Orlando Ribeiro, a renowned Portuguese geographer-historian, whose recently published Goa em 1956: Relatório ao Governo (Lisboa, CNCDP, 2000) refers to “mestiçagem espiritual” in Goa, implying thereby what Gilberto Freyre, a Brazilian sociologist of Portuguese origin, on a Salazar-sponsored visit to Goa five years earlier, in 1951, to propagate “luso-tropicalismo”, defined as “unidade de sentimento e cultura”, meaning a common heritage of feelings and culture ( an expression appropriated by Orlando Ribeiro on pp. 82, 119 of his Report). Orlando Ribeiro’s academic credibility and relatively high degree of impartiality and critical perspective make his Report valuable for all interested in evaluating  how much of the impact of the Portuguese in Goa was really lusotopic, lusophonic and lusophilic. Obviously Salazar did not like the report and it remained unknown till it was published recently by the Portuguese historian Fernando Rosas, with an introduction by Orlando Ribeiro’s wife Suzanne Daveau. Here follow some extracts translated from the Report:

 

“My intimate being and my way of going about force me to be very frank and not to hide those aspects which are less pleasant, or to avoid those aspects which hurt our national feelings. I think that it is good to face the hard reality, however painful it may be to us. It is only this way we can avoid ambiguities, illusions and hesitations, and can know for sure on whom we can depend and what should be the ground for our decisions.” 

 

“Unlike elsewhere where the Portuguese, attracted by the coloured females had produced   very quickly a mestiço population (população mestiçada), the rigidity of the caste system in Goa forced the Portuguese to produce only a new caste of descendentes.    Albuquerque’s dream of creating a luso-indian population, as insistently recommended by D. Manuel, vanished very early. Only a few women, whose caste condemned them to low social status, sought to marry these foreigners to gain upward social mobility. ”

 

“Unlike in Brazil, where so many illustrious and humble families proudly acknowledge  their Portuguese origin and mixed descent; unlike in Cabo Verde, whose creole population feels very close to us, because of their old African slave-ancestors who shared the blood of their white masters, the Goans have preserved the purity of their caste, but yet reveal a surprising degree of assimilation of our habits and living style. Here we have only a spiritual miscegenation (mestiçagem espiritual). It is hard to believe though that no Portuguese blood runs into the veins of the rural aristocracy of Salcete or the old Christian families of Margão.”

 

“Meantime, it is surprising to note the meagre presence of the Portuguese language among the Goan Christian population. Only the educated inhabitants speak Portuguese language correctly and fluently, and not rarely with remarkable eloquence. Many families in Margão use Portuguese to converse among themselves. But they use invariably  Konkani with their servants, just as it happens with the generality of the village population.  However, during feast celebrations, in the roadside conversations, in the dramatic performances, it is not difficult to pick up Portuguese words, like pai, mãe, família, casamento, sacramento, which reveal the deep influence of Portuguese language upon day-to-day lives of the people.

 

“I have known reasonably well the adjacent Islands and have a small book written on Madeira; I have visited all the Portuguese territories in Africa, starting from Mozambique, and have studied better Guinea and the islands of Cape Verde; I have spent four months in Brazil and observed its deep recesses; I have known something about the Muslim world since my days as student and after my visits to Morroco, Egypt and West Africa. I had thus acquired a good preparation to initiate my research in Goa. Goa appeared to me as the least Portuguese of all the Portuguese territories I had seen so far, even less than Guinea, which was pacified in 1912! I had witnessed a near total ignorance of our language, the persistence of a society, not only strange and indifferent, but even hostile to our presence, our limited influence, encrusted as a schist in the body of renascent Hinduism, all this has left me very disillusioned about Goa.”

 

Unlike in Portuguese Africa, where the expressions Metrópole and metropolitano are used with some discretion, in Goa it is common to hear the binary use of Province / Portugal and Goan Christian / Portuguese. That is how Portugal and the Portuguese are mentioned by Goans who share our language and customs, but not our feeling of patriotism. Pátria for a Goan is his Goa, not Portugal, and it is in Goa that they want to experience their freedom and their privileges. The Hindus in general and many Goan Christians as well, entertain ideas of closer relations with Índia and autonomy for their land.”

 

 “Twenty-three years ago I had gone on a boat-cruise to our Atlantic islands, and I remember the affection and warm welcome that was accorded to the Portuguese by the African populations. My longer visits to Guinea, Cabo Verde and São Tomé confirmed that experience. In Goa it is different. The predominant relationship is of distance and suspicion, when it is not an outright or camouflaged antipathy.”