By Selma Carvalho

From Menin Rodrigues comes the fascinating title Footprints on the Sands of Time: Goans of Pakistan, 1820-2020 (Karachi, 2021). Rodrigues rejects the academic approach to the documentation of a Goan presence in Pakistan in favour of collecting oral histories, albeit gathered through online interactions. He relies on memory, that of his own and others who have lived in Karachi but perhaps have migrated to the new world of the north American hemisphere. Like many cities of the Indian subcontinent, Karachi, the place of Rodrigues’s birth, is struggling with infrastructure even as it pays scant attention to its heritage architecture. In a myriad ways, then, Karachi is now the city of Rodrigues’s imagination, whose steady deterioration he mourns as he takes us through its founding by General Charles Napier in 1843 and its subsequent ascendance as a principal colonial township.

The book doesn’t follow a chronology of events, rather it is sectioned into various parts, mostly interpolating the Goan within Pakistan’s civic and social affairs of education, judiciary, civil service, the armed forces, the church, sports and music.  Much of it covers people and events recalled from living memory and as such focuses on mid-twentieth century achievement. An interesting timeline constructed by Rodrigues, records that a few Goans first undertook an exploratory voyage to Karachi (then Kurrachee) in 1830. Nothing more is known about this journey by dhow, its purpose, the names of those onboard, its findings or outcomes. This is hardly surprising, as very little non-Eurocentric archival documentation exists for Catholic Goan history, save for that which survives through the oral tradition. Using oral history and contemporaneous sources, I’ve conjectured a genesis of early Goans at the north-western frontier.

When the British explorer Sir Richard Burton arrived in India in 1842, recruited as an ensign for the East Indian Company, he took with him on his posting to Gujarat, ‘Salvador Soares, a handsome Goanese; a horse, in the shape of a dun-coloured Kattywar nag; a horse-keeper, a dog, a tent.’ (Don’t let the mention of Salvador being handsome fool you, as Burton throughout his career in India reserved only the most scathing of racial slurs for Goans, though he continued his dependence on them during his exploration to Africa’s interior.) Doubtless, Soares also travelled with Burton when he was soon after posted to the Scinde (now Sindh), the northwest region where General Napier was stationed and would become Burton’s senior commanding officer. Certainly, the invisibilised Salvador Soares was still with Burton when Burton visited Goa in 1847, where he would make notes for his book, Goa and the Blue Mountains.

Karachi grew as a cantonment town and it is likely that a good many Goan valets such as Soares, as well as cooks, mess-boys and storekeepers were employed by the British. But Goan migration has always had a two-pronged trajectory. On the one hand were the labouring classes venturing in search of a better life, but there were also the ‘learned elite,’ who traveled to distant shores, facilitating the project of empire, and in many instances becoming agents of empire. In a recorded interview for the Oral Histories of British Goans project (British Library), Kenyan-Goan nationalist Fitz de Souza revealed that his father, Valente Souza in 1913, joined the army as a medical doctor. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the British army became the employer of choice for Goan doctors, particularly if they had graduated from Grant Medical College in Bombay. Valente’s first posting being in Kabul, Afghanistan, he travelled there from Peshawar on horseback. Most likely, these two strands of Goan migration—elite doctors and priests—and those of the proletariat rank, cooks, shoemakers, bakers and tailors were the early Goans on the northwestern frontier just as they were in Mozambique and Zanzibar. Indeed, Rodrigues’s time-line bears this out, as the first significant store mentioned is the J. C. Misquita Bakery which opened in 1858 in Camp Area (Saddar).

It is an extraordinary feature of Goan migration, and certainly one which must intrigue the anthropologist, that wherever satellite Goan communities sprang, and mostly these were located in port towns whether in India or East Africa, the trajectory of their formation and organisation followed analogous patterns. One aspect of Goans arriving in frontier towns was the pioneering spirit with which they embraced nation-building. Manuel D’Abreo who arrived in 1846 was the father of Cincinnatus D’Abreo, who initiated ‘Cincinnatus Town’ (now Garden East) in Karachi. Rodrigues tells us, the idea of building such a town, a sort of model or smart city, originated with A. N. Menezes, and the foundational stone of the first house was laid in December 1907. My own research documents in Baker Butcher, Doctor Diplomat: Goan Pioneers of East Africa, a similar pioneering spirit in the townships of Zanzibar, Mombasa, Nairobi Entebbe and Kampala, where Goans enthusiastically built churches, schools, club houses, large European-styled retail stores and palatial houses of their own. The zebra-riding Dr Rosendo Ribeiro was a member of the Nairobi Township Committee constituted in 1900 to comprise of ‘four of the leading merchants or other residents of the township.’

Broadly speaking, the material and social formations of diaspora Goans involved running retail stores, joining the civil service, allying with the Catholic clergy, and forming associations which became the umbrella organism for socialising, welfare and education. Of particular interest in Rodrigues’s book is the establishment of the ‘Goan Union’ in 1908. (There is a photograph of the Goan Union Hall on the corner of Mansfield Street, inaugurated in 1931, with J. T. Alfonso as its president.) As per Rodrigues, the Goan Union acted as a counter to the elitist and older club, the Karachi Goan Association. Rodrigues cannot vouch for this being accurate, but it is likely to be true. With its headquarters in Bombay, by 1906, fledgling chapters of the Goan Union began to mushroom in East Africa in response to the elitist Goan clubs whose membership excluded the working class. Polarising members of the Goan Institute Nairobi, particularly F.X de Gama Rose, dismissed the Goan Union as the coming together of a ‘large number of illiterate and domestic servants’ with whom the educated classes of the community could not associate with in ‘communal, social and political matters.’

What becomes clear is that by the late 19th century, increasingly, metropolitan Bombay rather than Goa became the centripetal location from where Goan elite in the diaspora sought direction. The ambitions of Bombay-Goans like Leandro Mascarenhas, B.X. Furtado and Dr Acacio G. Viegas who were founding members of the Associacao Goanna de Mutuo Auxilio Ltd, the Uniao Goanna and the Instituto Luso-Indiano were mirrored in Pakistan and East Africa: that of inculcating in the Goan a sense of moral, intellectual and sporting vigour, of tending to the welfare and educational needs of disadvantaged Goans, and of assisting Catholic clergy with church-building. Hence emerged an early consciousness that Goans in the diaspora would operate as a separate and self-sustaining colony of Portugal. To this effect, their allegiance was always to the Portuguese consulate based in the region, the appointed consul-general acting as ‘consular court of the Portuguese nation.’ In the event, the Portuguese consul-general was absent from the station, Goans came under the jurisdiction of the British consul-general.

It would not be too far-fetched to hypothesize (and perhaps this warrants further academic investigation) that a sub-culture developed among Goans in the diaspora. Now that separate but not disparate strands of testimony are brought together, spanning Bombay, Pakistan and East Africa, what emerges is a commonality of school and church building, excellence in sports and music, and a stout political leadership which engaged deeply with contemporaneous civic affairs. Rodrigues’s book provides numerous instances of Goan participation in Pakistan, and is a veritable Who’s Who of Pakistani Goans, which besides being a font of information is also a delightful trip down memory lane for those rooted in things Goan.

Menin Rodrigues is an entrepreneur from Pakistan, he is a former member of the Pastoral Council of the Archdiocese of Karachi, former founder-member of the Board of Governors of St. Patrick’s and St. Joseph’s Colleges, and in his spare time, he researches and writes about Goans in Pakistan.

To buy a copy of Goans of Pakistan, please contact Menin Rodrigues at: menin100@gmail.com

The banner picture of Pakistan is by T B Zubair and is downloaded from Unsplash.com