From Post-Colonial to Neo-Colonial:
Perils and Prospects Facing Goan Culture Today
By Anthony Gomes
The aftermath of the Second World War saw the gradual
dismantling of colonialism and colonial empires that left
behind a legacy of post-colonial cultures in the colonized
countries around the globe. This post-colonial culture was
often a fusion of the original culture of the colonized
people with that of the colonizer, creating a de novo-culture
the aim of which was often to advance the colonial and
imperial agenda of the colonizer.
There is considerable agreement among the scholars of
colonial/post-colonial studies that colonialism benefited the
colonizer at the expense of the colonized. As far back as the
late 1800s, anti-colonialists of the time like Al-Afghani
claimed that the marked improvement in India's transport
system and the Western-style education system established
by the British was essentially to drain India's wealth and
facilitate trade for British businessmen and to turn Indians
into English speaking lackeys of the British administration,
respectively.
However, the reverse may partly be true when
examined in-hindsight: in this regard one might
argue that there might not have been the nation of
India we know of today, and the widely spoken
English language which has benefited the citizens
of India in a globalized commercial world. On the
other hand one cannot ignore the fact that the
carving of the Indian subcontinent and the
Middle-East has left its dire political and
socio-economic repercussions that are widely felt
to this day.
Whatever the merits and demerits, there is no doubt that
colonialism and subjugation of a people was immoral.
Furthermore, one never knows how far a culture might have
advanced left to its own means, its needs, and its methods.
In the past, however, the ills of colonialism for the most
part were presented and even romanticized by the colonizers
as the extension of Civilization, which ideologically
justified the self-ascribed superiority (racial, cultural and
religious) of the Western (European) world over the
non-Western world, which Joseph-Ernest Renan theorized in *La
Réforme intellectuel et morale* (1871), wherein an imperial
power would affect the intellectual and moral reformation of
the colored peoples of the lesser cultures of the world.
Needless to say, such an ideology assumes the superiority of
the culture of the colonizer over the colonized. Notably, La
mission civilisatrice, the civilizing mission of the French
Empire, proposed that some races and cultures have a higher
purpose in life, whereby the more powerful, more developed,
and more civilized races have the right to, and even perhaps
an obligation to colonize other people, in service to the
noble idea of civilization and its economic benefits.
In *The Wretched of the Earth* (1961), the psychiatrist
Frantz Fanon described the nature of colonialism as
essentially destructive and harmful to the mental health of
the subjugated colored people in the colonies. Fanon
advocated violent resistance arguing that it is a cathartic
process which purges colonial servility from the native
psyche, and restores self-respect to the colonized.
It is noteworthy however that more than fifty years before
Frantz Fanon's social and political assessment of colonial
subjugation, Mohandas Gandhi had organized campaigns for Hind
Swaraj to resist British colonial rule over the people of
India. Edward W. Saïd, on the other hand, devised the term
Orientalism, wherein the West created the concept of the East
allowing the European suppression of the people of the Middle
East, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and of Asia, and
enabling Westerners to express and represent themselves as
discrete peoples and cultures.
Portuguese colonialism
Portuguese colonialism as a whole, and specifically that of
Goa, has not been a part of the post-colonial debate among
scholars of colonialism, which focused mostly on British
post-colonialism in Asia and Africa. However, the degree and
severity of colonialism both in terms of exploitation,
cruelty, and religious conversion varied substantially among
the European colonizers and the lands they colonized. The
scope of this article does not lend itself to a lengthy
discussion of this issue.
Gilberto Freire, a renowned Brazilian sociologist proposed
the concept of Luso-Tropicalismo, presenting the idea during
a lecture in Goa in 1952, that portrayed Portugal's
colonialism as soft, non-racist, and non-exploitative.
Unfortunately, some elements of this concept can be hotly
debated in the face of the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa, the
massacres associated with the Pintos (1787) and the Margao
revolts (1890), and in regards to Portuguese colonialism in
Africa and the slave trade. Luso-Tropicalismo, however, was
subsequently used by the Novo Estado of Salazar as a
justification to
