Catholic Politics and a Goan Romance: Thoughts on the release of Radharao Gracias' A Shortcut to Tipperary

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It is a great pleasure for me to release A Shortcut to Tipperary this evening.

There is an interesting set of dynamics between the person who releases a book and the event of a book release. In some cases, it is the person who brings honour to the event, and in others it is the event that brings honour to the person invited to release the book. This afternoon is an example of the latter case and I thank Doutor Radharao for the opportunity. I could think of many others, some present in this gathering, who are more worthy of this task, but I am nevertheless delighted to be able to release the book and share with you my thoughts on the novel.

I have to confess that I agreed to release the book without having read it. But then, how could I refuse Dr. Radharao? And having been witness to his provocations in social media over the years, and thanks to our conversations I knew that subsequent to accepting I would not be placed in an awkward position. And to be honest, the author exceeded all expectations. For this, my congratulations Doutor.

When he invited me, Doutor Radharao had indicated that his intention had been to preserve a record of the Goa of his youth, a Goa that is fast disappearing, or indeed has already disappeared. This is not an uncommon desire among Goans of a certain age, and yet, oftentimes the result is disastrous. The narrative labours under the weight of an activist’s frenzied desire and one must deal with tedious explanations of the minutiae of the local life that the activist author wishes to capture, down to the most boring detail. And then there is the question of the language placed in the mouths of the characters – either it seeks to mimic the native tongue of these characters and is often a hideous pidgin, or it is a form of English that is so removed as to be unrealistic. I am happy to report that A Shortcut to Tipperary suffers from neither of these shortcomings. Doutor Radharao says all that he has to say, and he has much to say, but with a hand that is as light as a merengue! I wish I had such skill. Indeed, as a friend and I were discussing the other day, at times teaching is best done indirectly, through parables. On this score the Doutor has done very well indeed!

But what exactly is our Doutor preaching? In a nutshell I believe he is, like many of us, concerned with the question of Goan difference. In his telling, and I am in agreement with him, the difference is Catholicism. What makes Goa Goan to Advocate Radharao Gracias is the Goan Catholic. “Without us,” he argues through the figure of Alberto, “Goa will never be Goa.” Catholicism, and to some extent language – and on this latter point I disagree with him partially, but I will return to this point later – are what make Goa. What makes, or to be honest, what made, the Goan different, honest, hospitable, is Catholicism. This is the  ingredient of an earthly paradise. Our author recognises that not all Goans fulfil this norm, indeed A Shortcut contains a wonderful example of a dastardly Goan Catholic, but as the narrator points out there are always a few bad apples. Nevertheless, bad apples notwithstanding, the norm still holds, or held, and these general features of the Goan resulted from Catholicism.

Underlying the entire narrative, is the suggestion that the anti-thesis of this Goan-ness, is Indian-ness. At one point there is the query whether this morphing of the Goan spirit is a result of being incorporated into the Indian mainstream. There is one particular point in the narrative when our attention is drawn to the fact that the Indian courts are not courts of justice, but courts of law. Justice is not a virtue that the Indian state, through its courts, is able to deliver. Indeed, there are other points in the narrative when the reader is cautioned against litigation. Instead, the reader is offered that biblical counsel which helps in building community – make peace with your brother, your neighbour, resolve your differences among yourselves. What Gracias is offering for Goa is a vision of an organic polity, and I will return to the question of the future in a while.

Resolving some of the crises in A Shortcut to Tipperaray is the figure of the bhatcar. The bhatcar is a contested figure in Goan literature. Whereas some present the bhatcar as the figure of oppression, and I have no doubt that there were many who were, Gracias while not denying that there were some – perhaps many – evil bhatcar, proffers an example of the benevolent, wise and kind bhatcar. Is he being reactionary in this option? I think not, for a couple of reasons. To begin with, I suspect that the bhatcar in A Shortcut is the way Doutor Gracias would like to think of himself.  The second reason, however, I think is more important; Gracias is offering us a model of the ideal leader for this organic polity that will stand up to the rot represented by Indian influence. In this position his project is similar to that of the late Maria Aurora Couto, who wrote histories of the landed aristocracy of Goa, not to blindly glorify them, but to offer us, who are their political and cultural heirs, models of emulation, and ways forward. Most of us may have been mundcars or members of other service groups, but today many of us have the fiscal capacities formerly available to the bhatcars. How do we wield these capacities? The noble bhatcar is the model that Gracias, rightly in my opinion, offers to us.

The appropriateness of this model is one that derives from a certain kind of Catholic politics; one that is not tied to conflict between economic classes, the famous class war, but directed by a notion of justice. It is my belief that so much of so-called “progressive politics” ever since the French revolution is inspired not by an indignation over the unjust exercise of privilege, but by envy – why do they; i.e. the elite, have what we don’t, if we don’t have it, neither must they. As Doutor Gracias points out to us, once again through the voice of the bhatcar, “The poor take vicarious pleasure in the ruins of the richman’s house” (p. 195).

This model of Catholic politics is not simply directed by a notion of justice, it is further animated by the individual’s pursuit of the virtues. Each of the protagonists of the narrative is a virtuous figure, and urges others to be virtuous. Let us return once again to the scenario I just referred to from the narrative. After suggesting that the poor not take vicarious pleasure in the ruins of the homes of the rich, the bhatcar points out to how the very persons who claim that their tenants are not vacating the property, are themselves refusing to vacate properties in Bombay where they are tenants of another landlord. Forgive me for what I am about to say, but I have often had reason to be scandalised when I see Goans who have accumulated substantial property, refuse to abandon properties where they are tenants, and insist on paying miniscule rents that do neither correspond to the market value, nor are they sufficient to support the landlord. And then we wonder why Goan properties are falling to pieces.

Unlike these contemporary Goans, when, as in the case of the narrator, he fails to do justice, or do the virtuous act, his conscience – guided conveniently enough by the Sunday sermon – is sufficiently pricked so that he returns to doing the right thing. There is place also, in this model of Catholic politics for suffering. More than once in this novel we read that “through suffering comes salvation”. I think that this would be a good mantra to hold on to as we suffer through the trials and travails that is our lot in contemporary Goa. So long as we suffer in the course of our pursuit of justice, there is salvation at the end. Not just for us individually, but for all Goans.

And this is where I would like to return to the future that Dr. Radharao offers us in his novel. He has made his peace with the generations of Goans who have emigrated, and continue to emigrate. But, as he suggests via the words of Alberto, “You have a duty to your mother land to come back” (p. 228). This is all very well, but I am also concerned with the question of what do we do while we are away? I would argue that we do exactly what we have been doing earlier, and has been portrayed in the book. The late nineteenth century and the early to mid-twentieth century were marked by the institution of the kudd. The kudd embodied the networks of family, caste, and village that supported Goans in the city of Bombay. The kudd stood at the centre of Goan success in the metropole. I propose that we return to this principle of associationism, with one difference; every Goan is a brother who is in need of our support; not simply those from our family, caste or village network. We should learn to see the outmigration of this century not as a burden, to be lamented, but as an option to create a new Goan century. A century when Goans across the world join hands to reject the mediocrity of middle-class values and aim for the excellence that was a hallmark of the Goan not a couple of generations ago. I have to point out that this is already happening in some places. Speaking recently with Dr. Stella Mascarenhas-Keyes I realised that she is engaged with the issue of the impoverishment of Goans in the UK both in her current role as Patron of the Goan Welfare Association, and her earlier presence on the the Goan Association committee for welfare and immigration. We have here a wonderful example of individual and association engaged in community focussed philanthropy. The new Goan century will be built on the back of this sort of fraternal camaraderie, and not merely on the repetition of old songs, dances.

If we are to attain this vision, we have to necessarily embrace and love our past, as Dr. Radharao has done and transmitted to us. There are a couple of points, however, with which I disagree with him. First, at some points in the narrative, the author seems to display a utilitarian understanding of Christianity – our Lord Jesus Christ did not found a religion, he was a teacher. If Christ were not the Son of God, then to paraphrase the apostle Paul all of our Christianity is pointless. What makes Catholicism tick is not a set of mundane virtues, but the fact that it is animated by the transcendent. This fact is important to acknowledge because too often we Catholics assume that simply having the cultural markers of Catholicism is enough – both for us, and for our Goan difference. I beg to differ. Catholicism is so, only if linked with a recognition of, and love for, Jesus Christ, recognised as the Son of God. Doutor, I will have to turn you over to the Inquisition for this!

The second point on which I disagree, was the egregious lack of accents in words that have come to us via Portuguese. This is a common practice, and one, which I believe, compromises our cultural health. We need to embrace the discipline of the accents, because it is through this discipline that we are able to remain a viable, healthy cultural entity. As the Goan mango breeds will demonstrate, and indeed as the Catholic faith asserts, by ourselves we are nothing, it is when we draw from the traditions of others, that we grow sweeter, and better. On this note, and to return to a point I promised I would, Goa is not only the home of Konkani, it is also the home of Portuguese. A Konkani that is impoverished by cutting its links with Portuguese, is no Konkani at all. It is as the history of the Konkani language shows, some variant of proto-Marathi. It is through Portuguese that our Konkani was born, and became a universal tongue. Were it not for this, there would be no Konkani but a variety of dialects of different castes and sects.

I conclude on this point, thanking you Doutor for this opportunity, not only to present your book to the Goan audience, but for the opportunity to read this book. Thank you and God bless you.

(Radharao Gracias' debut novel  A Shortcut to Tipperary was released on Saturday 27 Aug 2022 at Ravindra Kala Bhavan, Margão. I was invited to release the book)

 

Modi meeting Francis: On the possibilities for Catholic politics in India

 On the night of the twenty-third of October I was woken up by a rather agitated message which read: “I hear that Modi is meeting the Pope…It legitimises what is being done to minorities – Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs, and Dalits and women.” “The Holy Father should not meet him” a second message continued. These messages were referring to Prime Minister Modi’s now confirmed meeting with the Pope in Rome on the thirtieth of October, prior to the former’s participation at the G-20 meet in the same city.

My agitated friend was not the only Christian in India to so respond. However, there is no reason to react in such a manner. Contrary to the suggestion from the Indian media, the meeting is a routine encounter between heads of state. Pope Francis will also be meeting with President Biden of the USA as well as the Canadian Prime Minister.

Nonetheless, contemplating the unease for a while longer, I realised that there is an opportunity for Catholics in India to show Christian witness. Thus, not only must Pope Francis meet with Prime Minister Modi, but in doing so the Pope might possibly lead the direction for a wholesome Catholic (and Christian) contribution to politics in an increasingly troubled India.

We need to go back in time to three incidents to appreciate my logic. The first incident is the letter written by Thomas Macwan, the Archbishop of Gandhinagar, in November 2017, the second, the letter by Anil Couto, the Archbishop of Delhi, in May 2018, and the third, a letter by the Archbishop of Goa, in June of the same year. All the prelates urged Catholics to pray that the elections – the elections to the State Assembly of Gujarat in 2017, and the elections to Parliament in 2019 respectively – result in the selection of persons true to the values of the Constitution and the dignity of the human person.

A furore was, surprisingly, raised in all three cases, largely by supporters of the BJP, based on the assumption that the prelates were instigating a political action against the BJP. In doing so, they made a fundamental error in appreciating the nature of Christian prayer. Directed by no less than Christ himself, the Christian does not, indeed cannot, pray against persons, even if they may be enemies. The Christian is obliged to pray for persons. To quote Christ from the Gospel of Mathew when he preached the beatitudes, “I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” for, he reasoned “if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?” What no one seems to have told the BJP at the time, was that Christian prayer was most certainly not directed against them, rather if the BJP was in fact guilty of acting against the values of the Constitution and the dignity of persons, then the prayers were probably for their benefit.

This insight into Christian prayer must then determine how Pope Francis might respond to a desire of the Indian Prime Minister to meet with the Pope. Carrying over prayerful love into action would first require showing courtesy; for did not Christ promise “knock and the door will be opened to you”? Indeed, a perusal of the Gospels demonstrates that Christ was attentive to courtesy – considerate to the cries of those who called out to him, and even chastising those who sought to shoo away those who, like the repentant woman who anointed him with nard, sought to do him honour. Christ’s chastisement focussed precisely on the fact that these hosts did not show him the courtesy due to a guest, which this woman was now showing him. And it is not just Christ who stressed courtesy. The Bible is peppered with instances of courtesy as a mark of grace, and indeed, as in the case of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, they were violently punished for violating the code of courtesy to a guest. Courtesy, as a gospel and biblical value, demands, therefore, that the Pope meet with Prime Minister Modi.

But practicing Christianity is not simply about being polite and civil. It is also about being honest to the truth, even if it requires plain speaking. Christian love is not so much an emotion, as it is a process. In December 2015 Pope Francis inaugurated the Extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy; and significantly, one of the spiritual acts of mercy is correcting the sinner. Receiving someone with courtesy does not mean one simply papers over the problems with one’s brother. On the contrary, it obliges us to demonstrate how our fraters have violated the higher laws of God. Pope Francis will have much to communicate in this context to Prime Minister Modi, and we know that he will seize this opportunity.

He will perhaps communicate his concern that the Union Government presided over by Prime Minister Modi has not been doing enough to secure the bodily integrity of the various minoritized groups in India. He will also express the anxieties of multiple religious orders and congregations whose representatives are often denied visas to enter the country, especially if these representatives or their orders or congregations are seen as being too vocal in their critique of the state-of-affairs in the locations they visit, or work in. The Pope would also have to express his concern of how the rights of Overseas Citizens of India are being constrained, by requiring that they do not engage in any missionary work. Then there is the question of how conversion to Christianity, especially by those marginalised by state and society, is being effectively criminalised in India. The impending survey of churches and conversions in Karnataka is another crucial issue to address. And then there is the entire matter of detention camps being constructed in India.

Pope Francis would also, no doubt, like to discuss how his Jesuit confrere, the late Fr. Stan Swamy, was callously treated by the judicial system. In discussing this matter, the Pope will be aware, no doubt, that while Fr. Swamy died under the BJP’s control, the UAPA (Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act) that was eventually responsible for Fr. Swamy’s death was articulated by the Congress government in 2008 – pointing to the deeper lack of justice in the Indian state. None of these difficult, but necessary, conversations would be possible without the extension of the basic courtesy and hospitality.

No, Prime Minister Modi must have audience with the Pope, for refusing him this dignity would be tantamount to not showing the love that Christ demands of us even in the face of those who wish us dead. In acting with the law of Christ, Pope Francis could offer a useful measure for the politics of Christians in India: pray for those who persecute you, love those who hate you, refuse to dismiss them as incorrigible enemies, but create the situations so that we can fearlessly correct them in charity; a situation that, as we have already seen, the Catholic prelates in India have systematically been attempting to articulate. All of this requires that we shift our understanding of the ‘political’.

The values of “woke politics” which harshly condemns those who have made mistakes, or even committed crimes, has taken too strong a hold on contemporary politics. In the clamour of vengeance, and the ardour of self-righteousness, there seems little space to extend common and basic courtesies, or indeed the desire to correct the individual fraternally. Christian teaching is based, however, on the idea that vengeance is the Lord’s, not ours, and that violence to our bodies is not as harmful as is the violence to our souls. What Christian teaching brings to politics, therefore, is the suggestion that there is something more important than payback in the immediate, since everyone will be judged fairly at the end of times, and what we ought to focus on is the love of our neighbour, even if the neighbour prove oneself an enemy.

Writing in 2012, and studying the Catholic Church and political practice in Tamil Nadu, the social scientist Aparna Sundar observed on the various factors that that “lead it [the Catholic Church] to articulate a secular, even radical politics as its primary mode of religious engagement.” This tendency needs to be recognised as a problem, because it often, if subconsciously, denies the fundamentals of the Catholic creed, and we need to return to understanding Catholic politics as one that works between the realms of the natural, and the supernatural. It is only with a firm belief in the supernatural, and the promises of Christ, that we would be able to articulate a genuinely Catholic politics in India. This we need to do, because at this troubled moment, this is precisely what India needs.

(A version of this post was first published on the ezine Raiot on 28 Oct 2021)

A Secular Indian's of Christianity in India

The publication of a number of books incorporating “the Idea of India” into their title recent times is indicative that this idea has been in a crisis for a while. Carpenters and Kings is one more response to this crisis of India, dealing with an oft-ignored population group. In an environment where the Hindu Right seeks to suggest the foreignness of Christianity and Islam in India, this book seeks to “set the record straight” and demonstrate that the history of Christianity in India is a nearly two-millennia-long story of great complexity. Divided into three sections that deal with Antiquity, the Medieval period, and finally the colonial, Siddhartha Sarma’s book admirably demonstrates that Christianity was present in India from its very inception.

Sarma writes that Christianity in India predated the conversion of the Syrian Christians who claim to be the first Christians in the subcontinent converted from local groups. Sarma points out that Christianity’s emergence was rather the result of the Gospel taking root among Jewish communities of the western coastal region, who may not have consciously broken from the religion of their ancestors.

The presence of these communities was the result of a network of Greek-speaking traders linking the subcontinent’s maritime commerce with Egypt, Persia, and Rome. Sarma´s book further challenges the popularly-held idea that the Latin Church, or the Church of Rome, was first established in the subcontinent via the Portuguese. Rather, Sarma writes, it was through the efforts of the Franciscan Giovanni of Montecorvino in the late 1200s, who, among other things, established a church at the tomb held to be that of St. Thomas in Mylapore. Sarma uses these facts to affirm that the subcontinent has “never been a land for a single people, or culture or religion” but populated by a diversity of groups, transient and settled, which were always in conversation with one another.

Carpenters and Kings is clearly a political history, locating early Christianity in the subcontinent among political processes, both local and global, be it Greek trade networks, the assertion of the Mongols, the rise of the Arabs, or the expansion of Western Europe. By dealing with the councils of Nicaea, Chalcedon, or the heresy of Manichaeism Sarma demonstrates that to explain contemporary Christianity in India it is necessary to go into the very foundations of the religion, and be familiar with the theological discussions within Christianity across the world. Given his desire to stress the foundational nature of dialogue to the idea of India, in various chapters Sarma stresses intercontinental and intercultural dialogues, pointing, for example in the chapter titled “The Fruits of the Wisdom Tree”, which discusses the legend of the saints Barlaam and Josaphat, to how the subcontinent impressed on Western Christianity.

Sarma is not focused only on how the East influenced the West and Christianity, however. His chapter “The Forge of the World” refers to how Tibetan Buddhism, in particular, seems to have interacted with Christ and Nestorian Christianity. The section that deals with the medieval world references in how the period of the Crusader states in the Middle East saw conversations between Franks and Arabs. All in all, the book is a delightful exercise in comparative history, which Sarma manages in elegant prose.

Nevertheless, the merit of Sarma’s work is compromised by the methodological nationalism that guides it, i.e. reading the existence of a contemporary nation-state back into time. For example, despite acknowledging that the ancients referred to a wide swathe of Asia, and at times even eastern Africa, as India, Sarma persists in referring to the subcontinent as if it were the same as the nation-state established in 1947. This ensures a number of erasures, like that of the contemporary states of Sri Lanka and Nepal which he subsumes into India, as well as the narratives and agency of Christians in India.

Another error flowing from Sarma’s methodological nationalism is the suggestion of the “natural multiculturalism of Indians”, which is not only mistaken, because it presumes the existence of an Indian society as if the polities in the subcontinent were an integrated, unified and relatively homogenous unit, but also a dangerous proposition since it erases the kinds of violence that have been engaged in but subsequent and prior to the founding of the Indian state in 1947.

An acknowledgement of caste, the foremost of these subcontinental violences, is glaringly missing from this reading of subcontinental history. Illustrating this is Sarma’s description of “an old man who had been born a Brahmin and had sailed across both the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal” and then converting to Latin Christianity, leading Sarma to surmise that “apparently, caste restrictions on sea voyages were different in that period, or perhaps more relaxed.” He ignores the possibility that the brahmin converted precisely because he had lost caste. Like Islam in the subcontinent, Christianity has been the refuge of outcastes, and indeed Christians have often been treated as untouchable.

The presumption of an Indian society pre-existing 1947 does not strengthen the idea of India, but is in fact at the root of the contemporary problems that are unfairly laid at the feet of the Hindu Right alone. For example, this presumption of a society ensures that he argues that “the victory of the British over the French and their rapid expansion in India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries created its own form of disruption, which would have a long-term impact on the Indian society that was emerging in response to modernity”. To look at the British presence and colonialism in India as an disruption of a natural evolution is to go back to the same kinds of hiving that Indian, and Hindu, nationalists engage in, only his are limited to different periods. While Hindu nationalists see the “Muslims”, who Sarma correctly refers to as Turko-Afghans, as foreigners, Sarma accepts them as Indian, but excludes those who arrived in the subcontinent via the European expansion. The burning problem that contemporary Christians in India face is not that their history is improperly told, rather it is that their links with Christianity with the colonial period are seen as problematic. What is required is a history that accepts and naturalizes this, rather than harking back to an earlier, glorious past.

Unfortunately, having spent more time on antique and medieval Christianity, this is precisely what Sarma does not do, and perhaps because of his methodology is unable to do so.  Rather, Sarma engages in the kind of demonization of the Portuguese that is standard fare among nationalist historians of all shades. His description of the Inquisition as motivated by the need for “Faith … to be tested on the rack and by the fire” has all the marks of the dated Protestant and Northern European propaganda against the Iberian empires.

Given that contemporary Christians in India are held responsible for the factual and imagined actions of the Inquisition, this period and the institution deserves a more nuanced treatment, rather than the popular histories from which he has drawn his references. Such treatment drawing from contemporary international scholarship and Dalit histories of the subcontinent would have highlighted that the violence associated with Portuguese presence, inclusive of the Inquisition, was just one more violence in a subcontinent filled with violence, but one that allowed hitherto marginalized castes, both Catholic and otherwise, the options of social mobility.

Contemporary scholarship would have also pointed out that unlike what Sarma avers, it was not the Danish missionary Ziegenbalg who was one of the original Orientalists, but in fact, as Ângela Barreto Xavier and Ines Županov have pointed out in their recent book Catholic Orientalism (2015), it was Catholic missionaries and the Portuguese Estado da India, that laid the ground work for much that was then later appropriated without reference by later orientalists. That the empathy required missionaries to understand local cultures and attempt conversion through dialogue, a strategy attempted even by the Portuguese supported missionaries is not recognised, and that the Portuguese, despite their five-century-long stay in the subcontinent are not seen as belonging speaks of the unfortunate nationalist lens through which Sarma writes his history of Christianity in India.

Sarma’s history also suggests that Indian agitation against proselytizing and conversions were born from Portuguese violence and brutality or proselytism in the shadow of imperial British support. These suggestions, in fact, share much with the assumptions that undergird the ironically named Freedom of Religion legislation, which effectively prohibits conversion to Christianity or Islam. Sensitive histories of India and the British Indian anti-imperial nationalist struggle have already pointed out that, on the contrary, the Hindu sensitivity to conversion resulted from the savarna fear that Hindus would be reduced to a minority, ideally embodied by Gandhi’s opposition to separate elections for Dalits. Like Gandhi, Sarma seems to naturalize caste, suggesting in his brief reference to the Revolt of 1857 that had the British accommodated caste, things may have been resolved more amicably. Fortunately, this observation allows us to perceive that the violence in the subcontinent was the result of caste, rather than solely because of colonial intervention.

Despite its erudition, charming language and noble intentions, Sarma’s work does not eventually respond to the needs of Christians in India, rather it reveals that much of the battle around the idea of India is restricted to ideological battles between savarna Hindus, some who prefer secular nationalism, others who prefer religious nationalism. Both, it turns out, in one way or another minoritize non-Hindus.

Carpenters and Kings: Western Christianity and the India of India, Siddhartha Sarma, Hamish Hamilton.

(A version of this text was first published in Scroll on June 2, 2019.)