India made Goa Portuguese

Recently, there have been a number of voices that have pointed out that a part of the problem in contemporary Goa is the manner in which Goa is being consumed. Writing in The Goan Everyday, Vishvesh Kandolkar pointed out that Goa “is perceived as a perfect holiday destination with its sun, sea, and sand, apart from the Europeanised atmosphere that they [Indian elites and tourists] don’t find anywhere else in India.” Picking up on the concerns raised by Kandolkar, Dale Luis Menezes, writing in the O Heraldo also pointed that Goa’s problem lies in the fact that it is perceived as European, and following an argument by Paul Routledge, argues that Goa was created and projected as a pleasure periphery, a site of tourism and pleasure.

To make sense of these claims it is important that we delve deeper into the process that allowed Goa to be seen, or be represented as European. Most persons with some knowledge of the academic literature on Goa will point out that Goa’s character and European is the result of the Estado Novo’s claims from the late 1940s. Responding to the demand of the post-colonial Indian State that Goa be “returned” to it, Salazar’s Portugal responded that this was impossible. Goa was not Indian, they claimed, it was Portuguese. 450 odd years of Portuguese presence had ensured that Goa was strikingly different from the rest of India, and that the people of Goa had more in common with Europe than India. This way of presenting Goa has given rise to the trope of Goa Portuguesa. 

 

Not to be undone, Indian nationalists, and academics who sympathized with the Indian position, crafted another trope in response; Goa Indica. Rubbish, they claimed, Goa was merely under Portuguese control. It is, and always has been, profoundly Indian. There are some who would argue that Goa Indica was the post-colonial response to colonial propaganda of Goa Portuguesa. The problem with this argument is that Goa Portuguesa has been one of the planks on which Goa’s tourism industry has been built, especially from the 1980s. This is to say, that while Goa’s Portuguese identity may have been initially crafted by the Portuguese state, it was given added life by the post-colonial Goan, and Indian, state, and the allied institutions of film, advertising, that support the state.

How does one make sense of this fact, that it was Indian control over Goa that deepened Goa’s image as Portuguese, Iberian and European? Raghu Trichur provides a very plausible argument in his book Refiguring Goa (2013). He suggests that “[i]ntegrating Goa into the Indian nation-state was more problematic  than occupying and liberating Goa from Portuguese colonial rule, especially if one was to consider the politics that surfaced in ‘postcolonial’ Goa over the two decades since 1961” (p.12). He elaborates that “it was only after the state sponsored development of tourism in the 1980's (two decades after Goa's liberation/occupation in 1961), was Goa effectively integrated into the Indian nation-state” (p.13). Trichur’s suggestion, then, is that the marketing of Goa as Portuguese and European was a strategy of the Congress government that sought to skirt the politics inaugurated by Dayanand Bandodkar and the bahujan groups subsequent to integration into India.

The nature of Bandodkar’s politics, and how it offered a genuine liberation for the Hindu bahujan of Goa is interestingly elaborated in India’s First Democratic Revolution (2015) a monography recently written by Parag Parobo from the department of History, Goa University. The difference between Nehruvian politics and Bandodkar’s politics was recently succinctly articulated by Kaustubh Naik: “Nehru’s vision for India was a result of his upper caste elite background which worked only to the benefits of Indian elites while the marginalized struggled to find a place for themselves within that vision. Bandodkar, with his lower caste capitalist background, set a model of governance that prioritized liberating the Bahujans from bonds of feudal and social oppression.” Indeed, the initial years of the Congress in Goa were marked by complete upper-caste dominance. This hegemony was completely rejected at the polls for almost two decades until the MGP ran out of steam, and the upper-castes were to combine forces and once again re-assert themselves through the Congress party.

There is, however more to this equation that merely trying to reformulate Goa outside of bahujan politics, and this aspect speaks directly to the desires of Nehruvian elites that marked the Congress party in Delhi and their largely upper-caste associates in Goa. This aspect can be uncovered if we ask why Goa Goa’s being European should be exciting for (elite) Indians?

To answer this question requires that we look at the politics through which Europe is constituted. The fact is that while core European values are defined by the practices in the north-west of that continent, such as Germany, The Netherlands, Britain, the South, namely Spain, Italy, Greece, has been marked off, since at least the nineteenth century, as the place largely of leisure and pleasure, tourism and adventure. Northern European, but especially British and American magnates, travelled to the South for leisure and illicit pleasure. Northern Europeans articulated their European identity by setting themselves off as different from Southern Europeans.  This logic was then applied to the rest of the world, where Europe was set off from the rest of the colonised world, just as Northern Europe was set off from the southern part of the continent.

To return to Goa, I would argue that a Portuguese Goa was appealing for the Nehruvian elites because they saw themselves as the inheritors of Britain’s paramount sovereignty in India. With Indian independence they became the British, and inherited the British gaze on the world. Thus, they inherited the British gaze on the Portuguese, as well as the Portuguese territory. Thus, if Portugal, part of the European south, was a place for leisure, so too did Goa become a place for pleasure for the brown sahibs. If European elites went to the South of Europe for their leisure, so too would the Indian elites go to Goa, their piece of Europe, for leisure. In other words, post-colonial Goa was Europeanised to cater to the fantasies of the Nehruvian elites for whose consumption India was constructed.

The problem doesn’t end with just the elites, however, since what the elites do, the upwardly mobile follow. To demonstrate how the consumption of Southern Europe, and the concomitant production of oneself as European of western plays out I would like to offer an example from the city of Bangalore from about little less than a decade ago. Around this time, there were three different real-estate developers who were offering homes around Southern European themes. There were “large Spanish homes” at Mantri España, Purva Venezia “inspired by the magical landscape of Venice", and another development that sought to sell property on the basis that it would feel like home to Vasco da Gama should be return to India.

Given that in our neo-liberal times work demands so much of us, the house is increasingly cast as the space of retreat, and leisure. In such a context, it makes sense that real estate developers would market their properties to the Indian upper middle class, who seek to be western, along lines that would make sense to westerners. Thus, where the house is a space of leisure, it follows patterns of leisure that would appeal to the Northern European. Translated into the Goan context, this ensures not only the hordes of Indian tourists, and the Indian middle class who want to buy homes in Goa, but also the pastiche architecture, with sloping roofs and faux-Iberian aspects. Because of Goa’s indigenous building traditions there is something vaguely local about this contemporary architecture, but its success lies in the fact that it appeals to vague Indian notions about what southern European architecture looks like.

Between the Nehruvian elites, and the upwardly mobile groups of contemporary India, Goa is up for grabs largely because it is a space where, thanks to whitewashed churches and the presence of Catholicism, these groups can pretend that they are in Europe, and play the European. While the Estado Novo may have been responsible for initially articulating this idea, it is the Indian regime, and the comprador class in Goa, that has done more for presenting Goa as Portuguese and European. As Dale Menezes has argued, this has been done largely to suit Indian interests than groups in Goa, the marginalized sections of which continue to languish without necessary attention, or respect.

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo on 16 Oct 2015)

Letters from Portugal: Monsoon Nostalgia

A couple of years ago, when I announced to a Portugal-familiar friend that I was soon to leave for Portugal, arriving there in September, he looked at me as if I had lost my mind. ‘But why September? You do realize it’s going to be raining cats and dogs then?’ He had a point, as, captured in the Portuguese proverb,’Chuvas verdadeiras, em Setembro as primeiras’, September marks the end of the Portuguese summer, and as if on clockwork, it pours come the first weeks of September.

This letter is not going to be about the Portuguese summer, there will be other times for that happy season. Though terribly out of sync with the calendar, this letter is to be about the autumn rains of September that draw watery curtains down on the holiday month of August. For a couple of years now,  while the rest of Portugal  sighs, folds away their summer clothes and begins to air their winter clothes,  the south Asian peasant heart that beats in my chest begins to trill its monsoon song. 

If you have invested a sufficient amount of energy in those romantic poetic tropes, that celebrate the weariness of the Indian summer and the dramatic break of the monsoon, then you know that once one is so invested, there is no way you can suffer the monsoon without also looking forward with increasing expectation for the monsoon to slake both earth and our fevered brains. The drilling beat of the monsoon rains is as much part of the experience as the cool that the sheets of water bring.

Sometimes I wonder if I would ever be able to encounter Portugal’s autumn rains on terms other than sub-continental. The sweet coolness that these rains bring after the not-to-be-laughed-at baking  summer afternoons evoke in this turned-towards-the-Atlantic-planted-garden sweet memories of monsoons in Bangalore. The rains are still warm, but the caress of the breeze cool and soft to the touch, and one could still run around with one’s shirt sleeves rolled up, the dread of heavy winter woolens still far, far away. Indeed if one is lucky, one can also smell the very same eucalyptus, that were planted as mistakenly in Portugal as they were across India, and especially in Bangalore.

Encountering the rains (Portuguese or otherwise) in a South Asian manner also involves greeting them with song.  From out of the internet and personal archives then come the Malhar and the Des raags, the songs of Khusro, and the sawaan geet of the North. To these South Asian choices however a couple of mood and monsoon appropriate fados have also now made their way. And as the rain lashes down, drenching the earth, saudades is reinvented to mean not the South Asian’s longing for a Portuguese metropole, but a Portuguese metropolitan’s longing for South Asia.

Romance however can only take you so far. Some hours of the music, more than a couple of weeks of the rain, the setting in of winter, and the rains begin to lose the charm with which they flounced in at the start of September.  It is then, that this tropical South Asian begins to clamour for the sun, yearns to be buffeted by the warm winds that coast off the Arabian sea, and thinks to himself; ‘Yes, it is about time we bought that ticket back home for Christmas.’

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo dtd 5 Feb 2012)

Dignity and Waste Management: Shifting perspective to accommodate the dignity of the human person

The perspective from which you view your problem substantially changes the solution to the problem. Every point of view, understands the problem differently, and presents a different solution to the problem. Take the case of garbage for example. Like most children from the Gulfie middle-class, my first encounter with what is now called waste-management began with the little symbols on the cover of Wrigley’s Chewing Gum. ‘Keep the countryside clean’ it read, with a stick figure throwing a paper wrapper into a large dust-bin. The appearance of cleanliness, or aesthetics was the perspective from which the issue of garbage or waste was then understood. Keep the countryside looking pretty, and we would be just fine, we were assured.

Clearly however the aesthetic approach to garbage did not resolve the issue. Such a perspective led to the issue of garbage being seen as one of waste-collection. The solution via this perspective on the problem was to put in place a centralized collection system. Once you ensure that everyone puts their waste into the bin, make sure it is collected from the various points in the city. Dumping our waste in dust-bins however, presented us with the formidable dilemma of land-fills. Landfills, as communities across Goa will assure you, create huge heaps of stinking refuse, that often combust spontaneously to fill the air with acrid cancerous smoke. In addition, the effluent generated leaches into the ground water, poisoning it and compromising sustainable access to potable water for generations. And because waste in landfills does not degrade, the amount of land required for landfills is limitless. One of the responses to the problem of landfills was to reduce the waste going into the dump. Realizing that one person’s waste is another’s resource, moves were made to segregate the bio-degradable food wastes, from the synthetic wastes like plastics, glass and metal. Such a resolution of the issue however presents its own issues. The sorting or segregation of waste is not necessarily done by the producer of this waste, since it is often argued that it can be achieved at the land-fill site itself, using chemical procedures to degrade the biological wastes.

What all of these resolutions have in common however, is the ubiquitous garbage collection truck, marked by the stink that comes with collecting mixed and rotten waste from households and commercial establishments.

The perceptive will have realized by now that an otherwise central figure is entirely absent from the descriptions of the garbage issue. That figure would be the figure of the human person. This absence is not surprising however, given that the problem has been framed in terms of ‘waste-management’, the human has been almost eliminated from the scene. They have no role in the equation except as producers of the waste. As such, they must only be educated to follow the appropriate procedure of either dumping waste in a bin (and not all over the countryside), or segregating the waste in appropriate bins. These actions end their role in the process. This is not a particularly comfortable location for the human being though, since this process in fact dehumanizes them, making them only cogs in a larger mechanical process.

Introducing the human element into the process of dealing with waste would radically alter the manner in which we view the problem of waste. It would also ensure a more effective way of dealing with the waste we generate. As suggested earlier, introducing the human element is not merely indicating the role that human beings have to play in the process. Introducing the human element would involve placing the dignity of the human being at the centre of our perspective and our resolution of an issue.

In the case of dealing with the waste we produce, a recognition of the dignity of the human person would involve a recognition that our actions of not segregating wastes, or providing rotting wastes to the sanitation worker is an affront to their dignity. In most of our municipalities, being forced behind the garbage truck is a nightmare. If forced behind it, we pull out our kerchiefs or hold our breath. Imagine now the condition of the person spending a good amount of his life within the truck, often time without gloves, or boots, or a mask to prevent him gagging on the smells? Invoking the dignity of the human person involves recognizing their right to a dignified working environment. This move takes us beyond the arguments for and against segregating waste at source. It is now no longer a matter of convenience or organizational success, it is a matter of our bounden obligation to another human being.

Invoking dignity ensures however that we move beyond uni-directional ‘giving’ of dignity, toward placing ourselves in a dialogical relationship with the object of our giving. Thus not only do we segregate waste at source, we also accept a situation where the sanitation worker instructs us in the ideal participation in the system. Such an experiment was conducted in some wards of Bangalore city some years ago, where municipality workers went from door to door of the ward, explained the workings of the system, and after a trial run, would refuse to clear garbage that wasn’t segregated. To the credit of Clinton Vaz and those involved in the waste segregation initiative, a similar principle was adopted in the Panjim Municipality. However, such initiatives also require the backing of the law. Where a citizen refuses to cooperate with the sanitation worker, not only must their waste not be cleared, but a suitable penalty imposed on them, one that can be levied through the municipality worker in that ward.

Invariably though we shirk from enforcing such systems. They stand to upset the existing social (and moral) order which is built on a failure to recognize the dignity of the individual. Placing the power to fine in a supervisor or a higher power, allows for interventions to protect the sensitivities of well-placed folk. Perhaps this is another reason why, despite loud cries for its implementation, the decentralization of governmental power to the panchayats and in particular the gram sabhas, has not been realized in our State and in others. The empowerment of the sanitation worker and the empowerment of the gram sabhas operate on similar principles of decentralization. The recognition of the principle of decentralization of power, must necessarily be accompanied by the social recognition of the principle of the dignity of the individual. The failure to do so would, in the words of a friend turn, our gram sabhas into garam sabhas!

To return to the issue of waste and our relationship to it; intervening from a position that recognizes the dignity of the individual promises to radically renew our waste management initiatives. It would highlight our moral burden to not push a member of our community (sanitation workers, rag pickers) into an undignified work environment, allow for a greater articulation of equality within our society, and allow for dialogical resolution of many more issues than merely the issue of waste.

In the end, perspectives and the words we use to understand an issue make all the difference!

(Published in the Gomantak Times 9 Sept 2009)