In memoriam

Maria Aurora Couto 1937-2022

THE passing away of Maria Aurora Couto marks the end of an era in Goa and, in a small but significant way, the end of an era in India as well. In the world she inhabited she had a distinct location, belonging both to an age and an aspiration, a community and a political ideology. What were these two eras? Rather than describe them in the abstract I think I can elaborate by referring to a pair of distinguished personalities. The two who came closest to what I have in mind, who in a manner of speaking embody my idea of what Aurora represents, are the pair of Frank Moraes and Sham Lal. Both were persons of Ideas. Both took public positions on issues of the day. Both imagined a future India that they campaigned and stood for. Both drew on different cultural resources, which had large areas of overlap, to make their statement. Frank Moraes was a Bombay Goan (both Bombay and Goan), Sham Lal the Bombay Punjabi.

In similar vein Aurora also combined the cosmopolitan with the parochial. The different sensibilities coalesced in her person and gave her public life a specific vitality. There was a creative tension, as there definitely had to be, between the different worlds from which she came, the elite Catholic from Loutolim, the IAS officer’s wife, the English teacher, the Portuguese and Konkani speaking public person, the charming hostess from the Hampstead salon. She fused them in a distinct way, giving them her unique personality which moved between Maria and Aurora. She was Maria to those outside Goa and Aurora to those within.

Travelling with her through her biography one meets the young wife of a young Goan IAS officer in Bihar having to hold her own against a bureaucratic elite that carried with them family histories of bureaucracy. Over the years she charmed them enough to be allowed into their world. She was the lady of letters who hosted many writers and intellectuals in her home in London. There were occasions when it was not breakfast at Tiffany’s but breakfast with Graham Greene. She was the public intellectual in Goa who sat on the Goa University Executive Board, who editors sought out for comment on important controversies, who counted among her friends writers and authors from across the spectrum, and who was invited to start the DD Kosambi Festival of Ideas in Goa. Aurora lived across many and varied cultural spaces and different historical moments. She was witness to the transition of Goa from Colonial province to the liberated territory of a free India. In her passing we have lost a chronicler who had an intimate view of that transition.

Glimpses of her seamless movement between these different identities one gets in her two biographical books, Goa: A Daughter’s Story, and Filomena’s Journeys (spelt with an F and not a Ph). Hers was a deliberate syncretism that defined both her politics and her age. If the first was the biography of a land that carries the scars of an unresolved history, which seeks in the present a peaceful reconciliation, not easily given by a competitive politics of othering, a forgiveness which Aurora worked tirelessly for, the second is the biography of a family that, although it is a unique elite Goan family is not unusual, spends its social life trying to resolve its own imperfections. In these two stories is the story of an era. Portuguese colonialism did leave residues in Goa, not all of
which were good and not all of which were bad. Contemporary Goa, and contemporary India, has to come to terms with these residues. Few individuals in the present attempt to do so. Few can. They cannot because either they do not possess the intellectual resources to give the residues a form, i.e. name the existential dilemma, identify its causes, or possess the cultural resources to give them a place. Aurora could. Maria did.

Having grown up in Goa and having spent her young adult years in Dharwad she knew closely the world of the elite Goan Catholic and equally closely the world of the cosmopolitan Indian elite. She was lifelong friends with the playwright Girish Karnad and the writer Shashi Deshpande. She spoke Portuguese effortlessly, wore a Benarasi sari with elegance, and I suspect listened to both Pandit Ravi Shankar and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on her verandah. Her fluency in Konkani allowed her into cultural spaces that gave her an enviable perspective on a changing Goa. She chose to spend her last decades in her husband’s marital home, in Aldona, a sort of return of the native, in a manner of speaking, although she was a native who was at home with the world. This is what makes her life so distinct. Her world, that of the Goan Catholic elite, has today passed into history, never to be replicated. It was the product of a particular global conjuncture of world history. She was perhaps one of its most illustrious children. Should one lament its passing? Should one just shrug? I do not know. But I do know that in her passing an era indeed has ended.

Peter Ronald deSouza

D.D. Kosambi Visiting Professor

Goa University