The story of the liberation of Goa, a former Portuguese colony, and its aftermath on the politics and culture of this coastal region occupies only a small corner of Indian history, almost difficult to spot, and is barely recognised in the collective Indian memory.
I recently watched the Portuguese film Feitiço do Império (1940), a propaganda feature made during the Salazar dictatorship to promote the Estado Novo regime’s imperial agenda. While watching the film, I kept anticipating the appearance of Goa as Luís Morais, the film’s protagonist, travels through Portugal’s colonies, crossing African landscapes, encountering big-game wildlife, and observing exoticised portrayals of native populations. Yet he never visits Goa, Damão, or Diu. It seems that, for the Portuguese state at the time, the larger African colonies were considered far more important than the smaller eastern enclaves, such as Goa, and therefore more worthy of inclusion in this propaganda film.
To find how the Portuguese state saw Goa and its forced severance by Indian state in 1961, I turned to Cinemateca Digital, the Portuguese cinematheque portal, but didn’t find much that would meet my interest. There were only cursory mentions to Goa in news bulletins on evolving military situation during late 1950s and early 1960s but of very little depth.
Finally, I turned eastwards and wondered: How has the prolific Indian cinema looked at this event?
I was surprised to find that Indian cinema, especially the dominant Mumbai-based Hindi commercial film industry, which is infamous for sidestepping political issues and staying far removed from contentious social and political developments—has engaged with the Goan story quite directly. Quantitatively, however, the attention it has received is minuscule.
Two feature films deal directly with the history of the former Portuguese colony, the anti-colonial struggle in this coastal enclave, and its final ‘liberation’ by the Indian army in 1961. The first is ‘Saat Hindustani‘ (Seven Indians) made by Khwaja Ahmed Abbas in 1969 and the other is Trikal (titled in English as ‘Past, Present and Future’) made by celebrated director of ‘Indian new wave’ Shyam Benegal in 1985.
The first, although produced independently, takes the form of a propaganda film and, curiously or coincidently, employs narrative techniques that are not very different than those used by Antonio Ribeiro: seven Indians coming from different regions, religions and political ideologies join hands to wage a covert war against Portuguese oppression in Goa in the midst of the anti-colonial movement in late 1950s. The characters and the regions from which they come represent struggles and tensions within the Indian union over religion, language, and ethnicities. The film tries to emphasise the cohesiveness of Indian union and the fight against Portuguese as a higher call against an outside enemy despite local differences. Like Ribeiro, Abbas also mixes documentary and fiction formats in the film.
The second film – Benegal’s Trikal – is breathtaking in the historic depth, empathy, and nuance with which it deals with the complex subject and the ideas of change, loss, trauma of the past, and the past’s ability to influence the present and the future. The fiction film is set in the tumultuous year 1961, just a few months before the Indian takeover of Goa in December 1961.
The film’s central plot revolves around a feudal Goan-Catholic family – Souza-Soares – and the family head, Dona Maria, who is in denial of her husband’s death as well as the imminent Indian takeover of Goa. The family is desperate to marry Maria’s granddaughter Anna to a young doctor who has settled in Lisbon, but the young girl is in awe of another relative, Leon, who has joined the Goan liberation movement against the family’s wishes. With Dona Maria attached to the past and unwilling to let go of the traditions, the younger generation seems eager to violate her wishes to find life away from the family house as they grapple with their loyalties—whether to Portugal, an independent Goa, or India.
In the film, the family home—the Souza-Soares mansion— and its deceased patriarch Ernesto Souza Soares, serve as metaphors for the Portuguese Colonial state in Goa. As the house and its occupants lose relevance for the local community – both Hindu and Catholic Goans – who are increasingly swept up in nationalist fervour, its residents grow anxious, even fractured, facing the impending takeover by the Indian army. The mansion also becomes a site where suppressed histories resurface, including Portuguese brutality against local revolutionaries during the native struggle, as well as those committed during the prolonged Catholic inquisition. The house’s eventual decay (shown when Pereira visits it 25 years later) seems to be telling the audience that Goa’s Portuguese past interests only historians and archaeologists.
Ernesto’s widow – Dona Maria – seems unwilling to acknowledge the death of her husband even after going through all the rituals of the transference of the souls from this world to the hereafter. The husband’s death seems to have incapacitated her, and she suspends all her familiar affairs, announcing a moratorium.
She takes the help of shaman practices – seances held through the help of Milagrenia (an illegitimate child of her husband employed as a housemaid in the mansion) as a medium – to contact her dead husband, which never succeeds. What’s important is that her efforts to contact the husband are mirrored with hope expressed by some of the characters in the film that the Portuguese government will intervene and will never allow the Indian state to ‘invade’ Goa. As it turns out, both of these expectations turn out to be futile.
Salazar orders the Goan government and citizens of Goa to fight until the last breath. The governor general Manuel António Vassalo e Silva, seeing the futility of resisting 40,000 Indian soldiers with 3,500 at his disposal, disregards the ‘orders’ and surrenders to the Indian army on December 19 1961.
The seances held by Dona Maria, however, have a result contrary to her expectations.
Director Benegal uses the séance episodes to deal with the problematics of memory and history and how different sides of a conflict remember and mythologise different and contradictory narratives.
The seances conjure the ghosts of Vijay Singh Rane and Kushtoba Rane (instead of her husband’s), the latter an anti-colonial bandit who was captured by the Portuguese authorities with the help of Dona Maria’s grandfather — a Portuguese loyalist – forcing her to confront her family’s – and by association Portuguese state’s violent past. This unintended encounter reveals how suppressed histories resurface, disrupting colonial nostalgia.
Rane, painfully, recalls the cultural erasure caused by centuries of Catholic inquisition that snatched away his community’s traditions and ‘even names’. Dona Maria, perturbed by these uneasy accusations, shouts: Why are you telling me this? I know nothing about this.” – highlighting the history bubble that surrounds her. She eventually abandons the seances, perhaps, with her coming to terms with the complex history of her family’s legacy.
After Ernesto’s funeral, the family doctor – Mr Pereira – who has been portrayed as someone who has resigned to the ‘new reality’ of Goa ( or is he an opportunist who has shifted his loyalties?) – raises a toast “not with Scotch, but with our native pheni”. He refers to Ernesto’s death as the departure of “the Goa that they knew until now” and that a new regime will soon take over. At a dinner later, he insists to others at the table that one’s culture is the culture where one is born and that Salazar doesn’t care about Goa because he sent all his army to rescue the African colonies.
By the end of the film, Dona Maria seems to have undergone some change in her attitude. In the beginning, she seems incapable of dealing with Ernesto’s loss (and hence by association the Portuguese Goa). “I feel that if I forget Ernesto’s face, I will forget mine. If he is gone, what will be left for me?” she wonders at his funeral. By the end, she seems to have – even if passively – accepted the change as she expresses her approval of her granddaughter’s decision to leave and make a life elsewhere.
Man Bites Dog 