Reading letters to my parents from TB Cunha, the ‘Father of Goan nationalism’

Going through the family archive of documents can be an emotional roller coaster. Often (as was most recently the case at the time of my mother’s demise in April 2024), one needs to find a specific elusive paper that you thought was safely filed away in this folder, only to find it has mysteriously migrated elsewhere and one has to turn the house upside down in order to retrieve it.

Too often, one finds that a precious document or photograph has gotten even yellower and more brittle and fragile. Then one has to digitise it and live in hope that one will remember where that jpeg gets filed away, and hope it doesn’t get corrupted or deleted due to some computer virus or other hocus-pocus that I can’t understand.

But there are some photographs and letters that stop you in your tracks from whatever your initial quest had been and take you in a completely different direction. It doesn’t happen often, but it is quite an experience when it does.

Last month, our family visited Goa’s Aguada fort, now for some inexplicable reason re-branded as “Aguad”, dropping the final “a”. Maybe it is easier for the visitor and tourist to pronounce. Why don’t we drop the “a” in “Goa” and just call our state “Go”?

It was our first visit to the museum, and our son, recently out of high school, still had the history of the Goan Liberation movement fresh in his memory. By coincidence, a few days earlier, tidying up a pile of old letters and documents, I had found the sheaf of letters to my mother and father in the years before they were married from the “Father of Goan nationalism”, Tristão de Bragança Cunha (1891-1958), better known as TB Cunha.

A significant portion of the museum at Fort Aguada is devoted to Cunha, as he was imprisoned in a dark damp cell there by the Portuguese authorities for his activities against the regime.

A brief biography: Born on April 2, 1891 in Chandor, South Goa, Cunha finished his school education in Nova Goa (today, the state capital Panjim or Panaji). He went to Pondicherry for his baccalauréat and then to Paris, where he secured a degree in electrical engineering at the Sorbonne.

In France, Cunha was associated with the Anti-Imperialist League. He published a biography of Mahatma Gandhi in French before the more famous one by Romain Rolland.

On his return to Goa, Cunha founded the Goa National Congress in 1928. He campaigned for Goan freedom from Portuguese rule through articles and books.

He was badly beaten by Portuguese police after making a protest speech in Margao in 1946, days after Ram Manohar Lohia gave his call for freedom at the same location on June 18. That date is now celebrated as Goa Revolution Day.

Cunha was arrested and confined in a solitary cell at Fort Aguada. He was the first civilian in Goa to be tried by a military tribunal. He was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment in Portugal’s notorious Peniche Fortress, to which many other Goan freedom fighters were also dispatched.

After his release, he made his way to Mumbai, where he formed the Goa Acrtion Committee to co-ordinate the activities of the many Goan freedom groups operating by then. He also published a newspaper called Free Goa.

He died on September 26, 1958. His remains lie in an urn at Panjim’s Azad Maidan.

Apart from the obvious fact that Cunha was a giant in Goan history, his letters throw warm light on the milestones in my own parents’ lives. For instance, when recreating a chronology of my mother Dr Elvira Dias’s life, I recalled that she had completed her MBBS exams in April 1956.

How lovely therefore to find a letter from Cunha dated July 19 of that year. In earlier correspondence, he had addressed her simply as “Miss Elvira”, but in this instance, he begins with “Dear Dr Elvira de Sousa”.

“First of all I congratulate you for your success in your Final Exam in your medical studies and wish you a brilliant and prosperous career of doctor,” he writes. “Your graduation has put you in a good position to help to the welfare of the people and I am sure that you will be of great service to the collectivity.”

Cunha then writes laconically about having “received the letter that you mention and I have replied to it, and also have published in my paper the translation of the Lawyer’s letter as you may have need. Copies of this since have been sent to Germany,” where my father was studying at the time.

His address, written in his hand at the top right of every letter, was then, as now, a very fashionable one: the Art Deco building Sunshine (on the Oval Maidan), Churchgate Reclamation, Fort, Bombay.

He ends “With best greetings, Yours sincerely, TB Cunha.”

In one letter, he mentions having called her hostel “but was told that you were out.” In another, he apologise for having missed her visit when she called on him.

You have to marvel at Cunha’s penmanship; it is legible most of the time and extremely neat. You get the impression of someone who has thought through his sentences and paragraphs before he commences writing. In all his correspondence spanning several years, there isn’t a single crossed-out word. He seems to have had a fondness for black ink, as he uses it in all the correspondence.

The letters to my father in West Germany are on diaphanous “air mail” paper, so the writing on each side can be difficult to read. The tone is a tad more formal, business-like.

In a letter on July 3, 1956, Cunha writes: “I am in receipt of your two last letters, thanks…I have sent to you two copies of the past issues of ‘Free Goa’ in order [that] you may send over to Lisbon.”

He adds, “I have been sending 3 copies with 3 different addresses to Portugal but I don’t know if they reach the addresses as ‘K’ has told me that none reached lately when he was there. So please make inquiries if any of them have been received there.”

Further on he laments, “It looks as if pro-Portuguese elements have succeeded in sabotaging the work for Liberation.”

In another letter he rants about a foreign student who borrowed an important reference book but never returned it.

Somewhere along the line, he sort of nudges my father to think of “Miss Elvira” as wife material. He gave their union his stamp of approval.

The letters shed some light on what was going on in his life too. The last letter I could find is from 1957; he was dead just a year later.

My parents would have been aghast at my making their personal correspondence public. But this is no ordinary personal correspondence when the sender is someone as larger-than-life as Cunha. With Goa Revolution Day upon us, I thought this would be a fitting time to share this facet of family history.

A version of this article first appeared in The Navhind Times, Goa. It has been reproduced with the permission of the writer.

June 18 is Goa Revolution Day.

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