Jose Inacio Francisco Candido de Loyola (1891-1973) 

 by Lino Leitão

Jose Inacio Francisco Candido de Loyola (1891-1973) was one of the leading intellectuals and a political activist of his day in Goa. He gave his time and talent to propagate the spiritual and ethical dimensions of democracy among the Goan people. In 1912 he edited his first newspaper – O Popular, in which he articulated the aspirations and resentments of the subdued populace in Estado da India. The Colonial Authority suspended his newspaper; and in 1913 he launched Jornal da India. That too was closed down. Reacting to the suspension, Loyola addressed a letter to the Governor, entitled Carta Politica, an important document in the history of the colony. It is included in the present collection of his writings.

Loyola also founded other newspapers but each of these met the same fate. He also authored a series of pamphlets under various pseudonyms. In the end, the Government destroyed his printing press in Orlim. His open defiance of the Colonial Authority added to his growing popularity, and he came to known as Fanchu to the people of Goa.

Fanchu Loyola was a prominent and influential lawyer. During Republican days he worked as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Labor Minister in Portugal. He was the Administrator of the Communidades of Salcete, Inspector of Communidades of Goa and first President of the Municipality of Marmugão. In a speech given on 25 November 1932, the anniversary of Goa’s conquest, he called Afonso de Albuquerque, a conqueror who unlike others brought justice to the land. Placing the conqueror on the pedestal, he vehemently repudiated Acto Colonial of 1930 and the Portuguese Colonial Establishment. The Colonial Authority filed a case against him and the newspapers that published his speech. He escaped to Bombay. From there he launched a weekly, Portugal e Colónias.

In this weekly he wrote extensively about the social iniquities that plagued Goa. Without the solidarity among the Goans, he emphasized, true freedom would elude them. He also wrote a series of articles analyzing the economy of Portuguese India, which he later collected and brought out into a book. It is an important economic analysis of that time. He warned the feudal lords that if they didn’t initiate economic changes, they would eventually be ruined, and would ruin the rest of the Goans as well. He took the Colonial Government to task for not laying the economic foundation in Estado da India. 

Once, when Loyola complained to journal in British India about the lack of freedom of the press and speech in Portuguese India, he was brought into the hall of the Military Library in Panjim and given a dozen of strokes by Captain Almeida Eça. He had to sign a statement, forbidding him from publishing similar reports in the foreign press. 

In the 1940’s he and Vicente João Figueredo started a daily Voz da India from Margão. He also contributed articles to another daily O Heraldo, attacking the dictatorial stance of Dr Oliveira Salazar, the Prime Minister of Portugal. On June 18, 1946, Ram Manohar Lohia came from British India and launched the movement for Civil Liberties in Goa. Fanchu Loyola lent him his moral support by issuing a press communiqué to the Free Press Journal, a Bombay daily in which he asserted that the freedom of thought, assembly and association are fundamental liberties, inseparable from the human personality. The communiqué is a very important document in the history of the Freedom Struggle of Estado da India.

On his return from Bombay to Goa after issuing that statement, he was arrested by the Colonial Authorities on the 11th October 1946. He was tried and sentenced to four years rigorous imprisonment, forfeiting all his rights for 15 years. In December 1946, he was deported to Portugal along with Dr Rama Hegde, Laxmikant Bhembre and Purshottam Kakodar and imprisoned in Portugal. He was released in 1950 and returned to Bombay in 1958. He was permitted to enter Goa, but the secret Police made his life difficult. Frustrated, he returned to Portugal where he died in 1973, away from his family and away from Goa that he loved so passionately. He was indeed a foremost Goan Nationalist who had a vision for securing a collective future for Goa’s posterity.

The house attached to the chapel (seen on the cover above  of the present book) is the ancestral home of Fanchu Loyola in Orlim. Irish sisters of the order of Our Lady of Presentation reside there and run a school – Convent of St Pius X. The house is included in the list of National heritage sites.

References:

(1) P. P. Shirodkar (ed), WHO’S WHO OF FREEDOM FIGHTERS – GOA, DAMAN AND DIU, - vol.1, Panjim: Goa Gazetteer Dep, 1986.

(2) Francisco Xavier Gomes Catão, Esboço Histórico Arqueológico, Freguesia de Orlim, Centenário da sua Igreja (1568-1968)


Lino Leitão presented a paper, Fanchu Loyola’s Contribution to Goan Political Thought and Democracy, in South Asian Studies papers, no 9; Goa: Continuity and Change – University of Toronto, Centre of South Asian Studies, 1995. 

click here for Fanchu Loyola :  a comment by Ben Antao

click here for Fanchu Loyola : a personal note by  Yona Loyola-Nazareth 

click here for Fanchu Loyola :   the review of The Man and his writings by Dr John Hobgood