I have not missed the celebration by neglect or disinterest, even when I was not too well healthwise, as it happened last year. Curiously, over the past two decades or so, I have seen the Gujaratis in Lisbon to be more enthusiastic than the Goan settlers to make their presence felt on that occasion.
The glaring disparity of response is just another reflection of the cultural distance that Goans in Portugal feel towards India, even though most Goans seem proud of their Indian origins and love the traditional Goan folk traditions of their motherland, or the land of their ancestors.
While in some countries one refers to fatherland, or even as homeland, as the Americans are wont to do, Indians prefer to call India their motherland.
The Indian matriots who fought for India’s independence were moved by Vande Mataram, a national song that carries the stamp of three great Bengali literary figures: composed by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in his novel Anand Math (1882), it was set to lyrics by Rabindranath Tagore and sung by him during Calcutta Congress session in 1896. Aurobindo Ghosh who edited the nationalist daily Bande Mataram in 1905 rendered it into English.
The story of his novel that integrated Vande Mataram was prone to feeding fundamentalism.
That is what happened, and while Rabindranath was driven by the controversy to follow an anti-nationalist path as reflected by his novel Ghora Baire (1916), Aurobindo himself retired from politics in 1910 to devote himself to Life Divine at Pondicherry.
It was to placate the Muslim reaction following the partition of Bengal along communal lines that Vande Mataram gave way to Jana Gana Mana as India’s national anthem. The Muslims could not approve veneration of land, and more so when the motherland was identified with goddess Durga.
The Indian Congress leaders opted for appeasement of Muslims and decided that only the first two lines should be sung, avoiding the rest of the song. For those unaware of the contents of the national song, here go the first and the last verse in Aurobindo’s English rendering of it.
“Mother, I salute thee! Rich with thy hurrying streams, bright with orchard gleams, Cool with thy winds of delight, Green fields waving Mother of might, Mother free.
….
In thy soul, with jeweled hair And thy glorious smile divine, Loveliest of all earthly lands, Showering wealth from well-stored hands! Mother, mother mine! Mother sweet, I bow to thee, Mother great and free!
Lata Mangeshkar, the queen of India’s playback singers since 1940s, and India’s Bharat Rathma awardee, she left her own touch on this national song through her lyrical rendering in 1998 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61u0-xpVhFU ]. Incidentally, it was a Muslim music composer and director, Ghulam Heider, who introduced her to the Hindi film industry, which eventually made her the Nightingale of Bollywood.
Lata Mangeshkar incarnated the true spirit of Vande Mataram by lending her voice to various Indian languages, beyond her home language in Indore-based Maratha-Gomantak family of Goan origin. Her rise and popularity represents the power of talent to overcome the caste-based social barriers in independent and modern India. It may have required moving out of
Goa’s caste-infected and infested environment exploited by a colonial regime, but it did not require seeking freedom overseas.
This is a challenge that Indian culture represents to all Indians, be it in India or overseas, to seek inspiration in Vande Mataram and to drink from one´s own well. Foreign waters are not expected to quench the thirst of native spirit, as so well reflected in the popular Boney M´s Rivers of Babylon.
In the context of the political controversies that plague post-colonial Goa, particularly those related to the language as medium of instruction, or the demand for special status, or the dual nationality, they all boil down to resolving what Tristão Bragança-Cunha had described as denationalization of Goans in 1939. The most vocal critics of his denunciation were some anonymous writers in The Examiner, run by Jesuits in Bombay at that time. They qualified the pamphlet as historically childish and its economic analysis as stupid, without pointing concretely to any falsification of facts.
Unfortunately, the same type of responses continue to be heard and read in Goa even 60 years after liberation, revealing that it is easier to change the flags but very difficult to recover from the colonization of minds. What T.B. Cunha had denounced as “the aping culture” was largely the influence of the European brand of Christianity, administered by colonial authorities, which over the generations across five centuries have drained culturally the native souls by cutting them off from the source of their eco-culture.
Since liberation the decolonization of Catholic liturgy is in slow progress, the native saints are still rare to replace the multitude of foreign saints that populate the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church. The replacement of St Catherine by St Joseph Vaz as the patron of Goa archdiocese needs to be followed by bolder steps to enable Goan Catholics to sync with the culture of Mother India as evoked by Vande Mataram.
(Teotonio R. de Souza is the founder-director, Xavier Centre of Historical Research, Goa (1979-1994).
