Literary history and postcolonialism: the case of indo-portuguese literature

Abstract

This paper tries to give an overview on the historical production of the Indo- Portuguese Literature published after 1961, the year of the end of the Portuguese occupation of Goa and its annexation to the Indian Union. Two historiographical texts considered fundamental in the study of Goan Literature will be analyzed, those are Esboço da História da Literatura Indo-portuguesa by priest Filinto Cristo Dias from 1963 and A Literatura Indo-portuguesa by Vimala Devi and Manuel de Seabra from 1971. Although being the first literary stories written in the Postcolonial era, both texts seem to still play a certain colonialist rhetoric, which is reflected in the work structure and the choice of dating the origins of this literature with the beginning of the Portuguese colonial enterprise in India, including also the literary works of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries. These cases will be compared with two texts published in 2012, replacing the definition of Indo-Portuguese Literature with the expression Goan Literature in Portuguese, claiming the autonomy of the latter in relation to the colonizer’s literature. The two books in question are Oriente e Ocidente na Literatura Goesa by priest Eufemiano de Jesus Miranda and Literatura Goesa em Português nos Séculos XIX e XX by Joana Passos. Finally, we shall discuss the problem of Diaspora Literature and their placing on the Literary History of Goa, with the help of Peter Nazareth’s text Pivoting on the Point of the Return – Modern Goan Literature of 2010.