Vimala Devi's Monção: The Last Snapshots of Colonial Goa.

Vimala Devi's Monção is a short-story collection set in Goa and published in 1964. It is thus roughly contemporaneous with other comparable Portuguese-language collection such as Nós Matámos o Cão-Tinhoso and Luuanda and is similarly an attempt accurately to portray the society in question in literary form, for almost the first time in Portuguese. Monção differs radically from Honwana and Vieira's work, however, in that there is little criticism of Portuguese colonialism, perhaps because of the particular status of the Portuguese-speaking intellectual in Goa and perhaps because Portuguese control had ended three years previous to publication. Following Julio Cortázar's assertion that the short story functions in the same way as a photograph, this article interprets Devi's short fictions as snapshots of colonial Goa, in which the hopes of the past and the social problems of the present are crystallized, criticized and their image preserved for future generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]