"When a Portuguese vessel came to Goa this year to mark their 450 years of cruelty in the state and the rape of our women by the colonizers, we protested and stopped the chief minister and even the governor from being a part of it. Only the MP from South Goa went like a traitor, a dog of the Portuguese."
---------------------------------------------- This "rape of our women" is a common scare and hate-mongering tactic used by all radicals. You will hear it often across the spectrum. The book by Historian Fatima da Silva Gracias (Women in Goa) is fascinating for the light it sheds on the plight of women in Goa during early Colonial times. Linschoten, the sixteenth century Dutch traveller is very often quoted on life in Goa at the time, moreso as he is taken to be an independent observor. Fatima Gracias uses him as a source and this is what he had to say about the women in Goa: "The women are very luxurious and unchaste, for there are verie few among them, although they bee married, but they have besides their husbands one or two of those that are called souldiers, with whom they take their pleasures:" (this is olde English, so some spellings are different) Fatima Gracias further writes: "In the early period, prostitutes were found all over the city of Goa, and particularly in an area known as Ilha de Fogo. Lower class Indian prostitutes were known among the Portuguese as perrinhas malabares. The nautch girls from the mainland were found on the island of Kumbarjua....Some of the prostitutes in the city of Goa were called home by their clients. High class prostitutes and adulterous wives were found moving in closed palaquins and soliciting from house to house." Well, it seems Goa has a long tradition of girls coming to the house to offer full services. Not only prostitutes but also women who should have been perfectly happy being married were actually drugging their husbands to sleep and climbing the walls to get to their lovers (I'm not making this up, its in the book). Goan woman might have preferred Portuguese men. Maybe their men knew something ours didn't. So the question of "raping our women" is a big bogey erected to radicalize society into thinking they are either under imminent threat or have been done an grave injustice in the past which has to be avenged. If the VHP are truly concerned about women and their rights, I challenge them to protest the rape of Dalits by upper-castes, dowry deaths and child prostitution in India. Best, Selma
