To honour and remember one of India's greatest poets, we must first keep his works in print.
There is no statue anywhere to mark the life of Joseph Furtado. That is a pity, for his patrician looks and his long flowing beard would have made a fine figure in stone. The house where he spent his childhood, in the north Goan town of Pilerne, is today in ruins. Only a handful of the oldest residents remember him, and hardly anyone knows that Furtado, who passed away in 1947 at the age of 75, was one of the finest Indian English poets of his time. Fortunately, many of his poems still survive – barely – in just one slim volume in the rare-books section of Goa's Central Library.
It is curious that a boy from a literary backwater became a proficient poet, and writing in English at that. According to Philip Furtado, the poet's son, his father's early education after passing the primeiro grau – the Portuguese primary-school exam – and apart from a year at a Latin school in Saligao in north Goa, was conducted mainly at home. Perhaps this was a good thing, for Furtado was known to be a sensitive child, and the aesthetic tastes he was to develop could well have been crushed by the drudgery of a mechanical schooling. Konkani was his mother tongue, but Furtado also wrote in Portuguese, later switching to a third language after enrolling in an English-medium school.
In 1890, he found work with the Great Indian Peninsular Railway in Jubbulpore (as it was then spelled) in modern-day Madhya Pradesh. From there, he went on to become a draughtsman in the engineer's office, a fairly important position. It was during this period that he began to read the classics of world literature, and subsequently began writing. Furtado published his first collection of poems in 1910. By 1927, when A Goan Fiddler was published in England, he already had four volumes of poetry to his credit. A Goan Fiddler had a preface by Edmund Gosse, then the most influential critic in England, and the book received warm reviews. Furtado subsequently published The Desterrado (1929), Songs of Exile (1938) and Selected Poems (1939), as well as a historical novel entitled Golden Goa! (1938). For a man writing in a third language, Furtado had a remarkable ear for the sounds of English. Take, for instance, "At Break of Day":