In my previous
engagements with Reginald Fernandes’ works of fiction, I had mentioned that Africa occupied a very important place in the imagination
of writers like Reginald. This was largely because of the nineteenth-century
migration of many Goans to places in Africa like Kenya
and Tanzania.
Thus, to understand the importance of Africa for writers like Reginald, one
would essentially need to think of the circulation of influences as a network where
stories about Africa circulated through
different means and modes and were then used by writers like Reginald to write
their romans. How this circulation worked
is something that needs to be charted in greater detail in the future through
meticulous research.
Like many of the
orientalist novels from the nineteenth-century, for writers like Reginald,
Africa was simultaneously a place that was utterly unknown and a place of many
mysteries, riches, and adventures. While it is true that writers like Reginald
were drawing on such orientalist and colonial fantasies, it is still
interesting to see how romi writers engaged with these stories, and indeed
re-worked them for a Goan cultural milieu. Today, we rightly acknowledge people
like Peter Nazareth (of the General is Up fame) as writers who wrote about Goanness in an African location, but we
seldom think of romi Konkani writers as engaging with Goanness and Africa. In
the same breath allow me to also note that the depiction of Africa within the
romi Konkani writings may share a problematic relationship with colonial
engagements with Africa.
Like Khoddop Ranni (1955), Africa occupies an
important place in Bhirancull Barrabas (1962)
though one cannot say that in this novel Africa
is central to the plot. The novel depicts the love story of Raul and Clotilda.
While Raul does not seem to hail from a lower social position, his family
falling on bad days becomes the pretext for Clotilda’s father to refuse to
bless their union. To make matters worse, the government office that Raul works
in is headed by Clotilda’s father, and as such the question of whether Raul can
match the ‘dignidad’ of Clotilda’s family arises. Thus, economic reasons rather
than one’s location within a social hierarchy become the cause of much heartburn.
Unable to bear
the insult to his high position, Clotilda’s father hatches a plan to falsely
accuse Raul of theft. The plan being successful, Raul is first sent to the
Aguada prison and when an attempt to escape from there fails, Raul is deported
to a high-security prison in Mozambique.
Sailing on the high seas, Raul finally manages to escape and ends up drifting
on an island: The Nameless Island. Though this island is not endowed with any
magical qualities, Raul comes across a large palatial building. Though The
Nameless Island is deserted, Raul soon learns that only two persons live there:
a woman named Rebecca and Dr. Barrabas.
Magic is
introduced into the novel to bring about bad and good deeds. Like many of
Reginald’s novels, Bhirancull Barrabas too
has a love triangle. Since the other man who seeks the love of Clotilda cannot
convince her, he resorts to magic to confound her. On The Nameless Island, Raul
learns about the three secrets of Dr. Barrabas: that he has a potion that can
bring the dead back to life, that he has a magic mirror that can project images
about the person whom one wishes to see, and that Dr. Barrabas possesses a
mechanical contraption that is shaped like a giant bat. The machine eventually
helps Raul to escape from The Nameless Island.
While trying to
survive the evil Dr. Barrabas, Raul also learns of a treasure of gold bars and
three very valuable diamonds. Raul manages to bring back with him many bars of
gold and the three precious diamonds. The problematic relationship that such a
genre of Konkani writings may have with Africa,
as alluded to earlier, comes to the fore when the story takes this turn. Though
the treasure of gold and diamonds was acquired by Dr. Barrabas through
not-so-honest means, yet Raul seems to spare no thought when taking some of it
with him. Here the relationship seems to be a peculiar one, wherein one person
from a colonized context (in a way) loots riches from another colonized
context. But as far as Reginald is concerned it might be more to do in keeping
with the idea that love and wealth is deserved after an arduous struggle, an
idea that animates many of his novels. Though we do not come across any Africans,
and the identity of either Dr. Barrabas or Rebecca is left vague at best, yet
one cannot help but think of Africa as a place
of simultaneous danger and riches. Raul finally manages to exonerate himself
from the crime he did not commit and also succeeds in marrying Clotilda, whose
beauty and character is matchless.
Reginald and
other writers like him frequently mentioning Africa also allows us to link
trajectories of Konkani literature to a larger African world. While making this
point I am falling back on the argument of Isabel Hofmeyr who in the context of
South African literature argues that Hindi should be seen as a language of
South African literature as many texts in Hindi are available from the
twentieth-century that speak of South Africa. Can we make a similar claim that
the productions of romi Konkani can also be seen as part of the African
literary landscape? Though, I cannot help but emphasize the critical distance
that one would need to understand the problematic relationship.
Though many of
the writers – including Reginald – did not have the benefit of post-colonial
critiques of racism and orientalism in Africa, nonetheless their engagement
does point to a certain complex network of the flow of stories from Goa to
Africa and back. Perhaps, it points to the skewed understanding that Goans had
(and still do) of Africa in general, and issues
of race and racism in particular. By trying to understand this genre of
literary imagination within romi Konkani literature we might arrive at a better
understanding of Goa and Goanness.
For more Reading Reginald, click here.
(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 4 February, 2015)
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