Resumo de Goa And The Revolt Of 1787

Teotonio R. de Souza, ?Introduction?, Goa and the Revolt of 1787, ed. Charles J. Borges (First English editionof Cunha Rivara?s A Conjuração de 1787), New Delhi, Concept Publishing Company, 1996, pp. 9-17We believe that this first English version of J.H. Cunha Rivara´s A Conjuração de 1787 em Goa will make this event better known to a wider readership and to researchers worldwide. Fresh interest and re-evaluation of the event can thus be expected. Cunha Rivara, who was Chief Secretary of the Goa Government from 1855 to 1877,was disturbed by the events in the neighbouring British India where the colonial rule was severely shaken by the so-called Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. The Portuguese feared that the insurgency would spill into Goa, and his fears were not unfounded. The Portuguese allowed telegraph linkage between Bombay and Surat crossing Daman. The British troops were also allowed passage through Goa for undertaking some operations to check the rebels. Some rebels from Sawantwadi had sought refuge in Goa. Rivara'sresearch on Conjuração has to be seen in this background. His claim of meticulous research and free from all bias (limpa da mácula da paixão) needs to be taken with a pound of salt. Rivara was provoked by Ultramar and Illustração Goana, two Goan journals that sought to rehabilitate the natives who had fought the Portuguese colonial pretensions and suffered for it, like Bernardo Peres da Silva, or Mariano José Conceição da Rocha. The Portuguese liberalism gave the Goan intelligentsia an opportunity to attempt this, and Rivara's historical research may be seen as a counter-exercise. Barreto Miranda's description of the Sentença de Conspiração e Alta Traição as a judicial murder became a red rag for Rivara and motivated his research on the Conjuração, specially in the sensitive context of the elections in Nagoa (Bardez) in 1861, as it is plain from p. 115 of the original Portuguese text of the book. Rivara was personally and emotionally involved in these elections on behalf of white interests and had referred in the Boletim do Governo to the mean and duplicitous character of the Goan natives. The conspiracy, wrongly linked by tradition almost exclusively with Pintos had three priests leading it, and none of them from Pinto family, namely Fr. Caetano Vitorino de Faria, Fr. José Antonio Gonçalves, and Fr. Francisco Couto, who had felt their talents and self-dignity burt by the dominant Portuguese colonial interests of the time and represented by the metropolitan whites and the Goa-based mestiços and descendentes. But when these Goan priests were bypassed in favour of the South Indian St. Thomas clerics for the appointment to the vacant sees of Cranganore and Mylapore, they did not seem to realise that they were contradicting themselves by their colonial and discriminating attitude towards the local candidates of South India. The Malabar clergy certainly had greater right to rule over their churches than Goa-born clerics. Rivara gloats on this point to ridicule the ambitions of the Goan priests. However, a more recent piece of evidence in the form of the published diary of Bishop Cariattil and written by the priest who accompanied him (Varthamanapustakkam, trans. and ed. by Placid J. Podipara, Rome, 1971) discloses the large game-plot of Fr. Caetano Vitorino de Faria, the real mastermind of the plot to displace the Portuguese and to take over the control of responsible posts in Goa. He was not opposed to Cariattil's appointment to the Cranganore see, but he would do it after taking over the metropolitan see of Goa. He had even shown special interest in ordering from Milan specially cut Malayalam letter-types which were better than those of the Propaganda. It appears from the new evidence that the departure of the priests Francisco Couto and Jose Antonio Gonçalves to Rome for further studies was not their own move as presumed ivara, but on instructions of Fr. Caetano Vitorino de Faria. It was only when Cariattil was appointed and his own claims were ignored that Fr. Caetano Vitorino de Faria seems to have decided on the revolt. And was the death of Bishop Cariattil in Goa and before reaching his see natural, or part of the conspiracy? It remains unclear.The discontent among Goans was real. The viceroy of Goa in 1760 (not too far before the Conspiracy date) had studied the reluctance of Goan natives to participate in the Portuguese military service and wars of the New Conquests, and he decided among other things to issue an ordinance banning under heavy penalties the use of the expression negro or cachorro (dog) to refer to the Goan natives. His ban was aimed at the Portuguese, including expressly the mestiços (porque nestes ainda mais que nos mesmos Europeos reina aquelle luciferino vício). He was referring to the vice of pride (soberba) or what we may describe as the white superiority, smacking of racism, which he considered greatly responsible for the native indifference towards the Portuguese colonial interests. The growing white superiority of the luso-descendentes needs to be understood as a reaction to their losses in Daman and Bassein where they owned large estates and which had been overrun by the Marathas in 1739. It was a bitter experience for the mestiços to swallow. A growing pressure of Goan natives to deprive them also of their monopoly over the local army made them more insecure and hostile.

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