WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24, 2024
It is extremely pertinent that the word “loot” entered the English language during the 18th century from Hindustani - the mother language of both Hindi and Urdu – soon after the 1757 Battle of Plassey delivered Bengal to the British East India Company under the ruthless plunderer Robert Clive. That notorious commander raided enough treasure to become the wealthiest “self-made” European of his times, and his legendary stash, which is still hoarded mostly intact in Wales by his descendants, remains richer than any Mughal-era collection in the subcontinent. Thus, it’s unsurprising “loot” showed up in Charles James’s military dictionary in 1802: “goods taken from an enemy, stolen property”.
Plassey was only the beginning, because the East India Company and its successor state that was the British Raj (which took over the reins in 1874) kept pillaging their colonial possessions unrelentingly. As the economist Angus Maddison famously - albeit not without controversy - attempted to quantify, India’s share of the global economy went from 27% at the height of Aurangzeb’s reign to roughly 23% after the first British depredations, and then plummeted catastrophically to just over 3% by the time of Independence in 1947.
In between were epic crimes, and also the making of the modern world we live in (itself now unmistakably teetering on the verge of collapse). As the great novelist and writer Amitav Ghosh writes in his 2021 tour de force The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, “colonialism, genocide and structures of organised violence are the foundations on which industrial modernity was built.” He explains how “capitalism was never endogenous to the West: Europe’s colonial conquests and the mass enslavement of Amerindians and Africans were essential to its formation.”
If not the specifics, this lingering brutality is certainly what Goa’s chief minister Pramod Sawant had in mind when he told the media a few days ago - at the launch of the state’s extensive Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav programmes – that the Portuguese Estado da Índia had been just like the British: “Goa was not poor, it was rich. And because of this the Portuguese came to Goa. While ruling for 400 years, they definitely looted our wealth. Goa was blessed with iron ore and natural resources. It’s not wrong to say this.”
Although his comments sparked predictable hullabaloo, the fact remains the chief minister was entirely correct in saying that the Portuguese were attracted to 16th century Goa because it was prosperous. Nonetheless, what happened here after Afonso de Albuquerque’s victory was substantially different from the relentless ransacking that characterised British rule in India. This twist of history cannot be denied, and it’s important to understand how and why it happened that way.
The first essential fact to note is the main source of precolonial Goa’s wealth - the reason Afonso de Albuquerque targeted it– was trade, and that trading economy expanded exponentially under Portuguese writ. In his excellent paper Trade and Commerce in Sixteenth Century Goa, K S Mathew notes what “was quite a flourishing city before the Portuguese conquest” transformed after 1510, as “the local and external trade of Goa received an unprecedented fillip.” He describes an unprecedented East-West emporium: “The merchants found in this city belonged to diverse religious groups and nationalities, Jews, Hindus, Christians, Jains and Muslims were among them. There were merchants from Persia, Arabia, Italy, Abyssinia, Germany, Portugal, Armenia, Gujarat, Kanara and the Malabar Coast.”
Mathew’s study is in Goa Through the Ages: An Economic History, an invaluable collection edited by the late Teotonio de Souza for Goa University in 1990. Another fine paper, Goa-based Seaborne Trade: 17th-18th Centuries by M N Pearson, details how even after “the glory days of the sixteenth century had gone” and Portuguese power declined, “many Goans still could make money and be innovative as they traded all over the Indian Ocean and beyond.” And here’s the twist, “it was not so much the Portuguese and mestiços who did best from it, it was local people, in other words Hindu and some Christian Indians, especially the former.” Just one eye-opener: “in the 1630s, the investment in Goa’s interport trade was put at 2,850,000 xerafins, and of this 2,000,000 belonged to non-Christian Indians.”
Pratima Kamat’s outstanding 1999 Farar Far: Local Resistance to Colonial Hegemony in Goa 1510-1912 outlines how “If centuries ago, the gaud saraswat brahmins (GSBs) had established their economic hegemony over Goa through the colonisation of the low-lying khazan lands, now with renewed grit and determination, in the face of an aggressive proselytising European colonial presence, they seem to have ‘captured’ the two symbols of Portuguese colonialism, the sea and the cross.” Eventually, “the GSBs assumed a controlling position in the coastal trade and further ‘axed’ the cross with the continuance of Sanskritic practices amongst the converts.”
Nothing like this happened in any other European colony, and certainly not in the erstwhile Raj. As Parag Parobo recounts in his superb India’s First Democratic Revolution: Dayanand Bandodkar and the Rise of Bahujan in Goa, “there was a nexus between the colonial rulers and the GSBs; the latter were the pillars of the Portuguese empire, virtually controlling and dominating the colonial economy.” By the 19th century, that pie was greatly reduced: “Unlike British India, the industrial backwardness of Portuguese Goa failed to provide an impetus towards industrialization”. What is more, “even though the Portuguese government was aware of the mining potential of the region since the 17th century, it was unwilling to develop that potential, fearing that the British might turn their gaze toward Goa.”
As we know, that was not the end of the story, because, starting in the 19th century itself, Goans fanned out across the world, to write one of the most remarkable annals in the history of globalisation. Hindu and Catholic Goans contributed far disproportionately to the establishment of Mumbai, Karachi, Rangoon, Nairobi, Kuwait. No credit to the colonialists in any way, but it is undeniable Goa flourished in unexpected ways during the colonial period. Graham Greene noted the difference in 1964: “Outside Goa one is aware all the time of the interminable repetition of the ramshackle, the enormous pressure of poverty, flowing, branching, extending like floodwater. This is not a question of religion. The Goan Hindu village can be distinguished as easily from the Hindu village of India as the Christian, and there is little need to drive the point home at the boundary with placards.”
Alas, the society, culture, environment and sheer quality of life in Goa began to come under severe pressure by the turn of the 20th century, with that steady deterioration accelerating to outright disaster in the past 10 years. It is now that we see the exchequer being raided to the grave detriment of future generations, while priceless community assets – not to mention the fragile ecology – are being pillaged, by precisely those who have sworn to uphold the public interest. We do not need to the realm of history to understand and appreciate loot and looting - it is happening in front of our eyes.
(Vivek Menezes is a writer, photographer and co-founder and co-curator of the Goa Arts and Literature Festival)
