Ben Antao's Blood & Nemesis

a book review by Lino Leitão

[ The author of this post,  Lino Leitao, 75, born in Varca, Salcete, was a student at Popular High School in Margao when Dr. Juliao Menezes and Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia entered Margao in a horse-drawn carriage on June 18, 1946. One of his teachers was Laxmikant Bembro, who was later imprisoned for participating in Goa’s freedom struggle. Lino, who became active in the freedom movement as a college student in Belgaum, gives his recollections of that period in his novel The Gift of the Holy Cross.  He is married with three children and lives in Dorval, Que., outside of Montreal.  -]

Blood & Nemesis by Ben Antao (Goan Observer Private Limited  Pages 318, Rs 250)

Ben Antao’s BLOOD & Nemesis is a historical novel. In this novel, the author attempts to recapture Goa’s freedom struggle from the Portuguese colonial rule. In doing so, he gives us insights into Goan psyches of both the Hindus and Catholics – the two main sectors of the Goan population.

In the very first chapter of the novel, we are introduced to Jovino Colaço, a young constable in Goa’s colonial police force at Margão. Jovino’s character is very vividly drawn, as if the author had known such a character personally; and many a Goan freedom fighter might have come across such a lout in those days of their struggle to free Goa from Salazar’s tyranny.

Though Jovino is a bonehead with nothing much of substance in his head, he is shrewd enough to use his position as a police constable to acquire money by graft, harassing the drivers of carreiras - buses in colonial times. He has huge appetites for booze and sex; and of course, he likes card games - gambling with his friends. For him dictatorship isn’t ugly; he has a nose to sniff out freedom fighters. His boss, Gaspar Dias, a fearsome detective, likes him for that, and promotes him as his assistant. And Jovino, who spends more money than he earns, sees it as an opportunity to make a lot of cash to support his tainted lifestyle. He is happy; the promotion goes to his head.   

Jovino’s sexual exploits introduce us to Devdasi cult at Mardol. The author draws vibrant and titillating sexual performances; and Kamala, a family devdasi, a steady sexual partner of Jovino, an expert in   innovative Kamasutra poses, knows to give and take sexual pleasures for herself. But at the same time, a reader might question, as I did, how this kind of degrading humiliation of the woman came to be sanctified in the Hindu religion?

June 18, 1946 is a historic date in Goa’s history. On this day, Dr. Julião Menezes, a Goan, and Dr. Rammanohar Lohia from British India lit the torch for civil liberties at Margão, defying the ban on the freedom of speech. Santan Barreto, Jovino’s nemesis, who was only eighteen years old then, was on the scene. Seeing Julião and Lohia hustled into a Police jeep and driven to the Police station, had an effect on Santan’s soul. His soul awakens to freedom.

Santan dreams going to college in Bombay, and participate in politics after India’s independence. But his ambition is shattered when his father, a seaman, passes away on board the ship. Having no one else to support his ambition, he pursues his dream by becoming a  ‘social worker’ – euphemism for the unemployed. He runs errands to get in touch with the like-minded Hindus to bring in freedom and democracy. Tough he could easily get a job in the Colonial administration, but being a zealous Goan patriot that he was, he couldn’t compromise his principles. Nor we see the like-minded Hindus offering him a job in their businesses that they owned.

Santan, an ardent idealist, whose soul burns fervently to usher in freedom and democracy to the Goans, has no scruples, whatsoever, to freeload on his mother’s meager widow’s pension; and the poor woman to make the ends meet, works her fingers to the bone laboring in the fields owned by others.  Santan when released after Liberation from the Aguada jail doesn’t rush back to his mother, the mother who had sacrificed her own needs and fed him on her paltry widow’s pension, when he was a ‘social worker’. Instead, we see him basking in ‘hero worship’, for a week at Vaicunto Prabhudesai’s, a like-minded Hindu and a fellow political prisoner from Aguada jail.  

The author portrays Santan, a freedom fighter, as an impulsive individual with no ability to control his anger when enraged. The reader will come across two incidents in the novel. One is: a glass of pale amber liquid, which is Santan’s urine, which he arrogantly, demands Jovino to drink it.  Why? If you read the novel, you’ll know the answer to it.  The other incident is, when Santan snatches the revolver from Jovino’s holster. These are impulsive and sporadic acts, not worthy of freedom fighters. Committed freedom fighters to the cause plan their acts carefully and execute them to get the desired results.

After Liberation, Santan and Vaicunto, their self-importance puffed up as Goa’s liberators, rush to settle scores with Jovino. The author, in the end, renders a debauched Jovino, on his dying bed, as a better human being than those two vengeful liberators.   

 Subtly, the author exposes the conceitedness of Santan. One gets the impression that the author must have known such a character like Santan personally too, the way he draws out his hidden traits of his personality.

The plot though unfolds around these two main characters – Jovino Colaço and Satan Barreto, other fascinating characters also pop up in the narrative, giving us the overall view of Goa’s life in those Colonial times under the dictatorship of Salazar.

Unsubstantiated historical perceptions are thrown into the story, sometimes they come through the mouth of the characters, or sometimes injected by the author himself. For example in pages 21 and 22, we read: “He (Gaspar Dias, Jovino’s boss in Police Force) was convinced that the political sympathies of Goan Hindus definitely lay with India…The younger generation of Hindus, if you cared to ask them, would say without hesitation that they wanted freedom from colonial rule; they wanted Goa to become a part of India. As for the Catholics, by and large, they tried to be good citizens …”

Gaspar Dias can be excused for such analysis of the Goan society of that time, he being a mestiço, might not have ever assimilated the intricacies of Goan nationalism.

Again, in page 110 the author probes the thoughts in Santan’s mind. The author writes, “…But he (Santan Barretto) was also aware that many Goan Catholics somehow had been brainwashed into thinking they were different from other Indians, that they were superior because of their Western ways of life.”

We can make allowances for Santan too, and overlook his assumptions of this nature because the author has portrayed him as an impetuous freedom fighter; impetuous persons do not use their brain muscle but their emotions.

But to assume that Goan Hindus because of their religion were pro-Indian, and to assume that Goan Catholics were pro-Portuguese are historically fallacious inferences. The Civil Rights movement that was launched in 1946 was launched due to the endeavors of Dr. Julião Menezes, who was a Goan and baptized Catholic, though he might have been an agnostic later on in his life. In that Civil Rights movement many Goan Catholics participated. To name only some important ones, are:  Tristão Braganza da Cunha, baptized Catholic, though atheist later on, Berta de Menezes Bragança, baptized Catholic, perhaps atheist later on, Evagrio Jorge, baptized Catholic, Aresenio Jaques, baptized Catholic, Critovão Furtado, baptized Catholic and many, many others.

José Inácio Candido de Loyola in Free Press Journal, Bombay, September 26,1946 sums ups this movement in this fashion, “An attempt is being made in certain quarters to create among the Catholic section of the Goan population, the impression that Dr. Lohia’s movement is directed against the Catholic religion. There is no truth whatsoever in this propaganda. This movement has nothing to do with any religion. It is a movement for all Goans.”

Goans always struggled to break the fetters that bounded them, and the author brings to our mind at page 95 the Pinto’s rebellion that took place in the summer of 1787.  Weren’t they Catholics?

 Francisco Luis Gomes in his maiden speech in the Portuguese Parliament (18^th January 1861), spoke: “…but far better models are the sacred principles, which in a free government require that hundred of persons should not be deprived of their political rights, of rights through which they share in the creation or exercise the political powers, simply because they had the misfortune to be born in the overseas colonies.”  (Dr. Francisco Luis Gomes- 1829-1869, by Inàcio P. Newman, Coina Publications Goa, 1969)

And again, Menezes Bragança, when Acto Colonial was incorporated in the Political Constitution of Salazar’s Dictatorship in 1930, repudiated the mentality of the Act, “Portuguese India does not renounce the right of all peoples to attain the fullness of their individuality to the point of constituting units capable of guiding their own destiny, for it is a birthright of its organic essence.” (Menezes Braganza, Biographical Sketch)  

At page 21, the author probing into the mind of Gaspar Dias, writes: “ …(Gaspar Dias) knew that the older Hindu businessmen mostly paid lip service to the Portuguese administration in order to make a living – and some became wealthy in the newly booing mining industry of iron and manganese ore.”

The Goan Hindu businessmen, tradesmen and landlords weren’t that naïve; they knew which sides the winds were blowing. Goa was their personal fiefdom without an economic base.  They understood that the economic power that they were holding would slip away from their hands if Goa integrated with free India, which had economic foundation.

So, they organized a public assembly in Margão (O Heraldo, July 30,1946), and petitioned Salazar’s administration for autonomy for Estado da India. José Inácio de Loyola gave the presidential address. The others who spoke were Mrs. Khrishnabai, the niece of Bairão Dempo, Mr. Datta Naik, Mr. Francisco Furtado and Mr. Vicente João Figueiredo. Laxmikanta Bembro making various observations, proposed a committee of the following:  Adv. Vicente João Figueiredo, Adv. Polibio Mascarenhas, Mr Manganlal M. Kanji, Adv. Panduronga Mulgaocar, Adv. Francisco de Paul Ribeiro, Adv. Prisonio Furtado. Adv. António Xavier Gomes Pereira, Mr. Bascora Desai, Dr. José Paulo Telles, Adv. Álvaro Furtado, Adv. Francisco Pinto Menezes, Adv Vinayka Sinai Coissoro, Adv Datta Phaldessai, Dr. Krishna Sanguri and Laxmikanta V.P. Bembro. 

But their efforts did not bear any fruits. And again in 1961, Purushottam Kakodkar perused autonomy for Estado da India, with no success.  Gaspar Dias, the character in Antao’s novel, who is a fearsome detective and obviously based on Agente Casmiro Monteiro, seems to know nothing about Goan native nationalism.   

“The Goan people, for all practical purposes, have been pulverized by these heinous acts of brutality; in effect, Goans had been figuratively castrated over the years and rendered effete. And thus in the course of time, generations of Goans had grown up denationalized (p. 95).

The above quote doesn’t come from any of the characters that abound in the novel. This above statement is inserted in the narrative by the author to remind us about the heinous acts of brutality committed by the Portuguese Conquerors on Goan populace. No historian will ever dispute the atrocities of the Inquisition, nor the ruthlessness by which the Portuguese Conquerors put down the rebellions, nor Salazar’s brutality in suppressing the genuine Goan aspirations to free themselves from the Colonial yoke.

But before the Conquest, the most inhuman injustices were seared in into the Goan collective psyche, through their religion and caste system. In their religion there was the practice of sati – burning the widows on the funeral pyre. Afonso de Albuquerque, the Portuguese Conqueror of Goa, stopped this barbaric practice. Devdasi cult, which the author depicts with all its dimensions in the novel, was a part and parcel of that culture. Shri Dayanand Bandodkar, the first Chief Minister of Liberated Goa, sought to put the Devdasi practice to end a few years ago. The caste system, in its evil designs, had contucares, (the village servants) system and manducar (serfdom) system incorporated into the Caste. These deep layers of subjugation implanted into the Goan society before the Conquest, ‘pulverized and figuratively castrated’ the collective psyche of the Goans. Being trapped in the immobility of their social structures, the Lusitanian supremacy did not matter to the downtrodden. Their main pressing concern was to eke out a living. The rural uneducated had no luxury of thinking for themselves. Frederick Noronha, a well-known Goan journalist, writes in one of his essays, “Society which has no chance to think for itself, is an enslaved society.” 

Though they were enslaved and servile and branded as denationalized because of the Lusitanian influences that made a way into their soul, they were never degoanized.  They carried love of Goa in their soul wherever they went to make a better living; and now in the present, we are the witnesses of Little Goas blossoming in all corners of the world.

The central theme of the novel is expressed through Australian Folk Song:       

          Freedom isn’t free

          You’ve to pay the price

          You’ve to sacrifice

          For your liberty 

Goans were paying the price and making sacrifices to break the chains that bound them.  They were imprisoned in Aguada, Peniche, Azores and Africa; and they were brutalized and their liberties were taken away. But Nehru’s administration, discarding Gandhi’s Credo of non-violence, invaded Goa on December 18, 1961, thereby robbing the Goans of their rights to seize their own freedom from the Portuguese Colonial Rule. Hope, the Liberation that is handed to the people on the platter, help them to empower and bring the control of the economy of the land into their own hands.  

BLOOD & Nemesis is a thought-provoking novel. The various contradictions that the author introduces through his characters, or his personal comments in the narrative are debatable issues.   

Lino Leitão – author of The Gift of the Holy Cross; his manuscript of short stories is at the present with TSAR, Canadian Publication.

Lino Leitão
August 21, 2005

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