Tristao de braganca cunha biography of mahatma
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He continued publicising the Goan case in a stream of articles and books, denouncing Portuguese rule. He argued that Goans' denationalization could only be reversed through reconnection with India, dismissing alternative paths like continued Portugueseautonomy or separate Goan statehood as illusions perpetuated by colonial rhetoric.
These pieces, often polemical, framed Goa's predicament as an extension of India's unfinished independence, urging alliances with the Indian National Congress while critiquing European colonial exceptionalism that exempted Portugal from scrutiny applied to Britain or France.[16] By the 1940s and 1950s, his publications shifted toward practical advocacy for Goa's inclusion in post-1947 India, as seen in essays documenting protests and demanding diplomatic intervention, which collectively underscored a Marxist-inflected nationalism prioritizing economic emancipation alongside cultural reclamation.[17]A posthumous compilation, Goa's Freedom Struggle: Selected Writings of T.
B. Cunha (1961), assembled by the Dr. T. B. Cunha Memorial Committee, preserves key articles and memoranda from 1926 onward, including analyses of the 1930 Portuguese Colonial Act's suppressive impacts and calls for autonomous Goan institutions as precursors to full Indian integration. Cunha formed and headed the Goa Action Committee, to help coordinate the numerous Goan liberation organizations that had emerged by this time.
Among his publications were booklets Four Hundred Years of Foreign Rule and The Denationalisation of Goans (1944). This move exposed him to environments less rigidly bound by Portuguese censorship, facilitating initial encounters with broader intellectual currents in colonial India.[1][10]Cunha then traveled to Paris around the early 1910s, studying electrical engineering at the Sorbonne University and obtaining his degree there.
He critiqued Portuguese propaganda portraying Goans as uniquely Lusophone or Westernized, asserting in a 1955 report to the World Assembly for Peace in Helsinki that such claims obscured Goa's integral place within the Indian subcontinent and its people's affinity with broader Indian nationalist aspirations.[20] This stance mediated religious differences by prioritizing anticolonial solidarity over communal divides, as evidenced in his establishment of organizations like the Goa Congress Committee in the 1930s, which aimed to forge a collective Goan-Indian identity transcending Hindu-Catholic tensions.[21]On integration with India, Cunha's core thesis positioned Goa unequivocally as Indian territory, advocating its liberation and incorporation into the Indian Union as a restoration of historical and cultural continuity disrupted by four centuries of foreign rule.
He was court-martialed and sentenced to eight years imprisonment. Such views inform contemporary Goan discourse on autonomy, where his insistence on cultural reintegration with India clashes with sentiments favoring special status to preserve unique socio-legal traditions like the Goa Civil Code.[11]
The Golden Jubilee of Goa’s Liberation was celebrated in New Delhi by unveiling the Portrait of Dr.
Tristao De Braganza Cunha, who is considered as the Leader of the Goan Freedom Movement, in the Central Hall of Parliament at the hands of the Hon’ble Speaker of the Lok Sabha and in the distinguished presence of the Hon’ble Prime Minister, Finance Minister, Leader of the Opposition, UPA Chairperson and other Dignitaries on December 19, 2011 at 10.00 A.M.
The portrait has been prepared by Mrs Harshada Kerkar Sonak, well known Goan artiste, who was felicitated by the Hon’ble Prime Minister by offering her traditional shawl.
Later, the Hon’ble Speaker of the Lok Sabha and the Hon’ble Chairman of the Rajya Sabha made special references in both Houses of Parliament to the Goan Freedom Movement and its Liberation from the Portuguese rule on 19th December 1961.
Among his publications were booklets Four Hundred Years of Foreign Rule and The Denationalisation of Goans(1944). Advocates cite his 1950s calls for pragmatic diplomacy over satyagraha as prescient warnings against over-reliance on non-violence, which delayed military action until 1961; critics, however, view this as premature defeatism that underestimated mass mobilization's potential.
The Government of India issued a postage stamp in his honour.
The World Peace Council at Stockholm in 1959 posthumously awarded T. B. Cunha a gold medal for his contribution to the cause of "Peace and Friendship among People."
Cunha's mortal remains are housed in an urn at a memorial located in Panaji's Azad Maidan. He was court-martialed and sentenced to eight years imprisonment.
He was deported to the Peniche prison in Portugal.
After his release from Portugal in 1954, Cunha returned to Bombay.
Pressured by Portuguese authorities, Cunha transferred operations to Bombay and in 1938, affiliated his organisation with the Indian National Congress. Scholars contend that while his 1944 essay effectively mobilized anti-colonial sentiment by portraying Portuguese rule as a systematic erasure of indigenous identity, it risks essentializing Goan nationhood by sidelining the plural, Luso-Indian elements that persist in contemporary Goan self-perception, such as linguistic and architectural legacies.
Among them the name that stands out is that of Dr. T. B. Cunha”.
Tristao Braganca Cunha
Tristão de Bragança Cunha, alternatively spelled as Tristao de Braganza Cunha, was a prominent Indian nationalist and anti-colonial activist from Goa.
Background
Cunha was born on 2 April 1891 in the village Chandor in Goa.
Education
He completed his school education in Panjim and then went to Pondicherry to French College for his Bachelor of Arts and then to Paris. In Paris, Cunha entered the circle of Romain Rolland and helped publicise the Indian independence movement generally, and the case of Portuguese India in particular, in the French-language press.
Cunha returned to Goa in 1926 and he set up the Comissão do Congresso de Goa (Goa Congress Committee) in Goa in 1928 to organise the Goan intelligentsia against Portuguese colonial rule.
Conversely, archival evidence of his engagement with Leninist organizational debates and later associations with the Communist Party of India suggests leftist leanings that aligned Goan resistance with broader anti-fascist fronts, though without subordinating local autonomy to Soviet models. Despite these deprivations, Cunha reportedly used his time in captivity to study political texts, including works by Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, which informed his later advocacy but underscored the regime's intent to break his resolve.
Released prior to completing the full sentence amid international pressure and shifting colonial dynamics, the episode solidified his status as a martyr for Goan liberation, with no prior or subsequent arrests documented in reliable accounts.[11][7]
Ideology and Intellectual Contributions
Core Nationalist Writings
Tristão de Bragança Cunha's nationalist writings primarily articulated the imperative for Goan liberation from Portuguese colonial rule through reintegration with India, emphasizing cultural and historical continuity with the Indian subcontinent over imposed Lusitanian assimilation.There he studied at the Sorbonne University and obtained a degree in electrical engineering.
Career
He hailed from Cuelim, Cansaulim.
In his seminal 1944 essay The Denationalisation of Goans, Cunha argued that centuries of Portuguese administration had eroded Goan ethnic and cultural ties to India, fostering a false hybrididentity that obscured the territory's inherent Indian character; he called for a revival of indigenous customs, languages, and social structures to counteract this process, which he attributed to deliberate colonial policies targeting both Hindu and Catholic communities.[13][7] This work, disseminated to raise awareness among Goans, positioned denationalization not as inevitable but as reversible through conscious nationalist reorientation, drawing on historical evidence of pre-colonial Indian governance in the region.[15]Cunha's writings from the 1920s, produced during his residence in Paris, linked Goan struggles to broader Indian anticolonial efforts and internationalist critiques of imperialism, including contributions to forums that highlighted Portuguese violations of self-determination principles under the League of Nations framework.
A statue of Cunha has been installed in his ancestral village of Cuelim, Cansaulim.
A school in Margao and a government higher secondary school in Panaji are also named in Cunha"s honour.
The campus in Panaji"s Altinho which houses the Goa College of Architecture and the Goa College of Music, is named as "Doctor T.
B. Cunha Educational Complex".