Luis Dias
A while ago I had written about the music soundtrack to ‘The Sea Wolves’, the 1980 film based on the book ‘Boarding Party’ by British author James Leasor (1923-2007), an account of Operation Creek, the Calcutta Light Horse (CLH) covert attack on March 9, 1943 against German merchant ship ‘Ehrenfels’, which had been transmitting information to U-boats from Mormugão Harbour in neutral Portugal’s territory of Goa.
It was a pretext to watch the film again after decades and read the book a little more critically.
Leasor uses the voice of the characters in his book to reveal his own disdain for the Indian people and what he refers to as the ‘Goanese’, and the Portuguese don’t come off too well either. There are so many instances so I’ll only mention a few.
Early on in the book, a gardener ‘regularly’ hawks and spits as he works, prompting comments from British officer Fletcher (“Do we have to endure that disgusting noise?”) to which Lt-Colonel Pugh responds “So long as we’re in India. I call it the song of India.”
According to him, Indians were so deferential to Europeans that “they would squat down at the roadside and put handfuls of earth on top of their bare heads” in their presence. Leasor gets some schadenfreude in recounting this, whether true or otherwise.
The mystery of how the co-ordinates of British supply ships were coming into the hands of the Germans is easily solved by Pugh: it’s the Indians in the employ of European companies who “imagine they are serving their country – or Gandhi or the Congress party – which to many of them is the same thing.” They get hauled up often, dismissively as “Congress-walahs.”
Ram das Gupta, the actual courier of the secret information to the Germans, is portrayed as a disgruntled, failed university student with a “disappointed downward curve to his mouth, and a cultivated sense of his own importance” whose only motivation towards resisting the British is “release from a dull and depressing job” and to redeem himself to his parents; apparently he couldn’t have had any higher ideals. Although Gupta is conveniently bumped off in the film, his fate is left unclear in the book.
Indians are derisively referred to as ‘koi hais’. The editor’s note explains it is a term “Europeans use when they wish to call a servant”. Although a crew of about thirty Indians (‘lascars’) actually navigated (after ‘recruiting’ them without letting them know how far from home they’d be going, for how long, and certainly not why) the barge ‘Phoebe’ all the way from Calcutta on our east coast to Goa on the west, a formidable feat on a tiny craft ill-equipped for such a voyage, none gets a mention in book or film. They’re just a backdrop. There is British exasperation when the crew threatens to mutiny, once it becomes apparent what a perilous undertaking they’ve been hoodwinked into. In general, Indians are nuisances to be suffered, impatiently honked at or ploughed through with one’s car on the streets, screamed at or cursorily ordered about, nothing more.
The ‘Goanese’ in book and film are servile, corrupt, or brothel-keep; our girls easily duped and exploited by ‘ingenious’ German sailor crew with false expectations of marriage.
Leasor’s description of Goa encapsulates how the Western gaze has now been replaced by the Indian tourist’s gaze, which finds ‘The atmosphere of Goa… mildly continental and so a welcome change from India”, with “safe and sandy” beaches and hotels “small and sometimes down-at-heel.” But he can’t resist a comparison between Portugal and Britain and their overseas empires with observations like the “water [was] not always safe to drink”, which however “were of themselves part of the attraction of going ‘continental’”. It’s a gleeful snicker at Portugal, Goa and continental Europe all at once.
Leasor puts thoughts into German captain Röfer’s mind that seem quite ridiculous to any student of Goan epidemiological history: each time Röfer hears the church bells, whether for Angelus or otherwise, he presumes it marks another death from “typhoid or cholera”, another jibe at how much worse things allegedly were in Portuguese compared to British India. Perhaps the German was unaccustomed to the cadence of a bell tolling as opposed to ringing. Even if the bell did toll, why necessarily due to “typhoid or cholera”? 1943 was not a particularly vintage year for either. On the contrary, Fátima da Silva Gracias states in her book ‘Health and Hygiene in Colonial Goa 1510-1961’ that cholera-related deaths dropped remarkably after 1941.
In Leasor’s 1943 Goa, there are “bloated carcasses of dogs and pigs at street corners”, attracting circling “kite hawks and vultures”; the sea-tides wash up more “carcasses” (he seems to really be drawn to them!) of “drowned dogs and cats”.
It all seems a continuation of the British tendency to anti-Hispanic (and by extension anti-Portuguese as well, for historical reasons) “black legend” bias and exaggeration in its historiography, making themselves come up smelling like roses in comparison.
The Germans are worthy adversaries, stereotypically “dedicated, disciplined”; but that only magnifies the heroism of the intrepid British crew (who we are reminded time and again are past their prime and unused to combat, more accustomed to pushing fountain-pens) in executing their mission.
Trompeta’s (the spy ringleader’s) “neat and tidy mind” is offended by the “slothful” Portuguese administration. The Portuguese are also portrayed as weak-willed and easily corruptible.
For the film’s post-release gala in London, “stars and celebrities gathered from around the globe”; there were royalty, the leading cast, of course, and the real-life British protagonist and families. But apart from the film’s naval advisor Admiral Gandhi and wife, no ‘koi-hais’, (real-life or otherwise, not even the heroic Phoebe crew) or ‘Goanese’ could be seen, at least in the official British Movietone footage on YouTube. Countries represented by dignitaries and prominently displayed flags included (apart from Britain), Portugal, even Denmark and the US. If the Indian flag did find a place that day, it didn’t catch the interest of the Movietone camera-team
Both the film and the celebratory party footage convey the impression that the CLH “knocked out” four enemy ships. But in actual fact, while they did blow up the ‘Ehernfels’, the remaining German merchant ships ‘Braunfels’ and ‘Drachenfels’ and the Italian ‘Anfora’ were scuttled by the ships’ own crews to pre-empt their seizure by the British, who would have repurposed them as warships.
With the benefit of hindsight, India and Goa were just a setting for the British “adventure of a lifetime” (as the Movietone narrator called it). A neutral territory was breached (but “all’s fair in love and war”, right?) and the tale is then breathlessly recounted in book and film with an imperialist swagger that was outdated at the time of their release, and even more so now. I was thirteen when the film was shot here, and although I had no part in the film, I remember it as an exciting time. I hope that in future we’ll do our homework more thoroughly before becoming unwitting accomplices in our own collective ridicule and humiliation.