I Enjoyed reading this. By Frederick Noronha
Nobody would like to be told they're dying; not even an elderly patient on a deathbed. So, one reads with rather mixed feelings the BBC.com story titled 'In pictures: India's dying Christian communities'. This feature was actually about a forthcoming book by the London-based photographer Karan Kapoor, the son of actors Shashi Kapoor and Jennifer (Kendal) Kapoor. Initially, the article focuses on the Anglo-Indian community, but latter on throws in the line that "Kapoor also took portraits of Goa's Catholic community". Karan Kapoor's parents were part of an early generation which owned a holiday home in Goa. This was at Baga, if one is not wrong. The Kapoors came in to Goa some time before it became the fashionable thing to do, for anyone and their uncle from Urban India. Given how the mainstream-periphery divide works here, one that Independent India has inherited from British India, this is not the first, nor the last depiction of Quaint Goa. Many many decades later perhaps, visiting photographers will continue to locate the 21st century equivalent of what Kapoor found here in the 1990s. Tiny boys striking a pose behind a violin at Loutolim. A blind musician being led to the church feast. Suit-clad teenagers consciously posing while seated on a parked scooter. A boys dressed as an angel for church service in Loutolim. A scene at the centuries-old seminary at Rachol. But despite the somewhat cliched depiction, Karan Kapoor's work pushes us to think of wider issues concerning Goa. Once again, in the 2010s, the Catholic in Goa feels a sense of uncertainity and disenchantment as he (often she, this is in some ways a women-empowered society, thanks to migration and education) looks to the future. For Goa's Catholics, history has been like a roller coaster ride. It's important not to get unduly pessimistic over it, but the facts have to be faced up to. Good and challenging trends have come its way, not just in the past five or six decades of tumultous political change. But this has been the case through centuries of migration, changing fortunes, shrinking and expanding opportunity, new El Dorados and unexpected threats. * * * In the 1960s, as ours was one of the families heading back to Goa, the local Catholic elite was largely caught up amidst fears, doom and gloom. Those brought up amidst a Portuguese worldview saw little hope. But, for the English-speaking Catholic, opportunity was just opening up back home. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the traumatic developments in former British East Africa, specially Uganda, ended up ironically in bringing in so much talent back here. I have argued elsewhere that this was a time when many emigration-oriented (read: Catholic) coastal villages flowered like never before. But, barely a decade or so later, by the 1980s, many of the children of those who had returned were finishing their education, and readying to once again migrate themselves. Today, many are settled in Australia, Canada, UK, the US and other parts of the Anglo-Saxon English-speaking world. Meanwhile, in the 1990s, quite a few Bombay Goans opted to resettle here, for reasons of real estate costs, and safety issues in the big city, among others. * * * Three challenges face the community now, that in some ways justify the 'dying' tag of Karan Kapoor. The first stems from a crisis of its own ambitions. The second is its struggle to legitimise its aspirations. Third, but not necessarily in that order, is the role it builds for itself in its home State and the wider world. Goans worldwide are, in some ways, victims of their own ambitious. The growing trend towards seeking foreign passports -- not just Portuguese -- has been widely commented upon. We all have our own stories of our own friends and colleagues, who, despite enjoying a perfectly comfortable lifestyle in Goa, one fine day just pack their bags and leave. If asked, they will justify it saying they are doing this "for the children's sake". Unlike other Indian migratory communities, the Goan Catholic is seldom known to return home once (s)he migrates. The Goan ability to merge into almost any setting is a doubled-edged sword. It makes migration easy, but lowers the desire to return. In contrast, highly education expats from the rest of India are ready to return back and contribute to that place called home, sometimes while they are in their 30s itself. Goa has a few exceptions of this kind, like the festival-organising Marius Fernandes. But most stay away, only to find their children too deeply entrenced in their new homes to ever be able to return. Then too, with all its wealth and its talent, the Goan Catholic appears rather headless as a community. Because it has got caught up in low-intensity communal conflict or caste disputes for some time now, it finds it hard to define its own priorities. For a variety of reasons, it finds it cultural space shrinking. Portuguese, the preferred language of the elite till the middle of the last century, died (or was phased out, understandably) with the demise of colonialism. Then, for unconnected reasons, the widely used Romi Konkani got step-motherly treatment while English was pushed out of primary education for over a decade. At another level, nobody seems to know how politicians who pose as community leaders get selected for, or manoeuvre themselves into, the job. In the first place, it's a myth to believe that an entire community shares a common, unified interest. But those in the political class who claim community leadership should at least be held accountable in some ways. The Goan Catholic is often made accutely aware of the fact that he is losing the numbers game. But this argument, a strange mix of majoritarian democratic rules, covert communalism and demography, overlooks the fact that being in a majority in Goa till 1925 or so did not make the community immune from the pressures it faced then too. The increasing inability to access government jobs should not be an alibi to explain its failure build the educational capabilities by the community. Even a cursory look at the latest Catholic directory would point to a rather limited presence of the community in fields like technical education, health care (including nursing), or college and university education. Even its schools have been eroded by the regional languages gamble, which was thought by some to be beneficial. Matter, they say, is neither created nor destroyed. Likewise, the Goan Catholic community seems to be changing its form. Today, we have at least a couple of Goan villages in places Swindon (and maybe four to five in downtown Bombay at the time of Liberation). So, challenges will come in new forms too. That the nature of Goan politics also means there is an eagerness in some quarters to disenfranchise them as fast as possible -- in more ways than one -- makes the issue no less complex. Yet, any effort to create a balance sheet needs to see both sides of the picture. (First published in The Navhind Times) ### -- DEV BOREM KORUM Gabe Menezes.