Hugo C. Cardoso

The Creole of Diu in Hugo Schuchardt’s Archive

With close to 200 speakers, the Indo-Portuguese Creole of Diu is currently spoken by a fraction of the island’s population and, despite a centuries-old history, has been largely unacknowledged. In the last decade, it was the object of linguistic documentation and description, making it available to researchers in the field of Creole Studies. Before that, however, the only significant source of linguistic information was a seminal 1883 article by Hugo Schuchardt, all the more relevant by the fact that it was one of the first publications dedicated to a creole by the pioneer of Creole Studies. To write it, Schuchardt relied on data obtained through a vast network of correspondents scattered across the globe. The recent edition of Schuchardt’s letter and manuscript archive, a collective effort coordinated by the Institute of Linguistics of the University of Graz, now makes it possible to reconstruct nineteenth-century interest in this language and ensuing scholarly debates. Here, we explore this archive and complementary sources to: (a) retrace Schuchardt’s steps in search of adequate informants; (b) observe Schuchardt’s process of data collection and analysis; (c) recover the opinions of several interlocutors about the status of Diu Creole; and (d) reconstruct the impact of the article’s publication.

Diu and the Diuese: Indian Ocean, Heritage, and Cultural Landscape

The island of Diu, off the coast of Gujarat in Western India, is peculiar. A laid-back and unassuming place in modern days, relatively hard to reach from anywhere but the Saurashtra peninsula above it (or Mumbai, from which there are now a few flights), most visitors will feel that it establishes a relationship of continuity with the surrounding state of Gujarat as much as it stands apart from it, and may be surprised to encounter a built heritage of a grandeur that seems at odds with its present quietness. While its Portuguese colonial past, which lasted from 1535 to December 1961, may be partly responsible for its specificity, the truth is that Diu was an especially dynamic place long before that. In fact, the historical centrality of Diu is largely unknown and rarely acknowledged, and the particular characteristics of the territory, of its inhabitants, and their culture are very much neglected. As a contribution towards redressing this obscurity, the international congress, Diu and the Diuese: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, was held in Lisbon in October 2016. A selection of the papers presented on that occasion constitutes the contents of this special issue. The objectives of this congress were to locate Diu in broader geographies of research, going beyond its current peripherality to observe this territory not only as a player in former Portuguese colonial networks in Asia, but also in much wider networks of circulation. Granted, in such an endeavour, one must unavoidably approach Diu as a part of former Portuguese India and interpret its fortunes in connection with the strategies of empire in the Indian subcontinent and East Africa. But a highly relevant fact is that, in the sixteenth century, the urgency of the Portuguese in controlling the island derived from the fact that it was already one of the leading ports of western India, with a crucial role in the western Indian Ocean routes that linked East Africa, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian subcontinent. For centuries, dynamic trade transformed Diu town into a cosmopolitan settlement and brought in diverse communities, art forms, languages, cultures, and knowledge, the signs of which are still visible despite its decline as a bustling port city. The congress, and therefore this special issue, were intended to be diverse. Participants encountered Diu and its people in different periods of time, met them in different geographies, read them in different sources, and interpreted them through the lenses of different academic disciplines. One of the key aspects of the conceptualization of the congress is revealed in its title and repeated in that of this special issue: ‘Diu and the Diuese’. Approaching Diu as a place plus its inhabitants, in the present as in the past, opens up interdisciplinarydialogues that are crucial to revisit and reinvent research fields. In the case of Diu, it enables us to engage with the stories that are kept alive in the memories of its inhabitants, to acknowledge the considerable impact of intense migratory fluxes to and from Diu, enmeshing colonial and postcolonial dichotomies, and to understand the transportation and transformation of cultural, religious, and linguistic practices. As a result of the interdisciplinary gesture that underlay the congress, then, the contributions in this volume represent a variety of disciplines, chiefly anthropology, ethnomusicology, linguistics, and literature – though they exclude papers from the strict domain of history, which will feature in a separate publication. As we see it, the wealth of historical, artistic, and social complexities that they unveil stands as an illustration of the need to pay more attention to places, populations, and contexts seen as marginal or secondary. However, precisely because Diu has been in that position and, as such, may be relatively uncharted territory for many, we should start with a brief introduction of the place and its people, and of the extent to which the humanities and social sciences have engaged with them.

Early Notices Regarding Creole Portuguese in Former Portuguese Timor

The area of Bidau, in the East Timorese capital of Dili, was home to the only documented form of Creole Portuguese in Timor. Although Bidau Creole Portuguese is now extinct, by most accounts, a few scattered records allow a glimpse into what it must have been like, and reveal its clear relationship with other Southeast Asian Portuguese-based creoles; Baxter’s (1990a) study of Bidau Creole Portuguese was based mostly on a set of recordings made in the context of the Missao Antropologica de Timor [“Anthropological Mission to Timor”, 1953–1954]. In this article, Baxter (1990a: 3) mentions that “[s]o far, the earliest located reference to Bidau Creole Portuguese, and one which contains some impressionistic examples of conversations and the verse of a song, is Castro (1943: 56, 177)”. However, since the publication of this study, a few earlier references to what can be interpreted as Portuguese-based creole in Timor have been located in unpublished archival sources. These sources are letters sent to two important philologists of the late 19 th and early 20 th century, Hugo Schuchardt and Jose Leite de Vasconcelos, who were greatly interested in ascertaining whether a creole was spoken in Timor and what the local Portuguese was like. The present study introduces and contextualises these epistolary sources, discussing the linguistic and sociolinguistic material contained therein, and its relevance for the confirmation of different threads of language contact involving Portuguese.