Pamila Gupta

The Disquieting of History Portuguese (De)colonization and Goan Migration in the Indian Ocean

This article presents a case study of Goan Mozambicans — a diasporic group created out of the itinerant quality that characterized Portuguese (de)colonization in the Indian Ocean. Many chose to emigrate from Portuguese India to Portuguese Africa between the 1920s and 1950s. That some Goans chose to stay while others left in the aftermath of Mozambican independence (1975) is also tied to this migratory history. An ethnographic life history approach is employed to access individual varied experiences of migration. Findings will suggest that Goan Mozambicans occupied an ambiguous position in the colonial order of things, and identify them as local cosmopolitans in postcolonial Mozambique.

The Life of the Corpse: Framing Reflections and Questions

This collection of six articles draws on contributions presented to the international symposium on The Life of the Corpse, convened by the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) in August 2008. The symposium in turn was the culmination of a thematic study group on the same topic. The intellectual animus for both was an interest in considering the cultural politics of death, from the specific vantage point of the corpse and the challenges in meaning-making and regulation that the dead body presents. In particular, as organisers of these forums, we wanted to foreground what we deemed the dualistic life of the corpse: as a material object, on one hand, and a signifier of wider political, economic, cultural, ideological and theological endeavours, on the other. The moment of death produces a decaying body, an item of waste that requires disposal – simultaneous with an opportunity, sometimes an imperative – to recuperate the meaning of spent life, symbolically effacing the material extinction that death represents. Every society, then, has had to face the question: how to reconcile the quest for a dignified end of human life, with a putrefying piece of flesh indistinguishable from other animals?

Some (Not So) Lost Aquatic Traditions

Every year on 29 June members of an immigrant Goan fishing community living in the port of Catembe (Mozambique) gather for a religious ceremony at a designated spot on the shore overlooking the Indian Ocean with Maputos skyline as a backdrop. They pray to São Pedro (Catholic St Peter) to bless their boats for the coming fishing season. Afterwards, they take out their highly decorated vessels, very often dedicated to Catholic patron saints, into Maputo Bay for a maritime procession. This essay takes as its entry port this ritualized annual event to look more closely at religious connectivities between India and East Africa, via Portuguese colonizing and conversion processes, and across the Indian Ocean. That this rite of passage has endured over four generations for this ‘littoral’ Catholic Goan community, one that largely relies on commercial prawn fishing as a way of life, suggests the power of religious practices, including the Catholic pantheon of saints, to migrate alongside persons. That this feast day celebration takes place at the oceanfront, the place they originally arrived as migrants from Portuguese India by ship at the turn of the twentieth century, suggests the ways in which Catholic religiosity is used to commemorate Goan migration and culture simultaneously. Lastly, that this maritime parade is dedicated exclusively to St Peter, the Catholic patron saint of fishermen the world over, suggests the importance of fishing – not only as a means of economic livelihood, but also as a source for community solidarity and social reproduction – in the daily lives of this dynamic diasporic group that presently numbers approximately one hundred families. Ethnography, literature and photography are used as forms of postcolonial intervention in carving out old and new (Indian) oceanic geographies.

(Sensuous) Ways of Seeing in Stone Town, Zanzibar: Patina, Pose, Punctum

ABSTRACT In his influential BBC series and landmark book on art criticism, Ways of Seeing (1972), author John Berger suggests that how we see things is determined by what we know. This article takes up his point to explore creative ways of seeing (and thus reading, viewing, interpreting, writing about, displaying, curating) the Ranchhod and Rohit Oza (father and son) vernacular photography collection from Stone Town, Zanzibar that spans 1930 to the present. This paper is a visual experiment; it provides an alternative way of approaching the Capital Art Studio (CAS) archive less as a body of work that serves as a window onto or illustration of Zanzibari history, daily life and culture. Rather this paper offers an alternative organisational framing, one that is a working through of the distinct characteristics of the medium itself, with a focus on incompleteness and its ability to “look.” Here the paper takes on ideas of patina, pose and punctum to open up and shift to more (sensuous) ways of seeing the Oza archive.

(Vernacular) Photography from Africa: Collections, Preservation, Dialogue

(2018). (Vernacular) photography from Africa: collections, preservation, dialogue. Critical Arts: Vol. 32, Vernacular Photography, pp. 1-12.

Visuality and Diasporic Dynamism: Goans in Mozambique and Zanzibar

ABSTRACT This article engages Goan diasporic dynamism in littoral East Africa – Mozambique and Zanzibar, respectively. It begins by considering a series of images taken by Mozambican photographer Ricardo Rangel, that of a rural Goan fishing community living across the bay from Lourenço Marques (present day Maputo), in the small village of Catembe in the early 1970s on the eve of Portuguese decolonisation. It then places this photo archive in dialogue with one compiled by Ranchhod Oza, of Capital Art Studio in Stone Town, Zanzibar, with a focus on his visual representations of a minority Goan community during the 1950s that took up positions as tailors and bakers (and photographers) in this urban setting that was once a thriving centre of cosmopolitanism and global trade. That both of these communities are the product of Indian oceanic circuits of exchange mobility will suggest the role that understudied minority communities had in forming port cities scattered across littoral Africa. Using these visual bodies to think about intersections and divergences of representations of Goan-ness in two distinct locations and timeframes, the article brings new cultural forms, i.e. the visual, to the fore for elaborating on the (Goan) African everyday, expressive moments captured on film.

A Voyage of Convalescence: Richard Burton and the Imperial Ills of Portuguese India

ABSTRACT This article takes as its analytical focus a little-known travelogue written by the well-known British traveller, translator, and proto-ethnographer, (Sir) Richard Burton. Entitled Goa and the Blue Mountains, Or Six Months of Sick Leave, it was not well received at the time of its publication, despite the apparent British ‘thirst’ for this literary genre. Central is the theme of ‘imperial ills’ as seen from the point of view of a recuperating English army officer catching rarifi ed glimpses of daily life in ‘moribund’ Portuguese India. Burtons prescient and often acerbic descriptions of Goa are foregrounded to suggest their import for revealing British colonial attitudes towards the Portuguese as their colonial counterparts in India, and concomitantly, for understanding Anglo-Portuguese relations during a crucial period in Indias colonial history. Taking Burton to be both a representative figure and not of British colonial discourse during the mid-nineteenth century, his various portrayals of the Estado da Índia as an ill-fortuned empire in decline, with fateful lessons to be learned for the British as the would-be colonial successors of the Portuguese in India, are critically analysed.