Govind Gaude is not to blame for the shocking, shameful cancellation of this week’s DD Kosambi Festival of Ideas, but that is the only certain thing about this disgraceful debacle. We do also know - because it’s obvious – this dynamic young minister was forced to pull the plug at the very last minute, even after invitations had circulated, but the whos and whys are entirely murky, with none of the speculations making any logical sense. It is deeply tragic that after several years of underwhelming, this year’s edition was uniformly superb, which means that Goa lost out on something genuinely meaningful for no good reason whatsoever.
“I feel terribly let down,” said the 2022 Jnanpith Award winner Damodar Mauzo, who was not only scheduled to open the Festival of Ideas, but also played the crucial role in the selection committee (of which I was also a member).
“It’s not only because I could not deliver my lecture (on which I had spent days to prepare; and I believe others had too), but because I was instrumental in persuading the other speakers to accept our invitations,” Mauzo said.
“On a personal note, my family members had bought tickets to fly in to attend, and I myself turned down two other invitations to prestigious events in Trivandrum and Mumbai to be here. It was absolutely shocking to find out about the cancellation, which has needlessly tarnished our state’s reputation,” the Jnanpith Award winner said.
Professor Madhavi Menon of Ashoka University was scheduled to speak after Mauzo, on The Law of Desire, which is also the title of her most recent book.
“I was very saddened by the cancellation. The official explanation did not seem to be the real reason. And if the real reason, as reported by the press, is the choice of speakers, then that is sad. I was, and am, proud to have been included, and all of us, I would like to think, are not only intellectually rigorous, but also ethically committed to the cause of intellectual debate and critical inquiry,” Prof Menon said.
“To label these traits as undesirable does not befit an event dedicated to culture, especially in the name of as brilliant a thinker as D D Kosambi. Diversity is essential to survival. Intellectual debates are crucial to a democracy. And thinking differently is a skill to be nurtured. Goa has for so long been a haven of understanding. I hope it will continue to be that way in the future too,” she said.
Dr Devdutt Pattanaik, the super-popular bestselling author and illustrator of over 50 books, was intending to speak on the spectacular diversity of the Gods of Goa - “the various deities from Sateri to Mangesh to Betal” - and is going right ahead to do so via Instagram Live today at 5pm (@devduttmyth).
“I was surprised about the cancellation until I realised there are some crazy people who blocked the project. But I will use the Internet to share this interesting topic anyway. Saraswati is free to flow everywhere - in Delhi and in Goa too,” he said.
Every single one of the speakers scheduled for this year’s ‘Festival of Ideas’ are stellar luminaries, without exception. Nonetheless, the single biggest loss for Goa is having missed out on listening to Dr Suraj Yengde.
This brilliant young scholar and public intellectual – who would also have rekindled the Kosambi connection to Harvard – has been thinking hard, and working hard, on understanding and contextualizing Goa, for several months in anticipation.
“The invitation allowed me to engage with Goan history and I even went to Portugal to understand this paradigm better. I was going to trace the lineage of Kosambis via the father, the great Dharmanand, an erudite scholar of Sanskrit and Buddhist India. Until this invite came, I was not paying attention to the Goan part of their background, but then I started to think about the Goan particularity of this story,” he said.
Yengde said, “I was also going to invoke the corridors that the Kosambis and I share at Harvard, and the libraries where they must have conducted their research and writing. Then I would dive into the problem at hand, the caste system and its defects.”
“The question of the evolving nature of caste and what that means to the materiality and spirit of a tradition has to wane as a prolegomenon of modernity takes shape. I would have presented case studies, and research findings on caste, not least in India but in select parts of the world - this was the first time I would extensively discuss the next book project. The only other venue where I introduced this new research was Stanford earlier this year,” the noted scholar said.
It’s tremendously frustrating to see and hear Yengde’s enthusiasm for Goa, which he cannot now share on the state’s premier intellectual platform: “I have been introduced to phenomenal writings and voices, such as Vishnu Wagh's scintillating poetry, the history of the backward caste communities through Paresh Parobo's work, the Gomantak Maratha Samaj's exile, and the new era of Goan scholarship cutting the high ceiling with Anjali Aarondekar, the young Kaustubh Naik and Angela Barreto Xavier,” he said.
“I developed a fond friendship with some Goan writers whose love of literature and the taste of genres was mutual. I was going to attempt to reinsert Kosambi's scholarly importance in caste studies, which does not occupy a seminal role. He is treated with many prefixes, which sometimes works to the disadvantage of a polymath. I will come and still do the above,” he said.
“I want to learn and grow by spending time with the bright minds of Goa and the general people. I wanted to make Goa accessible to the subalterns of India who don't see this space as belonging to them,” Dr Yengde added.
Some people presume Dr Yengde is why “the powers that be” suddenly got cold feet, but that would be particularly absurd: “Ever since I got the invite, I shared with many colleagues that the Goa government invited me, and some raised a disappointed eyebrow because of the party in power. That is precisely what I wanted to tell them: cancelling a dialogue is never fruitful,” he said.
“I have always found myself on the side of dialogue and communication. Goa is different, I insisted. When shared with some friends in the BJP at the centre, they wanted to come down to attend this event.
“After the news about the postponement was out, they sent me a message asking if I was still coming. One senior BJP leader invited me to his state, and offered a venue with the party’s central leadership later this month,” he said.
The final speaker this year was going to be Pranay Lal, the award-winning author whose Indica:A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent is one of the most invaluable books of our 21st century.
“I was shocked by the cancellation, because I did not expect a government-supported event to be rolled back. But I have been facing pushback for some time. I had a chappal thrown at me at a university when I mentioned species labels that had been derived from names of Indian gods (Vishnufelis an extinct cat, Ramapithecus, an extinct ape from the Siwaliks, which is actually named after Ramnagar where the first fossil was discovered). It is sad that academic settings have become insensitive and petty,” Lal said.
Lal said, “The Kosambi family has played an important role in critical thinking, raised wonderful questions and presented elegant theses on diverse aspects of science, math, history, genetics, linguistics, ethnography, and other disciplines.”
“I actually felt nervous when the organizers first asked me to speak at the festival because DD Kosambi Sahab was a pathbreaking thinker and firebrand intellectual. It is sad that the Festival of Ideas named after him was cancelled, because the Kosambi family embodied a culture where ideas flowered.
“I hope the people of Goa will remain in a space that will foster openness, and protect the arts, science, and free-thinking, and that books or paintings or, indeed, works of scholarship will be kept for posterity. I hope that this is a one-off event, and intellectual freedom and liberties of free-thinking individuals are restored,” he said.