As a little girl whenever we came to Goa on holiday with my Dad Wing Commander Anthony Michael Furtado, he would recite one of poet Joseph Furtado’s works for us. His favourite was when we all sat under the huge mango tree at the rear of the property overlooking the emerald green Pilerne fields.
The Mango tree
“ Thou art so tall oh mango tree,
I am so small oh mango tree,
thy mangos ripe they fall---”
The words still ring in my mind so many decades later -- simple, clear and true and I have alluded to him in my first novel -- “Above the Ricefields of Pilerne” which can be purchased from Amazon.
Even as a child I remember his house diagonally opposite ours, in Volvaddo, was in ruins. Today a huge Gulmohur tree sadly grows out of the living room.This was the house where he spent his childhood, and is today in complete ruins. Only a handful of us Furtados, the oldest residents of Pilerne, remember him, because my father and Grandfather spoke about him to us as children. In fact I am the proud owner of a first edition of his book of poems ” Songs in Exile” that he personally signed and gave to my grandfather, who passed it on to my father, who gifted it to me. Yes! I have it taking pride of place on my grandfather's book stand which also belongs to me now!
From an article published in The Himal, Augusto Pinto said, hardly anyone knows that Furtado, who passed away in 1947 at the age of 75, was one of the first Indian English poets of his time. But as always a prophet is never recognised in his own country and Joseph was ridiculed throughout his life as he did not conform. Fortunately, many of his poems still survive – barely – in just one slim volume in the rare-books section of Goa’s Central Library.
A handsome man with patrician looks and a long flowing beard it is curious that a boy from a little village became a proficient poet, writing in English. According to Philip Furtado, the poet’s son, his father’s early education after passing the primeiro grau – the Portuguese primary-school exam – and apart from a year at a Latin school in Saligao in north Goa, was conducted mainly at home. But Furtado also wrote in Portuguese, later switching to a third language after enrolling in an English-medium school.
In 1890, he found work with the Great Indian Peninsular Railway in Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh. From there, he went on to become a draughtsman in the engineer’s office, a fairly important position. It was during this period that he began to read the classics of world literature, and subsequently began writing. Furtado published his first collection of poems in 1910 but he was not reviewed by the local press favourably. By 1927, when A Goan Fiddler was published in England, he already had four volumes of poetry to his credit. A Goan Fiddler had a preface by Edmund Gosse, then the most influential critic in England, and the book received warm reviews. Furtado subsequently published The Desterrado (1929), Songs of Exile (1938) and Selected Poems (1939), as well as a historical novel entitled Golden Goa! (1938). For a man writing in a third language, Furtado had a remarkable ear for the sounds of English words and how to use them.
Like most of us Goans, Furtado had to seek his fortune far from the land of his birth, with his railways job taking him on to Nagpur, Calcutta and Bombay among other places. But Goa was always close to his heart. Certainly the poet writes of the sights, sounds and smells of his childhood with love. Figures such as Pedro the cowherd, Ruzai the tailor and Vishnulal the goldsmith come alive in his verses. But these word pictures of his were not sentimental, or patronising, due to the poet’s ability to see the essence of humanness in his subjects. Furtado’s verses also shed critical light on the society of his times.
Many of Furtado’s poems also have an autobiographical ring about them. During the 1920s, he came back to Goa to settle down, but became embroiled in a dispute over a village creek, where he championed the cause of the villagers of Pilerne. This made him the target of a brutal assault by some goons and influential people. Sadly during the attack, none of the neighbours came to his aid and history says in disgust, Furtado left his village for good. This perhaps accounts for the undercurrent of bitterness in “The Desterrado” and “Songs of Exile.”
Social concerns are apparent in most of his poetry, but rarely is Furtado preachy. It is in his only novel, Golden Goa, that his social vision and political views became quite overt. The plot revolves around a love affair between a Christian and a Hindu during the decadent Portuguese rule of the 16th century. The story contrasts the good works of the Jesuit missionary and later saint Francis Xavier on the one hand, with the horrors of the Inquisition on the other. Here, Furtado takes a series of potshots against the foreign rulers. At one point, quoting the British civil servant Robert Sewell, he writes, “The Europeans seemed to think they had a divine right to the pillage, robbery and massacre of the natives of India. Not to mince matters, their whole record is one of a series of atrocities.” He continues: “If humanity is proof of civilization, Indians at that time were more civilized than the Portuguese.”
It is important that the memory of this distinguished Goan literary poet be kept alive in Goa and in his village of Pilerne. But the poet himself would surely have appreciated it, if a fresh collection of his best works were published and made available to the public.
( research for this piece is from JSTOR Journal of South Asian Literature1983 Asian Studies Center, Michigan State University and The Himal)
Dr. Marianne Furtado de Nazareth
