Review: At Home in Two Worlds by Maria Aurora Couto

I make no claim to being part of Maria Aurora Couto’s inner circle, but for a decade we shared a relationship of mentorship, confidences and discussions about the world we inhabit and our place in it. She was gracious, she had no need to entertain conversations with a writer who back then was barely published, but such is the nature of friendship that it defies logic. Never once did I slip up and assume a level of familiarity which would have immediately coarsened our exchanges. I never stopped calling her Dr Couto, I never stopped being tongue-tied in her presence, or awe-struck by her extraordinary intelligence, her wide breadth of reading and the luminaries who kept her company.

Anecdotes of these luminaries are now liberally scattered across At Home in Two Worlds: Essays on Goa, from playwright Girish Karnad, a life-long friend whose passing she mourned deeply, to Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, Turkish novelist and Nobel Prize recipient Orhan Pamuk and Italian philosopher Umberto Eco.

Of particular interest is the time she spent with novelist Graham Greene, who stayed with the Coutos in 1963 during his sojourn in Goa. She writes of how this came about, her husband “Alban — ever intrepid and adventurous — decided we should host him in Panjim instead of booking a room at Hotel Mandovi. In Panjim, we lived in a beautiful modern bungalow on the tip of Altinho Hill, from where Greene would have a sense of urban architecture and graceful layout of the city, flowing from the hill down to the spectacular church and public garden/ square.” From this stay would emerge Greene’s Sunday Times essay, Goa the Unique. A decade before Greene, another visiting English novelist Evenly Waugh had similar thoughts on Goa. Both men saw Goan society through the prism of Catholicism, but as Greene remarked carrying a “tribal memory”.

This uniquely syncretized culture becomes a leitmotif in Couto’s own writing. She quotes Nehru’s enchantment, when in 1963, he wrote, “I have felt for a long time that Goa had a distinctive personality, and it would be a pity if anything were done to take away that personality. It may be that gradually, time and other factors will bring about changes, but it is not for the government to enforce changes that will affect Goa’s personality.” It is these changes which weigh heavily on Couto’s mind. The timbre of this late work in her years of “solitude” is sombre, sounding a warning bell for Goa which is metamorphosing into something unfamiliar and unrecognisable.

Clearly, Couto was preoccupied with Goa’s environmental degradation. Indeed, for Couto, the Goan is so intrinsically linked to the land that Goa’s very identity is informed of this bond. She is convinced, “the cultural strength of Goa lies in what politicians of all stripes describe as Goenkarponn, its uniqueness. This singularity is due to its history and, equally, its landscape: the undulating land, the sea, the rivers, hillocks, paddy fields, and coconut palms alongside mango and cashew groves. Both of these created a Goan identity, which, even now, resists all attempts at assimilation.”

Her scholarship and crisp thought shine though in an essay on the gaunkari system, the age-old gathering of Goans into clans as custodians of the land, a system whose singularity is accentuated by its absence in the rest of India. Couto provides compelling evidence of how after Goa’s liberation, this system came under grave attack by Indian bureaucrats who had little understanding of its deeply-rooted significance — its responsibility for crops, dykes, sluice gates, community and continuity. With local political complicity, the gaunkari system has been steadily stripped of authority and reduced to its current skeletal form.

As usual Couto’s forte lies in reconciling disparate worlds — the imperial and the post-colonial, the European and the South Asian, the Catholic and the Hindu, ruthless market economies and poet Bakibab Borkar’s Goa of veglench munxaponn, unique humanism. She constantly calls for accommodation of these many worlds, for a healing of the fractures history, religion, language and culture have wrought upon Goa. She writes, “In some senses, Goan society is in tumult. For instance, despite objections by some freedom fighters, Indo-Portuguese culture is celebrated for a whole week, sponsored by businessmen with their eye on opportunities in the European Union via Portugal.”

Couto’s astute observational power does not fail her when she denounces the politicisation of history as manufactured rage, conveniently forgotten if it can serve commercial gain. Self-proclaimed nationalists may appeal to their base by raking up a contested past but anyone who has landed at Goa’s International Mopa airport with its Portuguese inspired interiors knows well enough that what sells is the idea of a European enclave right here in India. Couto makes a strong case for the ambiguous space that Goa occupies to be co-opted within the broad church of nationhood, within what must become ever-widening definitions of Indian-ness.

What elevates Couto above other cultural historians is that so much of her writing brings to light a lived history, witnessed personally. As the wife of IAS diplomat Alban Couto, who she always considered her ideological soulmate, she travelled extensively with postings in Patna, Delhi, London and Chennai. Significantly, Alban was posted to Goa as Development Commissioner (1962-1965) immediately following liberation to smooth over the transition into India. Couto became privy to conversations taking place behind closed doors, political manoeuvrings and manipulations which would determine Goa’s future and which she now brings to light. The book in many respects completes the trilogy together with her previous works, Goa: A Daughters Story and Filomena’s Journeys, in which she examines her role as Alban’s companion, his ideals and aspirations, and shares extracts of his writings.

Couto was and continues to be Goa’s foremost public intellectual. She brought to her discourse both passion and politeness as much in her writing as in person. So many of the conversations she embarked on were conversations with herself, and these self-directed intellectual enquiries into her family, her pedigree, her privilege, her personal history became national conversations about nationhood. Her depth, intellect and the fluidity of her prose never loses vigour in her last oeuvre which is a manifesto for peace not just for Goa but for India.

Selma Carvalho is a writer. She lives in London.