I was surprised to read a quote by my friend Heta Pandit in the National Herald (April 23, 2023 ‘Goa: More welcoming to tourists than to ‘new’ residents?’)
“No matter what you do, you will always be an outsider,” said Heta Pandit, author of several books on Goa and founder of the Goa Heritage Action Group. It has been 26 years in Goa for her.”
I would have thought she, of all people, would have had the least reason to be made to feel like an ‘outsider’. But obviously she does, which is sad.
Nevertheless, the tone of the article is somewhat sensationalist, with sweeping generalisations. Consider the prefacing summary: “Deep-rooted locals call you a peanut. Everyone is up in your business.”
It helpfully explains the ‘peanut’ reference: “The Konkani word bhingta, which means groundnut, is used as an insult for outsiders (non-Goans), especially the kind who are disruptive.”
The pejorative term is the mutant cousin of other insulting names used for specifically “the Indian outsider”; foreigners (white and black) had other epithets.
The Portuguese-speaking generation before mine would refer contemptuously to “os indianos” (the Indians). Unless I’m mistaken, this was a classist and casteist slur reserved for the migrant of low socio-economic status, who was in Goa to do the labour nobody else would do, but nevertheless detested. The Konkani equivalent used to be ghantti, literally someone from the ghats, but used derogatively more broadly for the poor or labouring class.
I’ve only come across bhingta online, and it seems to have begun just a few decades ago, but now referring to Indians (tourists or migrant workers) but again generally of a lower income group. I could be wrong, of course but this is my impression from the context in which I’ve encountered it.
This is not to condone any of these odious terms; in fact, I’ve left more than a few social media groups where such slurs are bandied about. But it’s a bit of a leap to go from there to saying ‘deep-rooted locals call you a peanut’ tarring everyone with the same brush, as if ‘everyone’ does it, when it’s actually just a few (very vocal) online busybodies, who presumably are also ‘up in your business.’ It may clickbait readers but it’s not factually true in terms of actual numbers.
Many cyber-Goans are particularly given to ‘online toxic disinhibition’, a term used to describe how people have a tendency to act meaner online than they would in real life. They say (type) things that are more hostile and hurtful than they would in person. Again, this is not to defend or excuse the said behaviour, but merely to try and understand it.
‘Outsider’ and ‘insider’ mean very different things to different people. One presumes that the ‘deeply rooted local’ is synonymous with ‘insider’, but what constitutes ‘rootedness’ really?
I recently turned 57, and apart from the first four years of my life (in then West Germany) and a decade in adulthood in the UK, have spent the remaining 43 years in Goa. Does that, and the fact that both my parents have Goan ‘roots’ make me ‘deeply rooted’ here? How long does it take to acquire ‘deep roots’? Two generations? Three? Seven? Double digits?
Being married to a non-Goan (Bombay-born part East Indian, part Mangalorean) gives me perspective. Is she ‘more Goan’ or ‘insider’ through marriage to me than if she were living in Goa on her own for just as long, like some of her journalist friends?
What does it take to be an ‘insider’? Most of my family are abroad, and the number increases each passing year. I probably have a much smaller circle of friends or social life than Ms Pandit, despite my ‘rootedness’.
The writer of the National Herald article Lalita Iyer paints a picture of ‘city slickers’ like herself, who can uproot themselves at the drop of a hat because the metropolis they came from felt like a ‘jail’. Here they are able to ‘breathe, walk, cycle, swim.’ She herself admits how she quickly cottons on that a lot of them are able to live the high life, in plush homes due to the cushion of ‘family money.’
A lot of middle-class and lower-income Goan families cannot dream of such a privileged lifestyle, no matter how ‘rooted.’ Much as one would also love to ‘walk, cycle, swim’ it’s not practical when holding down a job, commuting to and from work, doing the school run, dropping and picking up children for after-school tuition just to get them from one academic year to the next.
The school her son goes to (‘a staggering number of Goan-Russian couples, among others—a third of my son’s school mates are mixed race—the sense of an international community is like nowhere else in India’) is an elite one that she chose to put him into. Had she tried the sort of school ‘middle Goa’ sends their kids to, she’d have a very different story to tell in terms of feeling accepted. In looking for ‘her tribe’ (whatever that means), I feel she has missed the wood for the trees.
She does have the grace to mention many small acts of kindness she experiences from that same ‘middle Goa’: Christmas goodies, moringa leaves, drumsticks, and mangoes, voice messages warning about termites, etc. Unlike her ‘tribe’ fellows (Pandit, Jain, Sharma, Master), their names don’t seem to matter.
Yet her parting shot is about a Konkani song that ‘refers to an outsider’, but she doesn’t elaborate what the reference is if it is a resentful one, or the song’s backstory.
For now, Iyer is ‘an outsider, happy to be looking in.’ And when she tires of Goa, like some of ‘her tribe’ have done, she’ll simply move on, either back where she came from or somewhere else. Trouble is, a lot of ‘middle Goa’ doesn’t have this luxury. This is their inside, outside and everywhere in between, in a nut-shell.
(Dr Luis Dias is a physician, musician, writer and founder of Child’s Play India Foundation)