The Saraswats are by a long shot, the most successful of the people of the land, we call Goa. By their own claim, the Saraswats are not natives but trace their ancestry to the banks of the long dried up Saraswati River in Northwest India. The Saraswats have three main branches being the Marathi speaking Kudaldeshkars with their Mutt at Kudal, the Konkani speaking Gaud Saraswats Brahmins (GSBs) with their mutts at Kavlem and Partagal and the Chitrapur Saraswats with their mutt in Chitrapur. All the Saraswats were originally Shaivites commonly called adve.
How did the Saraswats come to Goa? By sea perhaps? Two aspects make me think so. The Saraswat settlements in Goa are almost exclusively in the villages along the riverside. Take Salcete, where the Saraswats settled in Sancoale, Chicalim, Cortalim, Quelossim, Loutolim, Raia-Rachol, Curtorim, Macazana, Guirdolim all on the banks of the Zuari or Margao and Benaulim on the banks of the River Sal. A similar pattern is visible in Bardez and Ilhas. Why would anyone settle in riverside villages unless the travel was over water?
The second aspect is the food habits of the Saraswats who are fish/meat eaters unlike other Brahmins. Is it difficult to imagine that people travelling by the sea will have to survive on whatever food is available? Where would they get their vegetarian food? Would they not eat whatever they could find, in order to survive? And once you taste fish, can chicken and mutton be far behind?
It is common the world over for immigrants to name their new settlements after their native places. We see so many such places in North and South America bearing the names of old European locales. Did the Goan Saraswats do a similar thing? The main settlement of Saraswats in Salcete was in Banavali (present Benaulim) where the first mutt was set up. Saraswat legend has it that they were led by Parashuram who fought innumerable battles, slaughtered the Kshatriyas and settled the Brahmins on the land which he reclaimed by shooting an arrow (baan, hence Banavli). Is it not possible that the Saraswats named their new settlement after their native place on the banks of the Saraswati River? Is India’s best preserved Harrapan site till date, not at Banavali in Haryana on the banks of the dried up Saraswati? Could Saraswats have links to the Indus valley people? Could it be that Parashuram shot the arrow into the Saraswati and built a dam where it fell, diverted the river and settled Saraswats on the emerging land? And that the diversion later led to drying up of the river? Is it not possible that the Saraswats took to boats before the river completely dried up and sailed into the Arabian Sea along the Konkan coast?
The first revolt among the Saraswats in matters of faith took place in the 13-14th century under the leadership of Madhav Acharya a missionary from the South Konkan who preached against Shaivism. Saraswats in Goa except those from the villages of Cortalim, Quelossim and Divar found merit in his preaching renounced Shaivism and converted to Vaishnavism thus giving birth to ube. A small group preferred to move away and later coalesced into the Chitrapur Saraswats and continued to be Shaivites. The GSB community was torn asunder by the conversion to Vaishnavim. This schism lasted for several centuries during which the Shaivites and Vaishnavites refused to interact with each other until the relations thawed in the 20th century. It was something akin to the conversion of a large group of Catholics to Protestantism in the sixteenth century, with similar fallout.
An attempt being made to claim that the Chitrapur Saraswats fled, due to persecution by the Portuguese is untenable. Had the GSBs fled due to the Portuguese, the Chitrapur Saraswats would be a mixed group of Vaishnavite and Shaivites. But all Chitrapur Sarawats are Shaivites, a clear indicator of their pre Portuguese migration. Otherwise how is it possible there are no Vaishnavites among them, despite the fact the huge majority of the GSBs in Goa where Vaishnavites for two centuries before the Portuguese conquered Goa? Not very long ago Deepika Padukone a Chitrapur Saraswat with ancestry in Sancoale came to Goa and proceeded to her kul-devta, the Vaishnavite temple of Shantadurga in Veling. But she is a Shaivite! This anomaly occurs because her family had fled when the Sancoale Saraswats were still Shaivites in the 13th century. Later the Villagers embraced Vaishnavism but the Chitrapur Saraswats have continued to be Shaivites! What other evidence is required to show the GSBs had fled before the Portuguese were persuaded to conquer Goa, by Thimaya Nayak and Mhal Poi in 1510?
The Saraswats again faced the brunt of missionary zeal after the Portuguese conquered Goa. And like in the earlier instance they found merit in what the missionaries preached, renounced both Shaivism and Vaishnavism and embraced the Catholic faith. But there were also those who emulated the Chitrapur Saraswats and fled with their deities to territories beyond Portuguese control. Consequently now there are GSBs who are adve, ube and Catholic. The converts to Vaishnavism like their protestant converts to the Christian faith have prospered more than their Shaivite counterparts. The Saraswat Converts to the Catholic faith have surpassed their former co-religionists as achievers in various fields nationally and internationally. Is credit not due to the Saraswats for being progressive willing to acknowledge new ideas, ignore dubious paramparas and march on? Is it not this quality that has put the Saraswats, ahead of other Goans?
(Radharao F Gracias is a senior Trial Court Advocate, a former Independent MLA and a political activist.)
