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Hello Goodnight: A Life of Goa
This unusually fine travel book, written in a taut, literate prose, is a contemporary portrait of Goa -- that tiny and eccentric nodule on the Indian coast facing out across the Indian Ocean toward Arabia. David Tomory gives us a complex sense of how the Goa of today is woven out of the brightly colored if often clashing strands of the bizarre historical events that brought it into being. The place was conquered (more or less) by the Portuguese in 1510, not because they wanted to create the sort of colonial empires they had in Angola and Brazil but because they sought an outpost from which they could control the Indian Ocean and so the spice trade that sailed across it.
Goa attracted the Portuguese precisely because it was so out of the way, so cut off from the rest of subcontinent; they knew they did not have the military strength to hold it otherwise. And, in fact, their invasion was not only completely unnoticed at the time but remained a non-event to the rest of India for entire centuries. As colonialists, the Portuguese were not all bad -- more often than not their policy in Goa was to go along to get along. But the forces of the Inquisition that they brought with them were as implacably hostile to native culture and native temples as today's rulers of Afghanistan are toward Buddhist statues, and the havoc they wrought makes for depressing if instructive reading.
As it turned out, the Portuguese never really made a success of Goa, and they surrendered it to the Indian Army in 1960 with nothing more than a token struggle. Nehru then decreed that the Goans should be allowed to continue to follow their idiosyncratic ways, with their rebuilt Hindu temples incorporating stylistic elements of the European Baroque, and their music, which blended the sad laments of Portuguese far from their homeland with traditional Indian instruments and musical phrases. Had it not been for the conspicuous isolation of the place and its beautiful beaches, it would have remained a mostly unnoticed and rather sleepy backwater.
Instead, as anyone who grew of age in the sixties will remember, Goa became a major destination for hippies from both America and Europe, who found in the combination of pristine shoreline, a plentiful supply of marijuna, and the Goan attitude of saudades -- minding your own business and tolerating your neighbor's eccentricities -- the perfect recipe for paradise. Soon, local entrepreneurs were organizing bus tours so that Indian businessmen could stroll the beaches in groups and gawk at naked Western women. So did the seeds for Goa's ultimate (or at least current) destiny as "Touristhan," get scattered broadside.
Today, Goa caters to all: Saudi Arabians looking for rain and access to booze; high-class tourists drawn to the exclusive resorts; the discount charter-flight vacation crowd picking up bargains in the bazaar; and, albeit in a less perfectly distilled form, the hippy element as well. Peering down a beach at a distant cluster of reclining forms, a souvenir seller inquired of the author, "Are those hippielog or charterlog?" Charter people are worth the hike across the sand; hippy people, however, don't buy anything.
All of this would be interesting enough simply recounted, but Tomory is excellent at capturing the local atmosphere -- the lizards on the walls and the snakes under the bed, the outhouses with their resident pigs, the bakery boys on their bicycles peddling through the streets at dawn. He also allows the concerns and character of contemporary Goans to shape his narrative. Many of them have had a taste of the money economy from employment in Bahrain; others have returned from entrepreneurial adventures in Africa. Both groups came back to find their homeland irretrievably changed. However, even as they lament the loss of the old, quiet, and familiar Goa, they are not exactly immune to the temptations of the new, much more cosmopolitan one. It's a rare travel writer who simultaneously gets you to feel the sand of a place in your shoes and the spirit of a place in your heart. Tomory, self-effacing, open-minded, and endlessly curious, pulls it off.
- Forwarded by www.goa-world.com
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