Ananta Rau Sar Dessai

Last updated

Ananta Rau Sar Dessai (1910-?) was a Goan short-story writer, radio playwright and poet. He was one of a handful of Goan Hindus to have used Portuguese as his literary language, though he wrote also in Marathi. He was perhaps the only dedicated fictionist in Portuguese to have operated in Goa throughout the Estado Novo. [1] 'His idiosyncratic language, raw provocative themes, and the great ambiguity with which he treats his subjects, make Sar Dessai one of the more interesting Goan writers to have worked in Portuguese'. [2]

Contents

Biography

He was born in 1910 and practised medicine in the town of Mardol, Goa. He drew on his experience as a clinician for many of his plays and short narratives, such as "Um Cavalheiro Amável" [A Pleasant Gentleman] and "Vaxina, dá-me um pouco de Vaxina também" [Vacshin, give me some vacshin too]. [3]

Literary works

Sau Dessai penned over 30 radio plays, some of which were broadcast, for example via the former Emissora de Goa . Others were published in the now-defunct Portuguese-language press of Goa, in papers such as O Heraldo and A Luta. He also wrote in Marathi, but little work has been done to establish his corpus in this language. [4]

Themes in his Short Stories and Radio Plays

Sar Dessai's short stories are often about poverty and the lack of social justice. Indeed, in some of his stories, Sar Dessai is the closest Goa had in the Portuguese-language to an explicitly anti-colonial literary stance towards Salazar's Estado Novo. [5] Rare for a writer of his time, several of his narratives take place in the hinterland of Goa known as the Novas Conquistas, where Hindus have always formed the majority of the population and where the effects of Portuguese colonialism were rather different than in the coastal strip of Goa. [6]

Loss of Anthology

An anthology of Sar Dessai's short stories and radio plays was prepared by the Portuguese critic Manuel de Seabra in the mid 1970s. It was submitted to the Agência Geral do Ultramar, the Portuguese government agency dedicated to publishing work from the Portuguese overseas territories, but never commissioned and the manuscript never returned. The likelihood is that the manuscript was discarded when the dictatorship fell. Unless a copy of these texts has been retained in Goa - Seabra did not keep a copy for his personal records - it seems that at least half the author's oeuvre has unfortunately been lost. [7]

Poems in Portuguese

Sar Dessai's few poems in Portuguese were written after 1961 and mostly concern Indian nationalist themes.

Studies

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Goan literature</span>

Goan literature is the literature pertaining to the state of Goa in India.

Mardol is a census town in Ponda taluka, North Goa district in the state of Goa, India.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vimala Devi</span> Indian writer and poet (born 1932)

Vimala Devi is the pseudonym of Teresa da Piedade de Baptista Almeida, a Goan writer, poet and translator.

<i>O Heraldo</i> English-language daily newspaper from Goa

O Heraldo is a century-old broadsheet English-language daily newspaper published from Panjim, the state-capital of the Indian state of Goa.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Telo Mascarenhas</span> Indian writer and poet (1899–1979)

Telo de Mascarenhas was a writer, a poet, a journalist and freedom-fighter from Goa.

José da Silva Coelho was a Goan writer who was the author of several dozen pieces of wickedly satirical short fiction in the 1920s and 1930s, published for the most part in the Portuguese-language newspaper O Heraldo. He is 'easily the most prolific Goan fictionist in Portuguese'.

Goa is India's smallest state on the west coast, and its writers have written in many diverse languages. Poetry is a small and scattered field in the region, and this page makes an attempt to acknowledge those who have contributed to the field. It includes those listed below who have contributed to poetry in and from Goa, as well as those writing poetry in Goa. Poetry related to Goa is known to have been written in Konkani, in Portuguese, English and Marathi, apart from other regional, national and international languages to a lesser extent.

Walfrido Antão was a prolific cronista and short story writer in the Portuguese-language Goan press, becoming particularly active as this tradition breathed its last. The crónica is a journalistic form common in Iberia and Latin America and which was widely cultivated in Portuguese Goa. It can be roughly defined as a literary text combining elements of the short story, the memoir and the opinion editorial. Born in Arossim, Antão contributed several hundred such articles to O Heraldo and Diário da Noite from the late 1950s until the demise or Anglicisation of these papers.

Epitácio Pais (1924–2009) was a Indian short story writer and novelist who wrote in Portuguese.

Maria Elsa da Rocha (1924-2007) was a Indian short-story writer and poet in Portuguese.

Augusto do Rosário Rodrigues was a Goan short-story writer and poet.

Luís Manuel Júlio Frederico Gonçalves, who usually wrote simply as J. Gonçalves, was a Goan writer. Referred to by his contemporaries as the Alexandre Herculano of Goa, Gonçalves had a foundational role in developing Portuguese-language writing in the Portuguese colony of Goa.

Alberto de Meneses Rodrigues (1904–1971) was a Goan writer.

José Inácio Candido de Loyola, popularly known as Fanchu Loyola, was, in the words of Charles Borges, "Goa’s foremost nationalist". He is noted for his journalism and political activism in support of human rights and democracy, humanism, anti-colonialism, and Goan independence.

Francisco João da Costa, better known by his pen-name GIP (1859-1900), was a major figure in Goan journalism of the nineteenth century.

Mortó Sitarama Naique Pratap Rau Sar Dessai, born 4 January 1922) was an Indian-Portuguese medical analyst of Goan origin who worked in Goa and Portugal. He was born in Goa.

Paul Melo e Castro is a British scholar and academic, known for his work on editing and translating particularly Indo-Portuguese literature. His area of work is Lusophone literature, film and visual culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carnival in Goa</span> Festival in Goa, India

Carnival in Goa, also called "Carnaval", "Intruz", "Entrado", or (colloquially) "Viva Carnival" refers to the festival of carnival, or Mardi Gras, in the Indian state of Goa. Though significantly smaller than the well-known Rio Carnival or the Portuguese Carnival of Madeira, the Goa Carnival is the largest in India and one of the few traditional celebrations of the Western Christian holiday in Asia. The current version of the Goa Carnival was modelled after the Rio Carnival by a local musician named Timoteo Fernandes and imposed in 1965 to attract tourists. It has since turned into a major tourist attraction for the small state.

Leopoldo Cipriano da Gama Esq. was a Goan journalist and writer who was active during the era of Portuguese India. He was one of the notable contributors in the Portuguese weekly newspaper called "A Convicção". Through his articles, he skillfully conveyed his humanistic education, ensuring that the Portuguese content he presented to readers was thoughtfully organized and devoid of excessive, unprocessed facts.

References

  1. ↑ Vimala Devi and Manuel de Seabra. A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa. Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1973
  2. ↑ Paul Melo e Castro, Lengthening Shadows, 2 vols (Saligão, India: Goa, 1556, 2016), I p. 26.
  3. ↑ Paul Melo e Castro, Lengthening Shadows, 2 vols (Saligão, India: Goa, 1556, 2016), I pp. 22-23.
  4. ↑ Vimala Devi and Manuel de Seabra. A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa. Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1973
  5. ↑ Paul Melo e Castro. "Dictatorship, liberation, transition in the short fiction of three Portuguese-language Goan writers: Alberto de Menezes Rodrigues, Ananta Rau Sar Dessai and Telo de Mascarenhas". Journal of Romance Studies, 13(2), 2013, pp.1–18
  6. ↑ Paul Melo e Castro, Lengthening Shadows, 2 vols (Saligão, India: Goa, 1556, 2016), I pp. 23-26.
  7. ↑ Paul Melo e Castro, Lengthening Shadows, 2 vols (Saligão, India: Goa, 1556, 2016), I pp. 22-23.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.