Generations of Goans have discussed and debated questions of identity for hundreds of years – who belongs, who does not – but perhaps never so vehemently as today.
There are good reasons for why it is happening so broadly now, and with such high intensity, in our era of rapid demographic changes and unprecedented demands on the limited land mass of India’s smallest state. We all know Goa is under severe pressure, with its original communities – let us say these include everyone whose families have lived here since before the 1970s – already reduced to the minority, while being swamped by overwhelming numbers of new migrants. Involuntary transitions inevitably cause tensions, and of course it cannot be different here, as we have been reminded all over again by an interesting series of recent articles and essays that merit closer
attention.
“Why is belonging so important? Why does one need to belong somewhere at all?” asked Kaustubh Naik, the brilliant PhD student from Goa at the University of Pennsylvania, in an eloquent blog post that quickly went viral. He said “This performance of displacement, this idea of being a sensitive outsider who wants to “belong,” has become a tired trope among the new elites who have settled in Goa, especially in Bardez villages like Aldona, Siolim, Moira, or Assagao…They repeat the same story. They came here seeking home, but Goa refuses to accept them.”
Naik asks, “Why is this urge to belong such an obsession for the new settlers in Goa? These are people who have come here with comfort, capital and options. They have gentrified small villages to a point where even Goans now feel they do not belong. If you travel through Bardez today, you can see how much has changed. The scale of real estate development is unimaginable. Moreover, these homes are neither built for the local Goans nor can they afford them.”
Quite rightly, Naik points out these are “contradictions the newcomers do not want to see. They attend community gatherings filled only with
others like themselves, from the same class, the same schools, and the same networks. There is almost no attempt to engage with local life, politics, or crises. And Goa is full of crises right now: Environmental degradation, land grabs, water scarcity, and an increasingly lawless real estate economy. If these settlers truly wanted to belong, they would also take responsibility. They would speak up for Goa, use their skills, networks and privileges to protect the place they claim to love. But that rarely happens. Instead, the burden of defending Goa still falls on Goans, who preserved this landscape and way of life often at the cost of their own
ambitions.”
In the days after Naik put his thoughts on the Internet – they were quickly republished to an even wider audience via Scroll.in – many Goans have sorrowfully weighed in to agree with his main points: “Even for people like me, returning to Goa feels alien, because so much of the landscape has been altered. Real estate speculation has consumed villages, houses, and even identities. The elites who claim they do not belong have already made belonging impossible for everyone else [and so] when I hear someone say they ‘do not feel at home in Goa,’ I can only think: Even Goans no longer feel at home. The entire state is being reshaped to serve a class of people who have the time, money, and luxury to seek belonging at the expense of those who have always belonged here.”
The day after Naik shared his views, the equally notable young academic Dale Luis Menezes – he is Assistant Professor at Global Studies University in Sharjah – published his own blog post, under the acerbic title ‘The Casual Casteism of the Homeless Cosmopolitan’ – “You have come across them many times. They have hopped between metros all their lives, enjoyed cushy middle-class lives, studied in the UK or US, floated through well-upholstered childhoods, and now, usually in their late twenties or thirties, decide it’s time to “move” somewhere decent: Goa. They are not really homeless. They just don’t want to live in most parts of India.”
Here too, are insights
cutting deep: “The truth is that most of these wanderers can relocate to Goa because they carry caste capital in their deliberately modest tote bags. Their mobility is not magical, it is the gift of Indian society. They are privileged but strangely unaware of the means that facilitate their mobility in the first place. They want to hide this privilege by saying they cannot belong anywhere largely because the locals don’t accept them. And here lies the rub: Despite all the talk of cosmopolitanism, global citizenship, worldliness, art, anti-casteism, the homeless cosmopolitan has rarely examined their own position. There is no soul-searching, no discomfort, no ethical pause, and certainly no examination of the conscience. Just a seamless, thoughtless, and entitled slide into Aldona, Moira, Assagao, and Siolim; those promised lands for outsider salvation. What emerges from this is not explicit bigotry but something subtler, slipperier, and far more common: Casual casteism. It is casteism of the hip and meritorious.”
I liked and appreciated that Menezes explains how belonging can work in Goa, and offered an actual blueprint to getting there: “Goans have lived, lost, thrived, and fought their battles for five centuries without you. Whatever our problems, we have figured out our ways of living, our internal negotiations—our convivências. Goans will be fine without your art, without your good taste, without your self-appointed cultural authority, without your money, and without your casual casteism. But there is a second option. And it is harder. You can choose to stay and surrender to Goan culture…Allow Goa to change you: Your being, your soul, your whole life. Otherwise that rootlessness, not your mobility, not your career, not your origin, will sustain your casual, unexamined, and so effortlessly reproduced casteism. There is a way out of being a homeless cosmopolitan, a person forever drifting, always extracting, and never belonging.”
(Vivek Menezes is a writer and co-founder of the Goa Arts and
Literature Festival)
