Rethinking Origin Myths in Goa IV

For some time now I have been revisiting the myth recounted by Narayan Kondiba Mane, a Dhangar shepherd from the district of Kolhapur in Maharashtra. The myth tells of the birthing of the hero Parashurama and his relationship with the Goddess Yellamma. Mane’s myth suggests that Parashurama was born of the virgin Goddess Yellamma as a punishment for her violation of the sacred grove of Mahadev. Saddled with a baby, the Goddess was given aid by the Shia heroes Imam Hassan and Imam Hussein who built a residence for her on the hill of Saundati not far from Belgaum. As the titles of this series of columns will indicate, I have been using this myth to suggest that there is a way in which we can use this myth to rethink the central role that is often given to a brahmanically imagined Parashurama when recounting Goa’s mythical origins.

Rethinking the now popular Parashurama myth requires that we also be aware of the manner the centrality of the brahmanical, or Puranic, myth is perhaps only a century old. Prior to this period the idea that Parashurama, son of the sage Jamadagni and Renuka, created Goa by casting an arrow into the sea was not widespread. On the contrary, there were a variety of versions of the myth and it was restricted to brahmanical circles. As Mane’s recounting of the myth of Yellamma and Parashurama indicates there were a variety of other myths that provided different life stories for these personalities. How is it, then, that the Puranic myth gained the popularity that it today enjoys?

The key to this question lies in the figure of the Orientalist gentleman-scholar José Gerson da Cunha (1844-1900), who operated from Bombay in the nineteenth century. Cunha’s contribution to history was to locate a variety of the Parashurama myths, and establish a single version that he would publish and present as a scientific version as the following extract from his famous work, The Konkani Language and Literature, demonstrates:

"The edition of these fragments which I published in 1877, and the translation of which I have now completed, show the work to contain more mythology than history, more fiction than truth, and this embodied in a Sanskrit which has but little regard for orthography and grammar. Difficult as it is to disentangle the thread of truth from the confused web of fiction, or of those hopeless mazes of legends and myths which everywhere abound, there are still incorporated into the work some local traditions of more or less worth, treasured up for centuries by the Brahmans of the Konkan, who consider it to be their paladium. 

This extract clearly indicates that the version we do have of the myth was the result of his editorial interventions. While it is clear that Cunha clearly saw these texts as fanciful and mythical, it is also clear that Cunha sought to identify history from the piles of myth that he encountered. But why was Cunha so concerned with extracting history from this myth? The answer is pretty straight forward; Cunha had an obsession with caste, establishing the antiquity of his own caste, and his caste’s location as that equivalent to European nobility. Consider this extract from George Moraes’ obituary of the man in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bombay (1964-64: 8): “Another weakness of Dr. Da Cunha was his caste complex. In his Konkani Language and Literature he never misses an opportunity of boosting the caste of the author if he happens to be of his caste, however obscure may have been his work…” Earlier in this obituary (page 3) Moraes also credits Cunha with providing an interpretative gloss that allowed the title of Shenvi or Shenoy to be understood as that of aristocracy.

Reflecting on Gerson da Cunha, the scholar Filipa Vicente (2012) points out that his European-ness and his brahmin-ness were critical to the way in which he sought to project himself. Both were absolutely essential to his identity and worked in tandem. Where on one occasion, he was described merely as a brahmin, Cunha manifested great discomfort because this fact of his identity was separated from his Catholicism. 

Vicente points out that “this declaration of his Europeanism does not necessarily signify a rejection of his Indian identity. It was precisely his Goan origins that enabled this combination of both his identities. Goa's ‘Portuguese nature’ and his own personal and family history attributed to him with the Europeanism he acknowledged, and which he wanted others to recognize in him, while also recognizing his Indian Brahman identity.” In other words, da Cunha’s Catholicism allowed him to be seen as a European in European circles, while his brahmanical identity allowed him to claim the ancient and noble pedigree that he conferred on his caste fellows.

That Cunha’s machinations worked and were acclaimed by so many is an indication that his work filled a need of a variety of persons, both Hindu as well as Catholic, then as well as currently. We cannot grudge them the social mobility that they desired. However, it is important that we recognize that the ‘history’ that we babble today was born from very peculiar circumstances geared towards personal agendas of brahmanical groups. Mane’s myth indicates to us that non-brahmins have different stories to tell, stories that deserve as much credit as those told by brahmins.

(Jason Keith Fernandes is a legal anthropologist.)