WRITING NATIONAL HISTORY WITHOUT A NATION
WRITING NATIONAL HISTORY WITHOUT A NATION

THE CASE OF INDO-PORTUGUESE LITERARY HISTORY

Summary/Abstract: This article aims to make a retrospective enquiry into the Indo-Portuguese literary history by looking at the particular part of the literature that was written by the Catholic community of Goa during the Portuguese rule in India. Although Indo-Portuguese literature does not represent national identity or national history, this article shows the way in which a national and narrative model has been followed by most of the authors writing about the literary history of Goa. It can be seen that concepts such as elite, caste and community substitute the concept of nation, but without, in fact, replacing the ideological and theoretical basis on which the national model of literary history was conceived in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe. According to Linda Hutcheon (2002), the national and narrative type of literary history is also preferred even by Postcolonial literatures and by all those literatures that were excluded from the narratives of the Nation-State, referring to this choice as a political one. This theoretical frame will be the basis on which I built my argument.

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