The Church in Goa and the assembling of Konkani culture

Towards the end of last year Naguesh Karmali alleged that Church in Goa is doing what the Portuguese could not do to finish Indian culture.  “The suppression by Church today is much larger than the way Portuguese suppressed it in the 16th and 17th century”, he is reported to have said.

The souls of hundreds of dead Catholic priests must have begun clamouring for justice when they heard this baseless and hateful assertion. For, the fact is that a good amount of “culture”, Indian, Goan, or otherwise, in Goa today, was either formulated by Catholic priests in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and then more assiduously developed since the 1960s.

Nationalism and its child, post-colonialism have assumed – often erroneously – that Christianization under the aegis of European expansion resulted in the destruction of culture. However, this was not necessarily the case. Much local culture is the result of European intervention and interpretation. This position derives from larger arguments that suggest that the need to understand local cultures, customs, and laws, in order to govern the territories, and the subsequent misunderstanding by the British, or the misrepresentation by local groups, especially elite groups, resulted in the Indian cultures that we are witness to today.

Going by this understanding, in Goa too, local culture, and in fact Konkani culture was developed by the missionaries.  Prior to the coming of the Europeans, it would be difficult to suggest that there was such a thing as society, in the sense of a community committed to the care of its constituents. There was a caste polity, and while the castes could understand each other, they did not share a common culture as we understand it today. For example, the language of the dominant castes, was definitely not the language of the oppressed castes. Konkani, as a single language spoken, and eventually written, by a wide variety of groups was created by missionaries trying to preach the Christian faith to locals. By this understanding, Konkani was the result of missionary intervention and seen as the language of untouchable Christians. It was for this reason that poor Varde Valaulikar had to struggle so hard to convince his caste fellows to abandon Marathi and claim Konkani as their own.

The Church’s patronage of Konkani in the Nagri, Sanskritized variant, became even more aggressive in recent times. This was soon after the Vatican Council II. Spurred on by the permission to translate the liturgy into vernacular languages, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Goa lost no time in switching over to Konkani. They produced a liturgy, songs, music. Read through the issues of Renovação, the bulletin of the Archdiocese, and one can sense the systematic way through which they went about installing Konkani in the liturgical life of Goan Catholics.

Their interventions were not restricted to the spiritual lives of Catholics alone. Rather, they also supported secular initiatives to promote Konkani in Goa. Take, for example, the fact that it was Diocesan schools that first made the switch to the Konkani medium in the Nagri script. In 1964 Fr. Vasco do Rego pioneered Konkani primary education by getting four schools in the vicinity of Loyola High School, Margão, to introduce Nagari Konkani as the medium of instruction in the primary section. Later, in the 1990s, when the State government refused to support English as a medium of instruction, the Archdiocese adopted Nagari Konkani despite vociferous and sustained protests from parents.

Some have argued that this was because the Diocese had no choice in the matter. This is but one side of the story. The other side of the story is that there were a great number of linguistic nationalists within the Church, and they rubbed their hands with glee at this opportunity. What is also true is that even before the pronouncements of the Vatican Council II, the universal Catholic Church had been priming itself to make space for vernaculars alongside Latin.

Uncharitable voices often argue that the Catholic Church did so because the Vatican was trying to suck up to the newly independent nations. While this may be true in part, what must not be discounted is that already, from the early 1900s, a number of Catholic thinkers were committed to producing distinct national Catholic cultures. The Church has always been producing nuanced vernacular versions of Christianity, as can be seen in Goa. However, in the twentieth century, a world in the grip of racist ideologies, ultimately traceable to the Romantic movement, was unable to appreciate these nuances. The forms of the Catholic Church were seen as European, rather than universal, and sought to be replaced wholescale with “native” culture. In doing so, these Catholic leaders played along with nationalist forces. However, they did this out of conviction that they were doing the right thing, not out of fear of the nationalists.

As I have suggested, the clergy in Goa were no different, and have played a significant role in assembling a more sanskritic Konkani identity for Goa.  It is a shame that this selfless yeoman service, even if misguided, not only goes unsung by their former collaborators, but worse, is neatly swept under the carpet to suit the interests of a wicked cabal.

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo dated 5 Feb 2016)

Konkani Stalwarts and the Archdiocese

The hierarchy of the Archdiocese of Goa must not know what has hit it. While used to accolades from the leadership of the Nagari Konkani movement, more recently the same leadership has been subjecting the Archdiocese to the most vicious attacks. A month ago Naguesh Karmali made the bold suggestion that the Catholic Church in Goa was suppressing Indian culture in a manner that exceeded that of the sixteenth and seventeenth century Portuguese. Uday Bhembre has directed ire against the Catholic Church on other occasions. For his part, Raju Nayak, editor of the Marathi daily Lokmat, indicated that the Archbishop’s choice to address his guests at the Christmas reception in English rather than Konkani demonstrated a certain lack of Indian-ness of the Catholic Church in Goa.

In this column I would like to examine the manner in which Sandesh Prabhudesai, another Konkani stalwart, positions the Church in his book Clear Cut: Goa behind the Glamour (2014). Clear Cut is a collection of the op-eds Prabhudesai has written over a period of years. While the writing is uneven it nevertheless demonstrates the nature of his concerns, the most constant of which is securing a Goan identity through Konkani.

Reading Prabhudesai’s musings, one gets a sense of his opinion of the Catholic Church. Take, for example, the following sentence from the article ‘Medium of Destruction’ (p. 20), written originally on 29 March 2011. Not explicitly referring to the schools managed by the Archdiocese, he says that “the Konkani medium has been ‘exploited’ purely to get salary grants for the teachers and not to impart education in proper Konkani” (p. 21). Nonetheless, he admits in another article titled ‘What does Parrikar's MoI Policy Mean?’ (originally written in 2012 ) that “only Konkani medium schools run by the Church are shifting to English medium” (p. 35). What Prabhudesai seems to be suggesting, therefore, is that the Konkani medium was “exploited” by the Archdiocese way back in 1990, and that the Archdiocese had no inherent love for Konkani, but switched to Konkani only to financially sustain its schools. Incidentally, his suggestion is not very different from that of the opinion expressed by Raju Nayak in his recent editorial, who went so far as to suggest that the Archdiocese was in fact in favour of English right from the very beginning. Indeed, if one reads Clear Cut carefully, one is struck by the similarity between Nayak’s opinion and Prabhudesai’s as regards the Archdiocese’s relationship to Konkani.

What one gets from these writings, is of the Archdiocese as a manipulative institution. The idea of a manipulative Archdiocese is further elaborated in ‘What does Parrikar’s MoI Policy Mean?’ Here Prabhudesai writes: “As expected, Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar followed the suit [sic] of  his predecessor Digambar Kamat and surrendered his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) before the Church, to work out a ‘political’ solution to the long-pending controversy over Medium of Instruction (MoI).” The critical words to focus on here are “surrendered…before the Church”. There are a number of objectives that Prabhudesai seems to accomplish in this one phrase.

The first objective is that these words seem to suggest that the Archdiocese is an institution that can make or break governmental decisions whenever it wishes. To suggest that the Catholic Church is a major force in local politics is a common trope in Goan reportage. While it sometimes enjoys this power, this is not always the case. The fact is that the Catholic Church in Goa, just as in India, is in fact pinned, as it has been for some decades now, in the grip of Hindu majoritarian politics. All too often, as has been the case of the Archdiocese’s action in the post-colonial history of the Konkani language, the Archdiocese has gone out of its way, and in fact contrary to the wishes of many Catholics, to please the leaders of the Nagari Konkani establishment.

The second objective of the use of “surrender” seems to be Prabhudesai’s intention to shame the BJP into pursuing the anti-minority position that they are popularly identified with. Prabhudesai’s recourse to this strategy of shaming is particularly troublesome because it appears to insist that the BJP not respond pragmatically, but hold on, come hell or high water, to its ideological position. Using the metaphor of a war, tt seeks to provoke the rank and file to shame and anger so that they may prevail on their leadership.

Even more important, this phrase suggesting surrender seems to ignore the fact that the power-brokers of the Archdiocese are not acting on their own accord, but rather responding to the firm demands of hundreds, if not thousands of bahujan Catholics have indicated in no uncertain terms that they wish to have their children educated in English, not the brahmanised Nagari Konkani invented early in the twentieth century. Left to themselves, I have no doubt that the brahamnical leadership of the Archdiocese would have continued to pander to their brahmin cousins in the Nagari leadership. If Parrikar were surrendering, therefore, he would have been surrendering before the wishes of citizens represented in this case by the Archdiocese. No shame in this.  Once again, this denial that the Diocesan leadership is in fact acting in line with the desires of large sections of the laity, is a line taken more recently by Nayak.

It should be observed that I am not engaging in a blanket defence of the actions of the Archdiocesan leadership. There is much evidence to suggest that all is not well in many cases of the sale of church properties. Even if made in good faith, the fact is that various groups within the Church in Goa do not see eye to eye on the issue of the sale of properties. What is interesting, however, is that Prabhudesai, in particular, does not seem to problematize this democracy deficit in operation of the Archdiocese. His single point of critique is limited to his understanding of the Konkani issue.

In a recent op-ed taking issue with Nayak’s editorial, Kaustubh Naik suggests that Nayak’s stance denies “the minorities the agency to make their own life choices”. Naik is spot on in this analysis. In portraying the Church as a manipulative and dictatorial institution, and seeking to shame Parrikar for negotiating with the Archdiocese, what Prabhudesai appears to do is to prevent Catholic groups in Goa from using the Archdiocese as one more representational body to get their legitimate rights recognized by the government. Indeed, the thought of shame gains traction only if there is the suggestion that the Church or Archdiocese has no legitimacy being an actor, or representing Goan Catholics, in Goan politics. As the recent shenanigans of the BBSM demonstrates, politics is not determined solely by the ballot. In such a circumstance, there is no harm in the Goan Catholics utilising the structures of the Archdiocese to organise and articulate their demands. In denying them this choice, Prabhudesai denies political agency, or choice, to the Catholic communities in Goa, forcing them into a field that is dominated entirely by apparently secular liberal, or soft Hindutva rhetoric and politics; a politics that Sandesh Prabhudesai seems to subscribe to.

(A version of this post was first published in the OHeraldo on 8 Jan 210)

Art, Gender, and Faith

So profoundly has social media changed the ways in which we communicate and form ourselves that to declare that the world of social media has changed the manner in which we interact would be to state the obvious. Social media has given many of us the option to define ourselves in new ways, granting each of us access to resources that perhaps were scarcely imaginable even a decade ago.

Like many others, I took to these new forms of moulding my self-image like a duck to water. I was particularly fascinated by the possibilities that Facebook’s cover picture options offered. For those not yet in the know, the cover picture is what one would perhaps call the banner of the web page; it is a block of space at the top of one’s personal page that can be customised to fit in an image of one’s choice.

The release of this option to Facebook users coincided with my discovery of one of the features of the internal space of the Church of Saint Roque in Lisbon. The central panel of the retable of the main altar in this church is changed according to the liturgical season. Thus, the seasons of Lent, Easter, Advent, Christmas, and Ordinary time have their own panels. The effect on the largely illiterate faithful prior to times such as ours, when we are bombarded with so much visual material, must have been dramatic, offering an icon that was appropriate to the reflections of the season. Inspired by this feature, I have constantly changed the cover picture on my Facebook wall to suit the moment, whether it be a festival, a moment in history, an art work that strikes my fancy, or suchlike.

The Catholic Church commemorated the feast of St. Mary Magdalene on the twenty-second of this month. Almost every Christian is aware that Mary Magdalene is an important figure in the story of Christ’s life. She is identified as the woman who anointed Christ with perfume, and wiped his feet with her hair—an occasion that, according to the Gospels, caused quite a stir and called for a rebuke from Christ. Subsequently, she is depicted as present at the crucifixion and the resurrection of Christ, and finally, there are representations of her as a penitent, living her life as a hermit.

The occasion of her feast day, of course, called for a commemoration of the event. I was unsure, however, as to how to capture Mary Magdalene. Should I exhibit her before the Resurrection, where she is depicted anointing the feet of Christ, or wailing at the foot of the cross, or post resurrection, where she is depicted as the penitent?

I was uncomfortable with the images of the anointing because of their patriarchal character. One image in particular, displaying a woman and her hair, and merely the feet of Christ, was quite horrifying. Focusing on a male foot, female hands and hair,  despite the best intentions of the author, so much of the context had been removed to make the image seem vaguely pornographic. This image was too far removed from the more mystical reading that Christ himself provided of the action. Rather, it seemed to suggest the servitude of women to men.

The images of Mary Magdalene as a penitent similarly displayed an often lascivious male appreciation of her figure. Further, these images seemed to stress not Mary the privileged disciple but the prostituted woman that she has been identified with. Indeed, in these images, there was too much of an obsession with the fallen woman, without any appreciation for her redemption through Christ.

Of these many representations of Mary Magdalene as the penitent, there was one image that kept suggesting itself insistently. This was a Baroque period statute of the penitent Mary carved by the seventeenth century Spanish artist Pedro de Mena. Belonging to the Spanish National Museum of Sculpture, currently housed in the Colegio de San Gregorio in Valladolid, I had the privilege of encountering the image when it was on loan to the National Museum of Antique Art in Lisbon between 2011 and 2012. There are no words that can quite capture the sublime beauty of this image, whether in the care given to the coarse garments of the penitent Mary, or the bliss of contemplation that animates her face. Unfortunately, however, none of the images on the internet were quite able to do justice to this image. In any case, as I will subsequently elaborate, this moment of penitence was not the moment I decided on. Also, there is good reason to believe that the penitent Mary is the result of the conflation of Mary Madgalene with that of St. Mary of Egypt. This image, therefore, just would not do.

I eventually settled on the moment when Mary encounters Christ after his resurrection. This choice was determined largely because of the immense importance of this moment, captured perfectly in the words of Sr. Sandra Schneiders:

“as three of the four Gospels record, she was indeed the first witness to the Resurrection, and so then for those fateful moments, hours immediately thereafter, there’s a deep sense in which Mary Magdala was the Church. She was the only person who knew the story and could proclaim it of the Resurrection.”

There are times when one is unable to understand the full import of the words one encounters. And yet one is aware that something monumental has taken place. An entire worldview has been shifted, and a new perspective has been born. In these few words, Schneiders managed to convey the central importance of this female figure in a world that predominantly focuses on male and patriarchal actors. She repositioned Mary Magdalene, not as a fallen figure of immorality, nor as a penitent (whose value I am not disputing, though penitence can be overemphasized so as to occlude grace), but as a person who, as a result of Christ’s certain choice, was privileged to be the first to be made aware of the key moment of the Christian message and, in conveying the message of new life to the rest of the disciples, she embodied the Church in those initial moments. 

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo on 24 July 2015)

Children, Adoption, and Catholic Morality

I awoke, some days ago, to a storm in the internet tea cup. Social media was awash with a poster featuring a phrase located over the image of a flask of Dolce & Gabbana perfume called “Homophobe”. The phrase read “When you just want to smell like a couple of assholes from Italy.”

Quickly captured, the story is that this image was a response following Elton John castigating the Italian designers Dolce and Gabbana (D&G) for their statements calling children conceived through In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) “synthetic”. John’s response was “How dare you refer to my beautiful children as ‘synthetic’. And shame on you for wagging your judgemental little fingers at IVF - a miracle that has allowed legions of loving people, both straight and gay, to fulfil their dream of having children”.

This controversy should ideally have been ignored given that the fracas is between two sets of extremely privileged white men. The concerns of their universe are not necessarily those of the rest of the world. And yet, given the manner in which the issue has been turned into one of rights of people, gay and otherwise, to have children, there is sufficient reason to step in with an intervention.

My opinion in this column is not to undertake a defence of D&G. The statements attributed to them have been made via reports that refer to articles in Italian. Given my inability to directly access their statements, my attention is directed largely at John’s statement and the subsequent outrage peddled through the liberal propaganda machine. One of the locations through which I would like to critique this outrage is my understanding of the teachings of the Catholic Church.

An appropriate place to begin the critique would be at the seed of this whole mess, the statement by D&G. While Catholic teaching holds the clear position that IVF is morally wrong, the same instruction of the Church is quite clear that children themselves, regardless of the manner of their birth, are to be treated with respect and love. In light of this teaching, calling children produced via IVF “synthetic” is not merely a case of unfortunate phrasing but morally wrong. Should D&G think that they were toeing a Catholic line this insight should caution Catholics that the teaching of the Church is full of nuances that ought to be appreciated before being used to mount interventions in the public sphere, and in our private lives.

This brings us to Elton John’s denunciation of the D&G. Leaving aside the matter about the morality of IVF facilitated conception, John’s statement borders on the excessive. IVF is definitely NOT an option available to legions of people primarily because it is an extremely expensive option. While estimates in the US put the cost at about $10,000 per attempt, in India, the costs are in the range of about Rs. 2, 50,000. These are not economic options for a good part of the population anywhere in the world. Add to this the manner in which surrogate motherhood often involves the dubious use of the bodies of women. This relationship is especially problematic if these women are from the global South and servicing the needs of prospective parents from the global North.

IVF has gained some popularity in the North, and especially found favour among certain segments of the gay populations. The technique has allowed these groups to have children that they have a biological link with. But it is precisely the celebration of this biological link that is extremely problematic. While Elton John suggests that it is IVF alone that allows people to enjoy the gift of children, he is ignoring the fact that it is also possible for people to adopt orphaned children. If John finds D&G’s statements offensive, I find it particularly offensive that people should suggest that it is the biological link alone that constitutes a tangible bond between parent and child. This is a kind of fetishisation of the genetic that borders on racism and needs to be called out.

While the Catholic Church has drawn much flack for its opposition to IVF, what is often not given much attention is the fact that it does recognise the possibility, and merit of adoption. As in the words of Saint Pope John Paul II, “Adopting children, regarding and treating them as one’s own children, means recognizing that the relationship between parents and children is not measured only by genetic standards. Procreative love is first and foremost a gift of self. There is a form of ‘procreation’ which occurs through acceptance, concern, and devotion. The resulting relationship is so intimate and enduring that it is in no way inferior to one based on a biological connection. When this is also juridically protected, as it is in adoption, in a family united by the stable bond of marriage, it assures the child that peaceful atmosphere and that paternal and maternal love which he needs for his full human development” [all emphasis in the original].

The more astute would have realised that John Paul II crafted his words carefully, limiting the scope for non-traditional families to adopt. I have yet to appreciate the reasons for the Catholic Church’s opposition to adoption by gay couples. Given my own belief that it is not just the parents who raise a child, but a larger society, and that while one’s role models are chosen from a larger network of family and friends, I find the Church’s current position difficult to defend. However, I would like to highlight the fact that while the Catholic Church may close the door on IVF, it also opens up the door for extending our reserves of love to those outside of our biological ambit. It is important to highlight this route precisely because it stands as a counter to the class-privilege and racism that is embedded in the kind of gay politics that people like Elton John represent. 

The politics of the gay rights movement led by the mainstream voices from the global North has long ceased to represent the values of justice and freedom. Instead, they often urge routes that lead to a consumeristic view of the human body and human relations. While it may be important to continue to challenge the Catholic Church to rethink its positions on homosexually inclined and gender non-normative persons, it is also important to call out the biases inherent in the voices that claim to speak for LGBTIQ persons.

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo dated 20 March 2015)