Here's a paper that was read on my behalf by my Merxecho friend Basilio Monteiro who organized a wonderful colloquium on Goan diaspora at the New Rochelle College in New York last weekend.
Cheers, Santosh A MIGRANT'S VIEW ON WHO WE ARE Santosh A. Helekar Migration is a milestone in the life of a human being, not very different from birth, puberty, marriage and death. Many things are lost in this life-changing event, and many things are gained. Social psychologists must have formalized the impact of this event on the thought process of an immigrant, and described the stages of mental transformation that the immigrant goes through after a sudden transplantation into unfamiliar surroundings. Sociologists must have studied the assimilation of cultures on various scales and under diverse social conditions. I am neither a psychologist nor a sociologist. I like to think of myself as a migrant skilled laborer from Goa. So my account of what migration might do to the identity of a person is my own unvarnished perspective. While at first it did not seem this way to me, I now look at the elements of my identity that I have lost by having left my native land in my twenties, with the same sense of loss that a child feels when losing its first milk tooth. Yes, it was a little bit painful. It did draw blood, and I was partially edentulous for a while. But I did replace that void with a stronger, more permanent tooth - a stronger and more permanent identity. I have now blended my Goanness into a new global, perhaps even universal, mentality. So I do not believe I can say anything extraordinary or particularly interesting about what I have lost by the cultural transplantation that I have undergone, although I realize it might be different for others. To me the most significant change has been not a loss, but a gain - gain of an unexpected new perspective on what it means to be a socially conscious and culturally attuned individual, living on any point on the earth's surface at any time in the history of our civilization. This change has been possible because of the acquisition of the mind of a migrant and the eye of an itinerant. I have realized that our psyche and our culture are both products of the collision of thoughts, memories, habits and practices of people in a perpetual state of motion. We are who we are because we are fundamentally motile; we collide with each other; our collisions cause a significant exchange of energy, both as heat and light; and we emerge from the collision liquefied, homogenized and energized. Our condition is better described as a hot molten ball emitting a new radiance than the much-advertised melting pot. I call this view the Newtonian theory of culture. I suspect someone has already expounded such a theory many years before I was born. However, I do not remember reading about it, and I apologize for not knowing the name of the migrant who wrote about it or what he said, because I do suffer from frequent bouts of intellectual laziness, especially in respect of matters beyond my field of knowledge. So if you have not heard about it before, here is a brief primer on my own Newtonian theory of culture. The Newtonian theory of culture rests on the well-grounded observation that the world was populated entirely by migration of slowly motile masses of humans in constant battle with inertia and with internal and external forces of nature. Viewed over the time- scale of millennia there are no indigenous people on earth. People have always moved from some other place into their new place of habitation. People here are from somewhere else. Those who were there before we arrived only beat us to the finish line. They might have even arrived from the same place as we have, only a few hundred years before we did. This is the case with two of the earliest tribes that populated Goa, the Asuras and the Kols, who arrived from Chhota Nagpur 500 years apart. Indeed, the little we know about how the land of Goa was populated tells us the story that supports my entire view. This story is murky because History is a messy field. It is very easy to revise it and very hard to tell, who is doing the revising. I have always found writings on the prehistory and early history of Goa and India confusing. Therefore, I like to adopt an attitude of disbelief while accepting any historical account, even though I might not have any compelling reason to doubt its authenticity. So to tell you the story without investing too much effort into fleshing out the unfocussed details, I would like to provide a chronology of the people who settled in Goa beginning around 10000 B.C., give or take a few thousand years. This chronology, extracted from a book called The Cultural History of Goa by Anant Dhume, a well-known former Director of Land Survey in Goa (retired in 1968) who spent a fair amount of his life doing original archeological and historical research in Goa, is as follows: ~10000 B. C. -- Kurukhs or Uraons, a Dravidian tribe settled in parts of Goa and then moved north to Baluchistan and Chhota Nagpur. ~7000 B. C. -- Maraungs, later known as Mhars were cave dwellers in parts of Goa. ~4000 B. C. -- Pastoral tribe from Southern India that followed the Matriarchal system and practiced domestication of animals, particularly the buffalo, settled in most parts of Goa. ~3500 B. C. -- Asuras came from Chhota Nagpur. They could make use of copper and iron in spongy form, and started agriculture using the "Kumeri" or the cut and burn method. ~3000 B. C. -- Kols came from Chhota Nagpur. They practiced agriculture with subdivided paddy fields, and set up the "Barazan" (12 hamlets) system of village administration. ~3000 B. C. -- Mundaris and Kharwas also came from Chhota Nagpur. The Mundaris lived under the dominion of the Kols, and the Kharwas took to fishing as a profession. ~2400 B. C. -- The first batch of Aryans came from the north. They were from the Bhargava and Angirasa clans. They brought in the Rigvedic culture. ~2000 B. C. -- Sumerians arrived and settled in Ponda, Bardez and Salcete talukas. They brought in the concept of divine ownership of land, the village deity and the oligarchic system of village government. ~700 B. C. -- The second batch of Aryans came from the north by land and sea. The three main groups who came to Goa were the Bhojas, the Chediyas and the Saraswats. The Bhojas established the first kingdom. All the three clans practiced private ownership of land, and divided the land among themselves. Beginning around 600 B. C. up until 1510 A. D. Goa was ruled by various kings -- Bojas, Konkan Mauryas, Pulakesin II Chalukya, Sendrakas, Silaharas, Kadambas, Bhupala, Vira Kavana, Allauddin - Sultan of Bahamani, and Yusuf Adil Khan - founder of the Adil Shahi dynasty. The cultural identity of Goans today was therefore founded on the collision of cultures and identities of all the above immigrants who landed on Goan shores long before the ballyhooed arrival of the Portuguese. Their ideas, practices and personalities have thoroughly melded into our psyche to such an extent that it is difficult to tell them apart, much as the individual ingredients that impart the distinctive flavor of a well-cooked fish curry. Such melding is possible because our minds are plastic. The Newtonian theory of culture says that they are like Newtonian fluids. The resistance that they offer to unfamiliar forces is highly predictable and easily overcome. Beneath the fa�ade of xenophobic and territorial instincts there resides a deep-seated affinity for novelty and change, combined with a tendency for liquefaction and homogenization. While it is difficult to recognize all the seminal elements constituting our cultural identity, a closer look at our customs, rituals, language, cuisine, names of villages, ways of farming and modes of governing the affairs of our communities reveals telltale signs of a confluence of cultures. I have already enumerated some of these influences in Goa in the chronology of migrants listed earlier. The concept of divine ownership of land in Goa for example, was most likely brought in by the people of Sumer. Thus, the countless instances of blending of Portuguese influences into our collective behavior as a people, are merely the vestiges of the latest major collision with inwardly motile migrants in Goa. It would appear now that in the modern world of satellite television and the worldwide web physical motility of people has become less important to the collision and blending of distant cultures. Nevertheless, something tells me that all the sights and sounds that we witness in the flashy multimedia presentations held around us, are simply overrated. The physical touch and the senses of smell and taste, not to mention the colliding masses of people and colluding forces of nature, got to have a much greater role to play in the Newtonian fusion of cultural identities. ########################################################################## # Send submissions for Goanet to [EMAIL PROTECTED] # # PLEASE remember to stay on-topic (related to Goa), and avoid top-posts # # More details on Goanet at http://joingoanet.shorturl.com/ # # Please keep your discussion/tone polite, to reflect respect to others # ##########################################################################
