Abstract
AbstractThe mando is a secular song-and-dance genre of Goa whose archival attestations began in the 1860s. It is still danced today, in staged rather than social settings. Its lyrics are in Konkani, their musical accompaniment combine European and local instruments, and its dancing follows the principles of the nineteenth-century European group dances known as quadrilles, which proliferated in extra-European settings to yield various creolized forms. Using theories of creolization, archival and field research in Goa, and an understanding of quadrille dancing as a social and memorial act, this article presents the mando as a peninsular, Indic, creolized quadrille. It thus offers the first systematic examination of the mando as a nineteenth-century social dance created through processes of creolization that linked the cultural worlds of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans—a manifestation of what early twentieth-century Goan composer Carlos Eugénio Ferreira called a ‘rapsodia Ibero-Indiana’ (‘Ibero-Indian rhapsody’). I investigate the mando's kinetic, performative, musical, and linguistic aspects, its emergence from a creolization ofmentalitésthat commenced with the advent of Christianity in Goa, its relationship to other dances in Goa and across the Indian and Atlantic Ocean worlds, as well as the memory of inter-imperial cultural encounters it performs. I thereby argue for a new understanding of Goa through the processes of transoceanic creolization and their reverberation in the postcolonial present. While demonstrating the heuristic benefit of theories of creolization to the study of peninsular Indic culture, I bring those theories to peninsular India to develop further their standard applications.
Highlights
In, the journal O Ultramar reported from the wedding of the daughter of Senhor Antonio Maria Xavier Rodrigues of Margao, South Goa, noting that, at the ball that followed the ecclesiastical proceedings and that lasted until six in the morning, about couples at any given time were dancing to the music of a live orchestra.[1]
What kind of a dance is this, and what can it tell us about Goa and its relationship to India on the one hand and Europe on the other?
Mando lyrics, composed in a baroque Konkani striated with Sanskritized and Latinate lexis, accompanied by musical scores,[2] were being published by local presses
Summary
In , the journal O Ultramar reported from the wedding of the daughter of Senhor Antonio Maria Xavier Rodrigues of Margao, South Goa, noting that, at the ball that followed the ecclesiastical proceedings and that lasted until six in the morning, about couples at any given time were dancing to the music of a live orchestra.[1].
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