Sunday Express * The Indian Express ------------------------------------------- March 21, 2004 The Indian-ness of Pluralism It can be found in Goa, Maria Aurora Couto tells Sagarika Ghose
The contemporary dilemma turns on how to create the new Indian liberal. On the debris of official 'secular socialism', with the looming spectre of hate-filled cultural nationalism, from where shall we draw the mainsprings of an Indian cosmopolitanism based on plurality, yet strongly embodying India's piety? From where shall we create that alchemy that combines the bhakti inheritance, the intellectual agony and muscle of the East-West encounter, the grace of European manners and conversation, the rational education and rigour of the British administrators, the music of the Portuguese? How shall we become representatives of the thousands of little traditions of religious coexistence that is manifest in mohalla, qasbah and communidade across the land? The answers lie, in many ways,in Goa. Maria Aurora Couto, author of 'Goa, A Daughter's Story' (Viking) to be published next month, undertook a journey. After many years in Dharwar, Patna, Delhi, Chennai and London she set up home in her native Goa, in one of its most transcendental and cerebral villages, Aldona. And she set off in search of the evolution of Goan society and of the Goan mind. In the process, she discovered many truths that have the potential to resonate across not just Goa but across India. Her foremost discovery was a hidden fountain, a fountain that erupted quietly from the red earth and towered upward to the palms and jackfruit trees of her beloved land: the fountain of humanism. Humanism not as theory, but as the life blood of society, of emotion and of religion. Although caste has been tenacious, hierarchical rigidities have been softened to create what has been called vegdench munxaponn: a unique humanism, an original form of being. "Goa has been so brutally imprisoned in the tourist brochure," she says, "Goans have been so caricatured, that the depth and complexity of Goan society has not been seen for the ideal it can present for modern India." There are deep roots to liberalism in Goa, where the human condition is deeply spiritual precisely because it is deeply liberal. Her massive, luminously written book has been described as the "Zuari river in full flow", an epic telling of Goa's story, both polemical as well as personal, enlivened by a range of voices from the Lisbon-based advocate Priti Camotim to Malbarao Sardessai, patriarch of the Saraswat Brahmins of Goa. The book is a rediscovery of her father, "Chico", whose tragic life and self-destructive creativity are almost a mirror image of an older Goa which died after the Liberation of 1961. Chico, with his breadth of vision, equally at home in European and traditional cultures, above all, a musician, for whom music "was the breath of life -- was the epitome of the rich homegrown culture of East and West, which could not flower because of the lack of opportunity and constraints inherent in the experience," she writes. "For me, the story of the decline of old Goa, is like Satyajit Ray's Jalsaghar," she says. "The refinement and aristocratic patronage of music and arts were undeniably a part of a landed elite interacting with Portuguese rule and that class was destined to fade away." Yet Goa's enduring contribution to Indian liberalism, Couto believes, can never fade. Here society is marked by bhakti Hinduism and bhakti Christianity, tiny wayside shrines contain an ancient aesthetic faith, avenging fierce Durga from Bengal, in Goa becomes Shanta Durga, historian D.D. Kosambi's Marxism is different from others simply because he is a Goan. "The stereotype is Christian Portuguese rule being replaced by Hindu predominance. Yet Buddhism and Jainism have been important shapers of Goa and contributed to its textured religiosity." 'Goa: A Daughter's Story' is open to controversial readings in the polarised climate of today and Couto is anxious that some of her chapters are not misinterpreted. She admits that conversions were violent but argues that violent birth certainly does not preclude 400 years of nurturing. And as for misinterpretation, any grist is suitable for mills that seem to grind against communal harmony and the sustenance of the Indian-ness of pluralism. Her doubts were dispelled by Girish Karnad: "You should go by what you know or feel in your bones to be right -- that even if conversions were forced or violent, the faith that people gained from them could prove to be culturally and spiritually enriching." Today, she feels that India is at the "crossroads", and so is Goa. Subtle changes are beginning to cloud the unfussy if segregated harmony of Goa. She says the battle today is not "majority community" versus "minority community" but between liberal and non-liberal Indians. And the quest is now how to find that rooted plurality which is as native to India as its soil, rather than the borrowed prescriptions of Western think-tanks. Goa today may have fallen into sloth and decline, a money-order economy may have created torpor and stagnation, but its civilisational basis holds the clue towards a new way forward. ------------------------------------------------------------------- To Subscribe/Unsubscribe from Goa-Research-Net ------------------------------------------------------------------- * Send us a brief self-intro to justify your interest in this "specialized" forum. 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