On Goa, Portugal, and India

  As a person with Goan ancestry I have no issues with 1961. All our original temples are in Goa and my family had been thrown out during the inquisition. Around 1956 my grandmother was almost on her death bed and expressed her wish that my thread ceremony be performed at the temple in Goa. But we were not allowed to even enter Goa for a short visit. Her last wish was not to be. My thread ceremony was performed in 1958 in north Kerala, she died six months before India took over Goa.

But I do have a pet peeve about the way the government of India behaved towards Goan INDIANS with regard to language. Since Portuguese had ruled India for over 400 years, most education was in that language which had permeated through the local culture. You only have to look at pictures of Hindu temples in Goa to realise that they ar different. Once India took over, immediately Portuguese ceased to be the official language and stopped teaching it in schools. I remember as a graduate student in Calcutta where a Goan student had to use an English-Portuguese dictionary in the classes. In the meantime Konkani and Marathi could be used only in subordinate courts. India lost a golden opportunity to use Portuguese language as its window to Europe at the same time it was shoving English, no less an alien tongue, on the population fed on Portuguese for centuries.

Goan Indians born before 1961 takeover were offered Portuguese citizenship, and today even the Prime minister of Portugal is a Goan. On the other hand, there were 40,000 Goan Indians born in Portugal with Portuguese citizenship who were still in a purgatory when it came to Indian citizenship after 54 years. Compare that with the British who did not even accept Anglo-Indians but left for the Indian taxpayer the bill for the upkeep of cemeteries where tens of thousand British citizens are buried in India.

The Escola Médico- Cirúrgica de Goa was established in 1842, just a few years after the establishment of Calcutta Medical College in 1835 by William Bentinck. In 1822, Bernardo Peres da Silva and Constancio Roque da Costa became the first two Goans to sit in the Portuguese Parliament in Lisbon. Show me the first Indian who sat in the British parliament (Dadabhoy Naoroji SEVENTY years later in 1892).

It is only after the Carnation revolution in 1974 that the relations between India and Portugal started improving. When I came to US for studies the year before, my passport was NOT endorsed for Portugal (and Israel and South Africa).