23 Jan 2022  |   05:58am IST

VEGLENCH MUNXAPONN: The changing identity of Goa

The Goa Assembly elections will be held on Feb 14, Valentine’s Day. With the national Trinamool Congress Party (TNC) entering the fray, one can safely say that in 2022, the State will do neither what a West Bengal or a Tamil Nadu did in 2021 but what a Maharashtra did in 2019. This is not because of its proximity or affinity to Maharashtra but because the Goa of 2022 has finally buried, with little struggle, the Goa that had won the Opinion Poll of 1967. PETER RONALD DeSOUZA describes about two Goas -- one won, one lost – illustrating that today we have a different Goa from the one that the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, had in his head when he allegedly said Yeh Goa ke log ajeeb hai’
VEGLENCH MUNXAPONN:  The changing identity of Goa

What the 2022 elections foretell

In the last few days one question repeatedly being asked is ‘Who is going to win the Assembly elections in Goa?’ A quick survey of parties, candidates, alliances, resources, campaign strategies, constituencies, and the changing demographics of the new and old conquests, leaves one with just one answer: ‘one does not know’. This is not because there are no grounds for speculation or no trends for serious academic analysis. There are. One can safely say that in 2022 Goa will do neither what a West Bengal or a Tamil Nadu did in 2021 but what a Maharashtra did in 2019. This is not because of its proximity or affinity to Maharashtra but because the Goa of 2022 has finally buried, with little struggle, the Goa that had won the Opinion Poll of 1967. Two Goas; one won, one lost. We are today a different Goa from the one that Nehru had in his head when he allegedly said ‘Yeh Goa ke log Ajeeb hai’. In the first four decades after Liberation Goa had a distinct identity. As a region it was coming to terms, in a mature way, with the afterlife of Portuguese colonialism. After 2000, however, it got ‘aggressively mainstreamed’ and became a district of Nagpur.

So who killed the old Goa? There are the usual suspects. The hostility of the Sangh Parivar to the post-colonial cultural space that had been emerging. The leadership vacuum in the Congress. The robust market in land where everyone across India wants property in Goa and, in the process, fundamentally changing the incentive structure of politics. The in and out migration of people in large numbers that has significantly altered the demographic profile of Goa’s electoral constituencies. The silent democratic revolution that has brought to power politicians with short time horizons and partisan interests. The native elite of Goa who have, both politically and intellectually, abdicated their responsibility.


The Goa of the Opinion Poll

 These are the usual arguments offered to explain Goa’s transformation. Although democracy has made Goa more egalitarian, with better roads, more schools, better access to health care, improved HDI, etc, it is not the Goa of statistics that I want to talk about. I want to return to the Goa of the imagination expressed in the Opinion Poll. The people of Goa made a political and cultural statement in 1967. We need to ask what was the substance of that statement? They wanted to preserve their distinctiveness from both Maharashtra and Karnataka, both of whom were coveting Goa. It was this distinctiveness that was felt as it emerged from centuries of engagement with, and resistance to, European colonialism. In addition to being a political and social struggle, it was also an intellectual and cultural struggle. The Goa of the Opinion Poll recognised this and decided that it wanted to sort things out for itself, by itself, through its own social processes. Without the help of either Maharashtra or Karnataka, 1967 was a strong statement of Goa’s intellectual autonomy. It displayed a sensibility that set it apart from the talukas of the neighbouring States. Travel across cultural spaces in Goa and one clearly felt the difference between similar travel in Udipi or in Shaniwar Peth in Pune.

This distinctiveness of the Opinion Poll, therefore, is not about governance or development, but about a state of mind, state of being, of what philosopher’s call a ‘cultural consciousness’. This was the source of Goa’s second Jnanpith awardee Damodar Mauzo. It is there in a Vasudeo Gaitonde and a Vamona Navelkar, a Mario Miranda and a Charles Correa, a Dr VN Shirodkar and a Dr Ernest Borges, a Madhavi Sardesai and a Maria Aurora Couto, a Lambert Mascarenhas and a Ravindra Kelekar, a Kashinath Mahale and a Vaman Sardessai, a Manohar Rai Sardessai and a Armando Menezes. This is only a short list of Goans who have embodied the distinctiveness that the year 1967 signalled to the people of India. It is the Goa of a cultural imagination crafted by a history that was both bloody and oppressive but also emancipatory and enlightening. TB Cunha’s Denationalisation of Goans articulates some of this tension. But his analysis stops short of a clear answer.


Three and a half ‘inconvenient facts’ of Goa

 In what follows I want to offer a provocative thesis of who killed this Goa. I will do it in two stages. In the first part I will present three and a half ‘inconvenient facts’. They are ‘inconvenient facts’ because they force the reader to try to explain their existence in a way that is convincing. In the second part I will discuss the culprits who contributed to the demise of the Goa of 1967. It will be a discussion not of individuals, although there are many who are guilty, but only of large communities who may have, out of an insufficient appreciation of how and why Goa’s geography has triumphed over its history, inadvertently contributed to this demise. Let the answer remain cryptic here.

The first ‘inconvenient fact’, that we need to explain, is my recent discovery of how AJ de Almeida High School, the first educational institution of Goa Vidyaprasarak Mandal, was given its name. I learnt that AJ Almeida was a Portuguese national who had argued in the Portuguese parliament for the rights of the Hindus of Goa for education. He won them that right from the colonial state. To honour his battle on their behalf, Dr Dada Vaidya, Sitaram Kerkar and Vinayak Sarjyotishi chose to name their first educational institution after him, a Portuguese national. It retains that name even today, although it is located just a few kilometres from the world headquarters of Sanatan Sanstha, the organisation hostile to such cosmopolitan thinking. If this fact of naming their first institution after a Portuguese national is itself not an ‘inconvenient fact’ then hear this. In the committee room of the GVM institution hangs a portrait of the last Governor General of Portuguese Goa, Vassalo e Silva. The only other place where there is such a portrait is the Goa museum. The persons in charge of GVM have no difficulty with explaining the name or justifying the portrait. It is their history they say and proudly own it. Dr Vaidya and his colleagues had none of the insecurities and hostilities that defines today’s political discourse for like Vasudeo Gaitonde’s painting – inspired by the philosophy of Zen – which hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, they were engaged with larger questions. Although GVM was set up in 1911, more than a century ago, the thinking of the founders I believe is similar, in substance, to the thinking of the Opinion Poll of 1967. Sadly such naming and portraiture would not happen today. We must ask why?

The second ‘inconvenient fact’ is the location of a new garbage dump in Bainguinim less than 500 metres, as the crow flies, from the UNESCO World heritage site of the Churches of Old Goa. I find it difficult to imagine a government that sees it as perfectly reasonable to locate such a dump next to an important World heritage site. This at a time when the Supreme Court of India is trying to decongest the areas around the Taj Mahal. I am not talking about the law and its legal processes, for example the potential violations of The Ancient Monuments and Archaeological sites and Remains (Amendment and Validation) Act, 2010, which prohibits any development in the proximity of a protected area. Old Goa is a protected area. Does the regime care for this law? Not if it stands in the way of realising its polarising ideological agenda. It exhibits a state of mind that thinks it perfectly legitimate, and acceptable, to locate a 250 tonne processing garbage dump near an important historical and religious site. This hurts. It violates one’s sense of fairness and aesthetics. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to locate such a dump between the cities of Panjim, Porvorim and Mapusa, or even close to the open spaces of the Military camp at Bambolim? Unfortunately we have become a society where only one community, and sadly not all the people of Goa, has to protest the location of such a dump. From a sense of fairness and aesthetics, veglench munxaponn, the Goan mind of 1967 would fight against the decision to hypothetically locate such a dump near Mangueshi or Tirupati or Ranakpur or Jama Masjid. This aesthetic violence would not have happened in the first four decades after Liberation. People would not have thought it the right thing to do. Bandodkar would never have considered it. But the Nagpur mindset has replaced the mindset of the Opinion Poll.

The third ‘inconvenient fact’ is the naming of important buildings after people whose connection with Goa is at best tenuous. Why a Rajiv Gandhi Medical College when we have an eminent doctor Shirodkar who has a medical procedure, the cervical cerclage, named after him, as the Shirodkar Stich? Why an SP Mukherji sports stadium when we have a Mary D’Souza who took part in the Helsinki Olympics, but has received no such recognition? Why an Atal Setu when it could have been named after Dr Vaidya or Shenoi Goembab or Bakibab Borkar or Charles Correa who was honoured with a  Royal Medal for Architecture by the renowned Royal Institute of British Architects. Because Goa has no heroes. We are a small people to be walked over. After all no Goan fought against Salazar’s tyranny and therefore none needs to be honoured! We are a people without icons. We need to be ‘aggressively mainstreamed’. The Portuguese tried to also mainstream us but we called it Colonialism. We might as well accept that 1967 was just a rare magical moment. The other Goa has won.

And the half ‘inconvenient fact’, that I must discuss, is the destruction of the Bandodkar football stadium in Campal and promotion of a cricket Gymkhana. This may seem an innocent replacement but for one who remembers the golden age of Goan football, when at the Bandodkar stadium thousands of Goans came on cycles and scooters to watch Goa’s football prowess on display against teams from Bengal, Kerala and Punjab, and when clubs such as Sesa Goa, Vasco, Dempo and Salgaocar competed for the Bandodkar Gold cup, this is not an innocent fact. It is a cultural conspiracy to replace football with cricket, to erase the Portuguese legacy. To diminish football is to diminish Goa’s unique identity. FC Goa is no alternative. Goa was known for its football. It will never be known for its cricket. In the diminishing of football not only has the state undermined the linkages and channels between village football and the Bandodkar trophy, it has also handed over the loyalties of the Goan youth to European football especially to the teams of the British Premier league. A cultural history of football will tell you that it is a game nurtured by communities. Cristiano Ronaldo is a hero in Portugal. Brahmanand Sankhwalkar was one in Goa. Not any longer. The powers that be want to diminish Goa’s love for football because of it colonial association.

 

Veglench Munxaponn?

 Every critic of the three and a half inconvenient facts presented here has to offer a reasonable alternative explanation which takes into account the cultural and the plural character of Goa. ‘Post-colonialism’ has to face off against the politics of ‘aggressive mainstreaming’. In a prescient way Bakibab Borkar foresaw this tension, between the two ideas of Goa, when he formulated the wonderful, philosophically fertile, idea of veglench munxaponn (unique humanism) to describe the culture of Goa.

It is this veglench munxaponn that I want us to think about here. How did it emerge? What are its elements? How does it define the different relationships between communities in the old and new conquests? What does it offer the new migrants? How is it embodied in the Goan teachers who ran schools across India, the doctors who looked after TB patients in rural Maharashtra, the scientists who ran BARC and CSIR, the army officer who saved tourists from a cable car at Timber Trail in Himachal Pradesh, the advertising moghuls who gave us the lovable Amul girl, the corporate leaders who ran TELCO (now Tata Motors), the railwayman who chaired the Railway Board, the musicians who transformed Bollywood films with their orchestras, the sportsmen who played for India, the artist who set up the PAG and initiated the movement of Indian Modernism, the architect who was invited by IUCAA and Bharat Bhavan to give the buildings a civilizational flair. These are not random persons thrown up by a statistical lottery. They are the intentional products of Goa’s historically created veglench munxaponn.

So do not respond to the three and a half inconvenient facts with material statistics. Of course the roads are better. Of course there are more schools. Of course we are more wealthy. Of course we are better fed. But we have also dropped in the cleanest city rankings. This is not accidental. We have begun to create communal fissures. And we have done so because both of the major communities in Goa, the custodians of veglench munxaponn, have abdicated their responsibility to build a mature post-colonial Goa. We are the heirs to a history that we cannot allow to be erased. As the independence and courage of the custodians of Dr Vaidya’s imagination, at the A J de Almeida high school, have shown us.

Peter Ronald deSouza is the DD Kosambi Visiting Professor at Goa University. Views are personal.


IDhar UDHAR

Idhar Udhar