‘Portuguese India’: Between the Desire for a Konkani Cinema and the Paradoxes of Filmed Propaganda

The Estado Novo (1933–74) shifted to Africa the nostalgic image of the mythology of greatness (transversal to several administrations) surrounding the ‘Portuguese Orient’ — projected by the dictatorship as an illustration of the ‘Portuguese way of being in the world’ and the place where the professed merit of Lusitanian colonialization materialized. To overcome Portugal’s geographical smallness, and the scarcity of human, economic and technological resources, a historical right to own colonies was declared, reclaiming the primacy of maritime expansion and the supposed specificity of a colonialism sustained by a Christian ‘civilizing’ mission, promoted by the cinema. Before the constitution was passed, in 1933, the dictatorship had already defined a civilizational hierarchy, regulated by the 1930 Acto Colonial e do Estatuto Político, Civil e Criminal dos Indígenas [Colonial Act and Political, Civil and Criminal Statute of the Indigenous Subject]. Implicitly racist, this act differentiated between the rights and duties of those born in the metropolis and those native to the colonies, lessening the latter. In this pyramidal society, the bottom was made up of Angolans, Mozambicans, and Guineans; with the Timorese and Santomeans in the middle, and the Indians, Macanese, and Cape Verdeans nearer the top.