If Goa evokes feni, fish curry and susegad in the public imagination, Selma Carvalho’s book, Guts, Glory and Empire: The Epic Story of Goans in Zanzibar 1865-1910, is a timely invitation to look beyond the cliché. Its appearance is timely for another reason as well. Recently, there has been a growing interest in Indian Ocean history, shifting attention from the centres of imperial power to the margins. This tradition engages with the lives of migrant communities who left their homelands in search of economic opportunities, connected worlds, and created cosmopolitan societies in places such as the Seychelles, Mauritius, and Zanzibar.
Retrieving the stories of the Goans who travelled to Zanzibar in the second-half of the 19th century as sailors, cooks and clerks—some of whom rose to become the island’s most influential citizens—the book examines the larger themes of European imperialism in South Asia alongside the more intimate questions of human aspiration, identity and belonging.
Carvalho’s twin talents—she is a novelist as well as a historian—merge in reclaiming the lives of the Goan migrants from obscurity
In the opening chapters, we are reminded that Goan presence in Zanzibar was not an accidental consequence of imperialism. Long before European ships entered its natural harbour, traders from India’s western seaboard had been sailing to the Swahili coast. Bohras, Khojas and Banias were already part of a maritime world that had brought together diverse faiths and communities. When India became a Crown colony in 1858, the British began to see Zanzibar as an outpost of their empire and built a consulate. Carvalho links the rise of the Goan migrants, who were Portuguese subjects at that time, to the patronage of Zanzibar’s visionary sultan, Sayid Bargash, who extended personal goodwill and support to Goan businesses. Of the early Goans who arrived there, she writes, “These chameleon-like men with their easy facility for language, mercantile adventurism, administrative efficiency and personal charisma tended to the sultans as doctors, traders, musicians and interpreters.”
Among the earliest arrivals were three men who rose to astonishing heights. CR Souza, an unlettered man in his 20s, was employed as a table-servant, and was subsequently hired as a cook in the sultan’s household, from where his ascent to prominence began with the opening of a trading business that advertised itself as ‘general purveyors to HH the Sultan.’ DB Pereira started as a customs clerk before he discovered that supplying ships and caravans with bread and meat was far more profitable. Bras Souza, a doctor, rose to become the consul-general for the Portuguese government in Lisbon. While the stories of these men represent the community’s ascent, there were other Goans—photographers, musicians, newspapermen, postmasters, pharmacists, tavernkeepers, tailors, carpenters, cobblers, dhobis—who contributed to Zanzibari commercial and civic life.
Carvalho’s twin talents—she is a novelist and a historian—merge in reclaiming the lives of the Goan migrants from obscurity. In anecdote after anecdote, she displays the novelist’s flair for drawing lifelike characters against the backdrop of a larger historical context. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources—archives, oral histories, church records, memoirs and photographs—she recreates a vibrant world of enterprise and wealth. However, migration, she tells us, did not erase the old social orders. Race biases, caste privilege that conjugated with class rivalries, remained strong in Zanzibar. Carvalho writes: “The Indo-Portuguese cultural identity was premised on the vanishing indigene and upheld by isolating from other South Asian communities. This insularity permeated Goan society and informed Goan consciousness, the sense of not being Indian.”
While the granularity of research will delight Goan readers, to someone less familiar with the region, the abundance may seem overwhelming. Yet the narrative remains, advancing more by the sheer mass of detail than by momentum. Like the monsoon winds that facilitated journeys between Goa and Zanzibar, the chapters unfold in a cyclical pattern rather than with strict chronology. The story repeatedly touches the shores of history, but its heart lies with the people who lived it.