The young man’s first day in parliament was a rough one: he heard another member demand that the government rescind the right given to colonial savages to sit in a civilised parliament. The member from Goa, in his maiden speech, counter-attacked. Savages? “In India,” he informed the carnivorous Europeans, “there are no banquets of human flesh; on the contrary, there are sects whose hands are innocent of all blood; who abstain from a diet of meat; who show compassion towards animals.” His parliamentary eloquence won him admirers in Lisbon; Gomes met John Stuart Mill and corresponded with French novelist Alphonse de Lamartine, wrote a treatise (in French) on economic theory, and in 1866 completed a novel in Portuguese—Os Brahmanes. Set in Fyzapur, a town in Avadh, on the event of the 1857 upheaval, its main characters are Magnod, a Brahmin domestic servant, and his Irish master, Robert Davis. Though the civilisation from which Magnod comes is ancient and rich—the novel explains the Mahabharata and the Hitopadesha in some detail for its European readers—he is a decadent example of it, obsessed with caste purity: “Blinded by fanaticism, he denied to the Pariah and the Sudra the sympathy which he held out to irrational creatures.” His white master is another kind of Brahmin—one obsessed with skin colour: “Robert seldom spoke to him in English, and very often taunted him with the epithet for gentleman of colour.” The clash between these two fanatics is inevitable, and the revolt erupts as the novel ends. Gomes urges his European readers, familiar with horror stories like the Black Hole of Calcutta of 1756, to take a balanced view of 1857: “Impartial men, who care for liberty and not for races, desire India for India and detest all despots, be they called Nawabs or Clives.”