Goa: A Daughter’s Story By Maria Aurora Couto, Penguin, Rs 495

Of the many historical personalities who come in for special praise in Goa: A Daughter’s Story, one, in particular, invites scrutiny: Francisco Luis Gomes, a 19th-century Goan writer, statesman, activist and visionary. Maria Aurora Couto shares with Gomes a mastery over her medium. She also shares his “difficulty” in building a chapter and can “only clumsily tell a story”. With the result that “the digressions are worth more than the narrative” and “the inessential is more important than the essential...” It is a serious flaw marring this writer’s labour of love and of the intellect.

Committed to a “personal search” for the Goan identity, that owes much of its multi-layered complexity to “the transformations within society wrought by colonial policies”, Couto pursues too many leads. They take her (and the reader) on an exhausting journey across geographical, historical, socio-political, cultural, genealogical and emotional terrain. For all her good intentions, her obsessive attention to related areas of interest often ends up diffusing her central thought and disorienting the reader.

Arriving in Goa in 1961, on the cusp of its liberation from 400 years of Portuguese domination, the Goa-born Dharwar-educated Couto was uniquely placed to witness the predicament of a people torn apart by conflicting emotions — resentment at India’s military intervention, and relief at the departure of the colonizers and at the freedom from the repressive rule of the Lisbon-based dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar. With privileged access to insights from her bureaucrat-husband, who was entrusted with the responsibility of overseeing the transition of power, Couto analyses the trauma of this period with great sensitivity.

Sensitivity, however, has its flip side, especially when it conspires with Couto’s “own emotional involvement with Goa” to fuel a feeling of hurt indignation at the average Indian’s inclination to cast Goans in a stereotypical mould. Given the Goans’ strong sense of self and their efforts, through centuries of invasion and repression, to preserve it, the author, one feels, has little cause for concern. Besides, in the context of the ethnic (racist) jokes targeted at most communities and nationalities, the Goans are, probably, no worse off than most.

What this “product of experience, research and oral history” ultimately leaves behind are memories of the many sparkling cameos of Couto’s extended family and of the people she met or read about in the course of her investigation. Her scholarship, eye for minutiae, enthusiasm for debate on issues even remotely related to her sphere of interest and her penchant for in-depth research leave a lasting impression. So does her optimism about the promise of Goa’s “awakening into a new life” despite the rot that she fears has set in, post-liberation, with the ecological “degradation” of the state’s “priceless and unique asset” — land.

Ironically, the very qualities which are construed as the hallmark of excellence in a scholar and teacher (Couto taught English literature for some time) are responsible for robbing this book of its impact. Consider, for instance, the writer’s rather trying habit of restating a point for emphasis and her academic bent of mind that compels her, one suspects, to overwhelm readers with a vast quantity of archival material, not all of it crucial to the main theme. Tighter editing would have helped intensify the focus of the narrative.

In its absence, this daughter’s story reminds us of some of the gifted teachers of our youth whose erudition and unforgettable anecdotes so enthralled us that the actual lesson, when we were forced to go back to it, seemed diminished in import and appeal.