Across community barriers: female characters in Vimala Devi’s short stories

Cielo Griselda Festino

doi:10.4025/actascilangcult.v41i2.45888

Abstract

This article brings a reading of the short-story collection Monção [Monsoon] ( 2003) by the Goan writer Vimala Devi (1932-). The collection can be read as a short-story cycle, a group of stories related by locality, Goa, character, Goans, from all walks of life, and theme, in particular women´s milieu, among other literary categories. In her book, written from her self-imposed exile in Portugal, Devi recreates Goa, former Portuguese colony, in the 1950s, before its annexation to India. A member of the Catholic gentry, Devi portrays the four hundred years of conflictive intimacy between Catholics and Hindus. Our main argument is that Devi´s empathy for her culture becomes even more explicit in Monção when her voice becomes one with that of all her women characters. Though they might be at odds, due to differences of caste, class and religion, Devi makes a point of showing that they are all part of the same cultural identity constantly remade through their own acts of refusal and recognition. This discussion will be framed in terms of Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s theory of autobiography (2001) as well as the studies on Goan women by the Goan critics Propércia Correia Afonso (1928-1931), Maria Aurora Couto (2005) and Fátima da Silva Gracias (2007).

Highlights

The collection of short stories Monção [Monsoon] from 19631 by the Goan author, Vimala Devi (1932-), is a short-story cycle, a group of stories by the same author related by theme and locality, Goa, (Wiemann, 2013)
Devi brings Goa, her motherland and former Portuguese colony in India (1510-1961), back to life as it was in the 1950s, when she was already self-exiled in Portugal, turning the memories of her own life experience into a suggestive literary narrative that is one of the masterpieces of Goan Literature in Portuguese
Through the protective veil of literature, Devi seems intent on depicting a world fast receding into the past, but without sparing it any criticism about what she considered the main foibles of Goan society: inequalities due to class and caste as, though converted to Catholicism, Goans took into their new religion the caste hierarchy of Hinduism

Summary

Among hindu women

The relationship between authors and their works can be a complex one. Devis alternating admiration and criticism of her own community, the Catholic gentry, at which she can poke fun as in the case of ‘O genro comensal’, adopt a nostalgic tone in ‘Ocaso’, or a critical one in ‘Esperança’ acquires new layers of meaning when compared to her portrayal of Hindu women in the stories ‘Dhruva’, ‘Padmini’ and ‘Nâttak’. Like Dhruva, Padmini is a member of the local elite, as her brother studying in Lisbon suggests, and, paradoxically, closer to the Catholic gentry than Catholics from a lower caste, in ‘Nâttak’ the main character is another young girl, Durgá, perhaps even more innocent than her peers in the other two short stories. She is discriminated against for being the daughter of a bailadeira, women considered to be prostitutes, as Correia Afonso (1929b) observes in her classic study on Indo-Portuguese women.

Usos e costumes across communities

Final considerations