In response to your posts, please note that Jose Colaco and I had merely pointed out that Caste and Class are altogether different and oppositional concepts. Further, it was implied that some Catholic Goan casteists try to blur the difference between the two with the hope that such subterfuge will not be noticed. Unfortunately for them, there are too many smarter Goans (and not Johnny come lately types as you imply) who can take on any casteist apologist today, primarily because of education, and professional and class status in a globalised world.
On another point, I believe that you are inclined to suggest, or at least, desperately want to believe, that all this evil caste business was a thing of the past, and if prevalent at all today, it is limited to a few. So let me provide you a brief response to this point. Firstly, Catholic Goa absolutely reeks of caste today as it has always done. My grandparents and their generations before them, intuitively knew that casteism was absolute hogwash. Nevertheless, they were intimidated and undermined by the hegemonic casteists in Goa. Unfortunately, my forebears did not have the education nor skills to take on the casteists and their hegemony. However, I am ever so glad that I can now do this, with absolute relish and confidence, especially, in targeting contemporary Catholic Goan casteists wherever they may appear. Now, can you possibly have a problem with my stance? Do you want an historically oppressed people to suddenly suffer an attack of amnesia? Not on your Nellie my friend!
Secondly, Catholic Goan casteism was taken beyond Goa, and across the waters to places like East Africa with much enthusiasm by a thoroughly disgusting casteist lot. Their hegemony lasted, pretty triumphantly, for them, upto about three decades ago and still persists there but not with its former intensity. Instead it has tried to root itself in the UK, Canada, USA and other places in more recent times. However, it is my earnest hope that it is today fighting a losing battle in London, Toronto, Melbourne, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Jersey/New York and (believe you me) even in Oslo! And this is, particularly paradoxically, among people who should know better through education but have been unable to discard what they absorbed, very early on, through their mothers' milk. We know this because strident anti-castists, like me, keep our ears to the ground and know exactly what is going on. Yet, we are pleased when we hear former casteists accept and state that Catholic Goan casteism is and has always been totally indefensible. All I therefore personally seek, Gilbert, is this form of coming out, rather than the absurdity of some die-hard fellow Goans trying to be defensive about casteism in this day and age.
In sum, it is my firm belief that it is not by running away from evil that we overcome it, but by going to meet it. Brown racism aka casteism among Catholic Goans, in all its manifestations, has to be met head on in the Goan Diaspora, and simultaneously, but bit by bit in Goa itself.
Cornel DaCosta (London)
