Sneezing at the Brahmanical: Polemics at the Global Goans Convention

Responding to earlier columns, a friend recently asked for a definition of the word ‘brahmanical’. While perhaps a definition of the term will not be forthcoming, at least not in this column, perhaps examples of brahmanical thought, in this case history-writing, could be provided. A rather interesting example of the same was provided in the course of the first sessions of the Global Goans’ Convention held in London over July 22- 24.

The most striking example of brahmanical history-writing was provided by Dr. Damodar R. SarDesai, who is Professor Emeritus at the University of California in Los Angeles. That he is a historian is a somewhat tragic indicator of the manner in which brahmanical polemics, such as displayed in his presentation, are so often accepted as the acceptable basis of social science. Conversely however it is precisely because he is a historian, that we can see the manner in which polemics is converted to history.

For Dr. SarDessai, reflecting on 50 years of ‘Liberation’, the period of Portuguese sovereignty in Goa was one long and dark period of trial, tribulation and lack of development. He was able to say this however because he was speaking from the position of the brahmanised dominant castes of Goa. He did not recognize the fact that the initial period of Portuguese sovereignty allowed to the oppressed castes in the region, the possibility of conversion to Catholicism and thus social mobility. In later periods of Portuguese sovereignty, it allowed non-dominant Hindu caste groups similar options of social mobility, especially after the Novas Conquistas were added to the Catholic territories of the Velhas Conquistas. This acquisition, allowed for these caste groups, to not only change residence, and hence escape persecution of their ‘upper’ caste feudal overlords, but it also allowed them to represent themselves in the process of the shift, as a different caste group entirely, increasing in this process their social standing. Much later, the Portuguese State offered any options, especially to the Gomantak Maratha Samaj, for education and social mobility.

These facts are inconvenient to a brahmanical history, that because they see the pre-colonial period from the point of view of the dominant castes, see this period as a happy conflict-free time. The other side of this happy story however is that this pre-colonial time was an unhappy time for suppressed groups and for all its faults, colonialism also provided space for the partial liberation of these non-dominant groups. Brahmanical polemics do not necessarily see the post-colonial period as a necessarily happy one either. Until the post colonial order works to the benefit of the dominant castes, the brahmanical will not be appeased. Thus in Dr. SarDessai's polemic, it was not sufficient that the Portuguese were ejected from Goa, the first, and confirmedly anti-brahmanical Chief Minister of Goa, was mentioned but once, and in so flippant a manner, it left the audience wondering as to the man's ultimate worth.

A column of this length cannot do justice to the absolute horror that was the presentation of Dr. SarDessai. What should for the moment suffice to demonstrate its horror was the response of Dr. Teotónio R. De Souza. Dr. De Souza is recognized within the field of Goan and ‘Indo-Portuguese’ history as an authority. What is often not openly stated, by whispered and smiled at is the fact that Dr. De Souza does not normally spare a kind word for the period of Portuguese sovereignty. Dr. De Souza was forced however, by Dr. SarDessai’s polemic, to abandon his (no-doubt carefully crafted) text, and ad-lib a response to Dr. SarDessai. In a muted manner, perhaps owing to the presence of Indian government officials and non-academics in the room, Dr. De Souza sought to tone down Dr. SarDessai’s assertions.

Perhaps the rebuttal comes to late however, because Dr. De Souza has himself many occasions built his version of Indian nationalist history of Goa on brahmanical lines. An example of this foundational presence of brahmanical thinking was obvious when he argued that the specificity of Goa (as with any other place) was contributed to through the presence of the minorities in Goa. This assertion is brahmanical because it accepts the brahmanical assertion that Hindus across the subcontinent are the same, they are one single and indivisible community. Such assertions while patently untrue, are necessary to ensure the domination of the brahmanised groups (and the supremacy of brahmanical thought) that control the destinies of post colonial India. We should at the same time recognize however, that Dr. De Souza seems to have been forced into this position of speaking of the Catholic, because it was obvious in the course of Dr. SarDessai’s presentation, that his intense disparaging (bordering on hatred even) of the Portuguese formed an ideal basis on which to denigrate the cultural condition of the Goan Catholic. It should be pointed out simultaneously, that more recently, especially when he argues of the presence of 'many liberations', Dr. De Souza seems to be moving toward a more complex understanding of the moment of the integration of Goa into the Union of India. In doing so he seems to be recognizing the limiting frames that nationalism and especially brahmanical nationalism present to the study of Goa, colonialism, and the post-colonial. One suspects that it is the rise of right-wing Hindu nationalismto this rethinking, that spurs Dr. De Souza since Dr. De Souza persists in (rightly) calling out instances of Portuguese superciliousness in the academy. Dr. De Souza further betrayed the brahmanical influences on his thought when he responded to Dr. SarDessai, that the success of the Portuguese lay in the fact that they also managed to convert one-third of the population to Catholicism. Dr. De Souza made another error here, where he clearly (if unconsciously) buys into the generally accepted idea that it is only the Catholics that were ‘tainted’ by the Portuguese, while the ‘Hindus’ retain their cultural purity and authenticity. Once more, nothing could be further away from the truth. In the course of their working with the Portuguese State, as well as in the course of everyday market relations, the brahmanised groups in Goa were, and are, also children of the Portuguese (and other Catholic and European) cultural influences. This impress exists on their food, their language, their dress and every other cultural institution they may seek to present as authentic and untouched. Why then, assume that the Goan Catholics alone are the mark of Portuguese success? One does so, because of the brahmanical assertion that it not only in upper caste practice, but more specifically in Hindu practice that authentic ‘Indian-ness’ is captured

What was perhaps most striking about Dr. SarDessai’s address however was the fact that he found it necessary to humiliate and insult the Portuguese (and their lack of effective colonization) in order to retrieve the honour and prestige of the brahmanised groups he spoke for. Those who have reflected on the workings of caste will know that humiliation – whether verbal, when we point to someone’s birth in a ‘lower’ caste, invariably to ‘put them in their place’, or physical, through the practices of untouchability – is the most significant strategy of casteist and hence the brahmanical order. Interestingly however, when one humiliates the Portuguese for ineffective colonization (or development), one is praising the British style of colonization and development. This move then, demonstrates that close ties that the brahmanical makes with the colonial. In this move we realize that brahmanical thinking, is not necessarily an ancient framework that necessarily returns us to a moment of pre-colonial innocence, but in fact a contemporary development that gains its power from colonial (and especially British) intellectual frameworks. Through this lineage, the brahmanical is connected to the racist and other exploitative frameworks that held sway in the nineteenth century.

What should be mentioned in conclusion, is that it isn’t poor Dr. SarDessai alone who should be blamed. That he is the carrier of an infectious brahmanical thought process is true. However, his pronouncements were by and large accepted silently by the audience, because Dr. SarDessai was able to quote from a stock of knowledge that has gained credibility over time. Merely because it has gained credibility over time however does not make it right, it only makes the task of dealing with it, and the sneaky manner in which it secretes itself into our work, that much more difficult.

Jai Bhim!

(Comments are welcome at www.dervishnotes.blogspot.com)

A Letter to Amita: Unpacking Caste Politics

Dear Amita,

I want to begin this post by thanking you for your response to Dileep Padgaonkar’s review of Meera Kosambi’s book on her grandfather and Buddhist scholar Dharmanand Kosambi (Dharmanand Kosambi: the essential writings, edited by Meera Kosambi, Permanant Black) in The Times of India.

In your response you rightly point out that “To refer to the background of a brahmin landowner then as ‘humble’ is misleading and offensive.” No argument there. You raise points that are normally occluded in the debates and discussions within and about Goa. On the contrary, I would go further than you do when you say that “the condition of the non-brahmins was much worse, with many in grinding poverty, working on the land owned by the GSBs, unable to even think of basic education, their women and children sometimes bonded in the worst ways imaginable.” In fact, for most of the non-brahmin Hindu population of Goa, and especially in the Novas Conquistas, the GSB was the oppressor; not the Portuguese, and the GSB continues to be the oppressor. Let us also not forget that for the GSB the pre-Republic discrimination was not as severe as it was for other Hindu groups. There were sufficient number of GSBs within the system of the Estado da India to ensure that their interests were served, even while not being centre-stage. These inconvenient facts are unfortunately conveniently occluded in the anti-Portuguese hysteria that is generated by the ‘freedom-fighters’ whose lead figures are perhaps not surprisingly GSB! More recently, in other writings, I have suggested that perhaps the kind of stand-off that one saw in the Subodh Kerkar incident had as much to do with contra-GSB politics as with anti-non-Hindu politics.

Before I go on to my differences with you, and my suggestions of caution – that draw largely from Luis’ response to you - may I direct your attention ‘The Bomb,Biography and the Indian Middle Class’ published in the EPW issue dated June 10 2006, p. 2327. In this essay Sankaran Krishna points to the biography of the late Raja Ramanna. He points here to the curious fact, that like Dileep Padgaokar’s review, Ramanna’s review too begins with a reference to his Brahmin origins. Like you do, Krishna leads us from this reference to the Brahmin, to the manner in which this feature limits the extent of Indian modernity. Among other things, it is the basis on which the pride in one’s elevated caste background twines with the politics of ‘merit’ that we uphold to deny the reservation policy that Luis rightly supports, how it constructs the habitus of the Indian middle classes, its (our) response to the masses, and how it twines with Hindutva. The essay is a gem, and worth reading and I will hence cease to discuss that essay here. I will merely end by indicating that reference to the humility of the GSB caste is more than merely misleading and offensive. Padgaokar’s reference tells us also of how Padgaokar perceives himself, and the limits of his own modernity.

My differences with you commence from the position, where I argue that it is possible to conceive that the ‘humble GSB’ did in fact exist at the time in which Dharmanand was forced to manage the coconut plantations. Saying this does not, I believe, challenge your assertion of the preeminence of the Saraswat in Goa. This assertion only provides a critical nuance. What I am trying to gesture towards however is that we should not take the term GSB at face value but unpack it. The term GSB and the idea of a single GSB caste was in fact an invention of the early late 19^th and early 20^th century. This points was made in great detail by the historian Frank Conlon in an essay titled ‘Caste by Association: The Gauda Sarasvata Brahmana Unification Movement’ and published in 1974. That the discussion of this essay did not find its way into many of the discussions on Goan society and history, and contemporary Goan politics; I believe says much about the internal politics (and power structures) of Goa.

To return to Conlon’s essay however, he points out that the GSB community was forged in the early 1900’s primarily as a result of the efforts of non-elite migrants to Bombay city who members of around 11 historically related sub-castes. “The larger and more influential of these groups included Shenvi, Sāsastikar, Kudaldeskar, Bardeskar, Pednekar and Sarasvata (or Senvipaiki) jatis.” You will realize that his list, provides names for only 6 of these 11 sub-castes, and yet today most of us are unaware of the distinctions even among these 6 that until the early 1900’s were significant. These divisions were significant enough that non-elite members of the non-elite sub-castes had to attempt to create a single unified group that would allow them to gain from the combined strength of numbers, as well as the elite status of members of elite sub-castes.

These moves met with different responses. There were some, like the famed Shenoi Goembab who participated in this move by forging a ‘mother-tongue’ for this group outside of the language that the elite among them identified with. This caste-consolidation history of Konkani has today been occluded as Shenoi has been trapped in the Goan identity building movement (which is not unconnected with the machinations of some members of the GSB caste either). There were the Swamis (pontiffs) of some of the Maths, notably the Chitrapur Math and the Kashi Math who were not as keen to see these distinctions vanish. Indeed mention the commonality of Saraswats to a Chitrapur Brahmin even today, and you will see a smirk play on the their faces. Seeing themselves as Saraswats, rather than GSBs, they will tell you that the GSBs are known to be rather uncouth; villagers, shop-keepers and merchants. It was exactly this lower socio-economic standing among the non-elite sub-castes that the Gauda Sarasvata Brahmana Unification Movement sought to undo. This and get themselves recognized as Brahmins by other (notably Marathi-speaking) Brahmins.

I seek to raise this point, and stress this history for a number of reasons. First, we should not collapse the various sub-castes, the memory and identity of which may still linger, into the single rubric of Brahmin. The value of unpacking this term is similar to the value of the Dalit movement that resists their being packed into the box Hindu. Where strong ‘lower’-caste movements exist, for example Bihar, the specter of Hindutva has been diminished. I wonder whether the inclination of the GSB stalwarts in Goa who were formerly seen as secular, is not also the result of the recent years that has seen the effective consolidation of the GSB caste? Recognizing the non-elite status of some of these Brahmins would possibly also help generate insights into their other actions. Finally, unpacking ‘Brahmins’ would help deflect the kind of critique that the Luis who has responded to your post demonstrates.

As demonstrated by his response, the critique against casteism gets conflated into a critique against Brahmins. This then has less to do with a critique against casteism, and more to do with the continuing caste battle between the Brahmins and the Chardos. In fact, the conflation of monolithic Brahmins, or Chardos, aids precisely the attempts of elites in these groups to recruit foot-soldiers for the caste wars that benefit the elites. For make no mistake, the sub-castes that went on to compose the GSB, were and are very much present among the Goan Catholic as well. By this conflation, it is possible for Chardo (or any other dominant caste) sensibility to masquerade as ‘progressive’ while not questioning itself and its relationship to dominance and subjugation. Take for example the suggestion that not mentioning caste could possibly have to do with a higher level of maturity!

One could also take the other statement that Luis makes “It is difficult to otherwise imagine how else they’ll ever be able to rise from centuries of institutionalized injustice.” I do not have any problem with the ‘They vs. Us’ formulation implicit in this statement. After all I am sure that Luis comes from a dominant caste background and is acknowledging this. At the same time, there is nevertheless a certain teleology of progress embedded in the statement. It suggests that at the end of the day ‘they’ must rise to become like ‘us’. This is not a romanticisation of the miserable conditions of the oppressed. It is merely an attempt to contemplate a space for a Dalit response that is not dependent on dominant caste superciliousness. Off the cuff, the closest approximation I can think of is what I can think of comes from this little response to Gandhians from Dalit activists. Responding to being called Harijans, or Children of Goa, the Dalit activists retort, ‘if we are children of God, whose children are you!’

I will end on this note by simply summarizing, that as important as it is to point out that the GSB, no matter how ‘humble’ was also a landowner and oppressor; it is as important to unpack this term to display the variety of status groups that have been shoved into it. Simultaneously, we should beware of attempts to hijack this critique to aid the caste wars by other dominant castes against the clearly hegemonic Brahmin. Thus in saying so I return to your observation that “identifying caste is important in writings about India, for it can add crucial depth to our understanding of this caste-ridden society…”

Many thanks for your patience,

Jason

(First published on line at tambdimati: the goan review on 15 Oct 2010)

Home cooked food!: The mantra, yantra, tantra of hygienic and clean food

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine, recently returned from the United States, complained about the stomach condition he had developed. What galled him most was that his illness had been caused via spoiled food served at a 5 star hotel. He had been warned, a dozen times over, that while road-side stalls were unsafe and unhealthy, the food served in the 5 star hotels in India was safe. And yet, this was not the first time 5 star food had him shuttling to and from the toilet. When I heard his story, I sat back and smiled. There was ofcourse, an explanation for why exactly his logic was not computing.

To get a grip on this logic however, we would have to go back in time, a couple of years when I was sharing a conversation with a friend. Speaking about the dabbawallas of Bombay, this friend remarked that this unique institution probably had something to do with the unique eating and dining habits of the South Asian. Caste rules as regards dining in older times restricted who we ate with, what we ate from whom, and where we ate as well, not to mention the times at which we ate. Thus, it was possible for a ‘lower’ caste person to offer food to a ‘higher’ caste person as long as it was uncooked. Where the degrees of separation between castes were lesser, then the possible pollution could beundone by sprinkling the cooked food ritually with ghee. The best route however, was to make sure that the food was cooked by some one reliable, someone who was ritually pure, and would thus provide ritually pure food. Someone from your home. It was partly for these reasons, this friend reasoned, that the dabbawallah was such a success in Bombay. It ensured a perfect system where ritually and socially privileged ‘home-cooked food’ could be delivered to you.

These ritual obsessions with purity, could explain the mania that the Indian displays for ‘home cooked food’; the home being a symbol for the pure. It is the absence of such preoccupations in other parts of the world, that allows places as wide-ranging as South-East Asia, Europe, the Americas and not least of all, the Islamicate urban centers of the South Asian subcontinent, to have such rich street-food cultures. The elusive hygiene of the street-side food-stall in India then, is less about hygiene and more about (often time unconscious) concerns for ritual purity. When we are not so sure about the social location of the cook, it is better to err on the side of caution.

Similarly, certain ritual systems of the subcontinent consider the consumption of food is an activity that makes one vulnerable. Thus the space in which one eats is something that one ought to give attention to. For the ritually conscious then, the liminal space of the street, that is open to polluting influences of all sorts, is best avoided as a place to eat. The ideal space to eat is the space in which one is secluded, in an environment where one is safe from intrusion of the polluted and dirty outside. Once more, scientific hygiene has nothing to do with the safety of the food.

But this is not to say that scientific hygiene has absolutely no role to play in any of these choices. On the contrary, it does and in a very interesting manner. Scientific hygiene was a colonial introduction into the subcontinent, and marked heavily by racism. The brown (or black) body was seen as the repository of filth and dirt. The tropical home of these coloured bodies was similarly loaded with pestilence and illness. Colonialism, through its mechanism of the ‘white man’s burden’ offered a way out of this mess to the coloured person, through the doctrines of scientific hygiene, urban planning and education. The elite of the subcontinent grabbed these ideas of hygiene with as much aplomb as they grabbed at the political institutions and ideas of the white man. As an illustrative case, take Gandhi’s agenda was tied as much with hygiene as it was with the setting up of the Indian nation-state. The political language of equality that Indian nationalism utilized did not however, necessarily transcend caste boundaries. In a clever move, while the dominant castes invested themselves with Western attributes, the attributes that were credited to the coloured person, were passed on to the ‘lower’ castes of the subcontinent. Thus their bodies and lifestyles, already deemed ritually unclean, were now also see as unhygienic. Just as the coloured person was seen as lacking in education, the Westernised coloured person, now projected this need for education and upliftment onto these ‘dumb’ castes.

It is no revelation that to most people in the third world, the 5 star hotel represents the developed West. It is a space where we can produce, and reproduce, ourselves as sophisticated, westernized and upper class. But as should be obvious, this westernization, and upper classness, also has casteist elements to it. Thus it is also an exclusive space, where we reject those who are not ‘people like us’. While there is no denying that a greater amount of care is possibly taken in the kitchens of these hotels, the fact is that these places are deemed cleaner, not only because they are more hygienic. They are deemed cleaner, because they are places where ‘people like us’ go, and where food is cooked ‘for people like us’. This is the safe space where the unknown and unclean cannot intrude, and this, perhaps above all, produces its ‘cleanliness’. In the past we had filthy cooks prepare food that was deemed ritually clean, because the cook was Brahmin (or of comparable caste groups). Or ritually suspect food could be eaten, because it was ritually purified by water or ghee. Similarly today, hotel food is produced as hygienic by the ritual mantra, yantra and tantra of shiny modern kitchens, presumed conformance to hygienic standards, and the modernity and exclusivity of their location.

Consequently then, we can make sense of the Facebook status message that started this whole conversation…

“Myth: Eating @ 5 Star hotels in India is safe. Just had my 2nd ever experience of illness due to spoiled food served. Consequently I have warned against "road side chai" and have had it over 2 dozen times. Number of illness bouts from chai? = 0”

(A version of this essay was first published in the Gomantak Times Sept 8 2010)

Mantra, yantra, tantra: refer to the three necessary components of magic formula, machine or implement, and the procedure through which 'Hindu' ritual can be successfully completed.

Pork and the Goan pre-Portuguese past: Food habits that surprise!

It seems almost lost in the mists of time now. That time when the idea of Goa Dourada, a Goa that was Lusitanian, or Portuguese, needed to be fought with another idea. The idea that eventually emerged to contest that of Goa Dourada was that of Goa Indica; the Goa that was Indian. If one idea pointed to a Lusitanian inspiration for Goa, the other pointed more properly to a brahmanical inspiration for Goa. The support for Goa Indica was found in geographical contiguity, in Puranic legend and sundry other clues.

Now this Indic connection for Goa was not unwarranted. There was a need to overact the rhetoric overdrive of the Estado Novo, and Goa Indica played its role in this ideological battle. The question remains however, if Goa Indica managed to capture the entire essence of Goa, or was it another incomplete cliché that needs to necessarily give way to another? Where would this new cliché come from if at all? Thankfully, Mother India in her variety provides the answer to that question. In the early 1980’s a group of scholars who had suckled right at the brahmanical breast of the Mother emerged with an interesting intellectual agenda. Styling themselves the Subaltern Studies Group, this group of scholars argued that there was much in the history of the subcontinent, and the manner in which we thought about it that had to change. We had to move away from the understanding of history as the progress led by great men, to a history that features the non-elite groups, the subaltern, as agents of social and political change. This focus on the hitherto small people of history, was matched by the independent growth in the Dalit movement in India. As a result, we can today actively think of crafting a history of India based on Dalit and subaltern experiences and push back brahmanical histories from the centre-stage it has occupied till date.

One of the many problems with Goa Indica is that when it thought of the pre-Portuguese past, it thought of Goa as a brahmanical centre. The history of this pre-Portuguese past was the history of the great men and groups in the brahmanical tradition. There was, and is, no space for the non-brahmanical groups in the imagination of a pre-Portuguese Goa. Having said this though, it must be pointed out that Goa Dourada, at least when used within the Goan context, was a reference to the self-image and perceptions of the Lusitanianised brahmanical and elite groups. Between the two cliches, you have the nationalist, and imperialist imaginations of the elite and the brahmanical. If one has to redress this understanding of Goa then, at the same time not fall into Lusitanian moulds for Goa, where should we go? Where do we find the trope that will allow us to place at the centre, the experiences and histories of the Goan subaltern?

Happily it appears that we may not have to go too far. Perhaps the answer was sitting before our very noses all the time and thanks to our elitist obsessions we just didn’t recognize it!

The eating of pork is essential to any Catholic feast or festive occasion, and many assume that the consumption of pork was something that was ‘imposed’ and introduced to the ancestors of today’s Catholics by the Portuguese and the accompanying missionaries. What if however, this was not quite the story? What if pork was already a part of the Goan diet before the Portuguese came in? Would that possibly change the way in which we look at the constituents of Goan Catholic culture?

It is possible, and no doubt documented, that the missionaries urged pork on to the populace that converted to Catholicism way back in the 1500’s. However, to assume that this was the first time the converts to Catholicism had ever consumed pork is to assume that the entire population that converted was possessed of brahmanical sensibilities. If one looks around, at social groups in the rest of Mother India, one realizes that there is a good portion of the non-brahmanical population of the sub-continent that quite enjoys eating pork. We can also safely assume that these groups were insulated from the rigors of that famed beast, the Holy Inquisition in Goa, and that their pork-consumption is not a savory leftover from their missionary-scarred past. The consumption of pork then, it turns out, is not in fact some Portuguese introduction to Goan cuisine, but in fact foundationally (pre-Portuguese) Goan!

A significant social scientist in Goa, was recently contemplating the fact that the social groups, at least in Catholic Bardez, who were professional cooks were groups that in other parts of India were seen an untouchable. What caused then, this scholar wondered, for the missionary priests, to attach cooking as the traditional occupation of this group on their conversion to Christianity? If one realizes that these groups were in any case consuming Pork, and that the missionaries came from Europe with a taste for porcine flesh, then voila! One sees a natural partnership being produced! This association begins to make more sense when one realizes that the first Christians in Goa, were not members of the Brahmanical castes, but in fact the non-brahmanical castes, no doubt eager to get away from the stuffy sensibilities of the brahmanical groups. The fact is that only after the enactment of penal legislations did segments of the brahmanical groups convert to Christianity.

Realizing that the consumption of pork was a part of the pre-Portuguese culture of Goa pushes us to realize that there is much that we assume to be Portuguese impacts on Goan culture that are in fact remnants from the elusive pre-Portuguese past. To be sure there was some amount of colonial influence in the manner in which pork consumption spread. But for that matter, most of the constituents of sub-continental cuisine, are the result of the intervention of the Portuguese. It was because of the colonial transportation of American spices that we have the Indian cuisine that we are familiar with today.

In sum then, while the idea of Goa Indica was relevant and helpful, it is time we started relooking the clichés we use to describe Goa. Looking at the practices of the non-brahmanical groups in Goa, would perhaps give us another interesting angle to enter the Goan experience.

(First published in the Gomantak Times 25 August 2010)

We’re Brahmins! : The transnational transactions of caste capital

There is a certain segment of readers of this column who believe that it deals too much with caste. For the sake of those readers, I was hoping that my time away from Goa, and in Goa’s former metropole would allow us both to get away from the terrible ‘C’ word. Unfortunately, this was not to be. In a bid to be friendly, a student from one of Portugal’s more ancient universities, told me of a classmate who was also Goan. “He always reminds us that he is a Brahmin” this acquaintance told me with a grin. I rolled my eyes thinking, “Here we go again!”

If we imagine life to be a board-game, then the claims that we make in this game are not mere talk. These claims are in fact strategies, or counters for us to get higher in the game, or retain the position that we have. Flashing the right card at the right time can win us a particular round of the game. Thus we often flash our upper-caste belongings when there is need, through the way we speak, the way we look, our names, etc. This country, as almost any honest person will acknowledge, works along brahmanical lines.

Very often in a game, we are left with counters that seem to have no value. In such a case, we would need to transform the counter into something of greater value. The board-game of life seems to provide such options in certain cases. It is for this reason that Goan Catholics from the upper castes very often flash their belonging to Brahmin or Kshatriya categories when forging their careers or trying to make an impression in the former British-India. What they do is to transcend the peculiarity of being Catholic Brahmin or Chardo and find equivalence by casting their identity along pan-Indian lines.

But Portugal is not India, and while it may help to proclaim one’s upper caste status in India; what purpose does it serve in European Portugal? Proceeding purely on logic, it should serve only to make an oddity of oneself, sticking out like a sore thumb. And yet this student claims, we are told, this status constantly!

Trying to make sense of this puzzle, my mind flew back to a conversation I had had 2 years ago. Referring to Narana Coissoro, a significant Portuguese, a man of Goan descet; the lady I was in conversation with said “Ah Narana Coissoro! He’s a noble isn’t he? A Brahman from Goa”.

Speaking with a Portuguese anthropologist who studies Goa, I confirmed what I was beginning to suspect, the early Portuguese understanding of the Brahmin in Goa was to find equivalence for them in European aristrocracy and nobility. This reading was made possible through the fact that the Brahmin caste in the area around Goa was already in the early 1500’s a dominant caste group with substantial land holding. For the late medieval/ early modern European, control over the land translated into the fact of nobility.

Clearly then the counter of ‘brahmin’ that our friend keeps throwing about is not without some value even in Portugal. ‘Brahmin’ is used to signify social distinction, the fact of being a ‘noble’, a cut above the rest, of being special. Portugal’s long relationship with Goa has clearly then established certain rules in the game, rules that are understood particularly well by the elites there, through which counters in Goa, can be translated and made sense of in Portugal, allowing one to play the game with higher stakes there.

Having made sense of this situation, we can now begin to understand why the claims of expat Indians in non-metropolitan parts of the US make no sense to Anglo-Saxon residents of the US. ‘White’ friends from the US invariably indicate that their Indian friends never fail to point out that they are Brahmin, and confess that they have no idea what it means to be Brahmin. The counter that these upper-caste Indians are seeking to parade before to the others does not have any value without the shared historical bonds, and without out the value of the counter having been acknowledged by the larger collective of elites of the US. Ofcourse it does not stop these expats from continuing to claim their distinctive status back home, and it is possible that as India’s star as a potential ‘super-power’ continues to rise, there will emerge a way for this counter to make some sense in dispersed communities in the US too. The situation in Goa was markedly different though, the Brahmin (across religion) was for a long time a collaborator with the colonial power (indeed, this is a common understanding of the Brahmin in Portugal – the section of people with who they had intimate relations). This equation, specifically located in both time and space, allowed for the counter to continue to have significance in the Luso-Indian world.

An ancient coping mechanism when being in the realm of the unfamiliar is to domesticate it by comparing it to the familiar. The tables were turned on me when the unpleasantly familiar turned up rather innocuously in a Lisbon conversation. But perhaps the experience showed me more than the transnational character of caste, which operates as social capital. This episode also showed us how these two societies for all their differences, may in fact be joined in many more places that we often imagine.

(Published in the Gomantak Times, October 7th 2009)