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A Secret People of South Asia. The Origins, Evolution and Role of the Luso-Indian Goan Community from the Sixteenth to Twentieth Centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

Kenneth McPherson
Kenneth McPherson
Affiliation:
(Curtin University of Technology)
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Extract

Until fairly recently, histories of European imperial expansion in the Indian Ocean region have been written largely in terms of the endeavours of Europeans in creating and controlling empire. Only in the last couple of decades has recognition been given slowly to the role of the indigenous economic and political compradors, both large and small, who were vital to the evolution and sustenance of European colonial empires.

Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , July 1987 , pp. 72 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1987

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References

Notes

1 Hromnik, C.A., ‘Goa and Mozambique: The Participation of Goans in Portuguese Enterprise in the Rios de Cuama, 1501–1752’ (Ph.D. thesis; Syracuse 1977) passim.Google Scholar

2 Scammell, G.V., ‘Indigenous Assistance in the Establishment of Portuguese Power in the Indian Ocean’ in: Correia-Afonso, J. ed., Indo-Portuguese History. Sources and Problems (Bombay 1981) 172.Google Scholar

3 Pearson, M.N., Coastal Western India (concept; New Delhi 1981) 41–66.Google Scholar

4 Hromnik, ‘Goa and Mozambique’, vii–viii, for a detailed discussion of these problems.

5 Pearson, Coastal Western India, passim.

6 Ibidem, 42.

7 Yule, H. and Burnell, A.C., Hobson-Jobson. A Glossary of Anglo-Indian Colloquial Words and Phrases (repr.; London 1969) 154Google Scholar. For a more recent discussion of the origin of this term see Hromnik, ‘Goa and Mozambique’, 3–12.

8 Pearson, Coastal Western India, 60.

9 The Rudé parallel is Michael Pearsos's, and is more fully developed in Coastal Western India in the chapter headed ‘The Crowd in Portuguese India’.

10 Dias, M.J., ‘The Hindu-Portuguese Society in Goa’, Indica 17, 2 (1980) 109–116.Google Scholar

11 Boxer, C.R., The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825 (London 1969) 69–70Google Scholar. But even the Crown seems to have had some reservations concerning those of its subjects with a touch of indigenous blood for in 1546 a royal regulation declared testily that mesticccços should be given no pay or allowances for military service for: ‘It was their duty to serve for nothing, seeing that they had their houses and heritages in the country, and being their native soil were bound to defend it.’ Yuleand Burnell, Hobson-Jobson, 604.

12 Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 255.

13 In 1682 of the 36 married Frenchmen on La Réunion 12 were married to ‘Portuguese’ women from India: Kuczynski, R.R., Demographic Survey of the British Empire II (London 1949) 747 n.Google Scholar

14 Pearson, Coastal Western India, 52.

15 Ibidem.

16 Ibidem, 102.

17 Ibidem, 99.

18 Ibidem.

19 Ibidem, 100.

20 Ibidem, 55.

21 F. de Albuquerque, ‘Races and Caste in Portuguese India’ in: Section E, Sciences Economiques et Sociales, Comptes Rendus du Troisième Congrès’ de l'Association Scienlifique des Pays de l'Océan Indien, Tananarive, Madagascar, Octobre-Novembre 1957, 58.

22 Boxer, C.R., Portuguese India in the Mid-Seventeenth Century (Delhi 1980) 35.Google Scholar

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24 De Souza, T.R., Medieval Goa. A Socio-Economic History (New Delhi 1979) 53.Google Scholar

25 Curtin, P. et al. , African History (London 1978) 289.Google Scholar

26 For the best account of canarin activity in Mozambique see Hromnik, ‘Goa and Mozambique’, passim.

27 Ibidem.Alpers, E.A., Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa (London 1975)Google Scholar; Boxer, Portuguese India, 18.

28 Hromnik, ‘Goa and Mozambique’, passim; Newitt, M., Portugal in Africa (London 1981) 9–11, 88Google Scholar; Curtin et al., African History, 290.

29 Alexandre Lobato quoted in Hammond, R.J., Portugal and Africa 1815–1910 (Stanford 1966) 40.Google Scholar

30 Hromnik, ‘Goa and Mozambique’, xi, 13–14.

31 Hammond, Portugal and Africa, 41.

32 Sandhu, K.S. and Wheatley, P. eds., Melaka: The Transformation of a Malay Capital, c. 1400–1980 (Kuala Lumpur 1983) 1, 196 and 11, 266, 548.Google Scholar

33 Personal communication from Dr. John Villiers.

34 Sandhu and Wheatley eds., Melaka 11, 212–214, 243.

35 Ibidem, 199.

36 Disney, ‘Portuguese Empire’, 151.

37 Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 250–254.

38 Ibidem, 250–251.

39 Ibidem, 244, 254.

40 Ibidem, 256.

41 Personal communication from Dr. John Villiers.

42 Hromnik, ‘Goa and Mozambique’, 14; Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 259.

43 Ibidem, 244; V. Perniola, The Catholic Church in Sri Lanka I, (1658–1711) and 11, (1712–1746) (Sri Lanka 1983) passim.

44 Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 259.

45 Seammell, ‘Indigenous Assistance’, 70, 169; Hromnik, ‘Goa and Mozambique’, passim.

46 Disney, ‘Portuguese Empire’, 152.

47 The earliest reference I have come across to topasses in British service refers to Madras in 1672 ‘where the English have a Fort called St. George, chiefly garrisoned by Topasscs and Mesticcs’ (Peter Baldaeus), Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson, 533–534. The term topass is apparently derived from the Turkish ‘top-chi’, a gunner, Ibidem, 933; H. Furber, John Company at Work (Harvard 1951) 7 n.

48 Hunter, W. W., Imperial Gazetteer of India (London 1881) various references.Google Scholar

49 Albuquerque, T., ‘Christian Impact on Nineteenth Century Bombay’, Indica 20, 2 (1983) 111.Google Scholar

50 De Souza, Medieval Goa, 115; Alpers, Ivory and Slaves, 91–94.

51 Greenberg, M., British Trade and the Opening of China 1800–42 (repr.; Cambridge 1969) 124–125, 130Google Scholar; Haider, A., A History of Karachi Port (Karachi 1980) 12–15Google Scholar; Tripathi, A., Trade and Finance in the Bengal Presidency 1793–1833 (Calcutta 1956) 179–182.Google Scholar

52 Bauss, R., ‘A Legacy of British Foreign Trade Policies: The End of Trade Between India and the Portuguese Empire 1780–1830’, The Calcutta Historical Journal 6, 2 (1982) 64–115.Google Scholar

53 Tindall, G., City of Gold. The Biography of Bombay (London 1982) 54.Google Scholar

54 Bauss, ‘Legacy’, 94.

55 Albuquerque, ‘Christian Impact’, 112.

56 Quoted in Ibidem, 111.

57 Ibidem, 113–114.

58 Ibidem, 112–120; D'Souza, B.G., Goan Society in Transition (Bombay 1975) 186–187, 200.Google Scholar

59 Ibidem, 205; Albuquerque, ‘Christian Impact’, 113.

60 Two excellent articles by R.S. Newman throw much light on this culture: ‘Zatras and Fiest Days: Syncretic Social Dramas in Modern Goa’ (paper presented at the Asian Studies Association of Australia, 3rd National Conference, Brisbane 1980) and ‘Goa: The Transformation of an Indian Region, 1961–1981’ (paper presented at the A.S.A.A., 4th National Conference, Melbourne 1982).

61 The loss of the Portuguese language may have not been all that quick. Descendants of the original Luso-Indian population of Bombay now living in Perth, Australia, had relatives who spoke Portuguese in Bombay as late as the 1940s when it was replaced by English as their mother tongue with Marathi as a second language; source: Mrs. R. Gomez, Curtin University of Technology.

62 D'Souza, Goan Society in Transition, 171–172, 215.

63 Dixon, C., ‘Lascars: The Forgotten Seamen’ in: Ommer, R. and Panting, G. eds., Working Men Who Got Wet (Memorial University of Newfoundland 1980) 265, 270Google Scholar; Broeze, F.J.A., ‘The Muscles of Empire. Indian Seamen and the Raj, 1919–1939’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 18, 1 (1981) 48, 50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

64 Kuczynski, Demographic Survey, 161, 259, 352.

65 Morris, H.S., The Indians in Uganda (London 1968) 142, 182.Google Scholar

66 Albuquerque, ‘Christian Impact’, 114–115; the source quoted in reference 61 (Mrs. R. Gomez) claims that the ‘East Indians’ are the original Luso-Indians of Bombay and the ‘Province of the North’; Albuquerque, on the other hand, claims the ‘East Indians’ are descended from natives of Mangalore.

67 See Winius, George D.. ‘The Shadow Empire of Goa in the Bay of Bengal’, Itinerario. 7, 2 (1983) 83–101, especially 96.Google Scholar

68 Hunter, Imperial Gazetteer VII, 150, 400; Ibidem II, 87, 455.

69 L. Akanda, ‘The Legacy of Portuguese Contact in Bengal in the 16th and 17th Centuries’ in: The Portuguese in the Indian Ocean Region vol. G, papers presented at ICIOS II, Perth. Western Australia, 1984. In seventeeth- and eighteenth-century Jakarta slaves from India (mostly from Bengal) were known as ‘Portuguese’ and spoke a Portuguese patois, see Lutgen, Maaike M.C., ‘“Between Two Worlds”, Dutch Eurasians in Transition from the ‘Indies’ to the Netherlands 1930–1965’ (BA (Hons) thesis, Murdoch University, Western Australia 1985) 21.Google Scholar

70 The oldest Roman Catholic church in Dhaka (Bangladesh) was built by ‘Portuguese’ in the eighteenth century and a large number of its current parishioners bear Portuguese names and regard themselves as a distinct community: author after visit to Bangladesh in 1986.