Carvalho wrote: Why all the angst Doc? Sadly, if only it were true that it is a relic of pre-conversion days. It's a reality even in today's Goa but my interest in it is not to perpetuate it but as a means to identifying and/or tracing people, migrations, occupations and the inherent turmoil that it caused within our society. We cannot write about Goan society and ignore the elephant in the room.
Importantly caste is a marker of migratory patterns in Goa and a marker of clans. So it is an important geneology tool. ---------------------------------------------------- selma, In one post to Goanet, you were proudly beating your chest, informing us of the so called caste of your Christian hubby. Sadly enough, 500 years of Christianity has failed to remove this stigma from the Christian Goan. Caste, the propagation or the status quo of, remains regressive thinking to me. Bringing up caste is almost the equivalent of the dying kick of a donkey or that in the realm of the drowning, of those trying to grasp the last straw. What really kills the concept of caste, is education. The bright student who excels in school, in his/her accounting or IIT class, upsets, in a few years, the cart of eons of suppression. Just like the English gentry of yester century, those with so called God given rights, suddenly find themselves with God not on their side. Their facade becomes displayed, and destroyed. It is possible that this is not going to make sense to you. After all, not only are you acutely caste conscious, you have gone to the extreme of describing your fellow Goans, as, and I am paraphrasing here, "Slightly below cows." (If you are going to reply to this, please grace us with you original quote.) Lastly, if you need to know what prompted Goans to migrate to E. Africa and other places, why don`t you directly ask the people you are interviewingÉ I would love to hear this question i.e. What is your caste and why did it make you migrate from GoaÉ Mervyn Lobo
