The Portuguese in the East is not, as the subtitle declares, a comprehensive cultural history of the Portuguese empire in Asia or even of the Estado da Índia, nor perhaps is it intended to be. Instead, it is a somewhat eclectic account of how certain elements of Portuguese language, music and dance interacted, both together and separately, with the indigenous languages, music and dance of some of the Asian peoples among whom the Portuguese settled as colonists, traders or Catholic missionaries. No doubt because the author is of Sri Lankan origin, the majority of the examples she uses to illustrate this process of cultural interaction are taken from Sri Lanka, and to a lesser extent Melaka. She begins by describing how Portuguese became a lingua franca in Asia, not only in those places where the Portuguese settled in significant numbers and on a more or less permanent basis, such as Melaka, Macau, Flores and Timor, but even in those places where they established themselves only briefly or hardly at all. She goes on to show how in many parts of Asia the use of Portuguese as a means of communication with indigenous Asian peoples outlasted the Portuguese presence by hundreds of years and was used by other Europeans who followed in their footsteps as merchants, missionaries, soldiers of fortune or colonists. However, she does not prove convincingly that the phenomenon of the adoption of Portuguese as a lingua franca has anywhere been in itself a vehicle to any significant degree for the transmission of cultural influence in the strict sense of that term rather than simply a practical solution to the problems of communication in a multilingual environment, any more than have other lingue franche, such as Swahili on the east coast of Africa, Malay in the Indonesian archipelago, Franco among galley slaves in Constantinople under Ottoman rule or even, most recently, English worldwide. Portuguese used only as a lingua franca has certainly not exercised a cultural influence comparable to that of standard Portuguese and its variants in those countries where it has been adopted as the national or one of several official languages, or even of creoles such as Sri Lanka Indo-Portuguese or Melaka Portuguese Creole, to a detailed examination of which Dr de Silva Jayasuriya devotes a large part of the rest of her book.
De Silva Jayasuriya asserts that both these creoles, as with other creoles and with pidgin, so far from being inferior or bastardised forms of Portuguese, are languages in their own right and that their emergence demonstrates how cultural interaction can bring about the creation of new art forms. Little of what she has to say about these linguistic phenomena and their cultural implications in Portuguese Asia is new, though few scholars have described them in such meticulous detail, and it is in the chapters which deal with the combined influences of Portuguese secular and religious literature, music and dance on the indigenous folk literature, music and dance of some Asian peoples, particularly the Sri Lankans, that she really comes into her own and is at her most innovative. Her analysis and translations into standard Portuguese and English of two Sri Lankan Indo-Portuguese ballads, one from the collection made by the nineteenth-century German linguist, Hugo Schuchardt, now in the University of Graz, and the other, entitled ‘Margarita Maria Margarita’, from the Hugh Nevill Collection in the British Library, demonstrate admirably her contention that “the literatures of peoples who have come into contact, particularly folk songs, mirror the interaction of their cultural systems” (p. 12). To demonstrate how this cultural interaction works in both directions, she then compares the lyrics of these ballads with the form and the imagery of the Cantiga de Ceilão by the Portuguese poet Jorge de Sena.
In another chapter, somewhat misleadingly entitled ‘Music and Postcolonial Identity’, de Silva Jayasuriya discusses the music to which these ballads were sung and the dances associated with them, and in this connection her account of the modern Sri Lankan baila and kaffrinha is especially interesting. Here again, however, it is a pity that she concentrates on Sri Lanka and has little to say about those places, such as the Banda Islands, where the Portuguese presence was relatively fleeting but a strong Portuguese influence on both music and dance has remained to this day.
The author also refers to the adoption in some parts of Portuguese Asia of Western musical instruments and Western principles of harmony and polyphony that have led to the development of new forms of choral music, for example among the Goan Catholic communities, whose religious music combines elements of folk music with Western musical traditions. She also devotes some pages to a survey of the Portuguese musical legacy in Southeast Asia and the songs and dances, such as the kroncong, joget, ronggang and dondang sayang, that evolved in the port cities and courts of Malay and Indonesian rulers, and cites the sung pantun, in which the indigenous Malay verse form is set to music using a variety of Western and Asian instruments as another example of this blending of indigenous and Portuguese elements. She perhaps goes a little far when she asserts that “music and dance unravel the past”, but she is correct in stating that they “reveal the complexity of identities” (p. 70), especially in the context of the fusion of local and Western forms in the musical culture of Asian countries in the post-colonial period.
The second half of the book is devoted to a glossary of borrowings from the Portuguese in numerous Asian languages, including Malay/Indonesian and several of the regional languages of the Indonesian archipelago, and some Indo-European and Dravidian languages spoken in the Indian sub-continent, as well as several languages, such as Tibetan and Khmer, spoken by peoples whose exposure to Portuguese influence has been slight. Not surprisingly, most of the borrowings are of words for material objects, foodstuffs, and proper names and titles introduced by the Portuguese or associated with education, administration, religion or music. De Silva Jayasuriya is at pains to demonstrate that these lexical borrowings result from cross-cultural contacts made by trade and colonisation. But again it is questionable whether these borrowings indicate any significant degree of cultural influence exercised by Portuguese speakers on the speakers of the other language, since most of the borrowings of the latter were made for the purely practical reason that they were words for items that were unknown among them before the Portuguese arrived. Moreover, many of the words the author lists were not introduced directly from Portuguese but through the medium of Indo-Portuguese from Arabic, Sinhala or other Asian languages. She is on surer ground when she deals with grammatical and syntactical borrowings, such as gender differentiation and word order, which generally only occur after a long and deep exposure of the indigenous peoples to Portuguese influence.
The author gives a lengthy analysis of Melaka Portuguese Creole (Papia Kristang) and its relationship both to Baba Malay and Melaka Bazaar Malay and follows it with an even lengthier analysis of Sri Lankan Portuguese Creole, much of which duplicates the material she has already examined at various points in previous chapters. This is but one example of the her tendency to scatter material on a single topic in different chapters, and her attempts to overcome this lack of order by the device of frequent repetition of the same point, and in particular of the information, some of it not entirely accurate, that she provides on the historical context of the material. This muddled presentation suggests that some of the work may have been taken directly from some of her 22 published articles that she lists in her bibliography.
There are a few errors in de Silva Jayasuriya's Portuguese; one that she makes with irritating frequency is to give Trinidade as the Portuguese for ‘Trinity’.
This book, despite belying its title by dealing more exhaustively with cultural exchanges in the field of language and music between Sri Lanka and Portugal than with other forms of cultural exchange with other Asian countries where there has been a Portuguese presence, its confusing and repetitious presentation of the data, and its inclusion of some irrelevant detail, nevertheless gives a perceptive analysis of how at certain times in certain parts of Asia profound and enduring cultural interaction occurred between the Portuguese and the indigenous inhabitants. It goes some way towards proving, if further proof were needed, that the Portuguese seaborne empire was much more than merely a chain of fortalezas and feitorias strung across the ocean between east Africa and Japan, loosely linked together by membership of the Estado da Índia, and this makes it a valuable contribution to the study of the cultural history of Portuguese Asia as a whole.
