FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2024
Sujay Gupta
We are living in desperate times. In confined times. As we saw scenes of Goan outbursts at closed shops, police high-handedness, the use of sticks and forcible closures, during the lockdown, there was another narrative which was overtly missed.
What have we become? How far have we gone into the nadir of existence? Where are our Goan village communities, the foundation of our existence, the bulwark of our rural civilisation? We were a land of plenty and there was plentiful. The system of land, its inheritance and allocation meant there was enough land to farm on and resources belonged to the people and were adequately distributed.
Goa was built into a state of villages by using the river for irrigation. The produce of the land, the water, and the farms were shared. The people were interdependent but the community was self-sufficient.
Cut to March and April 2020. A Goan Chief Minister trying his best to see vegetable and fruit trucks come from Karnataka. Our supermarkets and department stores are desperate for vehicles from other States to enter our borders to stock the shelves, there is no fish on the bazaars of rural Goa and no grain to eat. The coconuts are there, but there are no pluckers but even that is under threat as trees are falling to the onslaught of development.
The memory of the Ganvkaris or Comunidades of Goa, have not faded in the minds of those whose time has stood still. Transfixed in the early to mid-1900s. The Ganvkari system still resides in the minds of so many octagenarians who simply cannot fathom why Goa should ever see a shortage of basic food from the farms, fruit from the trees and fish from the river.
The Coronavirus has not made life complicated for us. We have.
Fr Visitacao Boaventura Monteiro, the Parish Priest of Bodiem, and a long time writer and columnist in Herald, was one of the rare specimens (a term used with affection and humility) who refused to let the memory of the Comunidade system fade, especially for a generation neither born nor exposed to one of the civilisation’s greatest system of community living, in our Goem. The second edition of his book, ‘Goan Village Communities’, ideally should be compulsory reading for all Goans, but at the very least for all government servants and those from the IAS and the IAS and the revenue services who are posted here.
While he has through painstaking reading and research written two editions of the book, well-received, Father Monteiro did not stop there. He travelled on buses, with motorcycle pilots and on scooters, meeting people with copies of his book, to get Goans to read and understand the tragedy and foolishness of leaving a system as rich as this behind. And much of the narrative in this column is either from his book or inspired by him, through other readings and limited conversations possible.
Nearly 14-17 rulers, sometimes dynasties lasting for centuries, ruled Goa but respected system of Comunidades. Fr Monteiro has told Herald earlier during the release of his book “The peculiar thing about Goa is that all these rulers accepted that the land did not belong to the rulers till 1961. They accepted that the land belonged to the villagers called Gaunkaris or Comunidade. That is the difference between Goa and the rest of India. It has got the course of law which even the Governments did not understand. The State thinks that the land belongs to the State and that’s why they are going on acquiring land, right, left and centre, wherever they want which is leading to unrest in Goa"
Let us reflect how this system was created and evolved. Centuries ago the purported picture of Goa at that time was recorded later in the Foral de Afonso Mexica dated 16.09 1526 which was the Island of Tiswadi with the adjacent islands of Chorao, Divar, and Jua (St Estevam) which today is the taluka of Ilhas.
The first people who settled on these islands after their nomadic life had to organise themselves into communities. This was mainly to help one another, to live decently, take care of the general welfare and development of the entire community, especially the old and the sick. The common needs, common interests, and common causes led the people to organise themselves into closely-knit communities, in the common lands which comprise the village lands. They aimed at a better life and to procure food for the community (Please absorb all this in today’s context).
In the course of time, these communities came to evolve into agricultural cooperative societies and a system of village governance and administration called Ganvkary or village communes which the Portuguese later called Comunidades.
Other parts of India too had these institutions. In 1830 Sir Charles Metcalfe, the Kolkata born Governor-General of India, wrote “The village communities are little republics, having nearly everything they wanted within themselves. They seem to last where nothing else lasts… the union of the village communities have, I conceive, contributed more than any other cause to the preservation of the people of India through all revolutions and changes which they have suffered.”
Community agriculture played a big part in the preservation of the community. That is dead today or dying. There were hill side terraced plots called morodd, sandy laterite soils called kher and lower lands called khazans. The three big khazan areas were Carambolim holding the biggest sweet water lake, now destroyed and the khazans of Macazana and Pernem. These khazan lands were then reclaimed into paddy fields by bunding, to meet the annual food requirements of multiple families.
Goa’s prosperity lay in its agriculture, complimented by fishing and growing of fruit trees.
This was an extremely evolved system of community governance, control over land and resources by the community and above all living in a group, a pack where each revived the strength of all.
We now have an apology of not just the Comunidade system but also of local self-governance where greed, politics and self-sustenance had made them into bodies that have eradicated the system of community governance and replacing it with a vicious structure where village communities have no relevance.
The picture of thousands of trucks outside Goa’s borders carrying produce for the people of Goa, as they wait from this succour is a sign of how we have descended from prosperity to poverty. We were a civilisation that major powers of the world respected. As our village community systems crumble, we have become dependent seekers and not proud growers and providers, we once were.
