Late tonight “at the stroke of the midnight hour” it will be Independence Day across the border, and Tollentine (Tolli) Fonseca’s stirring arrangement for the Qaumī Tarānāh will begin to play across the length and breadth of the country that was brutally cleaved apart from India during Partition in 1947. The late naval bandmaster’s contribution, often misattributed to his friend Ahmad Chagla, is just one footnote to the remarkable - and continuing – story of Goans in Pakistan.
This astonishing history remains hidden in plain sight, despite
outsized contributions to both countries – and indeed the world – by
indisputably the most accomplished and successful outpost of the Goa diaspora.
It was Anthony de Mello of Saligao and Karachi who founded the Board of Cricket
Control of India (BCCI) and Cricket Club of India, and also chaired the
organizing committee that established the Asian Games. Another example: Frank
D’Souza was the first Indian on the immensely prestigious Railway Board, and
later set up Pakistan Railways at the mutual agreement of both his countries
(he had opted for India in 1947).
Goa’s connections to Pakistan track back 180 years to Charles
Napier’s opportunistic 1842 annexation of Sindh, and the breakneck development
of “Currachee” into an essential port city for the Bombay Presidency. In her
useful 2019 paper, Profiling Karachi Goanness (1840s – 1970s): Monuments to
Goan Emigration and Identity, the historian (and former Director of
Education of the Government of Goa) Dr Celsa Pinto, describes how ambitious
Goans piloted dhows up the Arabian Sea coastline“to take advantage of the
opportunities afforded by the formation of the Indian Flotilla in 1850, the
opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 that made Karachi, South Asia’s closest port
to Europe, the construction of the Lloyd Barrage and the fact that Karachi had
become the biggest wheat exporting port in the British Empire.”
In this 19th century
boom town – think Dubai more recently – huge fortunes were made by pioneers
from Portuguese India, who vaulted themselves up to push against – and
sometimes even surmount – the colonial “colour bar”. As the community historian
Menin Rodrigues puts it in his recent Footprints on the Sands of Time: Goans
of Pakistan 1820-2020, “the early Goans who came here in sizable numbers
and brimming with hope, were a mixed bag of talents with professional and
semi-professional skills; many were unskilled too.” Through dint of sheer
effort, they “excelled in everything they touched, grew in numbers (never more
than 20,000 at any point in time) and affluence, and made an indelible impact
on the society, rulers of that time, [and] development of the town and [all of
their] countries (British- India, India and Pakistan) at large.
The lore of the
Karachi Goans is almost beyond belief, considering the tiny numbers involved
(by contrast just the village of Santa Cruz in Tiswadi has always had a larger
population): the first two Cardinals of South Asia, the first two Goans to play
test cricket, distinguished servicemen aplenty for both Pakistani and Indian
armed forces. Many emerged from the substantially Goan-built and
Goan-administered St Patrick’s School in Karachi - where the current principal
is Anthony D’Silva – which has yielded two Presidents and two Prime Ministers
of Pakistan, as well as BJP co-founder LK Advani.
Dr Celsa Pinto grew
up near St Patrick’s, before leaving in 1964 at the age of 13. She attended the
sister institution St Joseph’s Convent, where “I received world-class education
at the hands of many a Goan teacher.” She says her home Lotia Mansion, “was a
cosmopolitan building with Shia and Sunni Muslims, Hindu and Catholic Goans,
East Indians, Parsees and Punjabi Christians all living in harmony” and points
to a shop in Karachi called ‘Amchem Goa’ that posts often on social media about
its thriving business selling bebinca, sorpotel and other delicacies originally
from the Konkan.
Like many others with
roots across the border, Pinto says “with love for India, my motherland, and
affection for Karachi, my birthplace, I sincerely wish that the 75th
Independence Day would lead to friendly and closer ties between India and
Pakistan.” It is the identical sentiment shared by successive generations of
Goans in the so-called “enemy nation” including the wonderfully talented
29-year-old artist Zoila Solomon, whose warm, textured paintings (her 2021
gouache Staple Food accompanies this column) often return to“fragments
of the stories and experiences that my mother and relatives have shared with me
over the years, carefully woven together to pay homage to my Goan roots.”
Via email, Solomon
told me her mother Catherine (Fernandes) Solomon left Goa in 1992 to get
married in Karachi, “and even while living and being a part of the Pakistani culture,
and molding herself to fit the local Pakistani life, never fails to always have
the right hint of Goan in her. I see Goa come to life through the deliciously
spicy vindaloo and sorpotel- through the recheado fried
fish that she makes. I see it in her Christmas traditions of making sweets
every year. I see it through the animated conversations held in part Urdu and
part Konkani over WhatsApp calls with her siblings in Velsao. I see it in the
tiniest of details that make me so proud and so honoured to have my artwork
based on and informed by my mother’s and my heritage.”
All this is precisely
the theme of Aanchal Malhotra’s superb new book, In the Language of
Remembering: The Inheritance of Partition - which was launched in Panjim
earlier this year at the first Liberty & Light Festival of Goa - where the
acclaimed 32-year-old historian “reveals how Partition is not yet an event of
the past and its legacy is threaded into the daily lives of subsequent
generations.” Her explicit intention is to “serve as a reminder of the price
this land once paid for not guarding against communal strife - and what could
happen once again should we ever choose division over inclusion.”
With
great relevance to Dr Pinto and Zoila Solomon and everyone else who carries the
trauma of unmooring in 1947 (which includes my own maternal family), Malhotra
writes in her epilogue that “For seventy-five years, we have endlessly
concerned ourselves with the geopolitical consequences of this historical
event, and not nearly enough with how it has registered – through remembering
or forgetting – in collective memory and public consciousness.” Noting the
Prime Minister’s 2021 announcement that August 14 will henceforth be
commemorated as Partition Horrors Remembrance Day, she writes that “the
struggles and sacrifices made at Partition were not one-sided, and so while a
day of remembrance is welcome, it cannot exclusively apply to Indians,
and must extend beyond our frontiers, potentially paving the way for
cross-border conversations and gradual reconciliation.”