Shades within Shadows: Review by Dr. William Robert Da Silva

With his book, Sarasvati’s Children, I came in contact with Alan Prabhu of Bangalore (origin: Mangalore). I had been doing research on the themes touched upon and written in his book for a long time. The material was, as always, used for lectures and seminars. He, however, had been doing research to publish.

We had much to share. One of the common interests was the self-proclaimed persecution and martyrdom of Mangalore Christians under the rule of Sultans of Mysore in the latter part of the eighteenth century, especially under Tipu Sultan. Under the patronage of the British who conquered Mysore kingdom in 1799, Christians began making representations to the British on their suffering, loss of houses and property, and places of worship. In 1999 two hundred years of memory was revived with seminars and workshops repeating the ‘old story.’

Alan wrote a factual report of these past incidents, especially from 1784 onwards trying to establish with facts from various written and oral sources that ‘the issue of persecution and deportation’ had other grounds and reasons. No one engaged in serious discussion with it. The myth had been made and needed its diffusion. We discussed in many sessions how to recapture the events of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when ‘India’ was a melting pot of competing kingdoms, from home and away (across the seas). Alan is continuing this research gathering facts and doing alternate readings based on facts.

There was another side to the story too, namely the migration of south Konkan (Goa state today) people to Kanara (coastal region of Karnataka State today), again, as a consequence of Portuguese persecution of the newly converted Christians adhering to their cultural and religious practices, and the notorious Inquisition. The romaticisation of this sojourn to the south was covered in a total of 10 volumes of novel narrative in the Konkani language. A people of rural origin, adjusted to field and garden culture, generally illiterate, was given a grand and noble past.

It was made chivalrous in the Frankish court model of early Europe with nobles on horseback with unsheathed swords and bowing before courtly ladies with deference. [The same has been now approached from another perspective of migration and war by Konkani Hindu Brahmana community in two recent books, one in English and the other in Kannada].

Within this framework and background Alan’s Shades within Shadows becomes an anti-structural narrative with characters and events plotted into a time and space frame, bringing alive all characters and events, fictionalised, from his vast historical research work. This home and away with a ‘homestead’ for the newly arrived in Kanara undulates like the waves of a sea in constant ebb and flow. The socio-economic and political state of south Konkan and Kanara, like the rest of south India, was in constant turmoil where people leaving one home for another homestead were left to make small decisions which, cumulatively, led to larger political squirmishes and wars with people thrown between them.

Originally the title should have been ‘We today, you tomorrow’ as translated from a Konkani tombstone writing. However, it irked on English ear. Hence this title: Shades within Shadows.

I have read through the first draft of the MS at least twice with some suggestions for the flow of the narrative and made suggestions for uniformity in the local lingo, especially Konkani (with Tulu and Kannada, local Kanara terms, thrown in). I have no doubt that this narrative would make fascinating reading for a world once again in global move from home to new homesteads, thrown out of one’s moorings on native land by circumstances of a different nature – global in scope.

The ‘saudade’ (roughly ‘nostalgia’ in English) this narrative mediates transgresses the earlier institutional and mythicised memory of the same people, made alive in their pristine originality of character, event and mutual interaction. The stormy historical times come alive on every page and people seem to be their original selves, all fictionalised into a salient narrative, cadenced within the parameters of time and space background, again fictionalised for narrative effect.

Dr. William Robert Da Silva

Senior Professor of Communication and Social Sciences

School of Konkani Studies

Mangalore