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)

The Hypocrisy of Goa’s Protesting Awardees

In the context of a number of Sahitya Akademi awardees across India returning their respective awards in protest against the growing intolerance in India, in Goa around fourteen Sahitya Akademi awardees together with Padmashri awardees Maria Aurora Couto and Amitav Ghosh came together and issued a joint statement on 15 October, 2015. One would be struck by the hypocrisy contained in their press note released were it not for the fact that their politics of intolerance is so blatantly displayed all over the same note.

In their statement these local notables condemn “the rising trend of intolerance in the country which threatens freedom of expression… [and] the age-old liberal and all-encompassing philosophical traditions of this country.” One would take this concern seriously were it not for the fact many of these notables have been complicit not only in acts of intolerance themselves, but also physical violence.

For some years now there have been demands from many quarters that Konkani literature written in the Roman script also be given governmental recognition. But Sahitya Akademi awardees like Pundalik Naik and N. Shivdas, who have presided over the Goa Konkani Academy, have not felt it necessary to take up this cause and ensure that a Konkani tradition with a longer history than that in the Nagari script one is recognised. On the contrary, all of these protesting Sahitya Akademi awardees and Padmashri Couto have watched silently while Roman-script Konkani has been officially ignored and excluded from all kind of state recognition, including awards and grants.

In addition, these persons have maintained a studious silence while their associates, such as Uday Bhembre and Nagesh Karmali, have engaged in the most vicious hate speech against the Catholic community in the course of the Medium of Instruction controversy (that has raged from 2011), when Goan parents demanded the right to determine the manner in which their children are educated. Where was their concern for the alleged liberal traditions, and traditional bonhomie, of Goa then?

To make matters worse, these same notables watched silently when in 2005 Naguesh Karmali, a member of this very group of protestors, led a violent mob in destroying public and private property on the grounds that such property was encouraging Portuguese (read as Catholic) culture in Goa. Given that Goa has had a long and historical relationship with Portugal, doesn’t the violent smashing of manifestations of this relationship amount to an act of the very same rabid communalism that these worthies profess to protest against?

In light of these inconsistencies, and the equally amusing announcement that they will hold on to their awards until the meeting of the executive committee of the Sahitya Akademi, it appears that these awardees seem more interested on jumping onto the bandwagon of political trendiness, than for any desire to stand against the growing intolerance in the country, and indeed, Goa itself.

We would like to stress that while it is true that the government of Mr. Modi has definitely presided over a rise in intolerance in the country, the roots of this intolerance lie deeper in the country’s history. As we have already pointed out, a number, if not all, of these Goan awardees are complicit in this intolerance. Their complicity is further evident in the manner in which they phrase their protest within the language of Hindutva. Why, for example, are the recent acts compared to ‘talibanism’, instead of calling them Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism? Talibanism is a phenomenon situated outside the country, when Hindutva is the problem actually at hand, given that Kalbargi, Pansare and Dabholkar lost their lives as a result of their opposition to this ideology. Indeed, Hindu nationalism has been a problem since before Indian independence. In referencing the Taliban, these awardees continue the refusal to recognize Hindu nationalism as the single greatest cause of concern in this country since 1947.

In conclusion, we would be more convinced of the genuine concerns of these state awardees from Goa if we heard them also protest the exclusion of Konkani in the Roman script from legislative recognition, also the violent condemnation of the Goans who are simply asking for English as a state-supported medium of instruction for their children, and also the lack of implementation of constitutional guarantees for education and jobs to historically discriminated-against Goan communities. Such protests would go further in establishing norms for the respect of fundamental rights, and the establishment of law and order in our state and country.

This statement was first published in the DNA web edition of 23 Oct 2015 and was penned along with  Amita Kanekar, Dale Luis Menezes, Kaustubh Naik, and Vishvesh Kandolkar.)

What Amitav Ghosh can teach us

While a number of litterateurs across India were making a symbolic protest against the rising intolerance in India under the Modi regime by returning their awards from the Sahitya Akademi, a bunch of Sahitya Akademi award winners from Goa, along with two Padmashri awardees, made a very odd statement.  On the fifteenth of October these persons made a statement indicating that “[s]ome of us wanted to return the awards but we have withheld the decision in view of Sahitya Akademi’s incoming Executive Council meeting where the Akademi is hopefully expected to condemn the cultural talibanism in the country.”

This seems like a bizarre statement. First, rather than mention Hindutva violence, they refer to the Taliban. Further, as I have discussed elsewhere some of these notables themselves have been associated with Hindutva violence.  But most bizarre of all is their announcement of an intention to return the awards. After all, if you want to return your award and make a point about the scuttling of various freedoms in contemporary India and the threat of a breakdown of law and order, one should do so. To indicate that we would like to, but will not, because we expect the Executive Council to issue a statement seems bizarre at best. One gets the sense that these awardees may have slipped down a rabbit hole to Wonderland.

If one looks at their company, however, one realises that these notables from Goa may have acquiesced to the logic of Amitva Ghosh, who as a result of his part-time residence in Goa seems to have integrated into some of the local literary circuits. In interventions in the Indian Express and Scroll.in, Ghosh made it very clear that while he is appreciative of the actions of those who returned their awards to the Sahitya Akademi, he himself will not follow suit. Ghosh suggests that outrage “should be directed at the present leadership of the Sahitya Akademi rather than the institution as such.” Ghosh articulates that there was a time when the Sahitya Akademi was held in greater esteem, that there have been presidents and office-bearers of the institution who would have protested vociferously against the current political climate in the country, and “that to return the award now would be more than an expression of outrage at the Sahitya Akademi’s current leadership: it would amount to a repudiation of the institution’s history.”

Does Ghosh have a point? Is the problem merely with the current leadership of the Akademi, and by extension with Modi, or is it possible that there are larger problems with the Sahitya Akademi itself and the project of the Indian nation-state?

The Sahitya Akademi was instituted in 1954, when the Indian nation-state was still young, and there was a need to assert cultural homogeneity in the country, and a need to assert uniformity within regional literary cultures. This agenda may look innocent, and indeed the institution may have awarded and promoted literature and critical litterateurs, but this is but one side of the story.  Linguistic development in colonial South Asia was critically tied to orientalist ideologies. This ensured that it was dominant-caste forms of South Asian language that came to be recognized as the forms deserving of becoming the standard. Consequently, language forms of the marginalized caste groups, and their speakers, were actively disparaged in the process of standardisation.  To this extent, the post-Mandal challenge regarding the meaning of merit, needs to be levelled against the works that the Akademi awards.

This modus operandi of the Akademi is eminently visible in the case of the Konkani language. If one has a look at the list of those who have been awarded for production in the Konkani language one is confronted by a long list of almost exclusively Brahmin names. Further, as many Konkani litterateurs will testify, despite the fact that the Konkani language is written in five scripts, it is only the Nagari form of the language that has merited awards, despite extensive or greater production in the Roman script and the Kannada scripts. These choices have as much to do with the privileging of upper-caste forms of language that is dominant in India, as with the casteist politics that has dominated the sphere of the Konkani language. Since at least 1987, when Konkani in the Nagari script alone was recognized as the official language of Goa, the language, and its speakers, not just in Goa, but also in the other states where it is spoken, have been held hostage by the assertions of the Saraswat caste and allied individuals who seek to convert Konkani into a brahmanical language. This has meant privileging the Antruzi form spoken by Saraswats in Goa, linking it with Sanskrit, and Aryan heritage, and also tying it to the Nagari script. This has meant that the peculiar history of the language, where it was first produced and popularized through missionary efforts since the sixteenth century, and subsequently given form through the lyrics, poems, and plays of laboring caste Catholics have been ignored entirely. In fact, until the mid-twentieth century, Konkani was seen largely asa language of laboring Catholics, and disparaged both by Hindu brahmins and upper-caste Catholics in Goa. Despite these facts, the Konkani committee of the Sahitya Akademi has been party to the attempt to destroy the language form in the Roman script in Goa.These facts are not extraneous to the question I pose to Ghosh’s argument, since it is with these persons that, either consciously, or unconsciously, Ghosh has combined with in Goa.

The point is that these politics are not an aberration from the Indian norm. Ghosh may think otherwise, and indeed, many of those returning their awards, like Ashok Vajpeyi, also seem to think that India stands for a liberal tradition of tolerance and acceptance. If anything, however, this image of India is a myth created in a large part by upper castes groups, and especially Hindu upper-caste groups who dominated Nehruvian India.

A view from the perspective of the many marginalized groups within the country, whether caste, ethnicities, or religions, would suggest a less tolerant India. For these groups, it appears that the problem may not be the current political dispensation, as much as the ‘idea of India’ itself, a country created to satisfy the desires of dominant castes across the subcontinent, and united through varying degrees of Hindu nationalism.

When Ghosh suggests, therefore, that it is merely the current dispensation of the Sahitya Akademi that is the problem he is merely speaking from the position of the Indian nationalist, refusing to see, and in the process preventing an exposure of, the deeper rot. Merely blaming the Modi government is simply not going to resolve the tensions that we are witness to today. These tensions have been building up since the start of Indian independence. In other words, the problems lies with the project of the Indian nation-state itself. This is, of course, not surprising, given that, as I have pointed out in an earlier observation on Ghosh's statements, that Ghosh speaks, and indeed writes, from a position of the imperial Indian. An India that would like to speak for the rest of the global south, even as more fundamental issues, like that of internal equity, are left unattended. Take, for example, his interview with the magazine Guernica, where he suggested "one of the wonderfully liberating things about India; it lets you be exactly who you want to be." This would be more than a bad joke for the many marginalized groups in India for whom their very non-Hindu and/ or non-upper caste identity is the reason for quotidian violence.

(A version of this post was first published in Round Table India on 22 October 2015)

The Brahmin Double in Goan history

In his article, “The Brahmin double: the Brahminical construction of anti-Brahminism and anti-caste sentiment in the religious cultures of precolonial Maharashtra” ([2012] 2014), Christian Lee Novetzke discusses the cases of the Marathi bhakti poets Jnaneshwar and Eknath. Novetzke’s argument is that the image of Brahmin reformers is not as cut and dry as it is made out to be. Rather, he argues that these reformers were embodiments of what he calls “the brahmin double”. The brahmin double is the strategy through which a brahmin pokes fun of, or critiques other brahmins who are cast as bad, evil, or bigoted. In doing so, the brahmin operating as the good part of the double “provides one important way to separate Brahminism and Brahmins”. That is, the audience fails to see that the problem is not with individual brahmins alone, but also with Brahmanism. By deflecting critique toward individual brahmin figures, and not the system that produces brahmins and brahmanical structures, the good brahmin ensures that Brahmanism continues its grip over Indian society. Novetzke points out that a classic feature of the Brahmin double is that it always offers reform of Brahmanism, and never radical critique. Thus the Brahmin double ensures that there are superficial changes, even as the status quo is maintained.

Reading this argument, it occurred to me that recent Goan history offers great examples of the “brahmin double” over various generations. A previous column discussed Varde Valaulikar’s response to Raghunath Talwadkar. Valaulikar’s proposed that the Saraswat caste embrace the Konkani language as their mother-tongue while Talwadkar opposed this proposal pointing to the language’s association with lower classes, and castes, and with “defiled” Christians such as José Gerson da Cunha. As pointed out in that column, Valaulikar’s response was not to condemn Talwadkar’s blatant casteism. Rather, he offered the suggestion that in fact the Catholic missionaries had learned Konkani from brahmins, and that da Cunha himself was a brahmin. In this equation, Talwadkar gets castigated as the bad brahmin, and Valaulikar effects the “brahmin double” move by ensuring that brahmin hegemony is not challenged, but rather paves the way for the Saraswat caste and associated caste groups to assert their claim over the Konkani language.

Another argument that I made in the earlier column was to point to the fact that Valaulikar’s project was carried forward by men like Uday Bhembre. To this extent, Uday Bhembre, and his associates, are contemporary embodiments of Valaulikar. Bhembre was a hero of the Konkani language agitation, a legend of his time. He was lionized as the man who went into the meetings of pro-Marathi activists and shouted out loud that Konkani, not Marathi was his mother tongue, at certain risk to his bodily integrity. The more important legend for my argument is his response when asked by pro-Marathi activists; “How can you claim Konkani as your mother tongue when your father claims Marathi as his mother tongue?” Bhembre’s famous response was “But don’t you know that my mother and my father’s mother are not the same person?” In the course of the Konkani language agitation, Bhembre was playing the Brahmin double, and his father, Laxmikant Bhembre, and other brahmins, were cast as the bad brahmins, who could not see that Konkani was the mother tongue of Goa. Through his actions Bhembre junior ensured that he deflected attention away from the fact that the Konkani that he and his companions were pushing was in fact not a Konkani of the bahujan masses, but the Antruzi dialect and the Nagri script, both associated with Valaulikar’s project of brahmin hegemony in Goa.

Today, with the kind of association that Bhembre is making with the RSS against the demands for the recognition of English as a state supported medium of instruction, you have younger Saraswat men who are effecting the strategy of the Brahmin double. Responding with horror to Bhembre’s suggestion, they point out that there are more Hindus than Catholics studying in diocesan schools that have switched from Konkani to English medium. What is interesting is that these arguments do not fracture the meaningless labels of “Christian community” and “Hindu community” invoked by Bhembre and others. This is not surprising given that this group is actively engaged in Hindu reform, a process which neuters dalit-bahujan assertions, and consolidates disparate caste groups into a single Hindu community usually under brahmin leadership or direction. Their rhetoric and activism is never really one of a radical rejection of caste hegemony, but of managing the anger against their caste group and its leadership of the political community Goa.

Another touchstone to use for evaluation would be their response to the demand that the Roman script be recognised on par with Nagari Konkani. These secular Saraswat will agree that there is a need for a more “bahujanised” Konkani, but will not budge when it comes to giving equal rights to the Roman script. Thus, what they are doing is trying to make Nagari Konkani, the vehicle of Saraswat hegemony in Goa, more palatable to the bahujans, even while they completely ignore the real issue of Romi Konkani.

It is important to underline that it is not my argument that these men are performing the strategy of the brahmin double deliberately. Very often our actions are determined not by our conscious selves but determined by the milieu in which we are raised. The response, therefore, is not to necessarily condemn these men. Our response ought to be to always be aware of the manner in which the social structure asserts itself, and thus question brahmin saviours, and make these saviours aware of the pernicious politics that they reproduce.

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo on 4 Sept 2015)