Policing in the time of Terror and Loot

It has been some months since Panjim was converted into a city of one-way streets. In other parts of the world such changes to street flow are accompanied by a change in urban design. In Panjim, however, the traffic police saw it fit to place ugly barricades as a way to tutor the populace as to which part of the streets were now off-limits.

For a while these barricades were manned by police. However, it has been a while since these new one-ways have seen police presence. As a result, the one-way system is often disrespected with impunity. At night this violation assumes scary dimensions, as people infringe the one-way rule at dizzying speeds.

This nocturnal overturning of the order only gets worse along the riverside streets. Here, tourists who have come to visit the casinos, drive through the wrong side of the streets causing grave threats to life and limb. They may be doing so because they are clueless and the city fathers have not seen it fit to place sufficient signage. In addition, the police are marked by their absence. Effective policing would have ensured that whether at night or day time, offenders are politely, but firmly, corrected and set on their track. Where the drivers are repeat offenders, a uniformly enforced system of fines would do much to ensure that traffic in the city is disciplined and not marked by the free for all that defines traffic in our state.

All in all, the police are markedly absent when it comes to enforcing a discipline that would benefit us all and make daily living easier and simpler.

On the flip side, the police were very much present when it came to enforcing a sham state of order over the initial days of the IFFI. The police went out of their way to arrest those protesting the arbitrary functioning of the Central Government. A few days ago the state administration was at pains to harass the Council for Social Justice and Peace which was co-hosting the alternate film festival organised by the students of the FTII. At the local level, operating under the cover of a selectively applied Sec. 144, the state administration disrupted the protest against the lackadaisical attitude towards the mysterious death of Fr. Bismarque Dias. Persons who gathered on 21 November to demand justice for Fr. Bismarque were unceremoniously placed under arrest and dragged away to various police stations.

Citizens who were wearing black and white, colours suggested for the protest, were selectively plucked out from crowds of people. These other people were allowed to violate the imposition of Sec. 144. Scarier still, one man was dragged off from the ferry boat. This action is scary because it demonstrates the state administration’s cavalier violation of basic principles of law and order maintenance; one does not arrest someone unless they are proving to be a threat or public nuisance. Worse still were the words of the Inspector who dragged this man off to jail; “Justice dita tuka f**ya” (I’ll give you justice, you f***er). Never mind the crude language that a state functionary has used against a citizen. What is shocking is the disregard for justice, and processes of justice displayed by that police functionary. While the case of Cipriano Fernandes who died while in police custody is still fresh in mind, it should be pointed out that the assault of detainees or those arrested by the Goa police is not an uncommon occurrence.

Juxtaposing the scenario of a lack of daily policing with that of extraordinary measures taken when the image-obsessed Government is hosting an international event should demonstrate just how misplaced their priorities are. This argument is not about policing priorities alone. Rather, it questions whether we know what the role of the State is in the first place.

Judging by the lack of policing or any form of rigourous attention to the kind of pressures that the casinos are placing on the urban infrastructure of Panjim and the safety of the people within, one can safely assume that the administration sees public resources and infrastructure as a milch cow to be exploited as long as it is giving. The state presides over the private loot of public resources and the police forces are on hand to terrorize the population; especially when they protest at the violation of the responsibilities that flow from the contractual relationship between citizens and state.

We, in India, live in a time where the State presumes that it exists for its own sake. The State demands our allegiance even as it systematically dismantles the rule of law and complicates the ability to lead an uncomplicated life. State organs are pressed to the service of its favoured elites, to support the populist circus that the regime understands to be good governance, and to smash the principled opposition to this perversion. But the citizens' relationship with the State is not a one-way street. The State is the result of a contract among citizens to ensure that life can be pleasant and fulfilling for all. The police should necessarily be facilitators of daily life. The police forces, like organs of the state exist merely to achieve that end. When these ends are not met, and the sole function of the police is to operate as the strong arm of a brute State then the State loses legitimate reason for existence.

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo on 27 Nov 2015)

Seeing Goa, Seeing Lisbon

“Quem viu Goa, excusa de ver Lisboa!”  (Who has see Goa need not see Lisbon) goes a saying that may have emerged and gained popularity in the late sixteenth century Goa, when the island-city of Goa, what we today call Old Goa, was at the height of its power. This must have been saying a lot, since at about the same time Lisbon was a pretty impressive European city itself. The latter city presided over a truly global trade thanks to the European discovery of America and grew in size as well as impressive monuments.

Goa and Lisbon are today denizens of two rather different worlds and one would think that the old saying would not hold good. And indeed it doesn’t for I would argue that he who has seen one or the other, must see the other. As so many others before me have remarked, to arrive in either Lisbon or in Goa from the other place is to embark on a journey of déjà vu, a sense that one has been here before.

My first proper encounter with Lisbon was when I entered the city

through the railway station of Santa Apolónia. Enthusiastic that I should not miss a thing, and believing that walking is the best way to see things, I decided to walk. Blessed decision, since it gave me my first sense of this déjà vu.  Perhaps a little more than a kilometre away from the station I walked into an area called Campo das Cebolas (field of onions). It must have been a field a long long time ago, since today there is no space for any agricultural activity close to one of Lisbon’s many touristic centres, the Praça do Comércio. 

What struck me about the Campo was the fact that behind the square that gave its name to the place was a huge governmental building dressed in the yellow that we in Goa today associate with the Police Headquarters and the Institute Menezes Braganza in Panjim. All at once, it was like I had been transported from Lisbon back to Goa, standing in a place where one could look at the Police Headquarters from across what is today called Azad Maidan in front of it. Don’t get me wrong, it is not quite the same view, the building and the square in Lisbon are on a much grander scale, but there is no doubt that both spaces speak a similar language.

Over time that initial sensation has kept repeating itself. This sensation is perhaps never as strong when I view the south bank of the river Tagus from a location in Lisbon. The view on the other side is of various Goan scenario’s stitched together; the view of Betim and Reis Magos from Panjim, the view of Vasco from Dona Paula. 

For a long time I thought that perhaps these imaginations of seeing Goa through a Portuguese landscape was just the product of some kind of (post?)colonial nostalgia. I was fortunately relieved of this guilty sensation when traveling from Lisbon to Coimbra with another Goan academic, who doesn’t really share many of my perspectives. Pulling out, again from Santa Apolónia, she remarked with delight at the landscape she saw; “But isn’t this exactly like in Goa?” I grinned at her in acknowledgement. There were portions of the river bank with its vegetation, and the fields that followed subsequently that did give one the feeling that one was in riverine Goa, with its bandh, backwaters, and paddy fields baking in the summer. One does get the feeling that perhaps a person with an eye trained to recognise different kinds of vegetation will not see quite the same vision that these two Goan academics did. But until the day in which we develop these skills, one suspects we must continue to see visions of the mother land when far away from home. This must not be a particularly bad thing.

If there is one thing in which Goa (in this case understood to be Panjim, the former Nova Goa) differs from Lisbon, then perhaps it is the relation of the two sides of the river bank to each other. In Lisbon, it is the north bank of the river Tagus that hosts the city; and the south bank, today home to a variety of dormitory towns, tends to be disparaged by Lisbon snobs. In Goa it seems it is the other way around.  Panjim is located on the south bank, and even though Ponjecars suffer from an incurable superciliousness, it is a fact that beyond some amount of threatened urban architecture, Panjim has not much to offer. Indeed, if denizens of the city want entertainment, they must perforce travel to the northern bank of the river Mandovi.

Who has seen Goa, need not see Lisbon went the old saying. However, with the passage of centuries, it would perhaps be more appropriate for those in Goa to rephrase it: Who has seen Goa, must indeed see Lisboa! One hopes that those in Lisbon will return the honour.

(A version of this post was first published in The Goan on 25 Oct 2015)

The Itinerant: Staircase to Heaven

Growing up in Panjim those who knew would tell you that the monumental staircase that adds so much drama to the façade of the church of the Immaculate Conception was an imitation of a similar staircase in the church of Bom Jesus in the Portuguese city of Braga. These suggestions of ‘colonial’ productions being imitations are always disturbing. It suggests that all innovations happen only in the metropole and those in the provinces and colonies are capable only of imitation. A more favourable reading would suggest that both metropole and provinces are engaged in conversations with a similar model but express themselves differently, as they should.

In any case, the staircase that gives access to the church of Bom Jesus in Braga is of an entirely different scale.  Where Panjim’s stairway is largely composed of a couple of sets of mirroring steps, the stairway in Braga is composed of two elements. The first is a stairway that is not symmetrical, but initiates the visitor to the stations of the cross that form the central element that binds these two staircases together, uniting them with the church whose main altar is given to the crucifixion of Christ. It is the second staircase that is composed, like that in Panjim, of a number of steps that mirror each other. And this is where the difference lies, for while the stairs leading to the Panjim church seek to impress with bulk, those of the Bom Jesus are composed of dizzying repetition of elements finally emerging like filigree.

A number of tourists to the church choose to drive up to the church and then walk down the staircases. Or, they choose to motor it up part of the way, and then walk up the second, more impressive staircase. In my enthusiasm to get the whole experience I began to engage with the staircase well before the more symmetrical portion of the stairway began. Walking through a tree lined avenue I passed through the baroque gates that announced the beginning of the staircase and began the ascent. In addition to the chapels that host sentimental terracotta images of Christ in the course of his passion, there are a number of fountains through the length of this part of this stairway. If the chapels of the stations provide a sombre Christian element to this walk, the fountains that mark the path add an oddly pagan twist given that each of them is dedicated to a planet.

Taking this part of the walk and not zipping up the motorable road was a brilliant decision. Having weaved and puffed up to the start of the formally arranged staircase, a vision of the plaster and granite baroque staircase complete with statues and fountains and gardens just exploded before my very eyes. Indeed, so sumptuous is the entire staircase that one wonders whether the whole exercise of constructing this stairway was to direct our faculties towards the passion of the good Lord, or create diverse spaces for a good party. As one ascends towards the church one encounters statues of prophets from the old testament and the persons from the new and little terraces off to the side that suggest that at one time they were carefully tended gardens. There are also two different sets of fountains, one set that highlights the various senses, the other the virtues.

The one feature that really caught my eye, however, were two fountains that stood at the start to this second ascent. They were not in operation on the day I visited, but the principle of their working was obvious enough. The fountain was crafted to represent a serpent twined around a pillar, water shot out of the mouth of the serpent into a basin and then spun around the body all around the pillar to finally continue its way down the hill. How brilliantly over the top was that!

Looking at this entire production, statuary, fountains, and the whole nine yards, it was clear as the light of day. The stairs of the church of the Immaculate Conception in Panjim are no imitation of the staircase in Braga. This latter edifice was in a completely different order altogether. No, the authors of the work in Panjim were working toward a similar but definitely different project.

(A version of this post was first published in The Goan on April 12, 2014)

When Death Comes to Goa: A review of The Coffin Maker

The sad truth about The Coffin Maker (not yet released) is that it is a very bad re-articulation of the Hollywood film Meet Joe Black (1998). Set within the context of the lifestyles of New York’s corporate elites, the latter film focussed on exploring the idea of Death taking on a human form to experience the variety of human emotions, crafting a complex story involving multiple characters. In contrast, The Coffin Maker attempts to set this exploration within a Goan context. The result is a narrative about the interaction of Anton Gomes, the eponymous coffin maker, with Death in the weeks prior to the former’s death. The film vaguely attempts to deal with the complexities of human emotions, but effectively restricts itself to love. Failing dramatically in this attempt, the film constantly lapses into pop-philosophy, among other things, comparing love to warm buttered bread, and boyhood lust. In short, if Meet Joe Black was somewhat limited as a film, The Coffin Maker is an unmitigated disaster, whose errors are compounded by the fact that it also sets the story within the shell of an ethnographic description of Goan society that it dramatically misunderstands and misrepresents.

Born in the context of Goan experiences with democracy in the late 1800s, a much-bandied Goan idiom suggests that when there are two Goans in a room, one can expect three opinions. One opinion that all Goans nevertheless share is that they are tired of the manner in which they and their state have been represented by the Indian media. Featured in this year’s edition of the Goa-based International Film Festival of India (IFFI), The Coffin Maker gained some attention in the local press by being represented as the first Indian film to have gotten Goa right. Hence the large turnout of locals at the special screening of the film the day after the conclusion of the festival. While, true to form, local opinion may have been divided at the end of the film, there were nonetheless many who were visibly and vocally upset at one more film getting Goa and Goans so dramatically and offensively wrong.

The film commences with the standard trope of the drunk Goan Catholic. In this film that character is Alloue, the grave-digger of the village where The Coffin Maker is set, who remains drunk through the film. Like many Indian film productions, this one too perpetuates the long standing trope of using drunken Christians to provide comic relief while not contextualising them, or their alcoholism. However, Alloue is not the only alcoholic in the film, given that the coffin-maker Anton Gomes, played by Naseeruddin Shah, similarly seems to have a troubled relationship with alcohol. The film portrays Gomes taking swigs of a potent liquor, perhaps feni, straight from the bottle that he carries to work in his bag of tools. To compound the image of Goa being a land of drunks, the film contains another gratuitous scene where Anton is seen dining with his wife where they imbibe enough alcohol to dance drunkenly in the streets of Panjim. That one does not see Goans consuming alcohol anywhere else in the entire film only goes to reinforce the suggestion that when Goans drink alcohol, they drink to get drunk.

The use of this trope could have possibly been forgiven were it not for two facts. First, this film suggests that it is representing the ‘real’ Goa. Secondly, this film compounds the problems of stereotyping Goans by adding to the cache of usual stereotypes. Given the manner in which the film has clearly sought to highlight what it considers ‘traditional’ and ‘authentic’ Goan life, and focuses on one individual and his story, this film is clearly not attempting to be a regular Bollywood masala flick. In not doing so, it seems to tread into the realm of the ethnographic documentary. However, this effort is so marked by bad research that the faux authenticity worsens matters by convincing non-Goan audiences that this is the ‘real Goa’. Thus, for example, in its ill-researched enthusiasm to reproduce Goan village life, the film has almost every local use the Konkani variants for mother****er and other allied cuss words with alarming frequency. While it is not being suggested that Goans do not swear, the profusion of swearing was so bad, and so out-of-the ordinary, I began to cringe chronically after a certain point in time.

While billed as a bilingual film in Konkani and English, there is in fact very little Konkani in the film beyond the mispronounced Konkani cuss words. The English that the film has the Goans speak is in fact an extremely bad representation of the Bombay-English that developed in colonial Bombay. This form of English was popular among various kinds of residents of colonial Bombay, like the East Indians, Goan Catholics and Parsis, and was present in Goa only as a minority language form of Bombay-returned Goans. There are a variety of Konkani-English language forms present in Goa, but the fact is that none of these were represented in the film. This film is in fact multi-lingual given that, thanks to the shoddy execution, the actors often fall back on North Indian exclamations, expletives (madarch**d, behench**d), and Hindi as well. The film is also marked by its use of Portuguese, which keeping in form with the way in which other languages are used, is mispronounced, and appears in unlikely social locations. Looking at this liberal use of language, one could well say that this film is been marked by the aesthetic use of language. Language is used not necessarily to convey the dialogues between characters, but merely to effect aesthetic flourishes to give the audience an ‘authentic’ experience of what Goa is allegedly like.

It is in the overwhelming presence of such flourishes that The Coffin Maker reveals itself not merely as a badly-researched film, but one more addition to the orientalist representation of Goa, Goans and in particular Goan Catholics. As is well known, in his book titled Orientalism the celebrated scholar Edward Said argued that European powers represented the Middle East as "almost a European invention ... a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences".  The success of Orientalism as an explanatory concept lies in the fact that it can be used to demonstrate the manner in which hegemonic, or colonial powers, similarly represent cultures and peoples that are either colonized or incapable of representing themselves. Just as the Middle East or South Asia was represented by the European colonial powers as places of mystery, romance, and landscapes, so too are Goa and Goans by the Indian media. This media produces Goa not as it exists, but as a space for Indians to lose themselves in European exotica. Thus, even though Portuguese was always a minority language, and has practically died out as a publicly spoken tongue, the film forces it into the mouth of a street-food vendor. Similarly, even though all statues of Portuguese heroes were torn down from public spaces subsequent to Goa’s integration into India, and Vasco da Gama is hardly a daily reference even to those steeped in Goa’s Portuguese past, the film still insists on inserting references to the non-existent statues of Vasco-da-Gama into the dialogue between characters.

Displaying the standard orientalist disregard for exactitude in relation to social reality, the film joyfully plays with the social structure among Goan Catholics, marrying the daughter of a doctor to a carpenter’s son. Seeking to exemplify the imaginary essence of Goa, the film pulls out features that an Indian audience or a visiting Indian to the territory is likely to identify as key features of the state. Thus, this bizarrely mismatched couple is made to reside in a home that is popularly misrepresented as a Portuguese home and is in fact typical to Goa’s upper-caste elites and colonial middle-class. That the internal arrangement of the home bears no resemblance to how such homes were, and continue to be, used is another feature that the film seems blissfully unaware of. What the film definitely was aware of, and sought to draw the audience’s attention to, was the existence of caste among the Catholics in Goa. More sensitive members of the audience could perhaps see the shame of caste as responsible for Anton not wanting his son to also become a coffin maker. Nevertheless, even this possible reference to caste was unfortunately left at the level of a flourish, since when Anton goes on to command his son to become anything else, he inexplicably references only other ‘lower’-caste and ‘lower-status’ jobs like those of a tailor and a carpenter, even though Anton’s son is a college-going student. The references to caste, therefore, once again works to cast the Catholics in Goa as weird aberrations who are neither properly Hindu, nor properly Catholic; cultural bastards, or accidents of history.

The most damning way in which this film demonstrates its orientalising tendencies is how, despite locating the story in Goa, there is only one non-Catholic character in the film. This runs against the hard facts of Goan demography and reveals the manner in which the film seeks to create a Goan Neverland for its audiences. This representation of Goa as practically devoid of non-Catholics is both a lie as well as politically irresponsible since Catholics in Goa are not only a mere 26 odd and reducing percent of the population, but also a culturally embattled minority. Thus, while their existence is fetishized by films such as The Coffin Maker, their cultural mores are actually under threat. Take, for example, the manner in which the Roman script in which most Catholics write Konkani has, until recently, been denied governmental support; or the manner in which their cultural and literary productions are deemed as lacking standard. A creeping Hinduisation of the state ensures that the dietary preferences of Goan Catholics - pork and beef - are prohibited from state premises, as was the case during the course of the IFFI. More disturbing is the fact that the misrepresentation of Goa as Catholic (and hence Western and European) territory is used as fodder by local Hindu rightists to aggressively assert that the true character of Goa is brahmanical.  The recent statement by Goa’s Chief Minister that Catholics in Goa were in fact culturally Hindu being a case in point.

The Coffin Maker is thus best described as a film that seeks to represent Goa from within Indian perceptions of what Goa ought to be like. Consequently, if there is one relationship that the film manages to capture perfectly, it is the relationship between that of India and Goa. Where every Goan character in the film speaks a vile patois, Death, played by Randeep Hooda, is the only character to speak the English of India’s educated classes. India then intrudes into the orientalist Goan Neverland only in the form of death. This is not an inappropriate cameo in the context where India and its elites, either through state practice or representative norms, seem to wilfully push every minority group within its boundaries to the brink of collective death.