A Goan Anti-pastoral
Tarun K Saint
THE BAPTISM OF TONY CALANGUTE by Sudeep Chakravarti Aleph Book Company, New Delhi, 2018, 179 pp., 208
August 2018, volume 42, No 8

The genre of the pastoral has a distinguished ancestry, emerging recognizably in ancient Greece in the form of Theocritus’s Idylls, and in Roman times with Virgil’s Eclogues. These poems about bucolic shepherds lamenting the refusal of their ladyloves (for the most part, city-based) to heed their protestations of love had a country setting, and formed a lasting tradition that continues to this day, with varied re-inflections. We could trace parallel traditions in literatures across the world, where the idealization of country folk and their environs is marked, though in some of the most interesting pastoral poetry, a darker tone may prevail, as the countryside is itself revealed to have a canker eating at its soul. This may, in time, have provided the basis for anti-pastoral writing, often in prose form, which relentlessly debunks the easy romanticization of the idyllic rural ambience.1 Sadly, for many urban dwellers, Goa has become exactly that, a convenient repository of pastoral fantasies that are inevitably set up for a fall. Goan residents have always known better, of course, and there is a rich vein of writing out of Goa that dismantles such stereotypes. To this stream of writing, we may add a novel which is sharply anti-pastoral in its treatment of contemporary Goa.

For Sudeep Chakravarti’s novel The Baptism of Tony Calangute has just been reissued with its original title restored, after an earlier release under the title Once Upon a Time in Aparanta (Aparanta, an ancient term for the Konkan region, and Goa are used interchangeably in the narrative). Chakravarti is a well-established journalist and political analyst, working in conflict zones such as the North East. He has tried his hand at fiction earlier, with the novels Tin Fish (about the life-world of students in a public school, Mayo College, Ajmer, where Chakravarti studied), and Avenue of Kings, which takes the bildungsroman motif further as his protagonist Brandy Ray experiences life in college in Delhi and the transition to adulthood in times of intense violence (the 1984 riots are the backdrop to this story). In this third novelistic outing, Chakravarti turns his attention to Goa, the State in which he currently resides. Today’s Goa becomes a vivid presence as the tale unfolds. The author has absorbed the history and contemporary crises afflicting the coastal State well, as he depicts flagrant encroachments on the Goan way of life by mining companies, land-sharks and mafiosos of various stripes, including the Russian and the local. Along the way, we get vivid descriptions of the changes brought about in Goa by the advent of unfettered commercialization and naked greed; the novel refrains from falling back on a nativist view of the Goan predicament.

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