nomeadamente pela qualidade e variedade de suas bananas, longas e largas.

Mais 5 km e eis Aldonã, propriamente Quitula, aldeia de Mariano da Rocha, goês que se notabilizou na defesa da nomeação de Bernardo Peres da Silva por D. Pedro IV (1835) para Governador da Índia Portuguesa, nomeação obstruída por reaccionários europeus e seus descendentes. Mariano da Rocha e seus companheiros pagaram caro essa ousadia, e acabaram com as cabeças decepadas por ordem de um homem sem palavra - Francisco Vicente da Cunha, apelidado de “Mata-Tigres”, que prometera não os matar se se entregassem. A cabeça de Mariano da Rocha ficou exposta espetada num poste defronte da sua casa.

Noutro cenário, os habitantes de Aldonã não esqueceram o cultor do ensino nesta aldeia – Edward

Revista da Casa de Goa

Joseph Soares, fundador em 1923 da Escola St. Thomas. Consagraram-lhe no cruzeiro do povoado uma estátua, inaugurada a 29/10/2006.

Desponta-nos agora Bastorá, que nos interessou particularmente devido a ter aqui vivido um homem que agitou a economia de Goa devotando a sua vida às artes gráficas e à indústria de conservas de produtos da terra - Vicente João Janin Rangel (18581949), natural de Piedade, na Ilha de Divar. Montou uma tipografia onde imprimiu livros, nomeadamente de literatura indo-portuguesa, e outros, para todas as idades, em português, inglês, francês e concani. Aqui também foram impressos e encadernados alguns Boletins do antigo Instituto Vasco da Gama (agora Menezes Bragança). Boletins da Escola MédicoCirúrgica de Goa também passaram por esta Gráfica.

Dinâmico, Vicente João Rangel enveredou igualmente pela valorização e divulgação dos produtos da terra e do mar da costa do Malabar, implantando a indústria de conservas, que pela qualidade arrecadou bastantes prémios fora de Goa. É bom terminar o dia e esta jornada com uma reconfortante chávena de chá, o melhor do mundo.

Quando tudo se esbate fica apenas a memória inigualável. Goa é um caleidoscópio, uma joia indo-portuguesa que exibe o encontro de culturas pela sua história e que se manifesta através da língua, arquitetura e culinária. Aqui podemos encontrar fragmentos de Europa em terra tropical e foi daqui que herdamos muito da Ásia para oferecer ao mundo.

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Cantinho do Concani | Konkani Corner

“BEKARYANC”: ADEODATO BARRETO-HACHI KOVITA “AOS DESEMPREGADOS”: POEMA DE ADEODATO BARRETO Óscar de Noronha-hachem bhaxantor ani samikxa Tradução e crítica sobre o Poema – por Óscar de Noronha

Óscar de Noronha Editor Associado Goa Associate Editor, Goa

Bekaryanc

Aos desempregados

Ganthá dongrá patlean Súryá uttún yetá, Aplyá bangr¬á-kensán Dogdogtá.

Por trás da cordilheira Nasce o sol, e derrama A sua barba soalheira Em flama.

Sabar bangrá-zori Tujim kirnam distái: Ekuch durboryanchi Guirestái.

Fios e fios d’ouro Formam a tua radiação: Dos pobres, o tesouro Da salvação.

Zaityá fudlyá tempá Amché agé-ponngé Taca “Suryá-Devá” Munntalé:

Em tempos que já lá vão, Os nossos antepassados, Ao “Deus-Sol” então Vinculados:

Doryá-laguim vossún Fantyá-pará vellar Kori tokli moddun, Nomoscar:

Indo ao pé do mar, Ao raiar o dia, Diziam, ao dobrar Em cortesia:

“Zoxim pilám daktim Combiê-pakám-khalá Zoxém avoi laguim Daktém balloc nidta,

“Tal como o pintinho Sob as asas da galinha, Dorme o menininho nos braços da mãezinha,

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Cantinho do Concani | Konkani Corner

“Toxém amim”, ballocám, tugê cuxic tencun guetão adar amcám Ani gunn.

“Também nós,” filhotes, A ti aconchegados Fruímos dos teus dotes E demais predicados.

Côro

Côro

Goenché tsakór, uttái!

Sorgar uzvadd zaló!

Súryá uttún ailó!

Báir sorái!

Erga-se, ó braçal goês!

Já se fez luz no céu!

O sol rompeu o véu!

P’ra frente, sem revés!

Tumchêo cuddolyô gheún Bollán dornir honddyái Tanchê torçadi korún Handar maryái.

Com as suas enxadas Furem o solo com ardor; Façam delas espadas, Ombreiem-nas com vigor.

Amchyá bekaryanchá razvotech’vell ailó: Bekari, ubé ráum-yá Sounsar amchó!

Dos nossos pés-rapados Chegou a hora prima: De pé, ó desempregados, O mundo nos arrima!

O único poema de Adeodato Barreto, em concani

N

uma casual leitura da história da literatura concani1 fui surpreendido pelo poema ‘Bekaryanc’, de Adeodato Barreto (1905-1937)2, porventura o único escrito em concani por essa figura ímpar da literatura luso-goesa e o qual consta d’O Livro da Vida.3 Porquê em concani – aos 30 anos de idade – e em Portugal?

Não consta que Adeodato Barreto tenha tido actividade literária nos primeiros 18 anos da sua vida que passou em Goa, então Índia Portuguesa.

No entanto, com redobrada coragem e consciência, conjuntamente com alguns colegas goeses em Coimbra, não só criou o Partido Nacionalista Indiano e o Instituto Indiano anexo à Faculdade de Letras, mas também fundou o periódico Índia Nova4 e as edições Swatwa. A sua actividade visava a propaganda do humanismo e civilização oriental, cujos elementos o grupo aprendera com intelectuais europeus, mormente Romain Rolland e Sylvain Lévi.

Adeodato Barreto exerceu, sucessivamente, as

Revista da Casa de Goa

funções de professor e de escrivão de Direito em Aljustrel. Teve iniciativas no ramo de instrução (inclusive um curso de Esperanto); fundou e dirigiu o semanário Círculo, a que se associaram vários escritores do País; e foi assíduo colaborador dos jornais Seara Nova e Diabo. Reuniu a sua prosa jornalística em Civilização Hindu. Autodomínio, tolerância, humanismo, síntese (Lisboa: Ed. de Seara Nova, 1935); e, postumamente, foi publicado O Livro da Vida. Cânticos Indianos (Nova Goa: Tip. Sadananda, 1940)5.

Sendo esse o ideário do grupo luso-goês, era natural que quisessem salientar a língua e cultura vernácula de Goa. É o que se deduz do seguinte apelo publicado no referido periódico: “Aos nossos leitores que tenham a rara felicidade de saber escrever em concani, pedimos especialmente o favor de colaborarem nesta página que será consagrada exclusivamente à defesa e utilização culta dessa língua.”6 Ora, esse plano não vingou, pois o periódico parecia ter mais promotores, aliás bem-intencionados, do

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Cantinho do Concani | Konkani Corner que colaboradores proficientes na língua concani! É que os goeses, já desde o período pré-português, haviam sobremaneira usado o concani como veículo de comunicação oral, sendo o marata a língua cultural dos hindus de Goa, tal como o foi, mais tarde, o idioma luso, em relação à elite católica.7 E se foi somente por gosto de escrever na sua língua materna que Adeodato Barreto se lançou em concani, fê-lo seis anos depois de fechar o Índia Nova, não constando que tenha tido intenções de continuar a fazê-lo.

Como língua nativa da estreita faixa costeira do Concão, o concani tem diversos dialectos e a fortuna de ser expresso em caracteres romanos, devanagáricos, canareses, malaialeses e perso-árabes.

Ora, ‘Bekaryanc’ aparece num dialecto misto de salcetano e bardezano e em caracteres romanos; não emprega a ortografia padronizada, pois, pelo menos no romano, ela não existia na altura; e, sem se perder em preciosismo vocabular, apresenta versificação mais ou menos regular.8 O Poeta, na sua tentativa de remediar uma carência histórica e melhor realçar a identidade luso-goesa, demonstra um entranhado amor à terra e ao povo.

Não é portanto sem razão que dele diz Ruy Sant’Elmo, no prefácio a O Livro da Vida: “Longe da Índia, onde nasceu, em contacto com um meio europeu, jamais perdeu as características, sentimentais

e mentais, que constituíam o seu ethos originário.

Adeodato Barreto permaneceu sempre, no fundo, um oriental. A ausência do torrão, embora num país onde era estimado, onde triunfou, e onde constituiu família, tinha para ele o ressaibo amargo de um exílio forçado.”9 Será que foi só a partir desse “exílio forçado” que Adeodato Barreto se apercebeu da profunda subalternidade da língua concani e da classe operária na sua terra natal? Embora a sua família em Goa gozasse de privilégios de casta e classe, Adeodato Barreto, no poema ‘Bekaryanc’, ecoa o célebre grito marxiano dirigido ao proletariado.

Tê-lo-ia escrito nessa língua para que o povo goês o pudesse ler e entender sem intermediários?

Pelos vistos, dois anos antes de a morte o silenciar, Adeodato Barreto sonhou em dar voz aos oprimidos da Índia, como, aliás, de certa maneira o fizera também em relação aos habitantes da sua terra de adopção.

Evidentemente, ‘Bekaryanc’ não pretende ser uma “obra de arte”, mas um simples “desabafo de alma”,10 como, aliás, diz Adeodato Barreto falando de toda a sua obra poética reunida n’O Livro da Vida. Volvendo, pois, os olhos saudosos a Goa, deu um último grito, em concani, antes do seu último suspiro, em Portugal.

Referências Pereira, José. Literary Konkani: a Brief History. Panaji: Goa Konkani Akademi, 1992, p. 36; Sardesai, ManoharRai. A History of Konkani Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2000, p. 139.

2. De nome completo Júlio Francisco António Adeodato Barreto.

3. Agradeço à Doutora Sandra de Ataíde Lobo o ter-me facultado este importante pormenor.

4. Tinha como colaboradores principais José Paulo Teles e Telo de Mascarenhas, ambos estudantes de Direito.

5. Veja-se também Civilização Hindu: seguido de O Livro da Vida (Cânticos Indianos). Lisboa: Hugin Editores, 2000.

6. Índia Nova, n.º 1, p. 4 7. Pelo menos no século XVI, o grande período das conversões religiosas, os portugueses reabilitaram a língua, estudando-a cientificamente, ou seja, confeccionando gramáticas e dicionários, obras que nenhuma outra língua indiana possuía na altura.

8. O que nem sempre sucede com os seus poemas em português.

9. Cf. O Livro da Vida. Nova Goa: Edições Swatva, 1940, [p. 8] 10. In “Proémio”, [p. 13], escrito sob o pseudónimo Forçu Deodat, respectivamente, corruptelas de Francisco e do nome hindu Devdatt.

1.

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Entrevista | Interview

“Maintaining good communal ties in Goa is a crucial issue” – said the late Narana Sinai Dumó, who hailed from a family of diplomats in the Portuguese regime, in a chat with Óscar de Noronha, on the radio programme Renascença Goa.

“Manter bons laços comunitários em Goa é uma questão crucial” – disse o falecido Narana Sinai Dumó, proveniente de uma família de diplomatas do regime português, em conversa com Óscar de Noronha, no programa radiofónico Renascença Goa.

Use the following link to listen to the original chat in Portuguese on the YouTube channel of Renascença Goa: Link

Figura 1. Dr. Narana Sinai Dumó (1939 - 2020)

ON – We would like to talk about a very important period in the history of Goa when the Dumó family had three diplomats. What information can you give us about this?

more due to his knowledge about the negotiations between the Portuguese and the Indians…

NSD – I only remembered now, at this moment, that there was a pamphlet published by Dr. Panduronga Pissurlencar of the Historical Archives, titled Agentes Hindus da Diplomacia Portuguesa (Hindu Agents of Portuguese Diplomacy). And he indicated some characters; for example, the first one was Vitogi Sinai Dumó. It seems to me that Vitogi’s appointment was

NSD – The Peshwas! So the first was Vitoji, and he certainly lived in Poona; next was his son, Panduronga Sinai Dumó, and the third was Narana Sinai Dumó, whose name I bear. And he lived and worked in Poona.

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ON – Do you mean the Peshwas?

ON – So, three generations!

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Entrevista | Interview NSD – Yes; the grandfather, father and son! And it seems to me that besides their knowledge of diplomacy, they spoke Portuguese very well. This is a great fortune. And he knew the Marathi language very well, so he could converse directly with the Peshwas. And it seems to me that during these three generations the conversations were limited to the exchange of Dadrá and Nagar-Haveli. I have heard that one of the streets of Nagar-Haveli is named after Narana Sinai Dumó.

ON – And how would they have learned Portuguese?

NSD – This is a big question mark, because there were no schools then. For me it’s an enigma. But one very important thing: my Philosophy teacher at the Lyceum used to say, ‘One learns to speak by speaking; one learns to write by writing; one learns to dance by dancing….’ This is a motto I’ve followed throughout my life, to learn languages.

I was in the Netherlands for almost six months, where I was a scholarship holder of the World Health Organization. Just through the practice of talking to the office staff I learned a little Dutch and then I understood that the best way to learn any language is to speak. Don’t go to its grammar: that doesn’t help – you won’t learn to talk. So, just talk, listen… have a keen ear, that’s it!

ON – But then again, you hail from the Dumó family that has a penchant for languages!

NSD – Oh! But I did have a problem. I mean, after passing the 4th standard in a Marathi medium school, the first-born would switch to Portuguese, because he had to look after the landed properties, even if they were small. The system was as follows: if you wished to deal with the Portuguese officers, you had to learn Portuguese… and then some students would switch to English. I continued with Portuguese until the seventh year of Lyceum.

Hindus were very few. At the Lyceum, the composition was as follows: some were Europeans, children of officers, for example, the Secretary-General… I still remember the names of certain officers, like Pamplona de Corte-Real who was a secretary-general; another one was Rui Guimarães… Then there were the Christians, or, the apostolic Roman Catholics; and

Revista da Casa de Goa

very few Hindus, but there was representation. Let’s say, in a group of thirty there were at least eight or nine. That was the composition.

Among those nine or ten, at least one went to Portugal. And in this small percentage I remember Narana Coissoró, who was Speaker of the Portuguese Parliament and university professor…

So that was the composition; and I belong to the last batch of that composition.

ON – But why were there so few Hindus at the Lyceum? Where did others study?

NSD – Because they always thought that the best avenue for employment was neighbouring India.

Portugal could offer nothing but a clerk’s job, and these jobs were so very few. Industrial development and things like that weren’t even heard of. So they launched out in India for employment. And many Christian Goans went into the merchant navy, and others, the Hindus, went into the civil professions.

FAMILY ORIGINS ON – Is the Dumó family from Goa, and originally from Cumbarjua?

NSD – Originally, we are from Cortalim; we are members of the Comunidade (village agrarian community) of Cortalim. We left when the first conversions took place; at the location of the first church established in Cortalim was the Manguexa temple and was destroyed. My father wrote a book after he retired: he went there and measured the dimensions. They are exactly like our temple [now located in Mangueshi].

ON – So, the temple that was subsequently built in Mangueshi [Ponda taluka] has the same dimensions!

That’s interesting!

NSD – Not only interesting; but new horizons of our past are being discovered. It is indeed very interesting.

You will see that there are still some Catholic families that hold their past intact: they were Sardesais, Cuvelcars, Camotins, Dumós…

ON – Do you know Dumó families converted to

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Entrevista | Interview Catholicism?

NSD – No; but I’ve only heard that some of the Dumós who converted to Catholicism were called Saldanhas!

Someone told me so, but I don’t know anything more about it. But there are some families – very few – that have preserved their old data where they find their roots. It’s a great joy.

Now, note one thing: in this effort to trace the past, it is worth entering into the field of genealogy. A friend of mine told me that a colleague of his, a student at the Art School, was called Maendra Álvares. His mother called her son’s friends and explained the origins of the families...

ON – The Álvares are from Loutulim; and Maendra Álvares’ mother was a daughter of Gomes Pereira!...

NSD – Oh, really?! From Divar! He was our family lawyer, a good family friend...

CONVERSIONS ON – What do you have to say about the friendly relations between the various communities in Goa? NSD – Oh! That’s a very interesting chapter! First of all, the priority of Europeans was the conversion of the Brahmins. Brahmins exercised a preponderant influence. It’s not that in every case there was violence and the Inquisition and things like that. Conversions also took place of their own free will. And why did they convert? Because they were offered large landed properties... You may offer some other explanation, but I think – as long as there is no other plausible explanation – that they were ready to convert attracted by those properties…. Or else how do you explain the existence of such large landowning Catholic families in Goa?

Figure 2. Narana Sinai Dumó during the interview | Narana Sinai Dumó durante a entrevista.

the Viscount of Perném! That’s true…

FRIENDSHIP AMONG COMMUNITIES ON – We were talking about friendly relations….

NSD – Yes, these friendly relations… Well, look, you’ve come here… and I’m keen on hearing this… from the mouth of the Catholics…

ON – A dialogue is the need of the hour!

ON – Well, they are families that turned rich much later, in the 19th century, and not at the time of the Conversions [16th century]… And similarly, among the Hindu community, there are still large landowners: the Quencró [Kenkre], the Dempó, the Cundoicar [Kundaikar], the Viscount of Perném…

NSD – Oh, yes! During my life at the Lyceum, I always thought: why does this priest have such a great affection for me? He wasn’t my teacher. I’m referring to Father Armindo de Santa Rita Vás. Later, I learned that my father was a great friend of his father… The relationships were so close that, in those days, you know, a little favour done carried a lot of weight, a lot of weight…

NSD – Well, the Quencró, the Cundoicar, and, oh yes,

ON – There was that feeling of gratitude!

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Entrevista | Interview NSD – Ah! that’s it! (cries) Once, when I was in the 5th Year [of Lyceum], Father Armindo said to me: ‘Look here, Dumó, listen! Would you like to go to Portugal?’ … ‘Portugal!’ My God, I was shocked.

Why? Because amid the Hindu families, there was great apprehensions that one’s children would go to Portugal, stay there and get married – and live there all their life. That’s because everyone who went to Portugal to study got married there, stayed there and never returned to Goa. Never!

ON – Have you been to Portugal or not?

NSD – After my retirement I went twice. I really liked it. But I didn’t get to see what I wanted to see. I had a bucket list. But I’d lost contact with my friends in Portugal. So going around in Portugal was difficult.

For example, I wanted to visit and see things at the University of Coimbra… Lisbon, not so much; and some hospitals, one of those where Dr Mortó Sardesai worked: he was the Director of the Pathological Laboratory in Lisbon. And I especially wanted to see Penedo das Saudades, in Coimbra.

ON – How can this friendship that existed in Goa, between communities, continue this friendship?

NSD – Ah!!! It’s a very crucial question. You see, during my days as a bureaucrat – I was in the Indian administration from 1963 to 1997, in the Health Services, first as a Rural Medical Officer and then as State Nutrition Officer – I was the first and last one, because after my departure the post was abolished.

And during that time I fought a big battle with them all. Many, on listening to my story, would love to hate the Catholics – talking about communalism, and things like that….

But let me say one thing: on this path, until the last day, I had the strong, unshakeable backing, a bulwark, in the person of a Catholic: Senhor Abel do Rosário, who was Under Secretary. I salute him! He never bowed to the influence of this and that, especially of religion and community; he went by the law, and always supported me. But the political forces were so sinister that they didn’t want to take the straight path.

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That’s a long story; it will take a few days to tell. But I would like to tell so that it is on record.

A PAST DESTROYED ON – We’ve already bothered you a lot!

NSD – No, no! It’s a pleasure; this is a tonic! I am very happy, very pleased to see that there are still people in Panjim – in Goa – who speak Portuguese. Why do these people want to fight the Portuguese language?

They embrace English so easily, and don’t want to accept Portuguese? Why? Portuguese is a language, after all. And there are liberal elements in Portugal, without which the democracy that exists in Portugal today would not have been there.

Wait a minute; I’ll tell you a little story. When Dr Mário Soares came here on an official visit, as President of the Republic, my father was taken there to the President; and he took this book about the Dumós of Goa, gave it to him, and he kept leafing through it...

‘I don’t understand; I don’t understand anything.

Why didn’t you write in Portuguese? Then I would understand and appreciate.’

‘Look, Mr President’, said my father, ‘there are thousands of books in Portuguese translated into English, and vice-versa; but there is no book translated from the Portuguese into Maratha, to show the important role that the Portuguese played in Maharashtra. The whole story only revolves around Goa, Damão, Diu, Dadrá and Nagar-Haveli!... There is nothing. Tomorrow, if there is someone interested in writing history, or in translating, what do we have! We have nothing! So, I did whatever I could do, despite my limitations.’

He got up and hugged him.

And he said: ‘This whole vast Indian continent is open to you all. Why is it that instead of receiving you with open hands, we are going to receive you at the point of the sword?

Dr Mário Soares was agonised. He said: ‘The whole of our past built over so many years was destroyed within a few minutes, a few minutes!’

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Crítica de Videoclipe | Video Clip Review

TUDO ISTO É FADO: CRIATIVIDADE E EXCELÊNCIA IT’S ALL FATE: CREATIVITY AND EXCELLENCE

Luís Pereira da Silva (Portugal) Editor Associado Associate Editor

Acesso | Access: Link

Neste videoclipe, 25 cantores e 6 músicos de Goa (Figura 1) reuniram-se para prestar homenagem a Amália Rodrigues, a Rainha do Fado, no seu 101.º aniversário natalício.

São todos artistas falantes e não-falantes da língua portuguesa, de diferentes profissões e ocupações, atuando em três estilos.

"Tudo isto é fado", letra de Aníbal Nazaré e música de Fernando de Carvalho, foi o single de Amália editado em 1955. É um dos fados mais queridos do reportório goês, cantado ao longo de gerações.

Foi popularizado em 1966 com a interpretação de José Velho Pereira, no filme em concani Nirmon (produção de Frank Fernand e direção de A Salam).

Tal popularidade está patente na excelente caricatura do baile da Escola Médica de Goa (Figura 2), da autoria de Mário Miranda, a quem é dedicado este número da Revista.

Tiro o chapéu à criatividade e à excelência musical deste videoclipe, em particular à magnífica versão em concani, intitulada "Sopon" (letra de ManoharRai SarDessai).

Revista da Casa de Goa

In this video clip, 25 singers and 6 musicians from Goa gathered to pay tribute to Amália Rodrigues, the Queen of the Fado, on her 101st birth anniversary.

Featuring here are Portuguese and non-Portuguese speaking artistes from different walks of life, performing in three styles.

“It’s all fate" (lyrics by Aníbal Nazaré, and music

by Fernando de Carvalho) was Amália's hit single in 1955. This is one of the best loved fados in the Goan repertoire sung across generations. It was popularized in 1966, in the Konkani film Nirmon (produced by Frank Fernand and directed by A Salam), in which this fado is sung by José Velho Pereira. Such popularity is evident in the excellent caricature of the Medical School ball in Goa, by Mário Miranda (Figure 2) to whom this magazine issue is dedicated.

I take my hat off to creativity and musical excellence of this video clip, in particular to the magnificent Konkani version entitled "Sopon" (lyrics

by ManoharRai SarDessai).

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Crítica de Videoclipe | Video Clip Review

Figura 1. Goa presta homenagem a Amália Rodrigues no seu 101.º aniversário natalício | Goa pays tribute to Amália Rodrigues on her 101st birth anniversary

Ficha Técnica | Datasheet

Conceito e direcção musical | Concept & musical direction - Orlando de Noronha Produção | Production - Lemon Tart Media Cinematografia e edição | Cinematography and Editing - Ian de Noronha Mistura e Masterização | Mixing and Mastering Emmanuel de Noronha Argumento e Tradução | Script and Translation Óscar de Noronha

Revista da Casa de Goa

Músicos | Musicians – Carlos Meneses // viola de fado | fado guitar – Emmanuel de Noronha // piano e contrabaixo | piano and double bass – Ian de Noronha // acordeão e guitarra portuguesa | accordion and portuguese guitar – Jarryd Rodrigues // saxofone alto | alto saxophone – Orlando de Noronha // guitarra portuguesa | portuguese guitar – Óscar do Rosário // viola | guitar

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Crítica de Videoclipe | Video Clip Review Manuela Lobo Melba Monteiro Nádia Rebelo Nilesh da Cunha Gomes Omar de Loiola Pereira Ruth Gomes Sherwyn Correia Shrunkala Joshi Siddharth Cota Sigmund de Souza Sónia Shirsat Tania de Souza

Figura 2. Baile da Escola Médica de Goa, ao som de “Tudo isto é fado” (caricatura de Mário Miranda) | Goa Medical School ball, to the sound of “It’s all fate” (caricature by Mário Miranda). (in: Momentos do meu passado | Fernando de Noronha)

Vozes | Voices Áureo da Cunha Gomes Carlos (Carlinhos) Bruto da Costa Dilip Chicó Efigénia de Santana Miranda de Sá Fátima Lobato de Faria e Álvares Francisco (Chico) Fonseca Francisco Colaço Ivete Silveira Barreto Jacinta Valadares José (Zezinho) Fernandes José Maria (Zito) de Gouveia Pinto Luella (Lulu) Fortes Lúcia Valadares de Souza

Revista da Casa de Goa

Coro | Choir Alana Andrade Aliyah Andrade Alyque Andrade Daniella de Noronha Irving de Noronha Lionel de Noronha Myra de Noronha Nicole de Noronha Renée Meneses Roy de Souza Stefan de Noronha Vera de Noronha

Apoio | Support Centre for Indo-Portuguese Arts – CIPA, Goa: https://cipagoa.com Madragoa: https://cipagoa.com/madragoa Renascença Goa: https://youtube.com/ renascencagoa Lemon Tart Media: https://lemontartmedia. com #tudoistoéfado #fado #amaliarodrigues

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Notícias | News

Merece nota especial a goesa Gayle Zulema Hydari Gilmore de Miranda, que reside nos Estados Unidos da América e compete no o remo, seu desporto favorito, pela primeira vez fora do país de residência, representando a Índia em Portugal!

O Campeonato Mundial de Remo de Mar 2021, onde a India estará representada no dia 25/09/2021.

Gayle Zulema preparou-se no Miami Beach Rowing Club, na Florida, durante o inverno, altura em que o clima propicia esse desporto, mantendo os seus estudos académicos. O treinador Eduardo De Camillis, entusiasmado com a sua atuação, conseguiu que fosse convidada pelo U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Training Site. Isto permitiu que ela fosse treinada durante um mês com a equipa do OKC Riversport High Performance Team, na cidade de Oklahoma, sob tutela da conceituada treinadora Reilly Dampeer.

Gayle Zulema é membro do Rowing Association of Goa, por sua vez membro do Rowing Federation of India. Esta Federação, na pessoa do seu presidente Rajlaxmi Singhdeo, que testemunhou o seu sucesso tanto em Miami como em Oklahoma, nomeou-a para representar a Índia no Campeonato Mundial acima referido, dado que atualmente a Índia não tem outro desportista de remo de mar.

Esperemos que a Gayle Zulema, vencedora de uma taça em Abril em representação do Estado de Flórida, tenha igual sucesso em Portugal, desta vez em representação da Índia, sob a orientação de Ismail Baig, o principal Treinador Nacional e Olímpico da Índia.

Gayle Zulema é neta do grande Artista, o saudoso Mário de Miranda (a quem este número da Revista é dedicado) e de Habiba Hydari.

Revista da Casa de Goa

Curiously enough, Gayle Zulema Hydari Gilmore de Miranda, a Goan residing in the USA, will for the first time appear out of her country of residence in her favourite sport, rowing, representing India, in Portugal!

The 2021 World Coastal Rowing Championship will take place in Oeiras. Date for your diary is 25/09/2021.

Gayle Zulema trained at the Miami Beach Rowing Club, in the State of Florida, during winter, where the mild climate permits this sport, whilst also pursuing her academic studies. Her Coach Eduardo De Camillis, very happy with her performance, was able to secure an invitation by the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Training Site, which allowed her to train one month with the OKC Riversport High Performance team in Oklahoma City under the guidance of their highly respected head coach, Reilly Dampeer. Gayle Zulema is a member of the Rowing Association of Goa, which is a member of the Rowing Federation of India. This Federation, in the person of its President, Rajlaxmi Singhdeo, followed her success in Miami as well as in Oklahoma and nominated her to represent India in the above mentioned World Championship as, at the moment, India does not have any other coastal rower.

Let us hope that Gayle Zulema, who won a cup this April, representing the State of Florida, has the same success in Portugal, representing India, with the help Ismail Baig, India’s Chief National and Olympic Coach.

Gayle Zulema is the granddaughter of the renowned Artist the late Mário de Miranda (to whom this magazine issue is dedicated) and Habiba Hydari.

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Notícias | News

Acesso | Access Link O Dia Mundial de Goa é um evento global anual celebrado pelos goeses espalhados pelo mundo, num esforço de se manterem unidos, onde quer que estejam. Neste ano, o Jazz Goa ao celebrar o Dia Mundial de Goa teve a ideia original de homenagear a obra do icónico cartoonista goês Mário de Miranda, com canções em concani e em português.

O evento terá lugar com uma transmissão no canal Jazz Goa do Youtube, dia 12 de setembro às 20 horas, hora padrão da Índia.

A diáspora goesa espalhada pelo mundo irá conectar-se a este evento online e desfrutará em casa de excelentes recordações.

Mário deixou um legado que agora reviverá sob forma de música!

Revista da Casa de Goa

World Goa Day is an annual global event celebrated

by Goans spread all over the world in an effort to stay united no matter where they may be. This year Jazz Goa came up with a novel idea of animating Goa's iconic cartoonist Mario Miranda's work with Konkani and Portuguese songs.

This will be presented as a scheduled broadcast on Jazz Goa's youtube channel on the 12th of September at 8 pm India Standard Time.

The Goan diaspora spread across the world will connect at this online event to enjoy some great memories of home.

Mario left behind a legacy that will now come to life in song!

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Notícias | News

DUAS RECENTES LEIS CONTROVERSAS TWO RECENT CONTROVERSIAL PIECES OF LEGISLATION

Bhumiputra O projecto-lei intitulado “Bhumiputra” visa favorecer qualquer cidadão que tenha vivido em Goa nos últimos 30 anos ou mais, de forma a lhes dar direito a terreno de 250 m2 onde possa construir uma casa. Embora “Bhumiputra” se refira a “filho da terra”, são os migrantes originários de outros estados da Índia que serão expressos beneficiários. Está a ser muito contestado este projecto-lei da Assembleia Legislativa de Goa.

The bill titled “Bhumiputra” aims to favour any person who has lived in Goa for the past 30 years or more, entitling them to 250 m2 of land on which to build a house. Although “Bhumiputra” means “son of the soil”, it is migrants from other states of India that are sought to be made special beneficiaries. The bill is highly contested.

Nacionalizacão dos rios | Nationalisation of the rivers Também lamentável é a lei de nacionalizacão dos rios, que passam a estar sob a égide da União Indiana e não do respetivo estado. É esperado que Goa venha ser um hub de carvão e os rios utilizados para o transporte deste material importado pelo magnate Adani para as suas fábricas de aço instaladas nos estados vizinhos do Maharashtra e Karnataka. Para o efeito, já foi construída uma autoestrada desde Patradevi, no norte de Goa, até Polém, no sul, e projetado o alargamento da linha férrea. É incerto o futuro das ilhas circunvizinhas de S. Jacinto e Angediva.

Revista da Casa de Goa

Also sad is the law of nationalisation of the rivers, which accordingly come under the aegis of the Indian Union and not of the respective state. The banks of these rivers are likely to be used as a coal hub, particularly for the magnate Adani who is importing coal from Australia and transporting them to his steel factories in Maharashtra and Karnataka, for which a highway has been built from Patradevi, in north Goa, to Polem in the south, and the railway line sought to be doubled. The future of the islands within these rivers is anybody’s guess.

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Notícias | News

A NOSSA REVISTA PARCEIRA | OUR PARNER MAGAZINE

The Global Goan - The magazine for Goans by Goans across the globe

Recomendamos a leitura dos dois últimos números, usando as hiperligações abaixo We recommend the reading of the two last issues, clicking on the links below

August 2021, vol. 2, issue 8

September 2021, vol. 2, issue 9

Link

Link

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Errata

Artigo

Article

J.M. Pacheco de Figueiredo. Dia de júbilo para os Goeses. Revista da Casa de Goa 2021, II série, nº 11, pp. 22-24

J.M. Pacheco de Figueiredo. A day of joy for Goans.

Revista da Casa de Goa 2021, II series, issue 11, pp.

22-24

Na versão em inglês, coluna direita:

In the English version, right column:

– Página 22

– Page 22

Onde se lê “…Venctexa Dessai and António Xavier Gomes Pereira, co-signatories.”

Where it is stated “…Venctexa Dessai and António Xavier Gomes Pereira, co-signatories.”

Deve ler-se “…António Xavier Gomes Pereira, Narana Bandorcar, and Cipriano da Cunha Gomes, co-signatories.”

It should be “…António Xavier Gomes Pereira, Narana Bandorcar, and Cipriano da Cunha Gomes, co-signatories.”

– Página 23

– Page 23

Onde se lê “Unlike the founders of the United States, Menezes Bragança, Venctexa Dessai, and Gomes Pereira…”

Where it is stated “Unlike the founders of the United States, Menezes Bragança, Venctexa Dessai, and Gomes Pereira…”

Deve ler-se “Unlike the founders of the United States, Gomes Pereira, Bandorcar, and Cunha Gomes.”

It should be “Unlike the founders of the United States, Gomes Pereira, Bandorcar, and Cunha Gomes.”

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