Dear Pratap, I enjoyed your presentation on Friday (April 15) as you competently confronted more or less popular perceptions of Konkani with established proposition from the domain of linguists. As you ended, like one of the persons who reacted to you, I too wondered: You have identified and spoken on some tress, but where is the forest? I was a bit taken aback by the strength and passion you stimulated in your audience though not so much by the substantive issues raised. I have been thinking about all this since. This letter to you is catharsis of sorts for me and much more than that too. I cannot but take you seriously also because I am empathetic with your concern and demand that a 1000 Konkanis should bloom and that in the current dispensation Sashti, Malwani, Romi, etc. have been short changed. I identify with you when you began with explaining ‘myth’ expressing some fundamental ‘truth’ (meta reality) and so also that they nevertheless represent interests, political interests. On the other hand ‘myth’ is also opposed to ‘fact’ (reality). “Myth” therefore elicits highly ambivalent meanings. Myth can mean an utter falsehood and, on the contrary, a sacred truth. It is this deep and profound play between that which is not real and is at once meta real (yet to be real?) that gives myth its power – an indispensable necessity for human aspiration and survival. In your presentation you chose to limit yourself to only one meaning of myth i.e. the Myth of Konkani as opposed to the Facts of Konkani. What was the proposition that informed the construction of most of the ‘myths’ you identified? It seems to me your underlying thesis (correct me if I am wrong) is that ‘Konkani has been and is an instrument of Saraswat hegemony’. I go along with that too. However to me the many myths you identified that support the hegemony proposition are as much myths in the more profound (meta reality) sense and not in the sense that they are contrary to facts. Let me explain with some illustrations: Myth IV.7 is ‘Shenai Gőybab awakened in us the Konkani identity’. You challenge this by arguing that Gőybab’s influence was on only one particular community. Valid as this is, it is also true that once the Saraswats aligned their own identity with Konkani, like any dominant group they also sought to create a pan Goan Konkani identity by offering their language dialect as the most refined marker of that identity i.e. at a time when the politics of creating geographical boundaries demanded unique cultural identity markers it is precisely the Saraswat’s who used their Konkani to win the support (arrive at a consensus or compromise) of non-dominant groups around Konkani as language and culture of the region. This was indeed a movement of resistance against the effort to erase any identity for this region by submerging it in Maharashtra . Clearly it was the dominant community that had to lead such a movement of resistance and it was done rather successfully. Today Goa as political and cultural entity (however much contested and unfinished it may yet be) owes its existence in large measure to the construction of Konkani as a language and culture and the origins of this lie in the works of Gőybab. (The seminal works of orientalists such Cunha Riviera or Dalgado important as they have been, seem to have lacked an organic relationship to the community that could have exercised such dominance). Hence Gőybab emerges as the icon of this identity. The fact that Gőybab may not be popular and that his writings are unfamiliar even to some of best known Konkani writers is simply not at issue (How many of the workers who died for communism read Karl Marx or for that matter how many of those who swear by Christ read the Bible or even the New Testament for that matter). An icon’s ideas are diffused through the people even while the people may never know the origins of the idea they live by and with. If Gőybab enjoys a mythic (meta real) status, it is indeed well deserved. Like so many other hegemonic language movements, Konkani in the hands of the dominant groups, too finds itself using the tropes (styles of discourse) provided by modern evolutionary theory, perhaps best exemplified in theories such as those of racism. The existence of a ‘pure’ (Myth I.7, I.16) or standard (Myth I.8, I.15, Myth II.2) or quality (Myth II.2) forms as opposed to corrupted (Myth I.10, I.12), drawing extraction from high pedigree (Myth I.1, Myth I.3), long lineage (Myth II.4,5 & 6), the superiority of the written over the oral (Myth I.9 – a rather too obvious give away of the hegemonic groups and Myth II.1 which also suffers from this trap), and a more recent addition due to the compulsions of democracy exaggeration in numbers (myth I.2 and myth II.3) The point is not whether these statements you termed myths have historically or linguistically (or by any other science) been verified. Rather the manner in which these statements are deployed is what we need to look at. They all go to bolster one proposition: One language, one script and one literature will unite Konkanis (Konkani speakers -Myth IV.11) and that the obvious, natural and only legitimate candidate is what we now call the standard and official Konkani. This is precisely how the hegemony of the dominant is sort to be sustained. The fact that a number of writers and award winners are not from the Saraswat community only goes to show the partial success of the hegemony. My favorite example of the partial success of the hegemony is the story of my student friend (once a seminarian) who speaks, reads and writes competent Sashti and communicates with his wife and mother in that language. But with his thre children (aged beween 4 months and 6 years) he insists on speaking English. He told me that when his children go to school they will learn the pure Konkani (as against the illegitimate language left with him through conversion) and besides his children need to know the language of their time (English) and by speaking to them in that language he was giving them a head start. (as he saw it, his choice of language with his children was a win- win choice). Hegemony works precisely in this way i.e. where the subordinate groups willingly (?) consent to the values of the dominant groups and thereby surrender their own history and subjectivity. I recall as a child, my father often reminding me that our Konkani was not ‘pure’. (Interestingly if I remember right he has never really understood why the ‘pure’ Konkani could not be written in Romi and must be written in Nagri) As an adolescent I did make an effort to mimic what I thought was ‘Anturzi’ and felt proud that I by talking the bare minimum could occasionally hide my less than pure Konkani and so also my identity – but away from such poor consolation there was always the haunting question: why did I have a less than pure cultural lineage as compared to some others. Sure I could learn but then there is always a difference between the one that learns and the one that naturally performs by sheer virtue of birth and that difference hurts. (Sure enough too, my own disposition and hurt was also brought on by my own low self esteem. But than, I have seen this hesitancy even among the best of us i.e. those who have the best markers of personal and social success and so also recognition for their work in Konkani – somewhere at some point the experience of a void pops up: – the lack of pure Konkani.) I have since learnt that the problem lay not with the language but rather the way in which it has been constructed: that underlying such constructions of purity, lineage etc. being superior is a racist development paradigm inherited from the enlightenment. In particular that National (and regional) concepts of culture that seek to present unity are doomed to surrender hegemony to dominant groups who have the where with all to acquire consensus from non dominant groups. The argument for a unified and uniform language (or identity for that matter) is itself suspect. That identity remains contested, incomplete and unfinished and must remain so, How else shall we live ‘other’ wise? That purity is the mode of ensuring sterility. The hegemony that Konkani suffers is in turn the hegemony of the enlightenment over the non western peoples. That challenging the hegemony in Konkani is therefore challenging also the intellectual discourse that make such hegemony possible. Saraswat language hegemony must be challenged and contested because it relies on tropes that are outmoded and irrelevant (I have suggested rather racial in their connotation and denotations) and so also because it debases a significant section of the ‘Konkanis’. This in no way denies the contribution that the hegemony did achieve and that was much, including providing us the space through which today we can contest that very hegemony A concern expressed is that this line of thinking is that this is divisive. But then I also see it as uniting by making spaces for some of the sentiments and groups that have hitherto been excluded as mentioned by Narayan Dessai in his thesis and so also as you have elsewhere identified in Ramnath Naik’s ‘Goveachea Bhashavadamagil Karashtqan’. The relationship between identity hegemony and resistance is articulate succulently by Teotonio, relying on Boventura de Sousa Santos: When someone speaks about one's own identity, reactions to hegemonic relationships in a society are necessarily implied, or there is always an implied feeling of subordination. In fact, someone in a hegemonic position rarely cares to raise questions of self-identity. The questions arise from those who seek self-assurance and recognition from the hegemonic group or groups. From a successful response to the questionings results usually a foundational interpretation that transforms the limitations of self-image into a surplus of self-projection. Such foundational interpretations are produced by creative and inspired native figures that seek to represent their people. Tagore did it for India, and apparently also for Bangla Desh, where also his poem was chosen to be the national anthem. Camőes and Fernando Pessoa did it for Portugal. We in Goa could think of Varde Valaulikar (1877-1946) or of T.B. Cunha (1891-1958) as representative figures of Goan identity builders. Their cultural creations seek to surpass time-limitations, absorbing the entire past and projecting the image into a limitless future. The resultant identity appears then as a solid construction with roots into mythical and undated past, and with an assurance of resisting challenges of the present and the future. From: "Goan Identity: One, Many or None" by Teotonio R. de Souza at http://www.goacom.com/goanow/2001/jan/goanidentity.html In confronting what you called myths with facts, you seem to ignored the other profound meaning of ‘myth’ as meta reality. You presentation came across to me at times as similar to the performance of some rationalist movements: They try to debunk Sants and Saints by organising shows where they reveal that the miracles performed by these religious people are simple or not so simple tricks (fictions) performed by magicians. In so doing, they hope in vain that the common man will give up his ‘belief’ and surrender to science and reason. These efforts are in vain because they seem to completely deny the existence of myth as ‘fundamental truth’ (meta reality). In this sense, in our time, Science is the greatest myth (in both senses). In so far as you did not analyse the myths of Konkani as meta realities, you came across to me as having ignored the seminal contribution of linguistics to our understanding of myth. You therefore may have been more of an activist rather than a linguist at work during that particular performance on April 15. Some suggested that you were belittling Konkani – certainly you have worked too long in, for and about the language to have even the remotest interest in doing so. If at all there was any belittling it was that of linguistics and myth. Let a thousand Konkani(s) bloom! I am sharing this letter with others who may be interested in theme that we are discussing. With regards. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to write to you and for listening to me. alito
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