Luis Dias
Luis Dias
4 posts published by Luis Dias during April 2021
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Luis Dias
Maybe some of you have heard of Dr. Acacio Gabriel Viegas (1 April 1856 – 21 February 1933). It was his 165th birth anniversary earlier this month.

I only heard about him around a decade ago. Prior to that, I probably passed by his statue near Mumbai’s Metro cinema without realizing it.

I’ve just finished reading ‘Room 000: Narrative of the Bombay Plague’ by Kalpish Ratna.

Ishrat Syed and Kalpana Swaminathan, both surgeons, writing together as ‘Kalpish Ratna’ explore the interface between science and the humanities. ‘Room 000’ is a fascinating read, especially for one with a medical background, but I’d recommend it to everyone. Had a book like this been around in my medical student years, I’d have had a better sense of perspective and awe when visiting Grant Medical College

(where Room 000, the site of groundbreaking discovery on the plague, was located) and so many other city landmarks. It brings to life Alexander Yersin

(1863-1943, who lives on through the name of the plague bacillus, Yersinia pestis),

Robert Koch

(1843-1910, one of the founders of modern bacteriology),

Waldemar Mordecai Haffkine

(1860-1930, who developed vaccines against cholera and bubonic plague),

Paul-Louis Simond

(1858-1947 who demonstrated that the intermediates in the transmission of bubonic plague from rats to humans were the fleas Xenopsylla cheopis that dwell on infected rats) and so many other pioneers who all were in India around the time of the Bombay Plague epidemic in the late 1890s spilling into the twentieth century.

It was thrilling to travel back in time into their world, and a refresher course on basic principles of bacteriology, from Koch’s postulates

to the intricacies of Gram staining.

Dr. Acacio Viegas features very prominently in the book (I counted at least 168 mentions), and deservedly so. To him goes the credit for spotting the index case and correctly diagnosing the outbreak as bubonic plague, much to the skepticism and scorn of some of his peers. He then launched a campaign to clean up slums and exterminate rats, the carriers of the plague.

His diagnosis prompted the British government to bring in four teams of independent experts to ‘confirm his findings’ (Kalpish Ratna speculates that there might have been subtle racism, in mistrusting the acumen of a native), most famously Haffkine, whose Institute still stands in Parel.

Viegas’ early diagnosis saved untold thousands of lives. He personally inoculated around 18,000 residents with Haffkine’s serum.

Kalpish Ratna portray him as a “grave physician”, who after hours was a “dreamy-eyed romantic, inclined to music, a classicist who read Camões-but not Bocage”, a “sharp dresser with a luxuriant crop of curls he tried in vain to tamp with pomade.” It is an imaginative description, given the little that is indeed known of his personal life.

There are so many parallels between the lives of Dr. Acacio Viegas and my own great-grandfather Gen. Dr. Miguel Caetano Dias (1854-1936).

They both were Goan doctors of course, but their timelines overlap neatly, born two years apart and their deaths three years from each other. Both were at the forefront of the campaign against plague in their respective cities, at different times (1896 onwards in the case of Viegas in Bombay; the first decade or so of the 20th century in Goa for Dr. Dias) and from slightly different vantage points. While Dr. Viegas was in private practice, Dr. Dias was at the helm of both the Escola Médica and Serviços de Saúde (Health Services). Both, from all available accounts didn’t discriminate between rich or poor.

Both saw the connection between public health and civic administration: Dr. Viegas became President (the first native Christian to do so) of the Bombay Municipal Corporation in 1906; Dr. Dias was President of the first Provincial Congress of Goa and also mayor of the Municipal Council of Ilhas.

Both had statues erected in their memory for their services to humanity in combating the same disease even during colonial regimes, British and Portuguese. Dr. Dias had this honour in his lifetime;

with Dr. Viegas it was three years posthumously, 1936, coincidentally the year of Dr. Dias’ death.

As I am from the family of Dr. Miguel Caetano Dias, I am privy to much about even his early years, passed down as oral history through generations.

I was unable to find any information on Dr. Viegas’ years growing up in Arpora. His family must have a similar oral history, perhaps even photographs. Currently, there is just one photograph from his later years

in the public domain, and of course pictures of the statue.

Kalpish Ratna bestows a wife Paloma and two unnamed children on him, and a genealogy website says his wife was Amelia, but I couldn’t find any further information on his Arpora years or about his family. Would anyone know where his family house was in Arpora, and if it still stands?

I also couldn’t help wondering: what prompted Dr. Viegas’ parents to send him to St Xavier’s High School Bombay after his primary education (primeiro grau) in Goa? Having completed his matriculation with distinction in 1874, he enrolled in Grant Medical College, getting a First Class at the Licentiate in Medicine and Surgery degree examination in 1880, later setting up private practice in Mandvi in South Bombay. From there he made history.

In contrast, my great-grandfather finished his school education in Portuguese Goa and then proceeded to study medicine in Lisbon. He went on to make history too. But Dr. Viegas and Dr. Dias occupied two different worlds, the Anglophone and the Lusophone.

The main reason the young Miguel Caetano chose Lisbon for his medical studies must have been the fact that his brother was already there.

But was Bombay ever an alternative option? It definitely would have been cheaper, and much closer to home. The story of his descendants would have been quite different had he studied medicine in Bombay. Interestingly enough, he did marry a ‘Bombay’ girl, Veronica, sister of Dr. Austin da Silva, who founded Holy Family hospital in Bandra.

My great-grandmother Veronica da Silva Dias,

although fluent in Portuguese, seems to have preferred English. This is clear from her letters to her eldest son, my grandfather Dr. Vítor Manuel Dias (1892-1949).

She would begin in Portuguese, “Meu querido filho” (My dear son), but after a few lines lapse into English.

What the separate trajectories of Dr. Acacio Viegas and Dr. Miguel Caestano Dias do demonstrate is how profoundly the medium of instruction (in these two cases, English and Portuguese) can set one on completely different life paths.

That said, Dr. Viegas and Dr. Dias would certainly have known of each other, and perhaps even corresponded with or even met each other.

I’ve not explored primary sources on the plague in Goa, but the secondary sources I’ve read only touch upon the sanitary measures employed. It is eminently plausible that the plague came to Goa from Bombay. Did its treatment come from there too? Were plague vaccines (serum, specifically the Haffkine serum; Haffkine even worked for a while in Daman) imported from Bombay? Or did politics or financial considerations come in the way? I’d love to know more.

(An edited version of this article was published on 25 April 2021 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

(An edited version of this article was also published on 28 April 2021 in Scroll.in)

Any violin student beyond a certain level will have heard of Kreutzer. His 42 etudes or caprices (42 études ou caprices)

are almost a rite of passage, a core part of the teaching repertoire ever since their publication around 1796. I have my much-used copy from my student days, and just before last year’s lockdown gave our more advanced Child’s Play violin students theirs. I still return to Étude 2 with its varied bowings.

French violinist-composer, conductor and pedagogue Rodolphe Kreutzer (1766-1831)

composed prolifically, with 14 violin concertos and 40 operas among other works. But it is for the etudes that he is remembered today.

Rather unfairly, he is also remembered for the ‘Kreutzer’ sonata (no. 9 opus 47 in A major) by Beethoven, dedicated to Kreutzer but which the violinist, not a fan of Beethoven’s music, actually spurned, calling it “outrageously unintelligible” and never playing it. It must count as one of the oddest dedications in music history.

Many of you will recall the eloquent account of this work in Panjim in 2012 by Israeli violinist Hadar Rimon (Natasha Tadson, piano).

It’s still up there with some of the most memorable violin-piano concerts I’ve heard in Goa.

Why did Beethoven dedicate a work to Kretuzer who thought so little of it? What is not so well-known is that Beethoven had originally dedicated it to another violinist who has faded into oblivion but is now getting his due.

George Augustus (also Hieronymus Hyppolitus de Augustus) Polgreen Bridgetower (1778 – 1860) was a violin virtuoso with an interesting story. He was born in Biała Podlaska, Poland to John Frederick Bridgetower, probably of West Indian descent, (most likely Barbados, with the name Bridgetower derived from the island’s capital, Bridgetown); and Maria Anna Ursula Schimdt from Germany. Both are thought to have been servants to nobility, although the father claimed to be an African prince (as stated on George’s baptismal record).

The year after George’s birth, his father found himself employed as servant to the Hungarian Prince Nicolas Esterházy,

the patron of Austrian composer Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

in Eisenstadt and Esterháza. Growing up in the music-loving Prince’s household must have had a strong inﬂuence on George’s development as a musician.

It is remarkable that the musical potential of a servants’ child, and a mixed-race one at that, was spotted at all, and so early. It is now certain that Haydn himself tutored Bridgetower in his early years. I had used the example of George Bridgetower at my presentation at Carnegie Hall, New York in 2012 for Child’s Play, to make the point that musical potential can be found in the most serendipitous places if children are only given the opportunity and encouragement.

The Bridgetowers moved to London soon after. By the age of ten, the young prodigy was established as a professional violinist and was performing with the Royal Philharmonic Society Orchestra at Drury Lane Theatre.

He took up composing and teaching, and later attended Trinity Hall, Cambridge where he earned a Bachelor of Music degree. In 1789, his concerts took him to Paris, London, Bristol and Bath.

After his Paris concert, French journal Le Mercure de France wrote: “His talent is one of the best replies one can give to philosophers who wish to deprive people of his nation and colour of the opportunity to distinguish themselves in the arts.”

His father arranged for him to play before the music-loving monarchs, King George III and Queen Charlotte.

Bridgetower also caught the attention of the Prince Regent, (the future King George IV)

who oversaw his further music education (studying with the likes of Thomas Attwood and Giovanni Battista Viotti)

and effectively became his guardian after his father went astray.

In 1802, Bridgetower was given leave to visit his mother and his brother (a cellist, Friedrich Joseph Bridgetower) in Dresden, where the brothers performed together. The following year, he visited Vienna at the invitation of Prince Lobkowitz, Beethoven’s patron, to play Beethoven’s string quartets.

The two musicians bonded instantly. They had much in common: they were less than a decade apart in age; both had abusive fathers who tried to exploit their prodigious musical ability.

It must be remembered that this encounter took place just a few months after Beethoven had seriously contemplated suicide and wrote his Heiligenstadt Testament documenting his despair over inexorably worsening deafness. But now he seemed to have found joie de vivre again. The two stayed up nights, drinking and merry-making.

Beethoven was so impressed by Bridgetower’s violin virtuosity that he dedicated this violin sonata to him, with this lighthearted inscription: “Sonata mulattica composta per il mulatto Brischdauer, gran pazzo e compositore mulattico” (“Mulatto sonata composed for the mulatto Bridgetower, great lunatic and mulatto composer”). Beethoven himself was nicknamed “the Spaniard” due to his own swarthy complexion and theories still abound on his ‘African’ blood, so the term “mulaticco” shold be interpreted in this context.

The work was written in a fit of creative frenzy. Its first public performance was given by dedicatee and composer at Vienna’s Augarten on the morning of 24 May 1803. But at 4.30 AM that morning, Beethoven’s pupil Ferdinand Ries was still copying out the parts. He managed just the first two movements of the violin part, and just sketched out the piano part. Bridgetower had to virtually sight-read most of the music, looking over Beethoven’s shoulder at the hastily scribbled score. Beethoven played his part from memory.

At one point Bridgetower amended or made an embellishment to the violin part, which so surprised and pleased Beethoven that he leapt up from his bench, saying Noch einmal, mein lieber Bursch!” (“Once more, my dear fellow!”).

Beethoven gave Bridgetower a tuning fork as a friendship token. But at some point, perhaps that evening over celebratory drinks in a tavern, Beethoven took offence over a remark Bridgetower allegedly made about “a girl” who Beethoven was happened to be fond of. Beethoven, enraged, withdrew the dedication and terminated the friendship. Instead the sonata was dedicated to Kreutzer, probably a calculated move by Beethoven who had planned to move to Paris (but never did).

Bridgetower returned to England, became a family man, and continued composing, teaching and performing. Two of his compositions survive, and one hopes that at least one violin concerto (composed around 1805 and that he performed often) may someday resurface. He is buried in Kensal Green cemetery.

The Kreutzer sonata has been immortalized as a novella (1889) by Leo Tolstoy

and the novella in turn has inspired art,

theatre

and film.

But Bridgetower has been largely forgotten.

In 2009, US poet-laureate Rita Dove wrote a collection of poems ‘Sonata Mulattica: A Life in Five Movements and a Short Play’

about Bridgetower and the Beethoven sonata.

Last month, over 15,000 people signed a petition for a plaque to be installed in the Assembly Rooms in Bath, where Bridgetower is known to have played.

Dove’s book is the basis for a film ‘Sonata Mulattica’

juxtaposing the lives of Bridgetower and of contemporary black musician Joshua Coyne (1993-) exploring racial prejudice from Bridgetower’s time to ours, and raises uncomfortable questions over how much (or little) attitudes have improved since then.

(An edited version of this article was published on 18 April 2021 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

The obstruction to the Suez Canal by an ultra-large Golden-class container ship ‘Ever Given’ for just a week (23-29 March 2021) has highlighted just how vital the waterway is to global trade ever since its opening in 1869.

The vessel is one of the largest container ships in the world, at 400 meters in length almost as long as the Empire State building is tall, far exceeding the width of the Suez canal, under 300 meters at its widest, even in its 2015 newly-widened segment.

The Suez Canal has played its role in altering the course of history as well.

During the ‘Ever Given’ stalemate, I happened to watch an episode (Season 2, Episode 1) of the historical drama Netflix series ‘The Crown’,

aptly titled ‘The Misadventure’. It is a double entendre, referring both to Prince Philip’s extra-marital affairs as well as to Britain’s ill-advised involvement in the 1956 Suez crisis. This year 2021 marks its 65th anniversary.

Briefly: Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal by its fiery President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970)

was followed by the invasion of Egypt by Israel, joined later by Britain and France under the ostensible pretext of ‘peacekeeping’, but with the real intent of regaining control of the Canal. The Suez crisis is therefore called the second Arab-Israeli war or the Tripartite Aggression in the Arab world.

The confrontation between Egypt and Britain put independent India and its first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964)

in a delicate position. All three nations belonged to the Commonwealth; but Nasser and Nehru (with Yugoslavia’s Josip Tito) were founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).

In fact, literally just a week before Nasser’s move to seize control of the Suez Canal, he had co-signed the Declaration of Brijuni in Yugoslavia on 19 July 1956, formalizing the birth of NAM.

Nasser had given no inkling to Nehru about what was obviously a calculated decision, bound to elicit a reaction.

The picture was complicated further by the United States romancing Pakistan in 1954; India thus felt compelled to maintain good relations with Britain as a sort of counterweight to this equation. India therefore had to tread cautiously.

Nehru wrote to C Rajagopalachari in August 1956: “This is by far the most difficult and dangerous situation in international affairs we have faced since independence…Probably we shall end by displeasing our friends on both sides.”

Shortly after Egypt’s takeover of the Suez Canal, an international conference comprised of the largest users of the Canal and a few other countries was held in London to defuse tensions. While Egypt refused to attend, it used India (and the Soviet Union) to represent its interests. Nehru (via the Indian delegate Krishna Menon) took India’s role of mediator seriously.

But the Tripartite Aggression by Israel, Britain and France a few months later caused Nehru to abandon the balancing act. Despite military successes by the three nations, pressure from the United States (enraged at having been kept in the dark about the military offensive by all three nations) and the Soviet Union threat of using nuclear weapons in Egypt’s defence led to a ceasefire. Egypt maintained sovereign control over the Suez Canal, and Britain and France lost what had remained of their post-WWII international clout. India was asked to lead the international United Nations peacekeeping force to enforce the armistice line between Egypt and Israel.

The role of Jawaharlal Nehru, both as leader of NAM and as India’s Prime Minister, was significant in this chapter in world history.

Nehru-bashing and airbrushing history have become almost a national pastime, but it is worth examining more closely his statesmanship, and hopefully, learning from it.

To quote Srinath Raghavan, senior fellow, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi (‘India should be prepared for the perils and prospects of diplomatic leadership’ Hindustan Times, 26 October 2016): “By showcasing its ability to play a genuinely independent role, India buttressed its standing as an Asian power. This history is worth recalling today. At a time when West Asia is in the throes of major conflicts, India is nowhere in the picture. It has stayed out of all international efforts to manage these conflicts, focusing instead on imminent threats to Indians living in the region. This stance sits awkwardly with India’s professed desire to be a leading power in its extended neighbourhood. The story of its involvement in the Suez crisis could offer New Delhi a lesson or two in the perils and prospects of diplomatic leadership.”

In what could be seen as Egypt’s ‘return of the favour’ to India, during the hostilities between India and Portugal leading up to the integration of Goa to the Indian Union in December 1961, an attempt by Portugal to send naval warships to Goa to reinforce its marine defences was foiled when President Nasser of Egypt denied the ships access to the Suez Canal.

It is interesting to note how it was reported in the international press. David Lawrence wrote in the Spokane Daily Chronicle on 23 December 1961 (‘Nasser Violates Pledge on Suez Canal Passage’), calling it “a grave blunder – possibly worse in its effects than Nehru’s theft of the Portuguese territory of Goa.” He speculated that “not long ago, Prime Minister Nehru stopped off at Cairo to visit President Nasser. Presumably an agreement was made then that if Portugal attempted to come to the rescue of her nationals in Goa, the Egyptians would block passage of any Portuguese ship through the Suez Canal. Such a deal would imply that the head of the Indian government disclosed his plans for aggression and Nasser was in effect, a party to them.”

It was followed by another short article: ‘Grab of Goa causes talk of Hong Kong, Macao’, the “alarm” over China possibly “taking the cue from India to invade the British colony of Hong Kong and the Portuguese colony of Macao.”

Egypt’s support of India over Goa in 1961 is also confirmed by Egyptian researcher Zaki Awad, El Sayed in ‘Egypt and India, A study of political and cultural relations, 1947–1964’, adding: “the fact that NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organisation] was supporting the Portuguese military action did not deter Egypt from standing by India.”

As it transpired, neither the NATO alliance nor the centuries-old Anglo-Portuguese treaty (“to be friends to friends and enemies to enemies”) worked to Portugal’s advantage in this instance.

My guess is that even if Nasser had allowed the Portuguese warships through the Suez, the conflict might have been longer-drawn and bloodier, but it wouldn’t have changed the outcome.

Be that as it may, one couldn’t fail to register the irony when reading this excerpt in Charles Hallberg’s book ‘The Suez Canal: Its History and Diplomatic Importance’. The same waterway that “brought back to the Mediterranean the traffic in oriental commodities which, ever since the epochal voyage of Vasco da Gama late in the fifteenth century, had followed the long route around the Cape of Good Hope” by the very act of its blockage of access played its part in 1961 in facilitating Portugal’s exit from its most-cherished and longest-held possession, beginning just 12 years following that 1498 ‘epochal’ voyage.

(An edited version of this article was published on 11 April 2021 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

I was amused to come across an anecdote recently, wherein yesteryear Congressman Y.B. Chavan

“who despite being a Congressman, campaigned actively for Goa’s integration in Maharashtra” in the 1960s and “referred to Goan Christians as ‘Black Portuguese’”. Goan Christians at the time were apparently, and quite understandably, enraged by the taunt. But what stung more, the word ‘black’, ‘Portuguese’, or both?

Funnily enough, these words came up again in the oddest of contexts, in the wake of Oprah Winfrey’s widely-televised interview with Meghan Markle and her husband, Prince Harry, the Duchess and Duke of Sussex.

The couple revealed that racism within the British royal family and the press played “a large part” in the couple’s decision to leave the UK.

Markel’s marriage to Prince Harry in 2018

only fuelled the obsession with colour (or ‘blackness’) within the British royal family on account of her mixed-race background.

Many commented on the timeliness of the release of ‘Bridgerton’,

the hugely popular Netflix period drama series in relation to the vitriol hurled at Markle (she was at the receiving end of 5000 racist and abusive tweets in just two months in 2019) merely on account of her colour, raising “pointed questions on who we [British society] want to be now.”

The show “ignited discussion about British Royals’ possible African ancestry”, in highlighting the rumoured “blackness” of Queen Charlotte (1744-1818),

consort of King George III (unfortunately better remembered today for the mental illness that consumed him in his final years), although she is not a character in historical romance author Julia Quinn’s novels that the ‘Bridgerton’ series is based on.

Its creator Chris Van Dusen was inspired by historical debate over the 1940s African ancestry myth of Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz “…to base the show in an alternative history in which Queen Charlotte’s mixed-race heritage was not only well-established but was transformative for Black people and other people of colour in England.”

In my years working in obstetrics and gynaecology in London, we often had to go to training sessions at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea hospital

– a maternity, women’s and neonatal care hospital down the road from Hammersmith hospital where I worked and resided for a year. At the time, one was too absorbed in clinical work to bother about the monarchs whose names adorned public institutions. But it turns out that in 1809 Queen Charlotte founded the General Lying-in Hospital,

a hospital for expectant mothers, which today bears her name.

George III and Charlotte were keen music-lovers;

both played harpsichord and he the flute as well. Both admired the music of Handel. The queen had Johann Christian Bach, (eleventh son of the great Johann Sebastian) as her music-master. In 1764, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) dazzled their royal court with his prodigious skill at the keyboard, and accompanied Queen Charlotte as she sang an aria. His six Opus 3 sonatas are dedicated to her.

Also an amateur botanist, the South African crane flower or Bird of Paradise is named Streitlizia reginae after her.

Of the couple’s 15 children, thirteen survived, among them two future kings (George IV and William IV) and Prince Edward, father of Queen Victoria.

For all that, suspicion over her supposed ‘African’ ancestry would persist during and after her life.

A 1761 portrait of her by Scottish portrait-painter Alan Ramsay

led Jamaican-American writer Joel Augustus Rogers (1880-1966) to conclude in his book ‘Sex and Race, volume I’ (1940) that she must have had a “Negro strain” based on his observations of her “broad nostrils and heavy lips”. Rogers also quotes her contemporary, the man of letters Horace Walpole, as having described her “nostrils spreading too wide; mouth has the same fault.” Another contemporary, Baron Stockmar said that Queen Charlotte had a “mullato face” as a baby (never mind that he had never actually met her until two years before her death). Despite the flimsiness and pettiness of these ‘observations’, the rumour mill hasn’t ceased.

This is where the Portuguese angle comes in. Charlotte’s alleged ‘African’ ancestor was thought to be Madragana ben Aloandro (c.1230-) of Faro, Algarve,

mistress to Portuguese King Afonso III (1210-1279), possibly “given to him” as a spoil of war when he ended the so-called ‘Reconquista’ by taking Faro in 1249; she would have been nineteen at the time. She bore him two children, (one of them a daughter named Urraca!). When the king’s “passion for her faded” around 1260, she was married off to one Fernão Rei, possibly a knight.

She has been romanticised and today is part of the tourist trail in Faro: you can take a guided tour of the city with someone dressed as Madragana.

Not surprisingly, just as with Queen Charlotte in England, Madragana was the subject of much conjecture in Portugal regarding her ethnicity, with chronicler Duarte Nunes de Leão claiming she was a ‘Moor’ (Moura, referring to ‘north-western African Muslim people of mixed Berber and Arab descent”) and António Caetano de Sousa disputing it two centuries later.

Most historians believe Madragana was Mozarab (Iberian Christians who lived under Muslim rule in Al-Andalus following the conquest of the Christian Visigothic Kingdom by the Umayyad Caliphate) and therefore not African. Even if she were, they continue, she would have been Berber, not sub-Saharan (to whom the description ‘Negroid’ usually has been applied, although a pejorative term today). In any case, fifteen generations separated the two women, so any genetic inheritance is unlikely to have been noticeable.

In the elaborate ‘line of descent’ connecting Charlotte to Madragana, another woman’s name is prominently displayed almost at the midpoint:

Margarita de Castro e Sousa (c.1440?) of the ‘elder and nobler’ Sousa family of Portugal. From that family, Martim Afonso de Sousa (c. 1500 –1564)

is known to us as Governor of Estado da Índia (1542-1545) and for the acquisition of Diu (1535). Curiously, no observations of a ‘Negroid strain’ have been made about his appearance in several excellent portraits of him.

Perhaps its phenotypic manifestation skipped his generation?

Furthermore, if one believes Wikipedia, which asserts that “there isn’t a single noble man (or woman) in Portugal that does not have the blood of the Sousas,” it follows therefore that they all inherit the ‘blood’ of Margarita de Castro e Sousa, and through her, the ‘blood’ of Madragana.

Doesn’t all this seem ridiculous? What’s the fuss about, anyway? So what if there is black or any non-white ancestry in the bloodline of a European royal family, whether British or Portuguese? Is it because they are traditionally seen as ‘white’ bastions, notoriously fastidious about marriage alliances, and so a deviation from the norm, (a ‘non-white’ partner), is therefore viewed as scandalous? Or is it a combined phobia, one of colour as well as Islamophobia?

This speculation over ‘dilution’ of blood over generations, as if African genetic contribution were some sort of contaminant that needed ‘purifying’, discussed with such seriousness by scholars, reeks of racism. That it should even be an issue proves how difficult it is to eradicate prejudice.

(An edited version of this article was published on 04 April 2021 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)