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14
15
Newton, however, had different ideas from his mother as to the career path he
should follow and the manner in which he should conduct himself. He was not
willing to adhere to the rules at his strict Jesuit school remarking that ‘
the system
was only good…to turn Indians into respectable toadies
.’
4
“
As a boy, I had to attend school like any other, the difference being that schoolboys
in Bombay were crammed by rote with a wretched system of education, the
Macaulay system, intended as everybody knows to provide clerks and bureaucrats
for maintaining what was a vast Imperial racket. I had tried to escape it for more
than ten juvenile years of my life, often successfully by playing truant day after day
or by malingering.
”
5
As a result of his truancy and making pornographic drawings in the lavatory,
after just two years, Newton was expelled from St Francis Xavier’s by the
principal Father Sologran, and with it his mother’s hopes of his career in the
priesthood. It was the sights and sounds of the city of Bombay, rather than
school, that ignited his imagination.
“
Then my mind began to wander into the city I was bred in: Bombay with its
rattling trams, omnibuses, hacks, railways, its forest of telegraph poles and tangle of
telephone wires, its flutter of newspapers, its haggling coolies, its numberless dirty
restaurants run by Iranis, its blustering officials and stupid policeman, its millions
of clerks working clocklike in fixed routines, its schools that turn out boys into clerks
in a mechanical, Macaulian educational system, its bania hoarders, its ghatine
women carrying a million tiffins to the clerks at their offices during lunch hour, its
lepers and beggars, its panwallas and red beetle nut expectorations on the streets
and walls, its stinking urinals and filthy gullies, it’s sickening venereal diseased
brothels, its corrupted municipality, its Hindu colony and Muslim colony and Parsi
colony, its bug ridden Goan residential clubs, its reeking, mutilating and fatal
hospitals, it’s machines, rackets, babbitts, pinions, cogs, pile drivers, dwangs, farads
and din.
”
6
The bustle of Bombay lay in stark contrast to the calm village life he had
known in Goa. It was a city bursting with creative energy, full of artists, writers
and musicians. He wanted a taste of it for himself, and aged sixteen, enrolled in
the J.J. School of Art.
SCHOOL
1937—1940
Newton, aged
16
,
1940
Bombay
© The Estate of Francis Newton Souza
Newton, aged
16
,
1940
Bombay
© The Estate of Francis Newton Souza