A new book asks if the love for the Portuguese language in Goa is genuine or display of vanity

Many people, once they know I am from Goa, assume that I must be fluent in Portuguese, and are surprised when I tell them that while I can understand and speak it to a certain extent, I wouldn’t (yet) call myself fluent. It is a work in progress.

As Shinichi Suzuki (pioneer of the Suzuki method) pointed out, fluency in anything, from language to music, is directly proportional to how early and extensive one’s exposure to it is. My father was born and raised in Portuguese Goa, so his first language was Portuguese. To his dying day, he would use “exposition” (from the Portuguese exposição) instead of “exhibition” when talking about a book exhibition; say his days were “counted” (from the Portuguese “contado”) instead of “numbered”; and many more such Freudian slips. This revealed that despite becoming very well versed with English and English literature (he was among the very few I knew who could not only quote Shakespeare, Chaucer, Thackeray, Milton, Byron, Wordsworth and others, but also tell you where the quotation came from, even, as in the case of Shakespeare, the play, act, scene and who said it and in what context), his brain would often fall into default “Portuguese mode”.

My mother, on the other hand, was born in British Africa (Nairobi, Kenya) and was Anglophone. So, my parents communicated in English, and (by virtue of my parents’ stint in Germany, and my brother Victor and I spending the first four to five years of our lives there), the family’s “secret” language was German. It was used mainly at home, but also when something sensitive had to be said amongst us in public. This was usually a scolding of one of us children to behave ourselves.

Having arrived in Goa aged four in 1970, I remember my bewilderment at the onslaught of so many “new” languages. The pecking order of importance for me was English (as it was the medium of instruction in school) and Konkani (as most of my classmates spoke it). Portuguese came a distant third by a mile, as only my father’s circle of family and friends spoke it, and even they often preferred to speak in English, maybe as a courtesy to my mother and us children.

But there were some of my father’s relatives who, even in the 1970s, were out of their depth in English. “Bai, you speak Paw-chew-geese?” one of my father’s maternal first cousins hopefully asked my mother when he visited us for the first time after our arrival from Germany. When she said no, he made a valiant attempt to converse in English, but then gave up the losing battle and lapsed into Portuguese. But full marks to the poor fellow for trying.

English and Konkani were taught to me as independent language subjects in school. But whatever of the Portuguese language I learnt in those days was entirely through osmosis, listening to it spoken when friends or relatives dropped in on my father, or on other social occasions – weddings, parties, etc. I quickly picked up enough Portuguese to get by in a limited conversation, before finding an excuse to either extricate myself from it or encourage a change of language.

There was a time when I could recite the whole Mass in Portuguese, forwards and backwards. This was because in my school days, we’d cycle up early to Don Bosco to serve the Portuguese Mass (which began, if I’m not mistaken, at 7.15 am) and finished just in time for the school bell. I’m a bit rusty now, but it all comes back to me on the rare occasions I go to a Mass in Portuguese.

On my tenth birthday, I was crestfallen to receive from my father, not an age-appropriate storybook or toy, but an unabridged copy of the epic Os Lusìadas by the Portuguese language’s greatest poet, Luís Vaz de Camões, in the original Portuguese – no translation. (This was a typical Daddy trait: presents to others were actually gifts for himself!) “It’s by another Luis!” he told me cheerfully, ignoring my disappointment.

But then, on our regular trips to the old Central Library (Livraria Central, Pangim), he’d put the epic into context, against the marvellous azulejo tableaux by Jorge Colaço at the entrance corridor of the Library building. And just like that, the cantos, stanzas and pictures would come to life as he recited them with much melodrama. It was an early introduction to poetry and literature in Portuguese – a legacy left to me by my father and his forebears, gracing the bookshelves of our home: Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, Éça de Queiros and so many more.

During my years in England, two of my hospital posts, Hammersmith and Northwick Park hospitals, for some reason had quite a few kitchen and janitorial staff who were Portuguese. My name-tag was a giveaway, and I have good memories of both those postings, because of their warmth, initiated purely because of the Lusophone connection. My colleagues and bosses would get quite bemused by their hearty greetings to me in the corridors and the extra helpings on my tray in the hospital mess, and wonder why I was so popular!

Portuguese once sat atop Goa’s linguistic totem pole, while Konkani was the “língua da cozinha e dos criados” (language of the kitchen and of the servants). In a role reversal, in at least two London hospitals in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the language of the kitchen and janitorial staff was Portuguese. Brexit may have changed all that.

On relocating back to Goa in 2008, I did formal courses in Portuguese up to the Intermediate level at Instituto Camões, to facilitate my interest in Goa and my family history and make better sense of antiquated documents and correspondences. During Covid, I got hooked on Duolingo Portuguese, and even though it is the Brazilian version, it has been useful. But it doesn’t progress beyond a certain level.

About a year ago, after a conference, a discussion began about the usefulness (or lack of it) of Duolingo Portuguese. “But surely there are enough people in Goa who speak fluent Portuguese for you to converse with?” said a visitor to a friend of mine who also used Duolingo. He answered, “The trouble is, those who speak Portuguese fluently here aren’t worth speaking to.”

I wouldn’t have put it quite so bluntly, but I got the gist of his meaning. The Portuguese language is weaponised by quite a few, even today, as a curious marker of class, social status or “sophistication”; as a means of social exclusion and one-upmanship. I find the whole charade quite amusing: the public display of the ability to speak and understand Portuguese in order to assert what they perceive as an “elevated” position in society. Fluency in Portuguese in Goa suggests generational family education and “good breeding”, which is tied to privilege, which in turn, is inevitably tied to caste.

Ironically, it is this snobbish attitude that accelerated (or at least has contributed to) its current irrelevance in Goa today.

As if to underscore this observation, a recent event in Goa, a poetry recitation to commemorate the fifth centenary of Camões’s birth, had an extremely sparse turnout. The Goan contribution was the same predictable handful from elite Catholic families, invested either in the promotion of Portuguese culture or in teaching the language, either at the Goa University or elsewhere. Even those who otherwise flaunt their fluency and facility were absent. It again begs the question: Is the “love” for the Portuguese language in Goa genuine or just a vanity display?

In a further irony, it is actually the Konkani language that has inadvertently helped keep at least the flavour of the Portuguese language alive in Goa. And it has offered advantages as a result that help Goans in the unlikeliest of places around the world.

I met up with a classmate from my Goa Medical College 1984 batch after ages last year, at our 40th-year class reunion. An interesting fact emerged in the wash. She mentioned how helpful the “Purtugez” (Portuguese) words in our Konkani were in enabling her to learn Spanish, which she now speaks fluently with her Hispanic patients and work colleagues in the United States. She had never ever spoken or learnt Portuguese while growing up in Goa, either at home or at school!

We had a merry time trying to recollect as many of those words as possible: lugar, susseg, kodel, jurament, cazar, feliz, cantar, muzg, tiatr, cansad, fugar, kestao, cabar, lissanv, sermao, etc.

Unfortunately, the way Konkani is taught in schools today, instead of inculcating a love for the language, is actually hastening its decline. One of the ways in which this is being done is the expunging of Portuguese-origin words from the vocabulary, replacing them with tongue-twisters, often comical neologisms that aren’t used in everyday speech or writing, by those who actually use the language. The sooner those deciding our academic curriculum realise that “Purtugez” loan words in our Konkani language actually enrich it, the better.

Although the efforts to promote the Portuguese language through cultural initiatives (for example, the Vem Cantar annual competition organised by the Fundaçao Oriente, the Fado workshops, the story-writing competitions) are laudable, thus far, barring a few exceptions, it still is largely the preserve of the same elite Catholic families that anyway spoke Portuguese for generations. Only time will tell whether the penetration into Goan society will ever grow deeper than this.

Excerpted with permission from ‘My ‘Encontro’ With Paw-Chew-Geese’ by Luis Dias in Lusophone Goa: Tracing the Portuguese Language, edited by Aren Noronha, Goa 1556.