-------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Read Valmiki Faleiro's latest column on Goa's traffic entitled: | | | | Goa's appalling road sense - 1 | | http://www.goanet.org/index.php?name=News&file=article&sidA8 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bye-bye, ta-ta and don't forget to cry Rahul Goswami
It is not yet passe to be charged with misrepresenting Goa. For a very long time, generations even, sensualists and mythicists of India and abroad have done so. Some have been feted for their efforts, others have been barracked and ridiculed, and most have been inspired by any number of colourful precedents. Chronicling Asia, and therefore India, has always been an irresistible temptation for the West -- and now the reverse is proving true for Asian writers and intrepid correspondents, practitioners of the art of advancing the footprint of the Great Indian Diaspora. Whether Asian or firanghi, the incredible, the bizarre and the fascinating make for gripping tales. The writer, the interpreter of cultures, is expected to have something remarkable to relate. But to do so engagingly -- even if by employing embellishment and poetic licence -- one must be something of a historian, be able to zero in on the curious minutiae of human nature, and most of all one must immerse oneself in the land. In doing so, there are dilemmas to be confronted, in Goa as much as elsewhere. None of these is as deadly, and as alluring, as the idea of Goan identity and its expression in the cultures of the day. It is given voice, gesture and intent in a variety of ways, in a variety of settings, though rarely in one as picturesque as a ferry running late because of powerful river currents and lashed by a ferocious monsoon. "We Goans are," an extremely agitated man informed me on the deck, "a bunch of bloody baizonns. We will stand on this bloody ferryboat and wait, getting wetter than wet, for the bloody dukkors up there" -- and he indicated the wheelhouse with a jerk of his bristly jaw -- "to finish their tiffin and move the boat. If this was Bihar or Bengal this ferryboat would have been set on fire. But this is Goa, we are Goenkars, so we hear and watch and tolerate like bandarrs, and say nothing." This apoplectic outburst was met by the embarrassed smiles of several nearby Goenkars, one of whom mildly observed that the reason people come here to live, instead of Bihar and Bengal, may be the subject of this man's rage, the anti-chronometric pursuit of a life worth living. It was Rousseau, I think, who advised that the more time citizens spend thinking about public matters and the less about their own private affairs, the better a society is. He may have been nonplussed by contemporary Goa, whose citizens old and new, 'niz' Goenkars and tolerated 'bhaile', seem equipped to tackle both private and public affairs with equal aplomb. In the seafront villas and wooded 'vaddos' of Goa however such social dexterity does little to help an understanding of the slippery substance of identity, and its comrade-in-arms, culture. "Imaging Goa is never going to be easy for you," I had been told by a bureaucrat who believed he was doing me a kindly turn, an age-and-a-half ago, when I first arrived to live in Goa, "It wasn't for me." Soon after, I was again welcomed, to "the original Peyton Place", by a wry gentleman who laced his orange juice with feni when his nurse wasn't looking. Understanding the effects and consequences of colonisation, independence/liberation and identity has always been a formidably difficult task in Goa. There are many more layers now that exist -- new cultural, old cultural, new tourism, old tourism, insensate tourism, labour migrants, economic abracadabras, 'new Goans', Hindu and Catholic, Muslim and tribal, the politics of defection -- and to live in Goa, whether part-time or all year-round, demands that any or all these must be engaged with at least part of the time. Among the legion of scholar-writers who have grappled with Goa as an idea is Robert S Newman. "There is no such a thing as the 'Goan mind'," he wrote. "There is no unanimity amongst Goans as to what constitutes a 'Goan' or 'Goan-ness', nor among social scientists as to why nationalism (or political identity) takes the form it does in particular places." Others have found the idea jejune of 'Goa Dourada' "as a verdant paradise lapped by sparkling seas, swept by cooling winds and showers; Goa the Golden clinging like a limpet to the edge of a hot, tropical hinterland". And it is the elegiac observation of Arthur G Rubinoff, a Canadian academic, which would resonate deeply with so many good Goans: "With each passing day, Goa becomes more like the rest of India. The loss of its uniqueness is the measure of Goa's integration." Ivory Joao of Margao, writing in the Gomantak Times letter to the editor columns (7 July 2005), bemoaned just such a loss. "It is high time that we Goans wake up before it is too late... it is a call to all Goans to find some solution to this growing inflow of migrants... go through the local newspapers you will find all sorts of news like theft, murders, cheating, crime against women and anti-social activities...." And so the litany runs on, unwavering in its exposition of the manifold threats to Goa, Goanness, Goenkars and Goana. It would be alarming if it weren't so common, so predictable. And thus we see arriving at the drab gateway into the land of the prosaic, two companion metaphors -- the tired and abused image of a Goa as painted by the West, and the far more recent, but no less jaded, image of the Outsider, almost inevitably Indian, as painted by the suffering Goan. Whichever metaphor you choose, sadly, it is the Goenkars who remains the sufferer, in their helplessness to prevent their Goa, amchem Goem, from being overrun by that which understands it not and cares for it less. Is it in fact all doomed? Has Bollywood taken over, reached out from the screen and so thoroughly occupied with its whorish leer the hearts and minds of a new generation of Goans, the same Bollywood whose most lilting tunes owe so much to the deathless art of Goa's most musically gifted souls? Or has the stealthy quasi-economic takeover of home and hearth, field and fen, now become so complete that the Goan is in fact in danger of becoming marginalia in Goa? Not so. Because such reactions -- while pleasing to the gut and an easy instinct for the besieged mind -- reveal not only their characters but also an assortment of possible responses that reflect the prevailing clichés of our time. So it is, at a far more complex level, with the non-resident Goans, both the younger and older members of the Goan diaspora that has spread through the Commonwealth, to the Gulf, to Western Europe and to the USA. They too have a strong desire to see a kind of Goa preserved, in a sort of nostalgic formaldehyde as it were, and rendered untouchable from the depredations of India on the one hand and Goans on the other. They too construct and live out, during their visits here, a Goa-as-it-should-have-been. Most aggressive of all, in their pursuit of the re-creation of Goa, are the 'new Goans' (into which constituency I was shanghaied a decade ago, a development that my neighbours, the good villagers of Betim, neither know of nor care about). Where twenty years ago villages and vaddos merged imperceptibly into one another in the Goan landscape, now there is a sense of rustic suburbia as the new Goans -- from Bombay, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and of course the Europeans -- have carved out their homes and retreats, and have brought with them the practices and perceptions of urban lives lived in the homogenized cities of our globalized world. Such effrontery offends the Goan, even the one wearing Ray-Ban shades and twirling the wheel of his climate-controlled Toyota Innova. Should it? The studied view indicates otherwise. "Goa was part of the great Indian civilisational cosmos," Vishvanath Pai Panandiker, founder-president of the Centre for Policy Research, wrote in his essay, 'Impact of democracy and federalism on Goa' (Seminar, November 2004). Pandurang R Phaldesai, Member Secretary of the Kala Academy in Panaji, reminds us that Goa has been ruled for fifteen centuries directly or through local feudatories by different dynasties. It is a roll-call of history when we read that the Bhojas, Mauryas, Chalukyas, Rashtrakutas, Shilaharas, Kadambas, Yadavas, Bahmanis, the Vijayanagar and Adilshahi dynasties all came before, many much before, the imagery that was in vogue in the 20th century, that of 'Goa Dourada'; and the one that transited into the 21st, aided and abetted by celluloid buffoonery, that of Goa as convenient pleasuredome. It is inside this unordered kaleidoscope that contemporary culture and cultural studies are pursued in Goa. The concept of heritage is of course a subset of the same, and its identification and preservation relies to a great deal on the attraction and identification (or lack thereof) towards one or more strands of cultures that are either dominant, promise to be, or should have been. There is also the question of harmony and Tomazinho Cardozo, a well known theatre personality and a politician, points out that "Goa has communal harmony but no cultural harmony -- it is evident from the fact that a 'nattok' is overwhelmingly witnessed by Hindus while a 'tiatr' is patronized by Christians". Commercially, the tiatr is the far more successful with the more popular productions running through dozens of performances. The tiatr is an industry that announces itself in many columns, in centimetres of frenetic, gaudy advertisements in the Sunday sections of the newspapers. The language is breathless, entreating, cajoling, telegraphic. The photographs are sharply etched, as if caught at the precise point of a strobe light's flash. The overall effect makes one gasp, for the genre, and its promotion, throb with vitality. "Comedy Duo – Supremo Humbert and Prince Jacob, Present New Style Superhit, After People Demand To See Again." "Pascoal Rodrigues And Antonet De Calangute Will Enact An Unforgettable Role Of A Lifetime." "Khor Mhojem Tujea Kallza Sarkem, Superhit Tiatr, Releasing Super Non-Stop Smashing Drama!" "Guarantee To Make You Cry!" There is so much authenticity here, and such a refreshing contrast to the caricatures of boat cruises on the river Mandovi. What is delivered here, as entertainment, is a grotesque anti-cultural pidgin that is neither Goan nor recognizably non-Goan, and yet it exists because of the need to experience a kind of Goa in the minds of visitors. The unspeakable acts committed on the tolerant bosom of the Mandovi in the name of tourism can scarcely be described. This cultural pederasty has for years consisted solely of enticing bewildered and uninformed tourists into leaky, diesel-belching contraptions outfitted with lurid lights and thunderous speakers, plying them unceasingly with drink and food, battering them with Hindipop and mangled folk tunes, and disgorging one stunned group in order to receive another. Indeed, music and food -- as also architecture -- are elements of Goa that are distinguished by their being the most stimulating children of the Indo-European relationship as it proceeded. The early decades of the Portuguese era in Asia were replete with intense activity in the fields of religion and culture, but they were not exclusively Portuguese; rather, they included a good deal of pan-European co-operation. Goa's first western music tutor is reckoned to be Padre Gaspar Berzen, who was Dutch. Saint Francis Xavier, Goencho Saib, was of course a Spaniard. And some of Goa's most outstanding churches, like St Augustine's or St Cajetan's, were designed by Italian architects. The Cidade-de-Goa of the era accommodated a veritable proto-European Union -- there were French apothecaries, German artillerists and Venetian bankers. There is perhaps no tale more richly steeped in the tradition of multiculturalism than that of the enigmatic Polish Jew, who according to one account, was 'discovered' by Vasco da Gama when his ship was drawn up on the beach at Anjediv island for careening. This apparition spoke Venetian well, swiftly displayed his linguistic skills by speaking Hebrew, Arabic and "a local dialect", and was in the service of the Adil Shahi ruler of Goa as a lapidary, which was his profession. Vasco da Gama acted swiftly and inducted the itinerant Pole into Portuguese crown service, following which he became known as Gaspar de Inde. This Gaspar did well for himself thereafter, accompanied several Portuguese expeditions, was knighted and given an appointment at the royal court complete with a small pension in recognition of his services. These are elements that have exerted their individual influences on the cultural spaces in Goa, and there are several of those that have taken on a life and a legitimacy of their own. They have in a sense been reified within the very eclectic multi-cultural microcosmos that surrounds us here in contemporary Goa. (they can also inflame passions, some of which have been ugly). Barring some of the more psychotropic imports, the encounters between Goa and its diaspora, between Goa and a bewildered though 'invading' India, and then between Goa and globalisation, have held more promise than doom. A drive through the village roads of Bardez brings the new cross-cultural topology into relief. Along the sides of the roads and tacked onto electricity poles and trees are the boards, banners, signs, hoardings and flyers advertising ayurvedic massages, organic rocket leaves, fresh-baked multi-grained bread, worry beads, pranayama classes, holistic healing, kundalini awakening yoga, authentic Mexican pizza, secret tai-ginseng, original soul tofu, best feta cheese and fish-curry-and-rice. There are an almost ludicrous number of German bakeries too, whose bakers all seem to be able to conscientiously divide their time between the raising of flour and bird-watching. Clearly, there are 'bhaile' and there are 'bhaile'. There are 'ghantis' too (and I am most certainly both, from a Goan point of view), and there are 'nova' Goans. One cannot be certain into which category the kundalini-mongers fall, and there is the need to cast the net wider in the search for perception and recognition of the changing landscape and what such change means for Goa culturally and socio-economically. Such research will certainly require a new discipline equipped with new tools, for Goa’s modern subcultures operate almost invisibly. Maria Aurora Couto has talked about the truism that "all societies go through upheavals, transitions and hopefully learn to accommodate change constructively" (in a speech presented at the release of a book on Indo-Portuguese history). "Apart from being concerned about moral decline connected with tourism, we also worry about the extent of in-migration," she commented. "I believe that more than 50 per cent of our population is not Goan. Most of it is migrant labour which is needed in Goa, There is also a professional class some of whom are seriously involved in issues to safeguard the character and quality of Goan life and environment, who should be given credit for their involvement." How is such involvement to be defined? And how shall our shared, linked, harmony-seeking Goan, nova-Goan communities apportion the giving and taking of credit? And is contribution to community fungible between cultures? To find a starting point may be far more difficult than it seems simply because the 'Who is a Goan?' primal question has no primal answer. "Goans speak, write and think a lot about themselves," wrote Edith Melo Furtado of the Goa University. "Should we be blamed for chauvinism? Here too we are the product of history, somewhere its beneficiaries, and everywhere its victims." What would Shennoi Vaman Raghunath Varde Valaulikar have made of the Goa of today, a 'dourada' to a good number of 'ghantis', a source of acute unease to his countrymen two generations removed? Valaulikar claimed a genuine Konkan culture, which led him to be called 'Goembab' ('Father of Goa') but from his prodigious talents was also born a literary canon -- Konknni versions of eminent world literature including Moliere's L'Avare, the Thousand And One Nights and the story of the Biblical Flood. Goembab's writings illustrated how fluently Konknni could absorb themes and styles from all over the world. Goa just as readily, if reluctantly, has absorbed the legions of 'bhaile' which sailed up its estuaries, slipped through the ghats, infested its beaches, smoked ganja on its hilltops, caroused during the carnavals, and now, who are quietly buying its houses and re-populating its village 'vaddos'. The nova Goenkars are learning Konknni, Portuguese -- not just to swear in the fish markets and with fine disregard for the "classical diglossia" that so traumatised their hosts' forefathers. Their demand for cultured diversion has aided the Goan artist, musician and chef. They/we have added -- and continue to -- considerable colour to the historical canvas that is our aparanta, a civilizational synthesis that remains a collaborative work-in-progress. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ABOUT THE AUTHOR: RAHUL GOSWAMI is a long-time journalist who has worked in Mumbai, Goa, the Far East, and across India. This essay was first published in PARMAL, the annual journal of the Goa Heritage Action Group, from where it is being reprinted with permission. PARMAL is an easily-recommedable buy, priced at Rs 100. and can be purchased from the GHAG at ghaggoa at rediffmail.com or www.goaheritage.or See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/goaheritage GOANET READER WELCOMES contributions from its readers, by way of essays, reviews, features and think-pieces. We share quality Goa-related writing among the growing readership of Goanet and it's allied network of mailing lists. 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