Raparigas, raparigas!
Mogarins cor de luar!
Vossas almas são cantigas
Que, noite alta, canta o mar.
Nascimento Mendonça
Nona pequinino, parqui calado santa
Ouvri vossa doce boca, oen cantiga canta
Cantigas ne o lingua de portuguez
[INTRODUCTION]
On Portuguese ships in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the undulating sea and the abstract line of the horizon perhaps foreshadowed the aesthetic thresholds of a future enigma: the implantation throughout the East of an apparent simulacrum of their civilization, a paradigm that unexpectedly yet inevitably constituted a new Eurasian or Indo-Portuguese system of culture. Across oceanic distances Portuguese navigators put their identity at risk, motivated by the alterity and estrangement of an occult world. As a form, the voyage was a metaphor for inherent otherness and absence, through which the travelers to Asia ultimately created unsuspected latent forms of themselves, explained as a nostalgia for the possible.
"Nhonha na jinella
Cô fúla mogarim:
Sua mãi tankaréra
Sua pai canarim "
(Pereira, Cantilenas Macaístas: II, p.704)
("Lady in the window
With a jasmine flower
Your mother sails a Chinese sampan
Your father is Konkani")3
For other peoples, the mixed descendents who accepted Indo-Portuguese identity, radical ethnic change implied a more exterior guise of otherness within an unfamiliar and displaced cultural presence. The thesis of my research on Portuguese literary and folkloric traditions in Asia, initiated in Sri Lanka in 1973, is that oral texts and music carried on Portuguese ships are indicators of culture, as theorized by Loman and Halifaz (1971), and played a key role in creating and preserving a distinct Indo-Portuguese cultural expression, developed through decades of contact. 4 I argue, moreover, that oral texts played a central role both in defining the cultural expresssions of identity and in preserving the coherence and cohesion of the creole-speaking communities over time. The resulting folklore text, defined following Elizabeth C. Fine (1984) as an interplay or translation between performance and print medium, spread throughout Indo-Portuguese society promoting new forms of cultural identity and social cohesion. 5
The verses, stories, proverbs, riddles, and music that characterize Indo-Portuguese culture represent a syncretism of Portuguese, African, and Asian source materials. 6 On the local level, this folklore was maintained in mixed coastal communities of peoples who called themselves Portuguese and spoke a pidgin or creole Portuguese language. 7 In view of their racial, religious, and cultural mixture, their local identification as Portuguese represented not only a change in meaning of the nationality of the discoverers but a voyage or immigration of their identities into a different Eurasian or mestizo reality. That such groups identified with Portuguese, as Ian R. Smith notes, 8 was not unusual considering that the Portuguese occupied the apex of the social order. What was obscured by the simulacrum of Portuguese civilization, in the enigma of a new Afro-Asian paradigm, however, was an identity that crossed categories, belonging neither wholly to one or to another. Sri Lankan sociologist Michael Roberts studied his country's population of 'Burghers' as "people in between," who did not fit into any national context or category save their own. 9
On a generic level, the term 'Indo-Portuguese folklore text' refers to a unified body of materials, still only partially collected, that constitutes a system of culture which is the expressive tradition over time of Portuguese communities throughout Asia. Beginning more than a century ago Adolfo Coelho, Sebastião Dalgado, Hugo Schuchardt, Tavares de Mello, and José Leite de Vasconcellos, followed by other European and Asian linguists and scholars, began to study creole dialects and to collect folk texts assiduously throughout Asia. Folk tales, proverbs, riddles, and verses began to appear in print, appended to grammars and lexicons or transcribed in Asian or Portuguese journals such as "O Oriente Português" (Goa), "Revista Lusitana" (Lisbon) or "Ta-Ssi Yang-Kuo" (Macao - Lisbon). In India Jeronymo Quadros and António Moniz published significant little-known accounts of Indo-Portuguese folklore in Dio and Daman, respectively. 10 The critical confrontation of texts collected from widely separated areas demonstrates the existence of a unified folklore, confirmed in the light of 'the Hugh Nevill manuscript' located in the British Library Additional Manuscripts Department. 11 My hypothesis is that the folklore text defines and reinforces community identity, drawing on its multiple sources and local practices, and has therefore persisted in widely differing sites throughout Asia for more than four hundred and fifty years.
§1. JANTIS MUDA KONDISAAN (PEOPLE IN NEW CIRCUMSTANCES)
Asian contacts opened a profound difference in the boundaries of Portuguese identity. Forts lining the Malabar coast of India maintained a maritime commerce stretching from Mozambique to China (bread, porcelain, opium, indigo, coconuts, cinnamon, pepper, drugs, cloves, woven cotton, gold, ivory, African slaves) and supported mixed communities of Portuguese settlers, Muslims, blacks, local Christians, and Hindus. The characteristic population of the important city of Chaul was described by Bocarro in 1635:
"The people who live inside the walls in good two-story houses of stone and lime are two hundred married Portuguese and five hundred native black Christians, some of whom have slaves to carry arms [...] the reason for the scarcity of slaves is that most have fled to the land of the Moors to live in palm groves and orchards not far from the City, almost under its artillery, some five hundred black married men both Christians and Hindus [...]."12
In a study of Sri Lanka Portuguese, Smith notes that by the early seventeenth century a Portuguese-based pidgin was in use in the littoral. Creole communities had formed, made up of Eurasians, 'topazes' (mestizos), and East Africans (for whom the Portuguese used the spurious Arabic term 'cafres' [kaffirs]), who brought a different Portuguese pidgin with them. Children of Portuguese 'casados' would have been introduced to the pidgin or creolized language by black domestic servants, some of whom had been slaves in Goa. When the Portuguese fort in the Batticaloa lagoon surrendered on the 18th of April 1638, the Dutch Admiral Willem Jacobsz Coster found seven hundred inhabitants, described as fifty Portuguese and mestizos and the rest blacks, women, and children. Distinct groups of Dutch and Portuguese 'Burghers' in Batticaloa who spoke the creole joined together only in the last century, according to local Church records.
Two principal points can be made about Eurasian Portuguese creole-speaking groups and their languages. First, the pidginized or creolized Portuguese dialects that were the mother tongues of these groups spread rapidly across Asia in the 1600s and were used as the language of social intercourse, and often of religious and legal practices, in Dutch and English colonial societies up to the early twentieth century. 13 Secondly, the creolized populations, who had little or no contact with standard Portuguese after the late seventeenth century but who nevertheless maintained European dress and Roman Catholicism against the grain of society at large, were subjected to social degradation and exclusion from higher offices. They led a life of poverty as 'mecânicos' ('mechanical' tradesmen or artisans), such as tailors, shoemakers, bazarkeepers, carpenters, blacksmiths, motor mechanics, and, in some cases, planters.
Indo-Portuguese ethnic groups－whether called Goans, Porto-Indians, East Indians of Bombay or Sri Lankan 'Burghers'－ have long assimilated and maintained customs, religion, language, and folklore initiated by Portuguese contacts. The colloquial Anglo-Indian terms and etymologies studied by Yule and Burnell (1886) reveal an extensive influence and knowledge of Portuguese vocabulary. The following creolized Indo-Portuguese folk quatrain sung in Sri Lanka, from the Hugh Nevill manuscript collection (#37538 L) in the British Library, represents the fusion of cultures and languages under the sign of maritime voyages:
Se kera pervos
Au lo lava mea tera
Meo korpo fia barko
Brasso fia vala"
(Nevill [50] 18.)
("If you want
I will take you to my land
My body becomes a boat
My arm becomes a sail")14
§2. CANTA DRATOE PURTIEGES (SING CORRECT PORTUGUESE)
In Lisbon, historian João de Barros cited in his Grammatica [...] (1539) as among the most lasting values of Portuguese expansion its religion, customs, and language, which he foresaw would survive the destructive forces of time. The Portuguese language, undergoing creolization with contact languages in Africa and Asia, began to function as a lingua franca for commerce, domestic life, and religion, loaning extensive vocabulary to all the contact and related languages: chave (key), vidro (glass), camisa (shirt), mesa (table), alfinete (pin), etc. 15 By 1875, the Porto-Indian scholar Gerson da Cunha saw in linguistic influence the most persistent evidence of Portuguese presence in India: "Of the once vast dominion of the Portuguese in the East all monuments whether edifices or archives are rapidly disappearing. The only documents that will longer defy the action of time are coins. But when coins too shall have perished then the verbal tokens which have enriched the languages of the East shall still continue to exist and stand as witnesses to the Portuguese domination and influence of these parts in the past."16 Still another century after Gerson da Cunha, marking the quincentenary of the discoveries, Portuguese language and culture are present in many communities in India and Sri Lanka, giving voice to the material relics of the past through syncretism of language, race, customs, architecture, cuisine, music, literature, and folklore. The lasting Portuguese contribution to Asian civilizations consists of the creation of a distinct Luso-Asian people, still largely unrecognized, whose language, cultural history, and identity is the product of cross-fertilization of European, African, and Asian sources.
"Sie kere canta
Canta dratoe purtieges
Numiste canta
Mallaiye landes "
(Nevill [59] 101.)
("If you want to sing
Sing correct Portuguese
Don't sing
Malayan dutchese")17
Portuguese culture in Asia stems both from oral and written materials. 18 European sources for the Luso-Asian folklore text are related to the ballad, popular and religious poetry, medieval drama, chivalry books, and folk tales. 19 Eurasian communities, formed by the seaborne empire of interconnected coastal settlements, assimilated and altered Portuguese materials, as in Indo-Portuguese balladry studied by João Figueiredo Filho (1958). Syncretism with African and Asian languages and cultures contributed structure, lexicon, and context to the growth of Indo-Portuguese dialects. Creolized verses, usually called 'cantigas' by the performers, reflected this diversity as a prominent aesthetic form of community expression. Folk 'cantigas' are sung and danced with instrumental ensembles. Themes of the quatrains in creolized verse reflect meaningful cycles and rituals of Indo-Portuguese community life: 20
sailing and travel,
"Eu tanda Bengalla
Riva de oen cheecha
Lo trissa oen noiva
Kie bonitoe oen beecha "
(Nevill [53] 69.0)
("I am going to Bengal
On a gecko
I will bring back a bride
A beautiful handmaiden")21
class, social condition, and race,
"Ne iste caminho nona
caminho de pase
Aqui te mora nona,
Todo casta baço"
(Cantigas ne o lingua, No. 65)
("On this road lady
Heavily traveled
Who lives here lady
All are low caste")22
satire and social criticism,
"Agor' su meninhas nona
Num poi confia
Até anda igreja
Até padre da caza"
(Cantigas ne o lingua, No. 15)
("Girls these days lady
You can't trust
Until they go to the church
Until the priest marries them")23
romance, matchmaking, and proposal,
"Papegaai ne giola
Batté azas quer' curre
Menina ne janela,
Batté peto quer morre"
(Cantigas ne o lingua, No. 32)
("Parrot in the cage
Beats his wings wanting to flee
Young girl at the window,
Beats her breast wanting to die")24
love and marriage,
"Ovi minha rogo nona
Eu qui te falla
Si não da caza
Eu ca furta lo leva"
(Cantigas ne o lingua, No. 71)
("Listen to my plea lady
I am speaking to you
If you don't marry
I will carry you off')25
proverbs and advice,
"Si toma amor nona,
Valé tome oen home
Si toma oen creança nona,
Lo acha mal nome "
(Cantigas ne o lingua, No. 20)
("If you take a love lady
You should take a man
If you take a boy,
You will have a bad name")26
and the song itself,
"Toma vi rabana nona
Vamos nos canta
Pussa oen cadeira nona
Diante santa "
(Cantigas ne o lingua, No. 36)
("Come take the drum lady
Let's sing
Pull up a chair, lady
To sit down before us")27
Performance of creole verse by and within the group gives meaning to the celebration, reenactment, and renewal of community life. In the first half of the sixteenth century, Indo-Portuguese folklore texts spread to communities along the Indian coasts, then extended beyond Ceylon to Malacca, the Moluccas or Spice Islands, Macao, and Japan.
"Jaaffoi toodoo partee
A rowpa una jappan
Nunca treya na tha forda
Fella da bottan"
(Cantigas ne o lingua, No. 24)
("I went everywhere
Clothed in a pea coat
I never wore a flower bud
In my uniform")28
Verses collected throughout the Indo-Portuguese world attest to the coherence of the folk text as a new Eurasian discourse. Sung to celebrate and to reaffirm identity, Indo-Portuguese verses cover the full range of the above mentioned themes of community life, exemplified by widely diverse examples. The extensive 'cancioneiro' of the blacks in Portuguese India celebrates birth in Dio,
"Sâ Pal já batê sin
Meia noite, já nacê minin
Meia noite, Já nacê minin"
(Quadros, Diu: Apontamentos, p.98)
("São Paulo rang its bell
Midnight, the boy is born
Midnight, the boy is born")
and humorously describes the dance:
"Niguerinha
Baix de manguêr
Qui tá fasé?
Tá buli cadêr"
(Quadros, Cartas de Diu, pp. 192-196)
("Dear black girl
Under the mango tree
What are you doing?
Swinging my hips")29
Verses of courtship reminiscent of the medieval 'cantiga de amigo' are subtly illustrated by Moniz's transcription from Daman, Oh! Mãi:
"Oh mãi qui horn aquel é
Oh mãi qui horn aquel é
Qui já passou baix de janella
Qui já passou baix de janella
Quem sab sinhorá
Eu não olho nada "
(Moniz, Notícias e documentos, p.294)
("Oh! Mother what man is that
Oh mother what man is that
Who just passed beneath my window
Who just passed beneath my window
Who knows senhora
I didn't see a thing")
The motif of the golden ring was identified by the author in 1979 as a surviving fragment from the Iberian ballad known as Bela Infanta:
"Analla de oroe
Sathi padra Joontho
Sie kerra analla
Kasa minhe Juntho "
(Nevill [52] 46.)
("Ring of gold
With seven stones
If you want the ring
Marry me")30
Religious feast days of São Gonçalo and São João are celebrated in quasi standard Portuguese verse:
"S. Gonçalo de Amarante
Cazamenteiro das velhas,
Porque não casay as môças
Que mal vos fizerão ellas?"
(Moniz, A devoção de S. Gonçalo, pp. 201-209)
("S. Gonçalo de Amarante
Matchmaker of old maids
Why don't you marry the young ladies
What harm have they done you?")
"Amanhã é S. João
Grande di em nosso terra
Toda a festa se encerra
Na barriga, na barriga"
(O Oriente Português", (15), pp. 5-6
("Tomorrow is S. João
Great day in our land
All celebrating ends
In the belly, in the belly")
Satire, humor, and romance are often united:
"Rôz branca Bastiana
Do jardim de mim pêt
Quem querê êss róz
Bastiana, Butá mão, tirá com gêt"
(Quadros, Cartas de Diu)
("White rose, Bastiana
From the garden of my breast
Whoever wants that rose, Bastiana
Reach in, pluck it with skill")
and the Indo-Portuguese woman is sung:
"Konda kotta kotta
Konda tha arraka
Maskie tha trigaroo
Thambo uen bunaka "
(Nevill [58] 57.)
("Knot of hair is dripping
Knot with palm wine
Although she is dark
Rose-apple is a doll")31
Misfortunes of love and poverty reflect both the pride and the low economic status of Indo-Portuguese people:
"Comê arec-bet
Num cuspi no chão
Cuspi no meu peito
Regáe coração"
(Dalgado, Dialecto de Damão, p.23)
("Eat leaves of the areca palm
Don't spit on the ground
Spit on my breast
Nourish my heart")
"Ainda que sou pobre
Andando pela rua
A minha opinião
É maior que a sua"
(Moniz, Canto de Raminha)
("Even though I am poor
Walking on the road
My reputation
Is better than yours")
"Amor ja falla
Minha junto lo morre
Quando olha pobreza
Ella ja salta ja curre"
(Nevill [5] 21.)
("My love said
She will stay with me until she dies
When she saw poverty
She jumped up and ran away")32
Above all, the folklore text is a constant invitation to the pleasure of the song, whose performance is both celebration and memory, novelty and reenactment:
"Cantha nona cantha nona
Cantha sen vargonya
[...]"
(Nevill [59] 89.)
("Sing lady, sing lady
Sing without shame
[...]")33
Indian west coast communities are a rich historical repository for Indo-Portuguese language, arts, and culture. The ancient port of Chaul, fifty six kilometres south of Bombay, became an important Portuguese trading and religious center in 1524. In the village of Korlai, settled in 1740 south of the Kundalika River near the ruins of 'Morro de Chaul' fort, when all the Portuguese who could afford to leave went to Goa, the existence of a lively creole Portuguese still spoken after another two hundred and fifty years came to light through contacts by Mitterwallner and Theban in the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to its creole verse, the village is a repository of folk tales, extensively collected by J. Clancy Clements in 1990-1991. 34 In December, 1987, village elder Helena de Sousa led Korlai women in the traditional song Maldita Maria Madulena about an elegant but headstrong woman:
"Maldita Maria Madulena
Maldita firmoza!
Ai compra mandar fulhy Madulena
Vistida de mata"
(Jackson, Field Notes)
("Scandalous Maria Madulena
Accursed beauty!
Buy and send a flower Madulena
Dressed to kill")35
Musical ensemble of Portuguese 'Burghers' of the Batticaloa Catholic Burgher Union performs traditional melodies in the east coast community of Sri Lanka.
Photograph taken in January 1974 by Kenneth David Jackson.
Although Indo-Portuguese creoles are said to be near extinction in isolated communities－as linguist Ian R. Smith (1977) states to be the case in Batticaloacreole speech is commonly used in Dio, Daman, and in the village of Korlai, near the fort of Chaul (Revdanda, Kolaba district), with vestiges in the Vypeen Island area of Cochin. A folk ensemble in Dio sings of the Eurasian lady Bahy Curcury, seen "pentiá cabel pela manhã cêd" ("combing [her] hair in early morning"). A large ensemble in Daman recreates the songs of sailors returning to port singing of Luzi (Maria da Luz):
"Barra de Damão
Mi Luzi, estreit e comprid
Alagra na entrad
Trist ne saíd"
(Moniz, Canto do Tyranno)
("Port of Dama
My Lucy, narrow and long
Happy on arriving
Sad on leaving")
The sailors' verses reflect the poem of an eighteenth century Dominican nun of Tarapor:
"Adeus terreiro gostozo
De paçatempos de mocidade,
Cada vez q lembro Damão
Snto partir o coração de saudade
Adeus Virgem dos Remedios,
Adeus Virgem milagroza
Adeus que me embarco Damão
Desta barra para fora "
(Moniz, Notícias e Documentos, p.278)
("Farewell delightful land
Of youth's pastimes
whenever I remember Daman
I feel my heart break with longing
Farewell Virgin of Remedies
Farewell miraculous Virgin,
Farewell Daman for I embark
From this port.")
According to Moniz, verses in Daman were sung by two ladies alternatively, accompanied by a dôll (small box) on which the rhythm was beat by hand or with chunche (two small sticks), and also guitar and rebec. On Vypeen Island in Cochin, Francis Paynter43 recalls a story of the angry, dark mestizo woman Maggie, who insisted on eating põn (bread) reserved for the fair reinol madame Luzi, rather than the bol (unleavened brea) meant for her lower social class. Porto-Indian communities are now isolated or forgotten--Korlai, Daman, Vypeen--and speak with unrecognizable or dislocated voices from a remote past whose cultural history combines Portugal with India:
"Vos de minhe frontie
Basoe de Koráál
Nona mea donsala
Nona purtugáál."
(Nevill [53] 58.)
("You before me
Coral lips
Lady my young lady
A Portuguese lady")37
The Indo-Portuguese practiced a religious and musical culture, rich in arts and architecture. Violinist Micael Martins (1954) describes Konkani and maritime traditions in the Goan salon musical dance called 'mandó'. The pattern and rhythm follow sentimental poetic verses in the Konkani language with a syncopated fifth beat in a 6/4 signature. It was a courtship dance by ladies using Chinese or Malay dress and accompanied by an earthenware drum. Miguel Vicente Abreu (1870) published verses satirizing use of the balloon skirt in Goan ballrooms:
"A saia, que assemelha
A uma balea gigante
A saia caricatura
De mil trombas de elefante "
(Abreu, Ramalhetinho, vol. 3, p.37)
("The skirt, which resembles
A giant whale
The skirt caricatures
A thousand elefant's trunks")
Small musical ensembles accompanying songs in creole verse and dance are a sure sign of Indo-Portuguese peoples in Asia. Even angels sculpted in ceilings of Daman's churches are playing string instruments.
"Bossa bossa baila
Bonitoe baila
Bossa Jatoe per da gosto
Eau Joento per Kassa "
(Nevill [54] 88.)
("Your dancing
Beautiful dancing
Your style gives pleasure
I come to marry you")38
§3. SINGELLE NONA / NONA PURTUGAAL (BATTICALOA'S PORTUGUESE LADY)
Sri Lankan language, culture, and religion were decisively influenced by Portuguese rule in all areas except the Kandyan Kingdom from the late sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries, a presence still visible in widespread use of Portuguese surnames. 39 The emblematic, hidden icon of enduring Portuguese presence is the wooden etching of a Portuguese horseman among Buddhist religious motifs at Embekka temple near Kandy. One of the earliest views of Sinhalese social life is João Ribeiro's Fatalidade Histórica da Ilha de Ceilão (Historic Tragedy of Portuguese Ceylon) (1685). Portuguese were instrumental in the development of the city of Colombo and of coastal forts and settlements such as Galle, Kalutara, Colombo, Negombo, Mannar, Jaffna, Trincomalee, and Batticaloa. Sri Lankan Portuguese peoples of mixed descent, created in such settlements, were later called by the Dutch term 'Burgher', and now number less than 1% of the population. These outposts became centers of creolized language, music, and customs that spread throughout the island. One folk tune is thought to celebrate the Ceylonese woman:
"Singelle nona Singelle
nona
Veeanda lava
Savam nuthen bolsa nuthen
Korpuper roosa "
(Nevill [5] 43.)
("Ceylonese girl, Ceylonese girl
I saw you going to bath
Without soap, without a bag
Scrubbing your body")40
A 'Burgher' woman of the older generation is the only person left to verify lyrics of traditional creole songs during the performance in Batticaloa.
Photograph taken in January 1974 by Kenneth David Jackson.
A creolized form of Portuguese used extensively for trade, legal, and domestic affairs survived into the twentieth century and is found in pockets to the present day. John Callaway's Vocabulary [...] (1818)typically included Portuguese with English and Sinhalese. Portuguese 'Burghers' were of low social standing, yet well known for their language, customs, music, and verse. References to the musical forms kafrinha and chicote in Sri Lanka invoke African influence in which the negrinha (local girl) substitutes the Portuguese nona (young lady) and, according to Goonatilleka,41 express an enhanced spirit of contention, rivalry, humor, parody, and satire. The African roots of Portuguese 'Burgher' music could still be heard in 1982 among the Puttalam 'cafres' (kaffirs), who sing creolized Portuguese verses that none of them understands. Nights of dancing and singing creole verses accompanied by instrumental ensembles and a liberal amount of arrack (distilled coconut liquor) were still a feature in the 1970s of the largest organized 'Burgher' group, the east coast port "Batticaloa Catholic Burgher Union"; similar music and dancing, recorded by the author in 1975, enlivened a Christian community at the jungle shrine of Palyuttu, near the bay and port of Trincomalee. Performance of a Eurasian 'cantiga'－whether at Dio, Daman, Korlai, Vypeen, Batticaloa, or Trincomalee－conveys festivity, music, dance, energy, and identity. Traditional instrumentation includes banjo or ukelele, hand-held drum, triangle, and perhaps violin or guitar. The music is highly syncopated, yet melodic, and usually danced by four couples. In the accompanying folkloric verses, the Sinhalese nona is usually the object of flirtation, love, courtship, and marriage by the longing young man without means. Modem popular Sinhalese baila music is an adaptation of the 'Burghers' folkloric kafrinha tunes. 42
"Nono de Colombo
Sava botha boloe
Maridoe ne brassoe
Amnigo ne Koloe "
(Nevill [53] 64.)
("Colombo lady
Knows how to make a cake
Husband on her arm
Friend on her lap")
Community song and folk verse survive as the resilient nucleus of a cultural synthesis that speaks in metaphors, symbols, dreams, and desires drawn from five hundred years of Portuguese interaction with Asia, where surprising survivals of peoples, customs, and languages can still be found spread throughout the small territories, forts, churches, and communities along the Indian and Sri Lankan coasts, from Dio to Batticaloa. 44 There, maritime expansion provided for a spatial and cultural fusion of Portuguese, African, and Asian peoples who actively carried on Portuguese traditions.
"Seus beiços cumprido
Seus olhos torcido
Rosto de rabana,
Tem cafre de Inhabano "
(Moniz, The Negroes, p.572)
("Your big lips
Your twisted eyes
A face like a drum
That's a kaffir from Inhambane")45
In Cantiga de Ceilão46, contemporary Portuguese poet Jorge de Sena contemplated the possible meaning of folklore texts recovered by the author in Sri Lanka in 1975. He grasped the apparent simulacrum of Indo-Portuguese identity by addressing the role of the folk text, altered over time by other scripts and sounds, in the cultural memory of an isolated and forgotten people, abandoned by a country they never knew:
"Mara nutem fundu minhe vida par tira
Rue nuga largu minhe marte par leva
Escritos em caracteres tamis, e transcritos
com fonética inglesa
por quem mal sabe a língua em que soavam...
estes versos emergem com uma tranquilidade
terrível de língua morta a desfazer-se
e cujos ossos restam dispersos num e de um
rimance
cantado há quatro séculos numa terra alheia.
Distâncias de oceanos os conduziram como
hábito
de serões e vigílias. Solidões do longe
os ensinaram a quem partilhou tédios e
saudades...
ficaram nas memórias teimosas de abandonada
gente...
Fundos de mar e ruas como a vida sabe
se perdida em si mesma, presa por um fio
a um país esquecido e que se esquece ao
longe...
Não os ouve nada/nem ninguém.
"O mar não é tão fundo que me tire a vida
Nem há tão larga rua que me leve a morte."
S[anta] B[arbara], 24/3/74
("The sea is not deep enough to take my life
Nor is the street wide enough to carry my death
Written in Tamil characters transcribed in
English phonetics
by those who hardly know the language that
gave them voice...
these verses emerge with the terrible
tranquility of a dead language falling apart
and whose bones are scattered in one or
another ballad
sung four centuries ago in a distant land.
Oceanic distances led them like the habit
of evening gatherings and vigils. Solitudes
from afar
taught those who shared tedium and melancholy...
solitudes stuck in the stubborn memories of
people abandoned...
Depths of the seas and streets like life lost
within itself,
held captive by ties to a forgotten country
that one forgets with distance...
Nothing and no one hears them...
"The sea is not deep enough to take my life
Nor is the street wide enough to carry my death.")47
§4. ASTANTOE KE CANTHA (MUCH SINGING)
Indo-Portuguese people inhabit a spiritual world of otherness, in between Portuguese and Indian. Their way of life itself symbolizes transformation and transfiguration: the uniting of continents, races, languages, and religious practices. Multilingual, multiracial, and multicultural, the Indo-Portuguese occupy a place apart, resonant with oceanic distance. Born of conquest and occupation, their civilization became religious and metaphoric. As Fernando Pessoa wrote of maritime ballads, their traditions have long been passed from one soul to another with the risk of shipwreck:
"Cantigas de Portugueses,
São como barcos no mar－
Vão de uma alma para outra,
Com risco de naufragar. "48
("Cantigas of the Portuguese
Are like ships on the sea－
They sail from one soul to another
At risk of sinking.")
Defying risk and outlasting empire, the Indo-Portuguese folklore text has survived for five hundred years in Asia as a distinct literary and musical system of culture mixing peoples and traditions from three continents. The forgotten voices of the discoverers and the Luso-Asian peoples they created sing texts of difference and also of identity.
"Maskie tha bunetoee
Papoogagu verdee
Adie iste cantiges
Todoe then verdade"
(Nevill [58] 64.)
("How beautiful is
The green parrot
All these cantigas
Every one is true")49
**A Portuguese version of this paper was presented at the Fundação Macau (Macao Foundation), in Macao on the 6th of February 1996.
NOTES
1 SCHOLBERG, Henry, A Bibliography of Goa and the Portuguese in India, New Delhi, Promilla, 1982; and DE SILVA, Daya, The Portuguese in Asia: an annotated bibliography of studies on Portuguese colonial history in Asia, 1490-ca1800, Zug, International Documentation Centre, 1987－For the most extensive bibliographies on the Portuguese world in Asia.
2 TABUCCHI, Antonio, Fernando Pessoa: A nostalgia do possível e o fingimento da verdade, in "Revista de Cultura", Macau, Número Especial [Special Issue], 10 de Junho [June] 1988, pp. 17-23－In a study of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa read in Macao, the author theorizes that the dynamic of the poet's otherness, the invented heteronymic personalities, lies to one degree in an 'oblique' nostalgia for what could be or could have been, a paradoxal escape from the self into plural and absolute forms. Portuguese 'presence' in Asia is in these terms a universal form of otherness, and the nostalgia for pure and abstract distance is one of its motivating forces.
See: JACKSON, Kenneth David, A Presença Oculta: 500 Anos de Cultura Portuguesa na Índia e no Sri Lanka / A Hidden Presence: 500 Years of Portuguese Culture in India and Sri Lanka, Macau, Fundação Macau - Comissão Territorial de Macau para a Comemoração dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 1995－For images of otherness.
3 JACKSON, Kenneth David, Sing Without Shame: Oral Traditions in Indo-Portuguese Creole Verse, Macau -Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company - Instituto Cultural de Macau, 1990, p. XI.
4 LOMAN, Alan - HALIFAX, Joan, Folk Song Texts as Culture Indicators, in MARANDA, Elli - MARANDA, Pierre, eds., "Structural Analysis of Oral Tradition", Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971, pp. 235-267－These authors study the folk song text as an indicator of culture.
5 FINE, Elizabeth, The Folklore Text: From performance to print, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984.
Since 1970 field researchers of Indo-Portuguese communities and creole language have included: Alan Baxter [Bibliog.], J. Clancy Clements, M. H. Goonatilleka [Bibliog.], D. E. Hettiaratchi, Dennis McGilvray [See: Note 10], Ian R. Smith [Bibliog.], Laurentiu Theban [Bibliog.], Isabel Tomás [See: Note 6] and the author [See: Notes 9, 14 and Bibliog.]. This paper argues that the Indo-Portuguese people have not been sufficiently recognized politically or culturally as a unique category in the population of the subcontinent. There is a need to reaffirm, in the politics of the overseas communities, the ethnic and cultural brotherhood of the Luso-Oriental people with their culture of origin, Portugal, at the same time as their cultural autonomy and specificity is recognized. Indo-Asiatic literature of Portuguese expression -- whether it be written in English, Konkani, Tamil, or Chinese－should also be recognized and taught as an 'occult' chapter of Portuguese literature.
6 HANCOCK, Ian, Malaccan Creole Portuguese: African, Asian or European?, in "Anthropological Linguistics", Bloomington/Indiana, (17) 1975, pp. 211-236－For linguistic theories of African and Asian content in the Portuguese creole dialects, which this hypothesis follows on the literary and cultural level.
7 TOMÁS, Isabel, Os Crioulos Portugueses do Oriente: Uma Bibliografia, Macau, Instituto Cultural de Macau, 1992－For a comprehensive bibliography of Portuguese creoles in the Orient.
8 SMITH, Ian Russell, Sri Lanka Creole Portuguese Phonology, Ph. D Thesis dissertation, Cornell University, Ithaca/New York, p.13 [Unpublished].
9 FERNANDO, Tissa, 1972, The Burghers of Ceylon, in GIST, Noel P. - DWORKIN, Anthony G., "The Blending of Races: Marginality and identity in world perspective", New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1972, pp. 61-78－The author defined and contrasted Dutch and Portuguese 'Burghers'. The latter, also known as 'mecânicos'('mechanics'), were characterized by their taste for dancing, drinking, and music as well as their mixed racial background and lack of caste system. The 'Burghers' were set apart from the surrounding Buddhist and Hindu societies that considered them to be decadent curiosities.
See: ROBERTS, Michael - RAHEEM, Ismeth - COLIN-THOMÉ, Percy, People Inbetween: The Burghers and Middle Class in the Transformations within Sri Lanka 1790s-1960s, 4 vols., Ratmalana, Sarvodaya, 1989, vol.1－For a social history of the 'Burghers' in Sri Lanka.
10 In later decades Portuguese scholars including David Lopes [Bibliog.] and António Silva Rêgo [Bibliog.] continued to study and document the expansion of Portuguese language and folk texts in Asia. Their pioneering work has been advanced in contemporary research studies by Baxter [Bibliog.], Clements [Bibliog.], Smith [Bibliog.], and Tomás [See: Note 6], among others.
11 JACKSON, Kenneth David, (1990), op. cit.; JACKSON, Kenneth David, Sing Without Shame: Oral Traditions in Indo-Portuguese Creole Verse, Macau - Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company -Instituto Cultural de Macau, 1990; and JACKSON, Kenneth David, Cantha Sen Vargonya: Tradições Orais em Verso Crioulo Indo-Português, SENA, Isabel de., trans., Macau, Fundação Macau - Comissão Territorial de Macau para a Comemoração dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 1996－For the transcription and comparison to previous collections of 'the Hugh Nevill manuscript', containing Portuguese creole verse from Sri Lanka.
12 PEREIRA, A. B. de Pereira, Arquivo Oriental Português (Nova Edição), to. IV, vol. II, part. I, Bastorá, Tipografia Rangel, pp. 197-198－Quoting: BOCARRO, António, Livro das Plantas de todas as Fortalezas, Cidades e Povoações do Estado da Índia [Biblioteca Pública e Arquivo Distrital de Évora, Évora (Public Library and Regional Archive of Evora, Evora)－MSS: Atlas Bocarro].
13 McGILVRAY, Dennis, Dutch Burghers and Portuguese Mechanics: Eurasian ethnicity in Sri Lanka, in "Comparative Studies in Society and History", London - New York - The Hague, 24 (2) 1982, pp. 235-263－The author documents the mixture of language, domestic customs, and race that resulted when the Dutch replaced the Portuguese in mid seventeenth-century Sri Lanka.
14 JACKSON, Kenneth David, (1990), op. cit., p. 143.
15 DALGADO, Sebastião Rodolfo, Portuguese Vocables in Asian Languages, Baroda, Oriental Institute, 1936－One among the numerous studies of the influence of Portuguese in Asiatic languages see, for example, Anthony Xavier Soares.
16 CUNHA, Gerson da, Notes on the History and Antiquities of Chaul and Bassein, Bombay, Thacker-Vining & Co., 1876, p.72.
17 JACKSON, Kenneth David, (1990), op. cit., p. 167.
18 Images of cultural difference in India were engraved on the papers of a new literature that altered Portuguese language and letters, foreshadowing deeper European currents of Orientalism and exoticism. The voyages expanded the scope of writing: maps, letters, verse, travelogs, shipwrecks, religious theatre, ballads, vocabularies, grammars, routes, documents, sketches, blueprints of forts, portraits of Viceroys and Governors. In a rite of cultural cross-pollination, Africa and Asia were inscribed in classic works of Renaissance Portuguese historiography: Ásia de [...], Dos feitos que os portugueses fizeram no descobrimento e conquista dos Mares e Terras do Oriente (Asia [...]) (1552) by Joao de Barros and the História do Descobrimento e Conquista da Índia pelos Portugueses (History of the Discovery and Conquest of India by the Portuguese) (1551) by Fernão Lopes de Castanheda. Among the captains, priests, and soldiers traveling to India were renowned Portuguese writers and intellectuals of the sixteenth century－Castanheda, Luís de Camões, Fernão Mendes Pinto, Garcia de Orta, and Diogo do Couto－all of whom incorporated a vision of India into their lives and works, a sign of the impact of the discoveries on European creativity that transformed arts, science, and philosophy.
Two masterworks of Western literature resulted from Portuguese voyages: Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads) (1572) by Camões and the Peregrinação (Peregrination /Travels of Mendez Pinto) (1614) by Fernão Mendes Pinto. While describing the Orient, they were also rewriting Portugal and the European Baroque through the reality of a new landscape, different languages, and cultural fusions. One of the first Western books published in India, Orta's treatise on tropical medicine and fruits, Coloquios dos simples, e drogas he cousas mediçinais de India [...] (Colloquies on the pures, and drugs and medicinal substances of India [...]) (1563), crossed Asian sources with Western science. Mannerist tensions reflecting conflict between humanism and the counterreformation extended to Asian themes: Camões' Velho do Restelo [in: Os Lusiadas, Canto V, strophes 94-104] and Couto's Soldado Prático [ in: Díalogo do Soldado Prático que trata dos Enganos e Desenganos da Índia ], representing humanism, questioned the very ethics and philosophy of the voyages of discovery, while unconsciously implying an unexpected breach of the Western imagination in its encounter with Asian lands.
19 MARTINS, Mário, S. J., Teatro quinhentista nas naus da India, Lisboa, Edições Brotéria, 1973; and NEVES, L. Quintas, O teatro popular na expansão colonial dos Portugueses, in Offprint of the "Arquivo do Minho", Viana do Castelo, 1958 [No. 2] -- For studies on shipboard theatre.
Teófilo Braga, Fernando Pires de Lima, Pedro Fernandes Thomas, José Leite de Vasconcellos [Bibliog.], and Carolina Michaelis de Vasconcelos, among others, published studies of the Romanceiro.
See: PICCHIO, Luciana, História do Teatro Português, Lisboa, Portugália, 1969 -- The author emphasizes the role of Jesuit theatre, beginning in 1553, for evangelization from India to Japan. Jesuit works, whether in Latin or local languages, took their themes from the Bible, hagiographies, and national or classical histories and were characterized by scenic extravagance (pp. 160-61).
Also see: RAPHY, Sabeena, Chavittu-Natakam: Dramatic Opera of Kerala, in "Journal of the Sangeet Academy", Sangeet Natak/Delhi, (12) 1969, pp. 56-73 -- Studies of a surviving example in India of local theatre in this tradition, the Chavittu-Natakam, or dramatic opera of Kerala.
20 JACKSON, Kenneth David, Indo-Portuguese Cantigas: Oral Traditions in Ceylon Portuguese Verse, in "Hispania", 74 (3) 1991, pp. 618-626 -- For categories of community life in the cantigas from the south coast of Sri Lanka.
21 JACKSON, Kenneth David, (1990), op. cit., p.150
22 JACKSON, Kenneth David (1991), op. cit., p.621.
23 Idem.
24 Idem.
25 JACKSON, Kenneth David (1991), op. cit., p.623.
26 Ibidem., p.621
27 Ibidem., p.620.
28 Idem.
29 JACKSON, Kenneth David, (1990), op. cit., p.40 [5.].
30 JACKSON, Kenneth David, (1990), op. cit., p.147
31 JACKSON, Kenneth David, (1990), op. cit., p.161
32 JACKSON, Kenneth David, (1990), op. cit. p.145
33 Ibidem., p. 165
34 Clemens published thirty five folk tales in a private edition in Bombay using Devanagari alphabet to transcribe Korlai Portuguese (without translation or transcription).
35 JACKSON, Kenneth David, Um conto folclórico no crioulo indo-português, in "Bulletin des Études Portugaises et Brésiliennes", Paris, Recherche sur les civilisations, (46-47) 1987, pp. 89-98.
36 JACKSON, Kenneth David, (1990), op. cit., pp. 28-30.
37 Ibidem., p.149
38 Ibidem., p.152.
39 ABEYASINHA, T. B. H., Portuguese Rule in Ceylon, 1594-1612, Colombo, Lake House, 1966; and SILVA, Chandra de, The Portuguese in Ceylon, 1617-1638, Colombo, H. W. Cave & Co., 1972 --For historical accounts of the Portuguese in Sri Lanka.
40 JACKSON, Kenneth David, (1990), op. cit., p.160
41 GOONATILLEKA, Miguel Hewage, Ceilão e Portugal--Relações culturais, in Offprint of "Studia", Lisboa, (30-31) 1970, pp. 113-166, p.150
42 MALM, Krister - WALLIS, Roger, The Baila of Sri Lanka and the Calypso of Trinidada, in "Communication Research", 12 (3) 1985, Everly Hills/California, pp. 277-300 -- Comparing unusual cross-cultural derivations, the authors studied the Sinhalese baila and the Caribbean calypso. Sunil Ariyaratna (1985) ARIYARATNA, Sunil, An Enquiry into Baila and Kaffirinna, Colombo, Dayawansha Jayakody Samagama, 1985 [Sinhala text] -- The author relates the kafrinha to the baila music in contemporary Sri Lanka.
43 JACKSON, Kenneth David, (1990), op. cit., p. 149.
44 Cantigas ne o lingua de Portuguez, Impressado ne Matre Sridhara Press, 1914 [23 de Juni] -- The survival of creolized folk verse and its pertinence to local society may be judged by this anonymous publication in Matara, Sri Lanka, which contains a collection of one hundred popular cantigas.
See: Note 19 -- For a transcription and translation of Cantigas ne o lingua de Portuguez.
45 JACKSON, Kenneth David, (1990), op. cit., p.74.
46 SENA, Jorge de, Quarenta Anos de Servidão, 1982, Lisboa, Círculo de Poesia - Moraes Editora - Instituto Português do Livro, pp.164-66 [2nd edition].
47 JACKSON, Kenneth David, (1990), op. cit., pp. XXIV-XXV.
48 PESSOA, Fernando, Quadras ao gosto popular, in "Obra Poética", Rio de Janeiro, Nova Aguilar, 1983, p.579.
49 JACKSON, Kenneth David, (1990), op. cit., p.162
***
See: Selected Bibliography -- for the following authors and further titles of authors already mentioned in this article's Notes:
ABREU, Miguel Vicente; BARROS, João de; BAXTER, Alan; BOLÉO, Manuel de Paiva; CALLAWAY, John; COELHO, Adolfo; DALGADO, Sebastião Rodolfo; FILHO, João Manuel Pacheco de Figueredo; LOPES, David; MARTINS, Micael; MELLO, B. C. Tavares de; MITTERWALLNER, Gritli von; MONIZ Jr., António Francisco; PEREIRA A. B. de Bragança; QUADROS, Jeronymo; RIBEIRO, João; SCHUCHARDT, Hugo; RÊGO, António da Silva; SILVEIRA, Luís; THA-NANJAYARAJASINGHAM, S.; THEBAN, Laurentiu; VASCONCELLOS, José Leite de; YULE, Henry -BURNELL, Arthur.
* Professor at the Department of Portuguese and Spanish Languages, at Yale University, New Haven/Connecticut.
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