– Joaquim Magalhães de Castro
We arrived at Goalpara hoping to find traces of the so-called “firingis”. The white statue of one of the rajas (certainly of the Narayan caste) wielding sword and shield announces the small village, and soon fifty yards ahead we come across the first symbol of indigenous Christianity: the parish church.
The nuns who live there are not able to tell us how many Catholics there are and how little they understand the meaning of the term “firingi”. Or if they understand, they pretend not to understand, perhaps because of the negative connotation that the word has today. They also do not know if there are Portuguese nicknames among the faithful (of course there is, says my consciousness and extensive experience on the ground) and immediately, perhaps to disguise ignorance, they divert the talk to a topic where they feel more comfortable: they ask if I am Catholic.
Finally, as the conversation does not develop (there was no theme for her), they send us to St Thomas school, where one of the responsible priests assures us that “some 300 Catholic families live in Goalpara.” He does not know, however, when and how they arrived. As we speak we notice the clear European features of the archbishop portrayed in the photo exposed in the entrance hall. We are approached by curious and colorful children. All expressed themselves in English and in one or the other obvious Western traits stand out. We walk a few hundred yards – the school area is huge, more like an educational farm – to the pavilions where the Sisters of Charity care for a hundred orphan girls. One of the nuns seems to come out of cloister of a provincial convent in Portugal. In fact, the so-called “Portuguese of Goalpara” community extends to Rangamati and also to Dhubri, another of the British enclaves mentioned by the British, who first seized Bengal and soon after all of India. Being our lightning visit a little bit more one might expect. I look forward, however, to the crossing of the Brahmaputra to try to locate the Rangamati that the maps insist on not wanting to unravel. More questions, in the short stops along the way, and again, here and there, faces that seem familiar to me. Or not.
Perhaps I am only informed by what I have been able to fish in one of my journeys to this valuable source of letters and facts that is archive.org, a virtual database that brings together thousands of titles from different libraries free of copyright and, as such, of free download. It has proved to be a very useful tool, especially as far as what we have left in the corners of the British empire, and which its officials, through reports, surveys and travel journals, inadvertently mention, almost always, how could it not be, in a condescending, prejudiced and unfriendly approach.
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