G’bye Goa: Goan Emigration-3
By Valmiki Faleiro
Imperial European powers generally did more bad than good in India. Between the
Portuguese, Dutch, British and French, Britain profiteered the most. Portugal partly
redeemed herself. Thanks to men like Garcia da Horta, Portugal gifted India, among
other things, a host of plant life … from potatoes and chillies, from American aloe,
China root, French coral tree, Guinea melon, Malay apple, to my killing tobacco!
(Horta was a veritable plant exchange bank. He brought species from East Asia,
Africa and the Americas to his gardens in Bombay. His house, later a British Guv’s
residence, still stands at the southernmost tip of the city, in the off-limits
Indian Navy establishment south of Colaba. Former Deputy Director of Agriculture,
Fernando do Rego, a senior friend and relative, catalogues 45 botanical species
brought by the Portuguese to India in his *Influences of Portuguese Voyages on the
Agrarian Economy of India,* read at a seminar on Indo-Portuguese history, Lisbon-1985
In the Anglo-French battle for supremacy, a queer British interlude in Goa spurred
the largest, longest, and yet surviving, wave of Goan emigration. Initially, to the
rest of India and on the high seas. Then to Burma and Bahrain. And finally, to
British Africa, West Asia and beyond. Let’s go into that story as briefly as we can.
Goa’s economy continued to stagnate at the dawn of the 19th century. The British
took advantage of the emasculated Portuguese presence in Goa, though the two had
a peace treaty in place since 1642. Under the ruse of an imminent French invasion,
the Brits forcibly made themselves welcome in Goa for 14 years, intermittently from
1799, until the Treaty of Amiens in 1813.
While here, they spotted two assets: one natural, the other human.
They discovered that the Mormugao harbour was better than their best three in India:
Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. Mormugao was a deep natural harbour where a ship
could enter at any tide and dock within an hour. It was evident that the Portuguese
had neither the inclination nor imagination to exploit even a fraction of its
potential.
From then began a series of offers by London to Lisbon to develop and modernize
Mormugao and connect it by rail to mainland India. When these evoked no positive
response, London offered to “buy” Goa from Lisbon, outright for cash. When that too
failed, the British beguiled the incumbent Governor who almost *ceded* Goa … but
was replaced just in time!
The tenacious British eventually succeeded on Dec 26, 1878, when Sir Robert BD
Morier for Britain and Joao Corvo de Andrade for Portugal signed the dotted lines of
the Western India Portuguese (WIP) Railway Charter (reworked April 18, 1881.)
That treaty gave Goa a modernized port and a railroad line across her geographic
waist. Five lakh workmen, Indian and Chinese, girdled Goa, from Vasco to Colem.
The Goan priest, Fr. Reginaldo Pinto, Vicar of Mormugao, baptized many Chinese,
and later solemnized their marriages to local women.
The human asset discovered by the British was a large idle populace of educated
and not so, but “denationalized” Goans, well acquainted with the European lifestyle
(read that as Goan Catholics.) A devout and docile people, honest and hardworking.
Retreating officers recruited 3,300 Goan sailors for the Royal Navy, a few thousand
as clerks, and a few more thousand as cooks, butlers, ayahs and nannies. Rudyard
Kipling, who spent his childhood in Bombay, was later to reminiscence, "My ayah
was Portuguese Roman catholic, who would pray, I beside her, at a wayside cross."
Soon, owners of the world’s leading British shipping company, MacKinnon McKenzie,
arrived and recruited sailors, particularly from Salcete, by the thousands.
And thus began a deluge of out-migration/emigration by Goans to British India and
beyond. Which survives to this day. Only a sprinkling of Goan Hindus out-migrated,
that too, to nearby Indian cities, rarely abroad until 1961. Even today, Catholics
account for three-fourths of the Goan emigration.
P.S.: Internet trivia: at 12 hours 34 minutes and 56 seconds on 7 August this year,
the time/date will be 12:34:56 07/08/09. It won’t happen again in our lifetime!
PPS: A local Editor, who once told of us of Goan “coconut trees with branches,”
emerges with another gem. In his July 18-24 issue (Page 4), he avers a new law
"authorizes the government to … acquire land, both moveable and immoveable.”
Heard of *moveable land* before? I didn’t! (ENDS)
========================================================
The above article appeared in the Herald, Goa, edition of August 2, 2009
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