Tribute to my Father
Early this month the social media was abuzz, in anticipation of the twenty-twenties; as for me, I was on a solo trip back to nineteen-twenty. As a child, this year had the earmarks of a happy milestone for me, yet it triggered anxiety for the future. My childhood was a shrine of happy pictures, yet the thought of that golden marker fading into the horizon would fill me with sadness. Why? Because while a young me was looking ahead to what would be, my father Fernando was already looking back upon what had been….
My lone source of anxiety for the future was that I was the eldest child, born in Papa’s forty-fourth year. I knew not how long I would have him: it was a worry I kept to myself so as not to dishearten him. But then, hardly anything disheartened him; he kept pace with his children and even his grandchildren’s progress, and enjoyed the sleep of the just. When he passed on, at 91, he was a grandfather to fifteen. His abiding trust in God was the secret of his longevity – as well as a salutary lesson on the futility of anxiety.
In my naiveté, 1920 still felt charming; as I grew older, I found Papa’s idealism, independence and integrity appealing. I looked up to him, especially because his life hadn’t been easy: the ‘roaring twenties’ of the West had played out quite differently in Portugal and Goa. Following a decade of political turbulence and galloping inflation, the country stabilised and the escudo roared upon the rise of Salazar the economist. Convinced that he was a man with ‘the right intention’, my father held him in esteem for his intellect and honesty – the antithesis of leaders in sham democracies.
After God, it was Goa uppermost in Papa’s mind. The Mass and the Bible alongside spiritual classics were his daily fare. To compensate for arid bureaucratic matters, he put his faith in reading, writing, teaching and music. Even while he took delight in the Romantics Eça, Camilo and Ramalho, he recommended some excellent Goan writers. Until his last breath he lapped up the masters of the Portuguese language, not forgetting two of our very own Goan purists, Costa Álvares and Filinto C. Dias.
One gets a bird’s eye view of Papa’s outlook from his first book, Momentos do meu Passado (Moments from my Past). Much of it is what he used to recount animatedly at the dinner table or talk over with relatives and friends. He obliged us by writing this slim volume comprising ‘figures, facts and facetiae’: pen sketches of over thirty personalities from the Goan social and political milieu; some little-known facts of contemporary history; and a host of anecdotes dating back to his Lyceum days. In his words, he wished ‘to quench saudades of a not so distant past, when one lived in a happy and carefree manner unique to Goa.’
It took me some time to appreciate Papa’s simple and straightforward nature. And noticing how people would often agree but also end up severing ties with him, I learnt that truth can indeed puzzle, confound, hurt… Papa’s intermittent observations on public affairs are lost in the thicket of Heraldo and A Vida for, whilst a bureaucrat in two key departments during the Portuguese regime, he used pen names of which he kept no record. In 1967, his commitment to ferry people to the booths on the occasion of the Opinion Poll (16 January, his birthday and feast of St Joseph Vaz) fetched him a resounding office memo.
It warms the cockles of our hearts to see that Papa’s second book, Goa tal como a conheci (Goa as I knew it), contains the essence of his views on people, events and ideas. Covering as he did twentieth-century Goa’s political and administrative affairs, society, culture, and religion, in a total of eighteen chapters, this offering is a testimony of love for the land and the people. It is also a tribute to the Portuguese language that was so dear to him. After opting to retire from public service, he taught that idiom at a city college and co-founded a weekly, A Voz de Goa. At Panjim’s Immaculate Conception church he prayed in that ‘language of the angels’ and put together a choir at Sunday mass.
Music was high up on his agenda ever since his father purchased a gramophone and a maternal uncle and self-taught violin virtuoso played along. An attractive feature of Papa’s day was his whistling and playing of the harmonica, providing the household with a kind of crash course in classical and semi-classical music. The mandó moved him very especially (he ensured that it featured at his children’s wedding parties) and so did two popular Konkani films of his time which, he said, ‘foster Goan patriotic feelings’. The Goan reality, however, was a far cry from what he had envisioned, so I can say with Wodehouse that ‘if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.’
No tribute to our father would be complete without a reference to our dearest mother Judite da Veiga, who was the love of his life, the reason of his being. On his death bed I heard him thank her for half a century of togetherness. She, their five boys and families, was all that he ever wanted. We have lost him in body, not in spirit. He has become greater in death, our strength and consolation, our conviction that there can be no anxiety for the future….
Herald, 19.01.2020, published an abridged version
For this full version see Revista da Casa de Goa (Lisbon), March-April 2020
https://issuu.com/casadegoa/docs/revista_da_casa_de_goa_-_ii_s_rie_-_n3_-_mar-abr_2
Divine Spokesman
The Pope is, by God’s design, a man for his times. As regards Karol Józef Wojtyla, after the initial public scepticism, it became clear that his every facet was a response to the world order of the last quarter of the twentieth century.
We can say without risk of mythologizing that KJW’s personal history matched up with the convulsive era in which he lived. Thanks to his profound faith and compassion, he identified the early loss of his close family[1] with his country’s troubled history. His sense of humour and sportsmanship helped him transform his hard labour under the Nazi regime into empathy for the human condition. His training for the priesthood in the underground seminary of Krakow endowed him with nerves of steel to eventually outwit a repressive political regime. His doctorate on St John of the Cross smoothed out his natural propensity for the ‘via negativa’; his second, on Scheler’s phenomenology, was an exploration into enhancing Christian ethics. By his longtime interest in theatre, he looked at the world as a stage, and later, his university teaching and successive appointments as bishop, archbishop and cardinal[2] gave him a vantage point on global affairs.
Probably it never occurred to KJW that one day he would be a key player on the world stage. His rise as ‘John Paul II’ in 1978 was indeed sensational: The first ever Pope of Slavic extraction and a non-Italian in 455 years brought palpable hope to far-flung Christendom while his unusually young age was a promise of long innings.[3] His intellectual baggage and experiential knowledge was set to make of his pontificate an ideological and political turning point, marked by healthy opposition, essential restoration and measured innovation.
His main opposition was to atheistic communism. As a passionate Marian (more intensely so after his miraculous escape from assassination attempts)[4] he simply pitted Mary against the Monster, becoming at once a challenge to the Soviet leadership and a beacon of hope to Eastern Europe. He endorsed the simmering anti-communist revolution; it was an initiative that won worldwide support, and amazingly, even from Russia. In Gorbachev’s words, “Everything that happened in these years in Eastern Europe would have been impossible without the presence of this Pope.”
These successes won Pope John Paul II great acclaim as a world statesman but he was essentially the bishop of Rome and the ‘universal pastor of the Church’, a new title that he assumed at the inauguration of his ministry. While he wielded politics and diplomacy with élan he remained at heart a man of intense prayer; he was the mystic behind the Iron Curtain, ensuring that the ‘dark night of the soul’ would steadily make way for the ‘ascent of Mount Carmel’. After dismantling totalitarianism in the East he denounced the liberal-capitalism of the West, proposing a renewal of Christian civilization as a whole. Hence his encyclicals speak as much about material realities[5] as they extol eternal mysteries[6]. All his interventions had a great liberating force; but perceiving the dark side of freedom at work inside the Catholic Church he also set about disciplined extremist theologians[7] and eventually restored Vatican to its preeminent position of moral and spiritual leadership.
Pope John Paul II became one of the most charismatic and influential leaders in our multi-cultural century. One of the most-travelled world leaders in history, the Pope-mobile and the kissing of the ground in the land he set foot on became two touching features of his pastoral journeys.[8] Over the years at the Vatican, he welcomed a great number of world dignitaries, and the most unlikely ones at that.[9] A brilliant linguist, and blessed with an uncommon sensitivity to the human person, he made Christ known urbi et orbi, formulating the thinking of the Catholic Church in a modern lingo, without compromising on principles.[10] No doubt he often received bouquets and brickbats either from progressives[11] or from conservatives and traditionalists[12]; but he treated them all with the same solicitude.
Pope John Paul II himself was perhaps a curious mix: by and large a conservative in faith and morals and a progressive in social and economic issues. He was a bold and innovative thinker[13] and, unlike most predecessors, who were reticent, he was also a prolific speaker and writer. His book Crossing the Threshold of Hope (1994) addressing major theological concerns of today became an international bestseller and further established him as a great intellect and teacher of our times. This divine spokesman had the ability to reach out to the flock, especially the youth and families. Perfectly at home with the modern media of communication, Time magazine named him the Man of the Year in 1994, while the people considered him the ‘Pope of the Century’ or even the ‘Pope of Popes’.
Pope John Paul II died a century upon the preliminary rumblings of communism, his bête-noire, and eve of the vigil of the Feast of Divine Mercy,[14] a prominent theme of his pontificate. Six years later, his beatification overshadowed communist-sponsored May Day,[15] vindicating his earthly mission; it also coincided with the said Feast whose great Promoter he had canonized. One can read in this divine esteem for the continual efforts that the Pope had made to spiritualize the world with the cult of saints and the message of mercy, peace and love. Significantly, the forgiveness that Pope John Paul II sought in the year 2000, for arguable ‘wrongdoings’ of the historical Church,[16] symbolized an earnest desire to enter the third millennium with a clean slate.[17]
Today, there is no longer room for scepticism; it is clear that God had designed that KJW with his unique background should be Pope, and that, in a globe fragmented by religious and political stances, he should speak in diverse yet not contradictory voices; when faced by hatred and strife, be unequivocal yet mellifluous; and, challenged by a humanity fast losing its religious sense, clinical in his assessment yet warm in his approach.
Endnotes
[1] He lost his mother at 8, his only brother at 11, and his father at 21 years of age.
[2] As a key figure at the II Vatican Council he became much better known internationally.
[3] Pope John Paul II (18/05/1920–02/04/2005) reigned as the 264th Pope from 16/10/1978- 02/04/2005. His was the second-longest pontificate after Pius IX's 31-year reign.
[4] On 13/05/1981, Pope John Paul II was shot at in St. Peter's Square by a Turkish gunman in the employ of the Bulgarian communist government. He recovered, resumed his work, and forgave his would-be assassin. In 1982, there was a second attempt, at Fatima, just a day before the anniversary of the first. In 1984, he consecrated the world (and not Russia, as per the Message of Fatima) to Mary. Also see his encyclical Redemptoris Mater (Mother of the Redeemer), 1987.
[5] Laborem Exercens (On Human Work), 1981; Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (On Social Concerns), 1987; Centesimus Annus (On the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum), 1991
[6] Redemptor Hominis (The Redeemer of Man), 1979; Dives in Misericordia (Rich in Mercy), 1980; Dominum et Vivificantem (The Lord and Giver of Life), 1986; Redemptoris Missio (The Mission of Christ the Redeemer), 1990; Veritatis Splendor (The Splendour of the Truth), 1993; Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), 1995; Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), 1998; Ecclesia de Eucharistia (On the Eucharist in its Relationship to the Church) 2003;
[7] Hans Kung (Switzerland), Edward Schillebeeckx (Belgium), Tissa Balasuriya (India), Leonardo Boff (Brazil), Gyorgi Bulanyi (Hungary), Jacques Pohier (France), C. E. Curran (USA), Bernhard Haring (Germany), Gustavo Gutierrez (Peru), among others, were banned for their unacceptable views on subjects ranging from papal infallibility and liberation theology to contraception. Similarly, discouraging priests and nuns from direct or full-time political activities, he ordered the American Jesuit Fr Robert Drinan to resign his office as congressman. He also excommunicated Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre for his acts of insubordination.
[8] The “Pilgrim Pope” made 104 foreign trips to 129 countries, more than all previous popes combined. He logged more than 1,167,000 km. He consistently attracted large crowds on his travels, some amongst the largest ever assembled in human history. While some of his trips (such as to the USA and the Holy Land) were to places previously visited by Pope Paul VI (the first Pope to travel widely), many others were to places that no Pope had ever previously visited.
[9] Political leaders like Mikhail Gorbachev and Yasser Arafat, among many others; and religious leaders of Christian denominations and other religions.
[10] Besides fourteen encyclicals, Pope John Paul II has to his credit several apostolic letters, exhortations, and books. Mention must be made of two significant publications under his tutelage: the Code of Canon Law (1983) and the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1997).
[11] They were critical of the Pope’s stance on artificial contraception, abortion, euthanasia, pedophilia, homosexuality and the ordination of women.
[12] They were critical of the Pope’s support to the II Vatican Council and its liturgical reforms as well as of his ecumenical efforts and inter-religious dialogue, whose supreme example was the meeting of world religious heads, which Pope John Paul II organized in Assisi in 1983. They also accused him of promoting Modernism, condemned as the “synthesis of all errors” by Pope Pius X.
[13] For instance, in Love and Responsibility (1960), which perhaps became a basis for Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae, KJW dismisses the “utilitarian” view of sex for pleasure and the “rigorist” idea of sex for procreation. Instead, he sketched out a high doctrine of sexual intercourse as mutual self-donation. In his Theology of the Body (2006) Pope John Paul II broke new ground, inaugurating what many regard as a revolutionary shift in Catholic doctrine and sensibility.
[14] Pope John Paul II instituted this feast when he canonized Sr. Faustina Kowalska in the year 2000. It is now celebrated on the Sunday after Easter.
[15] Labour parades were cancelled in Poland in view of the Beatification.
[16] As the world crossed into the third millennium, Pope John Paul II magnanimously apologized to Jews; Galileo; Muslims killed by the Crusaders; victims of the Inquisition, and almost everyone who may have considered themselves victims of history. He also included the involvement of Catholics in the African slave trade; denigration of women; the burnings at the stake, and the indifference of many Catholics during the Holocaust.
[17] See the Apostolic Letter Tertio Millenio Adveniente, in preparation for the Jubilee Year 2000.
(Renovação, Vol. XL No. 9-10, 1-31 May 2011)
Dona Teresinha, as I knew her
Something from within impels me to speak. I somehow cannot contain this gush of childhood memories of the time, way back in the 1970s, when I used to see Dona Teresinha criss-crossing the city in her Datsun Bluebird. I can still hear her voice in the Renascença programme of All India Radio, Panjim. An exponent of Indo-Portuguese culture that she was, right from her Lyceum days, I can picture her in the play ‘Barco Sem Pescador’. Many will remember that, at times, she singly animated the Mass at St Sebastian’s, the Fontaínhas chapel that was so dear to her heart. Her steadfast circle of friends will recall that she and her family never let go an evening of entertainment that included song and dance, particularly the fado and the mandó, which she sang and danced with verve. A lady of many parts, she was confident, smart, creative and forward-looking… ahead of her times in more ways than one.
Let me now fast forward a little, beginning some eight years ago, when I had the fortune of knowing Dona Teresinha a little more closely. That’s when I gathered that she wasn’t the stern person that she seemed when her car whizzed past us children. She had happily sacrificed her career as a pharmacist to become the dedicated wife that she was to Dr Hugo and devoted mother to Carlos and Jorge, a friendly mother-in-law to Marlene and Silvia, and doting grandmother to their four bouncy kids. She was a meticulous housewife, a good cook and gourmet. An excellent hostess, comfortable with people of all ages and stations, she was a great talker and a good listener. Thanks to her vivacity, there was never a dull moment in her company. Her joie de vivre, emblematic of Panjim’s Latin Quarter that she graced, was truly infectious: This stood her in good stead when, in her last years, she was in indifferent health – indeed in a state that would have some lesser mortal slide down the slippery slope of self-pity.
Early on 15th instant, after a pall of gloom had descended upon our household on hearing that Dona Teresinha was no more, I chanced upon an inspirational little story in the Herald, which I wish to share with you for its significance. It is the story of a lady in her twilight years. As she moved into a nursing home, she was seen to be very happy about the room allotted to her. ‘But you haven’t seen the room yet,’ said the health care staff. In fact, she never really would, because she was blind; yet, in her good poise, she replied, ‘That doesn’t have anything to do with it. Happiness is something you decide on ahead of time. Whether I like my room or not doesn’t depend on how the furniture is arranged… it’s how I arrange my mind.’
The brave lady further said – and it could well have been Dona Teresinha exclaiming this – ‘I have already decided to love my room… it’s a decision I make every morning when I wake up. I have a choice: I can spend the day in bed recounting the difficulty I have with the parts of my body that no longer work, or get out of bed and be thankful for the ones that do. Each day is a gift, and as long as my eyes open, I’ll focus on the new day and all the happy moments I’ve stored away… just for this time in my life.’
That reads like Dona Teresinha’s credo! And this is just the time to call to mind her edifying fortitude! She lived life to the fullest, enjoying the good things that it has to offer. Not one to be cowed down, she displayed an energy and optimism rare in our day and age; and despite her troubles, she went out of her way to comfort the other. I must say that one such other was our son Fernando – a ‘special child’, to whom Dona Teresinha doled out special attention. At any social gathering she made it a point to spend moments with him, to see him laugh and sing. He loved it, and he loved her for that.
It is this ability to reach out that will remain in my mind as the single most potent image of this amazing lady. No doubt, Fernando will miss her…. We will all miss her. But in her case we can say with the Poet, that ‘Death shall be no more. Death, thou shalt die’ – which means that Dona Teresinha will live forever!
(Herald, 25 April 2010)
Remembering Leonor
Paying homage to the dead is a cardinal civic virtue, an expression of gratitude that also helps to imbibe sterling values perhaps scarce in a new day and age. And this is what links us to Leonor de Loyola Furtado e Fernandes, who was born on 24th May 1909 to Miguel de Loyola Furtado and Maria Julieta de Loyola. Married to Martinho António Fernandes, she was essentially a matriarch and a grand lady of the Fourth Estate.
Leonor was a career woman with a difference. A mother at 16, it was after this that she began writing in earnest, without letting this disturb her duties as a housewife. Her husband encouraged her to fight for her ideals through the weekly A Índia Portuguesa, and bore the brunt as Administrator of the Comunidades of Salcete, dogged as he was by controversy fuelled by a mix of personal vengeance and political vendetta.
Although Martinho eventually emerged unscathed, it was not easy for Leonor to weather those storms while she raised four daughters. A grandmother at 39, two years later she took over the said weekly, a family heirloom and historic mouthpiece of the political party called Partido Indiano, becoming the first lady editor in the whole of the Portuguese speaking world and in the Indian sub-continent too.
In 1951, she travelled to Portugal, the sole lady in a five-member media delegation from Goa invited to see the ‘mother country’. Portugal had then renamed its colonies ‘Overseas Provinces’, considering them an integral part of a far-flung Portuguese State. Leonor wrote about what had impressed her, not forgetting the meeting with Premier Oliveira Salazar, the Minister for Overseas Territories, Sarmento Rodrigues, and the pressmen with whom she spoke on different aspects of life in Goa.
Her trip of 1956 was marked by the publication of her first book, Salteadores da Honra Alheia na Índia Portuguesa (‘Assailants of People’s Honour in Portuguese India’), whose arresting title and explosive content led to its confiscation in Goa. While she wished to publicize the truth about her husband’s professional troubles, evil doings of prominent individuals and shady workings of many a public institution got exposed too.
Leonor was a champion of civil liberties by virtue of her journalism. As a proud descendant of one of Goa’s best known families involved in the civil rights movement, she took to it like fish to water. While critical of the administrative faults of the Portuguese regime, she was a moderate in her political aspirations, open to the ideas of decentralization and greater financial autonomy for Goa, and more importantly a zealous protector of the Goan identity, in the pre- as well as post-1961 regimes.
Her second book, Contribuição para um Mundo Melhor (‘Contribution for a Better World’) shows her love for Goa but does not camouflage her combative spirit. It has interesting reflections on the period spanning 1961-78; her missives from Portugal, Angola and Mozambique (August-October 1969); historical snippets about her newspaper; the story of the legendary José Inácio de Loyola Sr.; and photocopies of historic telegrams of the tumultuous days of September 1890.
Under the new political dispensation, her journal had to change its name to A Índia – just ‘India’! She was smart enough not to grudge this. But what provoked her ire was that the Comunidades had been given short shrift in a chaotic democratic state. In 1966, when interviewed by the redoubtable D. F. Karaka, Leonor fulminates against the police for searching her residence by night, looking for components of bombs and other subversive material used in the Vasco bomb case. Frustrated with their sole discovery, a book titled , her Indian passport was impounded and censorship was imposed on her paper.
The intrepid journalist declared that “her fight was against all governments who tried to deprive the people of civil rights and who imposed censorship, whether it was a Portuguese censorship or the censorship dictated by the Indian Government.” And some of her statements to the Bombay tabloid have a familiar ring even today: “The administration has gone rotten. In the (Goa) Assembly, the Opposition has accused the Government of nepotism, communalism, inefficiency and incompetence…. Laws have been passed without going into the constitutional right of the people,” she complained.
To redress her own grievances against the Government of Goa, she either met or wrote to Indira Gandhi every time. In her letter of 19th February 1966, she declared, “I believe in a Power above the powers of the world and in justice that comes, sometimes in time, at other times a bit late, in some manner or the other.” The restrictions were soon lifted, by a letter dated 13th May 1966, the significance of which day was not lost on Leonor: she was a great believer in the Message given on this day, half a century earlier, by the Mother of Jesus, when she appeared at Fatima, Portugal.
Leonor was truly blessed with a deep and empowering faith, or else she would not have endured as a career journalist until December 1975. And, not surprisingly, when the Angel knocked at her door on 8th January 2005, he must have found Leonor de Loyola Furtado e Fernandes, at the ripe old age of 95, still steadfast in her principles and faithful to her people.
(Goa Today, June 2009)
Remembering Leonor: Editor Extraordinaire
To the dead it probably matters little whether or not they are remembered: having done their bit on earth they now belong to Eternity, where worldly honour and glory are of no consequence. But paying them homage is a cardinal civic virtue – an expression of gratitude for the valuable services rendered by them to the community, which also helps to imbibe sterling values that might well be scarce in a new day and age.
That is what links us to Leonor de Loyola Furtado e Fernandes on her birth centenary. Born on 24th May 1909 to Miguel de Loyola Furtado of Chinchinim and Maria Julieta de Loyola of Orlim, she was married to Martinho António Fernandes of Colvá. She was a woman of many parts but essentially a matriarch and a grand lady of the Fourth Estate.
Wife and Mother
Leonor – Lolita, in her close circle – was a person ahead of her times. She was a career woman with a difference. When the Panjim-based eveninger Diário da Noite (2nd May 1953) asked about the beginning of her occupation, she said, ‘I don’t remember clearly when I started writing. I know I became a mother at 16 and it must have been after this that I began writing in earnest.’
This candid statement of fact was also a reflection of her priorities. No doubt it was a man’s world but as a gifted woman she had found her way out. Talking to me (Herald Mirror, 15th September 1996), she said that her professional work never disturbed her duties as a housewife, “because my husband was an intelligent man with humanistic interests at heart. He never interfered in my work as I never did in his. There was a lot of mutual understanding. He gave me the courage to fight for my ideals – even though it might have reflected on him as a government official.”
And reflect it did. As Administrator of the Comunidades of Salcete, Martinho Fernandes, a lawyer by training, was dogged by controversy, initially fomented by individuals who eyed his post, while later some of it was fuelled by a heady mix of personal vengeance and political vendetta, thanks to his wife’s plain speaking in the weekly A Índia Portuguesa. The incumbent emerged unscathed, through long and tortuous battles up to the apex court.
It must not have been easy for Leonor to weather those storms while she raised four daughters, managed the household chores and the family estates. But the years rolled by and, interestingly, at 39 years of age, she was already a grandmother! In 1950, when that venerable journal, a family heirloom and historic mouthpiece of the pro-native political party called Partido Indiano, founded by the Loyolas of Orlim, was almost folding up, it was born again with Leonor.
Journalist and Author
It was for the first time that in the whole of the Portuguese speaking world and in the Indian sub-continent as well a woman was at the head of a newspaper. This was only a natural consequence of having her father for a role model: apart from being a brilliant physician and political leader, he had edited A Índia Portuguesa from the year 1912 until his sudden demise in 1918, and his memory remained with Leonor for the rest of her days. She once said, ‘If destiny were not opposed to it, I would have studied medicine. I had a fascination for the medical profession, so as to positively spread the good to all. But I was born for something else – and I am a journalist only. I would have liked to be a physician and journalist.’ (Diário da Noite)
A year after assuming editorship she travelled to Portugal, the only lady in a Goan media delegation comprising Fr Manuel Francisco Lourdes Gomes, Álvaro de Santa Rita Vaz, Amadeu Prazeres da Costa and Luis de Menezes Jr. They had been invited for a month’s stay, to see for themselves what the ‘mother country’ was like. It was a public relations exercise by the Estado Novo, for in March that year the Government had passed an amendment to the controversial Colonial Act, renaming the colonies ‘Overseas Provinces’ and considering them an integral part of a far-flung Portuguese State. The change of nomenclature reinforced the one-nation theory, in a bid to counter global pressure against European colonization in the post-World War scenario.
The exercise paid dividends. Members of the delegation sent regular reports to their respective newspapers. On her return, Leonor wrote about what had impressed her, not forgetting the meeting with Premier Oliveira Salazar and the Minister for Overseas Territories, Sarmento Rodrigues. She had spoken to pressmen from continental Portugal and its overseas provinces on different aspects of life in Goa.
This was the first and surely the most memorable of her many visits abroad. Her official trip of 1956, on the fortieth anniversary of Salazar’s New State, was marked by the publication of her first book, Salteadores da Honra Alheia na Índia Portuguesa, (‘Assailants of People’s Honour in Portuguese India’). The curious little book’s arresting title and explosive content prompted the Portuguese Governor-General Paulo Bénard Guedes to have it confiscated on its arrival in Goa. While the author’s primary intention was to publicize the truth about her husband’s professional troubles, these are universalized, turning the book into a “repository of truths that make up our life in India.” The picture of a coconut tree and a cobra on its cover probably point to the coexistence of indolence and poison in our land. The evil doings of some prominent individuals and the shady workings of many a public institution are exposed.
Civil Rights Activist
Leonor was a champion of civil liberties by virtue of her journalism. As a proud descendant of one of Goa’s best known families involved in the civil rights movement, she took to it like fish to water. While critical of the administrative faults of the Portuguese regime, she was a moderate in her political aspirations, open to the ideas of decentralization and greater financial autonomy for Goa, emanating from the new Lei Orgânica do Ultramar, and more importantly a zealous protector of the Goan identity, in the pre- and post-1961 regimes. This was clear from her statement upon taking her seat in the legislative council of Portuguese India, in 1961: ‘Regimes fall, empires vanish, ideologies die, but the land remains, and we have to work for Goa to remain forever.”
Leonor was now left to fight life’s battles alone. She had lost her husband in 1960; and under the new political dispensation, even her journal had to change its name to A Índia – just ‘India’! She was smart enough not to grudge this, given the fait accompli of the Indian take-over of Goa. But what provoked her ire was that the Comunidades were being given short shrift, enough to have Martinho Fernandes turn in his grave.
In her second book, Contribuição para um Mundo Melhor, a tribute to her husband, printed on her last visit to Lisbon, in 1978, she addresses him on his life's interest, saying, "Do you see the state of our land today, how the Comunidades are faring, and how the land is groaning under injustice?" (p. 8) “Because our people are not rebellious and have not lost their sense of discipline and honesty, there has been no revolution yet,” she thunders (p. 14). It is clear that although she wishes to reconcile everything under a positive title (‘Contribution for a Better World’) nothing can camouflage her combative spirit.
Eye-opening Interview
In 1966, The Current, a well known weekly published from Bombay, invited readers to send in entries for an interview competition to mark the publication’s 18th anniversary. Leonor submitted her experiences as editor of A Índia. As one of the four short-listed, she was interviewed by the redoubtable D. F. Karaka, who, curiously, twenty-three years earlier, had been mentioned as one of her favourite authors. It was a rendezvous of two editors sans peur et sans reproche…
The picture of Leonor that accompanied her “interesting entry” was considered “almost as threatening as the entry itself”. On the morning of the interview, a tornado was expected to blow into the newspaper office, bearing a flaming torch in one hand and a sword in the other. Although Leonor fulminated against the police for searching her residence by night, looking for components of bombs and other subversive material used in the Vasco bomb case, “the tornado from Goa was only a gentle breeze”, wrote Karaka. Frustrated with their sole discovery, a book titled Invasion and Occupation of Goa (National Secretariat for Information, Lisbon, 1962), containing world press reports on the contentious Goa Question, her Indian passport was impounded when she was on a visit to New Delhi and, back in Goa, censorship was imposed on her paper, with a heavy bond and two sureties made necessary to ensure “due performance of the restrictions”.
The intrepid Goan journalist stated that “her fight was against all governments who tried to deprive the people of civil rights and who imposed censorship, whether it was a Portuguese censorship or the censorship dictated by the Indian Government.” She especially decried censorship under a democratic set-up. “I wanted to publish in my paper extracts from Inside, which is a Swatantra Party paper. These quotations were cut out by the censors,” she said.
Final Years
Some of her statements to the Bombay tabloid have a familiar ring even today: “The administration has gone rotten. In the (Goa) Assembly, the Opposition has accused the Government of nepotism, communalism, inefficiency and incompetence…. Laws have been passed without going into the constitutional right of the people,” she complained.
While she made a case for the preservation of the Goan identity, showing her red-pencilled extracts of Nehru’s speech at Siddharth Nagar, Bombay, on 4th June 1956, to redress her own grievance against the Government of Goa, she either met or wrote to Indira Gandhi every time. In her letter of 19th February 1966, she declared, “I believe in a Power above the powers of the world and in justice that comes, sometimes in time, at other times a bit late, in some manner or the other.” The restrictions were soon lifted, by a letter dated 13th May 1966, the significance of which day was not lost on Leonor: she was a great believer in the Message that the Mother of Jesus gave on this day, half a century earlier, in her apparition at Fatima, a place Leonor visited on several occasions.
Her meetings with Mrs Gandhi are recounted in Contribuição, which also carries interesting reflections on the period spanning 1961-78; her missives from Portugal, Angola and Mozambique (August-October 1969), which though “innocuous” were responsible for her passport problems yet again; historical snippets about her newspaper; the story of the legendary José Inácio de Loyola Sr.; and photocopies of historic telegrams of the tumultuous days of September 1890.
Karaka had found it “heartening to see a woman in her 50s, who had been so disturbed by the turmoil of politics, still crusading for the rights of the people and still having faith in a Power above the powers of the world.” Leonor was truly blessed with a deep and empowering faith – or else she would not have endured as a career journalist until December 1975. She said, “I have great faith in Our Lady. Although I have been harassed in my life by the powers on earth, I have never cared or worried.” And not surprisingly, when the Angel knocked at her door on 8th January 2005, he must have found Leonor de Loyola Furtado e Fernandes, at the ripe old age of 95, still steadfast in her principles and faithful to her people.
(Herald, 'Mirror', Sunday magazine, 24.05.2009)