By: Selma Carvalho Source: Goan Voice Daily Newsletter, 3 April, 2011 http://www.goanvoice.org.uk/ Full text:
My grandmother always smelt of eau de cologne. That's what she smelt of. Its use for her was partly medicinal and partly a ritual of her toilette as was fashionable for ladies of her time. She was born in the early 1900s and lived into her eighties. I know so little of the Goa she lived in where women smelt of foreign eau de cologne and men drank imported Port wine. This, of course, is a Goa of my Europeanised fantasies. Mostly people smelt of the paddy fields and from the 1900s onwards, many of them smelt of the mines where they worked. Perhaps the Goa of yesterday was not too different from the Goa of today. The things that bothered Goans then are what bother us today. In the 1950s, the nationalists, the freedom-fighters hated the mine owners. They saw them as Indian capitalists who had come to Goa and were single-handedly sustaining the Portuguese administration. Most of the venom was directed at Chowgule who by 1957 was mining 41% of Goa's total export of iron-ore. While in the main town-squares of Panjim, people prayed on Catechistic Day, danced the Vira and listened to the music of splendidly liveried brass-bands, in the distance over the hills, there were other sounds; the dissenting sounds of bombs and border skirmishes. Mines, bridges, border posts were frequent targets. Chowgule was particularly targeted; the Chowgule mines in Shirgaon were attacked. They called him "one of the unpatriotic Indians who has chosen to be a prop of the colonial regime in Goa against the interests of his own country." (Free Goa, T. B. Cunha, March 10, 1957). They accused him of owning a palatial house in Thalakwadi, Belgaum; a place called the Gold colony because all the houses there had been built by the ill-gotten gains of gold smuggling through Goa. Between May of 1956 and 1957, iron-ore exports increased by 32%. The concern then was not environmental devastation; it was what mining stood for, the revenue propping up the Portuguese regime. The foreign exchange earned through mining was used to purchase foreign goods lending an impetus to the smuggling carried out from hospitable and nurturing shores of Goa. Goan nationalists and politicians have always felt a certain distance from Delhi's power-grid. India, they saw as mired in hypocrisy. On the one hand paying lip-service to the principle of freedom for Goa but on the other hand actively facilitating Indian businesses with their engagement in Goa and with the Portuguese. The prospects for Goa's freedom seemed to be as black as its economy. Disillusioned by what they saw as Delhi's indifference to their plight, they turned in on each other, berating fellow Goans for factionalising support and putting personal interests ahead of the collective good. The state of affairs prompted renowned Marathi-Konkani writer, Laxmanrao Sardesai to set up the Goan Renaissance Centre in Bombay, in 1957. It was a non-political organization aimed at creating a wave of social change amongst Goans, for in Sardesai's words, "neither satyagraha nor sabotage movement of a limited type, can serve as powerful weapons for the removal of Portuguese domination from the Goan soil and secondly, the present political parties with their limited ideology, uninspiring programme, jealousies and generally an ineffective leadership, not supported by the masses can never create the necessary political opinion…" Sardesai understood profoundly, that no revolution is complete without an essential reformation of thought. No revolution is sustainable if the ideological infrastructure to sustain it, has not been created. He wanted to bring about a revolution of ideas and challenge the existing social and cultural institutions in Goa, as well as the political. Besides being a writer, Sardesai was also a teacher having taught at the Almeida College in Ponda. Perhaps Sardesai above all, understood how important education is to a pupil, how in those first, tender, formative years we create human beings that determine the destinies of countries. Fifties years hence, we are still struggling to bring about change; still hoping for a Goan Renaissance. That we are determined to bring this about is reflected in the number of parents who marched onto the Azad Maidan to demand a better future for their children. Our society is reforming; ever so slowly but surely. We have a long way to go but there is no need to be disillusioned along the way. The pitfalls we see today are the same ones our heroic elders saw generations ago as overwhelming and insurmountable. Yet they did overcame them. So will we. Selma Carvalho is the author of Into the Diaspora Wilderness. This week celebrated writer George Menezes comments on the book. To view, click here: http://selmacarvalho.squarespace.com/reviews-etc/ Do leave your feedback at [email protected]
