Sixteenth-century humanist João de Barros wisely predicted in his Grammatica (1539) that language would outlast material remnants of Portuguese presence in Asia. Examples of Portuguese language recently collected in creolized form along the South Asian coasts of India and Sri Lanka reflect a once flourishing seaborne empire of interconnected settlements and fortifications whose resulting cultural syncretisms have survived to the present day.¹¹⁷ Oral texts and musical traditions carried on Portuguese ships played a central role in defining the cultural identity and expression of Eurasian communities that developed as a consequence of Portuguese conquest, trade, faith, and settlement.¹¹⁸ The oral tradition and its cultural program, centered in music and verse, including a strong African component, came to constitute a distinct folklore that spread through Indo-Portuguese society as a whole and promoted the long survival of a cultural identity with European, African, and Asian components.¹¹⁹

According to João Ribeiro,¹²⁰ the early population of a Portuguese garrison such as Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, sketched in Luís Silveira's Ensaio de Iconografia, consisted of «a Captain and fifty soldiers with a chief gunner, twenty settlers, and a chaplain...» (1948: 40). Yet Adolfo Coelho states that of the 20,000 men in Portuguese fortresses in Sri Lanka in the late sixteenth century, only 1,000 were European (1967: 45). Ian R. Smith identifies two groups as the core of Portuguese communities: topazes, defined in the Hobson-Jobson as «dark-skinned or half-caste claimants of Portuguese descent, and Christian profession»; and Kaffirs (Cafres), or East Africans (1977: 12-14). A Portuguese dialect spread throughout the island from mestizo and Eurasian communities flourishing near the forts of Galle, Colombo, Mannar, Jaffna, Trincomalee, and Batticaloa. In Sri Lanka, people considered to be of Portuguese descent became known as «Burghers» during the Dutch period (c. 1650-1800), although they were considered racially and economically inferior.¹²¹

The cultural and linguistic histories of Portuguese creole communities in Asia nevertheless played an indelible role in transforming the societies in which they flourished. Dennis McGilvray (1982) documents the cross-cultural nature of Portuguese language, customs, and race in colonial societies, including the Dutch and English periods of Sri Lanka. As a modern example of cultural syncretism, Ceylon Portuguese and Portuguese-African music have been adapted into Sinhalese popular baila tunes.¹²² Baila music properly belongs to the Portuguese Burgher communities as a generic term for specific musical forms such as kafrinha and chicote. The creole folk verses known as cantigas, sung to this music, are central to the mixed identity of the people who perform them. As texts, the cantigas further document a system of culture, well established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, extending from Sri Lanka to the whole of Portuguese presence throughout Asia.

Performance of a Eurasian cantigas -whether at Diu, Damão, Chaul, Batticaloa, or Malacca- conveyed festivity, music, dance, energy, and carefree enjoyment of life. Traditional instrumentation includes bandeirinha (banjo or ukelele), rabana (hand-held drum), ferrinhos (triangle), and perhaps violin. The musical forms kafrinha and chicote invoke African influence in verses dominated by the negrinha 'local girl' rather than the Portuguese nona 'lady' and, according to M. H. Goonatilleka (1970: 150), express an enhanced spirit of contention, rivalry, humor, parody, and satire. Usually danced by four couples, the music is highly syncopated, yet   —619→   melodic. The creole verses evidence syntactical and lexical influence of major contact languages -whether Sinhalese, Tamil, Malayalam, Konkani, Marathi, Gujarati, Malay, or Chinese. Burgher orthography is influenced by Dutch, which coexisted with creole Portuguese in Sri Lanka in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Indo-Portuguese creole verse is related to the Hispanic ballad, popular and religious poetry, medieval drama, and the folk tale. Representing a tradition comparable to the Brazilian literatura de cordel, Asian creole texts likewise represent Portuguese popular and religious theater and chivalric themes of medieval folk narratives. João Manuel Pacheco de Figueiredo Filho has documented the popularity of ballads and cantigas in India, showing how they were modified by local tradition and printed in works by Barros, Diogo do Couto, Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, Gaspar Correia, and others. Folk motifs such as the green parrot and ring of gold are also included.¹²³ Not only did ancient rhymes and proverbs serve as exemplary themes; the Indo-Portuguese poets were likewise adept at techniques of biting irony and social criticism in the tradition of Camões's «Disparates da India».

Sebastião Rodolfo Dalgado belongs to a group of eminent linguists -including Tavares de Mello, António da Silva Rego, Hugo Schuchardt, Adolfo Coelho, and José Leite de Vasconcellos- who documented and studied Asian Portuguese from the late nineteenth century. Grammars, vocabularies, dictionaries, etymologies, glossaries, prayers, phrases, and dialogues are among the early printed works. Dalgado (1936: 1xxi) considers Sri Lankan Portuguese to be the most important Asian creole dialect because of its wide use and influence on Sinhalese. David Lopes (1936) studies publications by Dutch, English, and Danish mission presses in Asian Portuguese, as the necessary language of religion, commerce, and government throughout the eighteenth century. Vocabularies and religious publications of the Wesleyan Mission Press in Colombo, represented by Rev. John Callaway (1818) and William Fox (1819), continued well into the British period (c. 1800-1947).

An anonymous publication in Ceylon Portuguese presented here for the first time, Cantigas ne o lingua de Portuguez, Impressado ne Matre, 23 de Juni 1914, Sridhara Press, of which the only extant copy is located in the Colombo Museum, testifies to the survival and pertinence of Portuguese creole folk texts into the twentieth century.¹²⁴ Matara, once the name of a large province in the seventeenth century, is now a district capital on Sri Lanka's southern coast near the city and fort of Galle, where a Portuguese dialect was known to survive. At Matara Callaway signed the preface to his English, Sinhalese, and Portuguese Vocabulary on March 9, 1818. Printed in the same town at the Sridhara Press almost a century later, these 100 cantigas were transcribed from oral traditions of the Portuguese Burghers, as attested by the last entry that frames the volume:

The folk quatrains recapitulate much material previously published by Dalgado, Schuchardt, and other linguists, as well as transcriptions in the recently uncovered Hugh Nevill manuscript of Ceylon Portuguese verse (circa 1890) located in the British Library.¹²⁵

Indo-Portuguese cantigas from Sri Lanka tell of family and community traditions and social relationships, creating an Asian context for European and African traditions. The Cantigas ne o lingua de Portuguez, texts harking to the sixteenth-century origins of Ceylon Portuguese, can be organized into thematic categories that dramatize basic social activities and existential concerns: A) the song itself; B) sailing and travel; C) class, social condition, and race; D) satire and social criticism; E) proverbs and advice; F) love and nature; G) deceit and rejection; H) courtship, matchmaking, and proposal, I) ring and marriage; and J) faithfulness. They also reflect two of the categories applied by Silva Rego to Malaccan cantigas: cantiga de amigo and cantiga de maldizer.¹²⁶ The resulting textual system of culture informs a literary, linguistic, and anthropological view of Eurasian Portuguese community life.

This rare published collection of Portuguese creole verse, to which an English paraphrase has been added, serves as a primary source of creole customs and literary traditions. The cantigas compare favorably to other collections of folk texts by Dalgado, Nevill, Marques Pereira, and Silva Rego. In the transcription that follows, similar verses collected by other linguists in Asia have been juxtaposed in many cases to the Sri Lankan cantigas in order to illustrate diffusion of the oral tradition over space and time. The creole   —620→   folk texts, organized according to thematic categories and numbered as in the original printing, reaffirm the unity of Indo-Portuguese cultural life and the singular role of the cantiga.

32.