“The Sixth Night” A novel by Silviano C. Barbosa

A Review by Prof. Isabel Santa Rita Vas

Panjim, June 12, 2005

The Sixth Night makes its appearance as a novel. It sketches its characters, works out a plot to tell a story, and paints its backdrop. The hero(ine) of the piece is actually the backdrop, the setting in Goa against which the protagonist Linda Cardoso plays out her life. The author, Silviano C. Barbosa delves into memory and oral tradition, history and possibly personal experience, to weave a detailed tapestry of Goan life which he obviously knows very closely and loves very dearly.

It is a first novel, and the author picks his way through the thickets of fiction-writing. Barbosa sets it mainly in village Goa in the decades just preceding Liberation from Portuguese colonial rule. Historically, the 1940s and the decades that followed were immensely dramatic for India in general and for Goa as well. Political struggle, enormous social change, and emotional upheaval were the underlying motifs that deeply coloured the lives of all in the sub-continent. Barbosa traces out the destinies of three generations of the Cardoso family wending their way from the villages of Cuncolim and Navelim to Bombay and back, from Goa to Portugal, England and Canada. The attention of the writer centres on Goa, the details of rural life, the attitudes and concerns of a middle-income Catholic community in Salcete.

It is with pangs of recognition, and perhaps nostalgia that one travels through the novel: we discover pictures and textures, domestic and communitarian. From the rituals surrounding birth and death, to the preparation of food and the celebration of the village fest, from the exigencies of finding employment and tales of migration, from love of the tiatro and the khell to the passion for football, from hierarchies and power structures in the village to the roles of women, from the timid entry of a village girl into a Westernised town and eventually migration into Europe and the Americas, from history to folklore, the novel draws on the storehouse of the social history of Goa through the eyes, mostly, of the heroine, Linda. It is a tour that many a Goan reader of the older generation will admit to being close to his/her own; one that for the younger Goan might put flesh on the bones of the history he/she reads about; one that the general reader will find a treasure of sociological detail.

Of all the social tensions in this dramatic age, Barbosa centers discrimination based on caste in pre-Liberation Goa. Other forms of discrimination also surface as the novel unfolds, based on language and race, but the caste issue carries the greatest passion. Perhaps in the quiet rural setting, peaceful and harmonious in most ways, the oppression of the members of one caste by another, though professing the same religion and race was the most painful and real. Linda, the young heroine, has a rebellious bone in her body that first reveals itself in her childish and agonized protest against this injustice.

The title of The Sixth Night refers to a folk belief in Goa that the goddess who visits a newborn child on the sixth night after birth actually determines the destiny of the child. The parents of little Linda take every precaution to please the goddess; the life of their beautiful daughter turns out to be, not uniformly happy, but certainly ‘happening’ in its struggles and transitions. Could it be the destiny of the land itself, the ‘linda’ Goa that the author loves, that the goddess determines? Certainly, it is this love and familiarity that the reality it documents that most strongly characterize The Sixth Night.