Anthropologist revisits our links with Portugal's former colony in India
There was, especially in the 1950s, a strong intellectual connection between Brazil and India, but it was progressively lost until it practically did not exist today. For anthropologist and social scientist Lucas Mestrinelli, who has just completed a study on the topic, the epicenter of this link was Goa, territory of the Portuguese State of India. Research on the State dominated by the government of António de Oliveira Salazar until December 1961 brings relevant elements to understand what Brazil said, in the 1950s, to Goans.
“The circulation of ideas between Brazil and India took place intensely via Goa. Goans saw themselves, in the 50s, as colonized by Portugal, in the same way that Brazil had been. They saw in the Brazilian example the possibility of overcoming Portuguese colonialism. And also, the promise that social and economic prosperity would reside in this rupture in relation to Portugal”, reveals Lucas Mestrinelli.
One of the authors studied by the Unicamp researcher, Goan Telo de Mascarenhas, made constant references in the journal Resurface, Goa! to his “Brazilian friends”, characterized by him as liberals. “Part of the author's hope with Gilberto Freyre's visit to Goa was described precisely in these terms, although, as happened in other contexts, many Goans were disappointed with Freyre's approach to Salazar's government”, reports the anthropologist.
East and West dialogue
In the study, Lucas Mestrinelli investigated views on the future of Goa on the eve of the State's incorporation into the Indian government. “Goa is now practically forgotten in Brazil. There is an effort to return to this experience because it says not only about Goa, but about the place that Brazil occupied within a broader context of relations that, at the time, were not just between Brazil and Portugal.”
The theme, according to the author of the study, also becomes relevant in the current context of rapprochement between emerging countries, of which Brazil and India are part. “The last BRICS meeting [Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa[, in 2016, occurred in Goa and this was not a causality. The region is considered, in India, the most westernized state and, therefore, could bridge the gap between East and West.”
The research conducted by Lucas Mestrinelli was part of his master's degree defended with the Postgraduate Program in Anthropology at the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences (IFCH) at Unicamp. IFCH professors, John Manuel Monteiro, who passed away in 2013, and Omar Ribeiro Thomaz, guided the work. Part of the research was carried out at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, in Portugal. The São Paulo State Research Support Foundation (Fapesp) financed the studies.
East-West
The IFCH researcher focused on the narrative of three authors who were in Goa between 1952 and 1956: the Brazilian Gilberto Freyre, the Goan Otelo de Mascarenhas and the Portuguese geographer Orlando Ribeiro. “All these authors talk about a 'harmonization' that Goa could promote between East and West.”
Lucas Mestrinelli says that, in the writings of Othello de Mascarenhas, for example, there is an attempt to recapture, based on the East/West encounter, what India could teach Europe and vice versa. In Orlando Ribeiro, there is a clear appreciation of what the author calls the “double treasure of civilizations”. According to the researcher, Ribeiro tries to show how Goa would be proof that Portuguese colonialism was different from British colonialism.
“For him, Portuguese culture allowed, for example, 'the peaceful and tolerant coexistence of two religions, the absence of conflicts, coexistence between Christians and Hindus'. Ultimately, Ribeiro ends up reproducing a bit the rhetoric of the Portuguese government during the Salazar period.”
Portuguese colonial ideology
The main characteristic of the circulation of ideas and references by these authors was defined as key concepts for Portuguese colonial ideology: ideas such as race, culture and miscegenation, the latter fundamental to Salazar's government. “When Gilberto Freyre goes to Goa, he reports that he finds the same process of miscegenation as in Brazil, absent, for example, in India colonized by the British.”
Although I recognize Although the period was one of great consolidation of Portuguese national ideology through Salazarism, the Unicamp researcher highlights that the Portuguese heritage in Goa was permeated with multiple and complex meanings. Lucas Mestrinelli notes that, despite there being an official ideology, there were many differences between the three authors studied.
“They saw, for example, different futures for Goa. Freyre argued that Goa had been intimately restructured in the Lusotropical sense of life, and that it would, therefore, forever be Portuguese. Mascarenhas stated, in turn, that its future mirrored nothing more than its remote past: in this aspect, Goa would inevitably be Indian. For Orlando Ribeiro, the future of the State was open.”
