Churches and temples and mosques! Oh My!

The reverend Christian theologian was sitting in the upper room and preaching to a small community that was gathered around him. This theologian had built a career around inter-faith dialogue and was talking of how Christian sites were often built over the sacred sites of other faiths. “For example”, he said “the Basilica of Bom Jesus is built over the tank of a temple and can today be seen under the altar of the church.”

This was about as much as the angry young man could take. He sprang up and challenged the old man. “You’ve got your facts all wrong” he charged. The Basilica was built on the maidan outside of the walls of the Bijapuri city of Goa. There was no temple there. And that’s not all, the church you are referring to is the church of St. Cajetan. And here too you are wrong. The church sits within what was the very heart of the citadel of the fortified Bijapuri city. The well we see today is the result of the architect’s attempt to drain the soil so that he could sink the massive foundations he needed to raise the huge dome of St. Cajetan’s. Further, we need to decide who were the bad guys, the ‘Muslims’ or the ‘Portuguese’, they both cannot have destroyed the same temple can they? That is, if there was any temple destroyed in the first place!”

That great temples were destroyed and the Goan churches of today were raised over them is a shibboleth of much popular Goan history. But this nugget of information may be more myth than actual history. The churches of Old Goa, as has already been pointed out, were built within the Bijapuri city of Goa, and if anything, the churches were built over mosques. The Cathedral is reported built over the Jama Masjid of the city.

The scene becomes ever more complex if one leaves the urban contexts of the city of Goa and heads into the villages that surrounded this core of Portuguese domination in the sixteenth century. To begin with, most people make the mistake of assuming that the countryside around the city was a Hindu space. This is a popular misconception. The land was teeming not just with Hindus (that is to say brahmanised castes) but with a variety of subaltern and untouchable groups, as well as Muslims and other social and cultural groups. If sacred sites were taken over, then these sites could have also belonged to groups beyond the brahmanised castes. Indeed, because of what we know of the history of the location of Goan churches, one could safely assume that if a sacred site was repurposed then it was the shrines of the marginal groups that suffered this fate.

In his marvelous book Whitewash, Red Stone that discusses the Goan-ness of churches in Goa, Paulo Varela Gomes makes the astute observation that most of the early churches in Goa were not built in village centres, but rather on the peripheries of villages. This was the case because there was no centre in the European sense of the term. Rather, villages were organised according to castes, each caste having its own little ward, set apart from those of the others. Within such a society, Varela rather persuasively suggests, rather than risk identifying the church with a particular group, these priests built their churches outside of the villages in spectacular locations. Think of the church of Penha da França, or that of Curtorim. Where settlements do exist around these churches, whether in the case of Margão or Chinchinim, these were later developments with the village shifting toward the church, following the lead of powerful families that sought to replicate European urban forms.

What then do we make of the fond myths that have been told and retold for generations? Take the case of Margão for instance. We are told that the (Brahmin) villagers of Margão offered any space in the village for the church, but requested that their temples be spared. Unheeding the Bishop is said to have cast a sword into the air and toward the temple of Damodar causing this temple to be displaced to make way for today’s Church of the Holy Spirit.

The strength of this story rests on the conflation of the Damodar of the story with the great lord of Zambaulim. There are, however, a number of crucial details in the popular retelling of the foundation of the church in Margão that could tell us a different story. According to legend, the Damodar in question was a brahmin male who was killed on the outskirts of the village as he returned with his bride after his death. Hell hath no fury like a brahmin spurned, even worse a brahmin who has been killed before he could realise his desires. Their tormented souls turn into Pisacha and wreak havoc on the realm of the living. It was to pacify this soul, therefore, that a shrine would have been built. A minor shrine to a demonic being is different from a central shrine of a brahmanical deity patronised by the dominant caste of the village. We can conclude therefore, that it was no great temple that was destroyed in Margão, but if at all, a minor little marker, perhaps not so different from the shrines (of all religions) that continue to spring where a person has met a violent death.

Contrary to widespread beliefs today, temples did not come up at the whim and fancy of people. There was an entire cosmology that allowed for temples to emerge. To sustain its growth the brahmanical order would first set up the temple of a brahmanical or brahmanised temple. Other deities would then be constructed as minor and hierarchical relations constructed between this main deity and the minor deities. In this process, those who worshipped the inferior deity were also crafted as inferior. This is another story, however, and it connects with the theme of this column only to the extent of making the point that we need to realise that very often, the missionaries chose to avoid sites of the dominant castes and constructed their churches outside of village centres. The myth of the destruction of temples to facilitate the building of churches over them therefore needs to be revisited and systematically examined for the facts in each case. 

(A version of this post was first published in the Herald dated 13 June 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.

The Goan in Goa: A Response to Aravind Adiga

In his essay “The Lusitanian in Hind” for the magazine Outlook India (2 September, 2013), novelist Aravind Adiga strives to situate the 19^th century Goan writer and politician Francisco Luis Gomes (1829-1869) as an Indian patriot while decrying how “most Indians [have] not heard about Gomes,” which to Adiga “speaks more about the narrowness of our present conception of Indianness [...].” Yet, through his essay, Adiga further perpetuates the very narrowness he warns against. In trying to resuscitate national and nationalistic interest in Gomes, Adiga explores the possibility of the Goan polymath’s canonicity solely within a prescriptive Indianness hemmed in by Brahmanical, masculinist, Anglo-centric, and ethnocentric preconceptions of what it means to be Indian. In Adiga’s estimation, Gomes can only be made legible to the larger Indian imagination if, as a Goan of the Portuguese colonial era, he can be seen as adequately Indian based on elitist particularities of caste and other constricted views of proper national and historical belonging.

While Adiga notes how Goa generally registers in popular Indian thought “as a landscape of fun,” he also pre-empts any discussion of the history of the region apart from modern India, and the impact of such historical regionality upon Gomes’ own oeuvre. Instead, when citing Gomes as having written of himself that he “was born in India, cradle of poetry, philosophy and history, today its tomb,” Adiga rushes to correlate such sentiment with Gomes having penned those words in 1861 which, in turn, would make one suppose “[naturally] enough that [the] author was a Bengali Hindu, writing either in Calcutta or London.” However, as Adiga interjects, “[Gomes] was a young Goan Catholic in Lisbon [...].” Clearly, Adiga endeavours to draw attention to the biases that exist in how perceptions of patriotism connote an Indianness circumscribed by location, coloniality, and religion. Nonetheless, rather than striking a contrast for deeper critical reflection on difference, Adiga’s purpose is to collapse all distinction into nationalist similitude as if it were “natural.”And what is believed to be natural here is that Goa can be a known quantity precisely because there allegedly is no difference between it and British-colonised Hindu Bengal, which at once reveals what the historic, religious, ethnocentric, and colonial default of the nation is as Adiga predicates it in this ostensibly neutral reasoning.

There is no denying that there were overlaps, and even collusions, between British and Portuguese colonialisms, but there were also marked differences. Although relegating it to a parenthetical aside, even Adiga must admit that “[u]nlike Britain, Portugal gave its colonies the right of representation.” This was an opportunity that was not available to the sub-continental subjects of the British Crown, not even to Dadabhai Naoroji who even while he may have been the first Asian in the British Parliament, was able to raise issues about British India only while representing a constituency in London. In contradistinction, it was from his position as a representative of Goa in the Portuguese parliament that Gomes sought to speak about the effects of colonialism on his Goan homeland and about India. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his book Os Brahmanes, or The Brahmins, written in Portuguese and published in Lisbon in 1866, making it one of Goa’s, if not India’s, first novels. What might Adiga do with other divergences in histories between the former British and Portuguese Empires in India? Not only was the latter a longer colonisation, witnessing radically different forms of inclusion and exclusion of the colonised, it also resulted in the decolonisation of Goa in 1961, much after British-occupied India. His essay can only sidestep the fraught history of India’s “democracy” in which Goans were not allowed self-determination despite much evidence of efforts in that vein. This is itself a political trajectory within which one could arguably place Gomes’ own polemical writing.

In his haste to employ a one-nationalism-fits-all approach, Adiga’s lauding of Gomes as a forgotten patriot occurs, furthermore, along the lines of an unquestioning maintenance of religious and other supremacies as the default of proper Indianness. One way the article effects this is by privileging narratives of upper caste loss. For instance, Adiga posits the notion that it was “[t]he brutal start of Portuguese rule in Goa in 1510” which caused Saraswat Brahmins “to flee their homeland in order to protect their faith [...].” This according to him was a “boon for modern India,” as the Saraswats “fertilis[ed] commerce and culture everywhere they went.”

Yes, under the leadership of Afonso de Albuquerque, there was much bloodshed of the residents of the city of Goa by the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century; strikingly, many of these victims were the soldiers of Adil Shah who, like the Bijapuri ruler of the city, happened to be Muslim. Albuquerque is in fact said to have declared that Muslims were enemies and the “gentiles” friends, which is not surprising given that he was aided in his conquest by the army of Saraswat chieftain Mhal Pai, after being invited by Timayya, agent of Vijayanagara, to capture the city in the first place. These allies buttressed the more preponderant contestation between the Portuguese and the ‘Moors’ for trading rights and privileges in the Indian Ocean. Some Brahmins did flee, as did members of other caste and religious groups who do not factor into Adiga’s retelling; consequently, their contribution to India is forgotten rather than celebrated as a “boon.” It must be pointed out that some Brahmins and others even opted to convert to Christianity. As recent research has shown, not all conversions were forced, but were calculated decisions taken by members of various groups. Moreover, in the last few years, scholars like Pankaj Mishra and Goa’s Victor Ferrão have questioned the idea that Hindus, as they are known today as a faith group, pre-existed the orientalist efforts of colonisers to classify, and lump together, discrete religious sects into one category. In addition, Adiga does not reckon with how members of the upper caste echelon who lived on in Goa sought to preserve their authority within the machinations of colonialism. As in other parts of India, Goa too bore witness to the collaboration between colonisers and higher caste groups in order to strengthen domination based on existing hierarchies.

These details fail to appear in Adiga’s narration because he predominantly restricts his understanding of Goan history to the mythologies of the Saraswat caste. In so doing, he also misrepresents the fact that the Saraswat caste was already well established through the length of the Konkan coast prior to the arrival of the Portuguese. It was this coastal predominance that allowed the Saraswats to operate as interlocutors for the Portuguese, as well as to ensure that those Brahmins who chose not to convert were able to migrate to places where they were not entirely without some social and cultural capital. The casting of Goa as a Saraswat homeland was a feature of nineteenth century Goan politics, a politics supported in equal measure by Catholic as well as Hindu Brahmin elites as they both sought to jockey for greater power. For the latter group, in particular, their power struggle was to secure a regional fiefdom in Goa against the supremacy of the Marathi-speaking Brahmin groups in Bombay city.

As Adiga repeatedly points out, despite the privileges accorded to some natives in the Portuguese colony, even elite Goans found themselves “doomed to a second-class existence.” Of Gomes’ own trial by fire at the onset of his time in the Portuguese parliament, Adiga states that the Goan politician “heard another member demand that the government rescind the right given to colonial savages to sit in a civilised parliament.” This caused Gomes to wax eloquently about the civility of Indic cultures in educating his parliamentary counterparts, a group Adiga refers to as “the carnivorous Europeans.” What is the purpose of such an authorial statement other than to ascribe some notion of purity to one group over another along the lines of casteist exclusion? While it serves to characterise Europeans as uncouth because of their presumed dietary habits, it can only do so by participating in the logics of defilement used against the many marginalised peoples in India and, perhaps, meat-eating Goan Catholics, a group that Gomes himself belonged to. Though that irony seems to escape Adiga, it nevertheless continues to establish a sense of Indianness in the article that strongly veers toward Brahmanical Hindu nationalism.

The bent of such nationalism is made even more explicit when Adiga likens Gomes to Vivekananda. The essay purports that the two had similar visions of emancipation: “Vivekananda saw education and the renaissance of Hinduism as the answer. Gomes, who believed Hinduism was spent, pointed to education and Christianity.” As one might expect of a novel titled Os Brahmanes, the book – like Gomes’ own politics and thinking – is not without orientalist or elitist notions. Albeit, in describing some of Gomes’ narrative as being “Orientalist escapism,” Adiga spotlights the novelist’s indignation at the inherent contradictions of European colonialism. The essay quotes Gomes’ novel as declaring that if “the law of Christ governs European civilisation [...] [i]t is a lie – Europe tramples upon Asia and America, and all trample upon poor Africa – the Black races of Africa are the pariahs of the Brahmans of Europe and America.” Idealism, no doubt, but it is in this regard for the oppressed beyond the confines of nation and religion that one can locate the conspicuous distinctions between Gomes and Vivekananda.

In “Dharma for the State?” - an article that also appeared in Outlook India (21 January, 2013) - writer Jyotirmaya Sharma begins by underscoring the “one phrase [...] that effortlessly invokes the name and memory of Ramakrishna,” who was Vivekananda’s mentor: “Ramakrishna’s catholicity.” The article, which is an excerpt from Sharma’s book Cosmic Love and Human Apathy: Swami Vivekananda’s Restatement of Religion (HarperCollins 2013), charges that “Vivekananda, more than anyone else, helped construct [...] this carefully edited, censored and wilfully misleading version of his master’s ‘catholicity’.” Like Gomes, Vivekananda travelled beyond his homeland in the 19^th century. Sharma records how “[i]n 1896, Vivekananda gave two lectures in America and England on Ramakrishna.” Studying these lectures, Sharma finds “that they are placed entirely in the context of the glorious spiritual traditions of India as contrasted with the materialism of the West.” While on the one hand a decided subversion of the universality espoused by Ramakrishna, the essentialism Sharma infers from Vivekananda’s lectures may also be seen in Adiga’s aforementioned pronouncement of an East-West dichotomy founded upon casteist notions of restrictive purity.

Of the lectures, Sharma goes on to mention that “[t]here are frequent references to Hinduism’s capacity to withstand external shocks, including the coming of materialism in the guise of the West and the flashing of the Islamic sword. Despite all this, the national ideals remained intact because they were Hindu ideals.” What should be perceived here, then, is not only the conflation of nationalism with Hinduism, but also the theorising of the religious state as needing to be masculinist in order to withstand purported threat. Accordingly, it is not only Vivekananda that Adiga troublingly aligns Gomes with, but also “Tilak and Gokhale” as if the only way to understand the Goan’s place in the Indian context is by placing him firmly within the male iconicity of nationalism.

Gomes’s position is much more complex that the easy binary of bad coloniser versus the suffering colonised that Adiga seems to have adopted, and it is precisely Gomes’s Christianity that sharply distinguishes him from the Hindu nationalism of Vivekananda, Tilak, and Gokhale. As Adiga mentions, Gomes may have worn a dhoti to a reception, and spoken of the hallowed wisdom of the East, as also of the hypocrisy of Western civilisation. Even so, this should not be read as representative of Gomes’ overwhelming desire to cast off his European self and wholly embrace Indian subjectivity. Rather it should be seen as a limited strategy that he, as a member of the Goan Catholic elite seeking greater autonomy within the Portuguese empire, was using against recalcitrant Europeans. If there was one position that the Goan Catholic elite of the 19^th century espoused, it was that they were capable of managing the Estado da Índia Portuguesa without metropolitan oversight because they were not only heirs of the millenarian Indian civilisation that spun the Vedas, but were also reprieved by their Christian religion and European traditions. They were not merely Indians superior to the Europeans; they were Goans superior to both the Europeans, as well as the subcontinentals because in either case they had a marker that trumped the other: ancient Indian culture against the Europeans and Christianity and European culture against the subcontinentals. Nor was the contest that Gomes was in necessarily a simple case of natives versus those with foreign blood as Adiga seems to suggest when recounting the case of Bernado Pires da Silva, who in 1835 was “[t]he first Indian to rule colonial Goa.” In attempting to craft Goan history within the narrow frames of nationalist British Indian history, Adiga fails to highlight that the Goan polity of the time was the scene of a vicious battle for dominance among the local dominant castes, that included the metropolitan Portuguese, the Luso-descendente caste, the Catholic Brahmins, the Hindu Brahmins, and the Catholic Chardos (Kshatriyas), with theatres spread over Goa and the metropole.

If Adiga really believes in the project of securing visibility for those marginal regions and personages that do not figure in usual conceptions of the Indian cultural and political landscape, this cannot be achieved without accounting for both the peculiarities of a location apart from the nation-state and the vexed relationship between the two. It is not colonisation alone that chronicles a history of the marginalisation of Goans, but also the contemporary postcolonial condition. Adiga asks if Portuguese, “the language of the Inquisition” can “be called an Indian language” as it was one of Gomes’ “mother tongues.” One could put this strange question to Sanskrit, or indeed any language used by rulers anywhere: can the language of the Manu Smriti, the language that advocated the horrifying oppression of Dalits, be called an Indian language? By equating Portuguese language and culture with the Inquisition alone, Adiga negates the formation and endurance of Portuguese culture in the former colonies. He brushes aside a whole gamut of cultural innovations by peoples, many of them subaltern, who still cherish their traditions, even if he does allude to them in passing.

The memory of the Inquisition, as Adiga posits it, either shames if one is a Catholic, or it hurts if one professes Hinduism. This essentialist rationale proceeds to permit Catholics to feel ashamed and Hindus to feel victimised, thereby leading to the victimisation of their Other. The majoritarian Hindu politics in Goa with all its trappings of casteist purity has made sure, quite successfully, with the insensitive misuse of the history of the Inquisition, as well as conversion, the perpetual marginalised status of the subaltern Goan Catholic, and those seldom mentioned groups, like Muslims. Correspondingly, language is another site of contention. Gomes’ other language, as Adiga indicates, was Konkani. Adiga rightly offers that Konkani is “now Goa’s official language,” and also that “Catholics, aware that their presence in Goa is diminishing [...], seek to protect their heritage.” But what Adiga obscures is that the postcolonial state’s official recognition of Konkani is only in the Devanagri, and not the Roman script largely used by Catholics.

For the Goan in Goa and for the marginalised elsewhere in the country, it is not useful to simply be squeezed into a preset notion of Indianness, but for that very category to be critiqued at every turn for its lack of inclusiveness by design.
          (This essay was collectively written with R. Benedito Ferrão, DaleLuis Menezes, and Amita Kanekar

 It was first published in Outlook India.com on 6 Sept 2013.)