Lembrando Prof. Dr. Teotónio de Souza

Vim para enterrar César, não para louvá-lo.

O bem que se faz é enterrado com os nossos ossos,

que seja assim com César.

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Acto III, cena 2.

Devo começar por dizer que estou bastante escandalizado com a recente tendência que notei, especialmente depois da morte do Manohar Parrikar, ex-Chefe Ministro de Goa, de elogiar sem reservas as figuras públicas e não refletir sobre alguns aspetos mais negativos do seu carácter ou sobre as suas intervenções na sociedade. A falta de reflexão aspetos menos atraentes da sua personalidade é uma indicação dos tempos perturbados em que vivemos, onde a crítica é vista como criticismo e desrespeito, não sendo sequer tolerada.

Gostaria de acrescentar que a crítica é a reflecção desapaixonada ou imparcial, que deve examinar ambos aspetos, positivos e negativos e refletir também sobre as razões mais profundas para estas qualidades. Por tanto, hoje, gostaria de começar com uma reflecção desapaixonada sobre alguns aspetos da vida de Teotónio. Preferia começar com o elefante na sala, com o facto de Teotónio ter sido uma pessoa difícil, especialmente em contextos profissionais.

Teotónio era uma pessoa rabugenta, ficava ofendido facilmente e frequentemente maldisposto em ter que reconhecer o trabalho de jovens acadêmicos, especialmente se estes não vinham ao beija-mão. Ai deles que o contradissessem, pois era certo que se montaria de imediato uma cena pública que destruísse o seu trabalho.

Seria fácil atribuir estas características claramente negativas só a Teotónio. As suas fraquezas, enquanto suas, foram também produto de um certo contexto social e Goês. Contexto este onde ele nasceu e dentro do qual trabalhou e contribuiu. 

É uma crítica constante que faço à comunidade Goesa, seja em Goa ou na diáspora, o não reconhecimento dos esforços dos seus filhos. Se não pertencem a uma família ou casta poderosa é quase garantido que a pessoa que desenvolve qualquer trabalho interessante até importante irá trabalhar sozinho, sem aplauso do resto da comunidade. O facto que qualquer reconhecimento, se vem, vem muito tarde, quando estes já estiverem mortos, implica que pessoas que se esforçam por articular novas perspetivas e criar novas iniciativas trabalham sem qualquer consolação. O caso de Teotónio é um exemplo perfeito. Conheço apenas um reconhecimento de Teotónio enquanto académico, o festschrift intitulado Metahistory. History Questioning History. Festschrift in Honour of Teotonio R. De Souza, tenho certeza que não foi uma iniciativa de alguma instituição Goês.

É um facto que trabalhar solitariamente sem reconhecimento pode ter um impacto corrosivo na alma. Torna-nos amargos, com tendência a que nos gabemos sobre os nossos sucessos e sem vontade de reconhecer o trabalho dos demais. A final, se ninguém reconhecer o meu trabalho, tenho que ser eu a faze-lo, verdade?

Isto não é apenas o caso do Teotónio, mas o caso de vários outros Goêses ilustres que tive a oportunidade de conhecer e é um facto que me deixa muito triste. Para re-enfatizar o que distingue as comunidades Goêsas no mundo não é somente a falta de institucionalização, mas também a falta de investimento na sua vida intelectual. Há já vários anos que tem havido um crescente interesse académico em Goa. Enquanto este acontecimento é bem-vindo, há também um perigo porque Goa esta a ser definida por académicos não Goeses e serão, consequentemente as suas agendas, ou seja, as suas preocupações, que irão determinar a representação dos Goêses. Creio que Teotónio percebeu este problema. Ele quis articular uma identidade Goêsa diferente do que dos Portugueses e ficou rabugento porque percebeu que era a única voz a desenvolver esta tarefa. Isto não sugere que concordo com a sua posição. Separadas por gerações, a minha perspectiva sobre a identidade Goesa é substancialmente diferente. Enquanto a posição de Teotónio era a do nacionalismo Indiano, a minha é influenciada pela necessidade de combatê-la. Mas acho que poderíamos concordar que tem que haver mais investimento Goes na sua propria representação.

Creio que grande parte da sua antipatia surgiu também da sua posição social. Bramane, mas não tanto.  Percebi essa peculiaridade depois de ler a introdução do seu livro Goa To Me (1994). Fiquei muito comovido pelos detalhes que partilhou sobre a sua vida íntima e pareceu-me um acto de coragem e honestidade. Este texto mostra de fato a crueldade do sistema de castas entre Goeses e demonstra o fato pelo qual somos incapazes de criar uma saudável e vibrante identidade Goêsa. Na nossa sociedade enfatizamos sempre a nossa posição social, e portanto diferença em vez de enfatizar semelhanças e criar um sentido de comunidade. Tenho uma história para partilhar convosco a este respeito. A minha primeira experiência de Lisboa quando cheguei para participar na reunião de Goeses pelo mundo, organizada pela Casa de Goa alguns anos atras (talvez 2007?). Fui nessa altura a Coimbra por um mês e utilizei esta oportunidade para almoçar com Teotónio antes da reunião. Durante o almoço, Teotónio partilhou comigo a sua leitura das políticas entre as comunidades Goesas em Lisboa, apontando os conflitos entre castas e como naquela altura a Casa de Goa era dominado por brâmanes.

Cheguei à Casa de Goa equipado com esta informação. Foi cumprimentado por uma pessoa e foi-me dirigida aquela muito antiga questão Goesa “De onde és em Goa?” Atenção que a pergunta não funciona como quebra-gelo numa conversa, mas para localizar a posição na hierarquia das castas da pessoa a quem é dirigida a pergunta. Normalmente não participo neste jogo, sempre indico que cresci em Pangim ou que moro em Dona Paula, mas deste vez indiquei que as minhas origens na Ilha de Divar. “ah!” respondeu a mesma pessoa, adicionando, “somos de Margão!”, demonstrando a sua posição superior na scala bramanica. Prometi a mim mesmo   que nunca mais participaria neste jogo. Não é minha intenção sugerir aqui que este é o caso na Casa de Goa, mas esta é uma atitude com a qual temos que lidar firmamente. 

Acho que vou deixar as minhas reflecções por aqui, porque suspeito que ja tenha gasto mais do que o tempo que me foi alotado. Agradeço a vossa atenção, e a Casa de Goa pelo convite. Desejo descanso eterno a Teotónio e agradeço o trabalho por ele desenvolvido.

(Apresentação proferida na Conferencia sobre a vida do Prof. Teotónio de Souza Casa de Goa, Lisboa – 22 March 2019)

Shades of casteism

It is often the case that when speaking about caste-related problems one is accused of being casteist.  This is also true in Goa, where any discussion about the realities of caste power evokes accusations of being motivated by a personal dislike for brahmin groups, or of constantly “targetting” brahmins, especially—so the argument goes—given that the Saraswats are but a minority community; so any polemical attack on them amounts to casteism or communalism.

 But it is not casteism to speak about the violence of unequal power relations engendered by the presence of the caste system and the identities of caste. Rather, the conspiracy of silence around unequal power relations and the dominance of a single group, or a couple of groups, through caste privilege is what constitutes casteism. There is generally a deep silence about the violence of caste, and casteism operates when those who seek to speak about this violence, and challenge it, are accused of being casteist.

Let us be clear that in Goa, the Saraswats may be a small community, but they are a powerful community who hold much social, cultural and economic capital, and whether consciously or unconsciously, they wield power to ensure their continued hegemony. They fulfill the sociological category of “the dominant caste” constructed by the famous sociologist M. N. Srinivas. To expose the manner in which this power is wielded is not, to my eyes casteism. 

There are often suggestions, that “to be proud of one’s origins is not casteism”. Rather, casteism is when one “belittle[s] the origins of others”. This is an ingenious strategy beloved of many supporters of the caste system.  These proponents of the caste system fail to recognise that any identity of the self is invariably linked to identities of others. Thus, one can be brahmin only because others are not. Further, as a result of the operation of history, the brahmin identity is not an innocent identity. It is invariably the identity of oppressors. This is more so the case in Goa, where groups that claim a Saraswat identity, whether Catholic or Hindu, have controlled property, people tied to those properties, and attempted to control the rest of society too. There is not the space here to demonstrate fully how the assertion of a brahmin identity in Goa is invariably at the cost of demeaning a non-brahmin one, but any honest look at our society and history will bear this out.

It needs to be stated clearly, however, that the problem in Goa is not just with brahmins alone. There are other upper-caste groups, like the Chardos and the Desais, who despite their limited size similarly exert power owing to the manner in which they not just control landed property, but enjoy social privilege. Indeed, as the case of the Konkani Bhasha Mandal (KBM) will demonstrate, it is possible for Chardos to operate with the brahmanical matrix that the KBM embodies. As friend once commented, “for the Chardos, to be anti-brahmin is to be anti-caste”. What they all too often ignore is that they are a part of the problem, along with the brahmins.

It is this limited anti-brahmin agenda, instead of an agenda of anti-brahmanism that has ensured that the bahujan movement in Goa has missed a historical opportunity to forge a democratic polity. Instead, they have slipped into Hindu nationalism, precisely because the brahmanical logic of Indian nationalism have not been challenged. Take the constitution of the Bharatiya Bhasha Surkasha Manch (BBSM), which includes not just brahmins like Bhembre, but leaders of the bahujan castes, like Shashikala Kakodkar and Vishnu Wagh. Once again though, it is impossible to have Brahmanism, without the body of the brahmin, and it is precisely through the presence of brahmins in the BBSM that it gathers its symbolic strength. This is so because historically, it has been dominant caste groups, and especially brahmins that have set themselves up as arbiters of style and standard.

The power that Bhembre, Bhatikar, and other brahmins, Hindu or otherwise, claim to determine “standard”, whether of Konkani or otherwise, flow from the way in which upper caste individuals asserted their claim over languages in the late nineteenth century. In this context I would like to refer attention to the work of Veena Naregal in Language, Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere (2001) where she points out  that

“By the later decades of the nineteenth century, drawing on philological beliefs about the essentially interrelated genealogy of the Indian vernaculars and their common descent from the immaculate purity of the great and ancient Sanskrit language, English-educated individuals in different parts of the subcontinent could claim to constitute a transregional kinship with an immaculate high' cultural pedigree. An important part of this elite self-image was their shared status as custodians of 'correct' cultural practices. Thus, when giving the Wilson philological lectures in 1877, claiming descent from the noble brahmins of the 'ancient aryavarta' was, for the well-known orientalist scholar Bhandarkar, clearly, a way of enlarging through their dominance over the regional vernacular spheres”(p. 48).

It has been suggested that Uday Bhembre and Arvind Bhatikar are ‘good’ persons who have “the highest respect” for the Christian community in Goa. If they do, they have a very strange way of showing it, given that they have been suggesting Goan Catholics are anti-national merely for asserting their right to educate their children in the same English language that Bhembre and Bhatikar’s families are being educated. One wonders if these good persons have directed similarly vituperative language at the members of their own families. In any case, the assertion of the patriarchal right to dictate to other local communities is very much a part of brahmanical arrogance. An ideal way to show respect for the Christians in Goa would be for Bhatikar and Bhembre to cease their frightening hate-speech and support the right of these communities to determine the path of their own future.

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo on 18 Sept 2015)

Interrogating the bhakti movement: The Sant Sohirobanath Project

Some months ago, the State government honoured the memory of Sant Sohirobanath by organising a book exhibition in tandem with a festival of devotional music. What a clever sleight of hand! Along with this column, there were other voices that protested the manner in which the state government is shamelessly promoting caste Hindu hegemony in Goa.

There were a number of arguments raised to defend the commemoration of the Sant when the government’s decision was revealed to the public. Of these, two were significant. The first suggested that the Sant was part of the bhakti tradition of the subcontinent and this was a good thing. The second suggested that it represented the validation of the spiritual in the face of the materialism that contemporary society seems to be mired in. This column will deal primarily with the suggestion that the bhakti tradition is an undeniably positive tradition.

The bhakti tradition has been much celebrated largely because it is seen as having challenged the hegemony of the brahmin and vedic priesthood over access to the deities. The bhakti movement is credited with enabling the common person, and especially lower caste persons, to have direct access to the deity and the salvation that this access promised.

There is indeed a robust anti-caste critique in the visions of those who are seen as a part of the bhakti movement. Gail Omvedt, a significant authority on dalit-bahujan assertion in the subcontinent, has penned a book titled Seeking Begumpura (2008) that references the utopia that animated the works of many dalit-bahujan sants and poets.

And yet, this is not sufficient reason for us to uncritically accept the bhakti movement as an unmitigated good. In her book Language, Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere (2001), Veena Naregal points out that the relations between the emerging dissenting devotional practices and the ruling elites is still not very well understood. She refers to the case of the celebrated bhakti poet Eknath to make her point. Naregal highlights that when castigated by his brahmin peers for writing in the vernacular languages, Eknath “claiming not to be a deviant, [he] justified his writing in the vernacular as a popularisation of the high religious texts” (p.15). Indeed, Naregal goes on to quote the celebrated scholar Sheldon Pollock, who argued that, “the work of vernacularisation was not necessarily a subaltern process, but actually represented attempts by political elites to re-articulate their authority in localised idioms” (p.15).

This insight can be further buttressed by the recognition of the fact that Eknath may not have been the only person of the period who was seeking to popularise brahmanical texts and create a political culture defined by Brahmanism. Naregal places Eknath within the period c. 1533-99. In her work on the politics around the Telugu language, Language, Emotion, Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue (2010), Lisa Mitchel makes a similar point about the eleventh century composition of the Mahabharata in Telugu by the poet Nannaya. Challenging the idea that fired with the love for his mother-tongue Nannaya was articulating a Telugu identity, Mitchell in fact argues that this composition of the Mahabharata can be seen “as an attempt to prevent the spread and expansion of already existing anti-brahmanical heterodox identity by expanding orthodox meanings and practices” (p. 50). By composing the Mahabharata in Telugu, Nannaya was actively countering an already established heterodox Jain identity that used Telugu as a medium for spreading itself. Looking at this history, she points out that the Telugu language was in fact a weapon, a medium and a tool for accomplishing a specific purpose, the expansion of elite culture and identity into new realms.

From his fieldwork in Karnataka, the eminent sociologist M. N. Srinivas also noted that the practice of Harikatha served to popularise a sanskritic theology among the non-brahmanical groups. Such Sanskritic practices exposed the populace to new ideas and values and hitherto unknown terms such Karma, dharma, papa, punya, maya, samsara and moksa which found frequent expression in the vast body of Sanskrit literature, sacred as well as secular.

Seen in this light the Bhakti tradition is not necessarily the innocent, liberating project that defenders of the Sohirobanath project make it out to be.

There is a strain of rhetoric in this country that resorts to challenging unpalatable research by claiming foreign bias. However, no less a person that the renowned Dalit-bahujan activist, Mahatma Phule was sceptical of the texts produced by the bhakti poets of Maharashtra. In his polemical tract Shetkarayacha Aasud (Cultivator's Whipcord, [1881] 2002) Phule suggests that the bhakti tradition emerged as an ideological response to the liberation that Islam was providing. “From amongst the bhat brahmans, Mukundaraja and Dnyanoba lifted some imaginary parts from the Bhagavat-bakhar, and wrote tactical books in Prakrit called Viveksindhu and Dnyaneshwari and crazed the ignorant farmer to such an extent that the farmers started to think of the Mohammedans as low, along with the Quran, and started hating them instead.” Bhakti, then, rather than uplifting the marginalised, befuddled their minds, made them hate their liberators and pushed them deeper into the hands of their brahmanical oppressors. We know enough about the nature of the Hindu Right’s vigorous assertions, both in Goa and India, to be aware that the sudden celebration of Sant Sohirobanath probably has nothing to do with any love for promoting universal brotherhood. On the contrary, it has probably more to do with snipping bahujan-dalit assertion in Goa, and casting non-Hindus as enemies.

Phule was in fact categorical on this point. In Ghulamgiri (Slavery, [1872] 2002), he asserts that “There were several brahman authors like Mukundaraj, Dnyaneshwar and Ramdasa, among the plenty that mushroomed all over, who wasted their talents in composing silly books. None of them dared to even touch the rope of bondage tied around the necks of the shudras. Obviously, they lacked the courage to renounce such wicked practices and deeds openly. So they made a distinction between ‘Karma Marga’ (the Path of Action) and ‘Dnyana Marga’ (the Path of Knowledge), assigning every wicked practice to the former and atheist opinion to the latter. Then they wrote heaps of hollow books like these and allowed their selfish brahman brothers to continue robbing the shudras.”

We would do well to learn from Phule that just as some of the bhakti poets were using vernacular languages to extend the reach of brahmanical power, contemporary Hindu nationalist associations, and the state itself, are using bhakti to sanskritise Dalit-Bahujan groups and convert them into brahmanised Hindus. This strategy would not have been problematic had it led to genuine empowerment of the Dalit-Bahujan groups. As noted by Ronki Ram, the problem with Sanskritisation is that this process reinforces the structural logic of Hinduism by asking Dalits to internalize the very same social system that they ought to contest in the first place. Sanskritisation forces Dalit-bahujans to imbibe outmoded cultural patterns of the upper castes without seeking any radical change in the hierarchical and oppressive structures of the brahmanical social order.

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar minced no words about the regressive impact of a narrowly defined Bhakti. In his final speech to the Constituent Assembly on 25 November, 1949, he pointed out that “in India, Bhakti or what may be called the path of devotion or hero-worship, plays a part in its politics unequalled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country in the world. Bhakti in religion may be the road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.”

Seen in the light of scholarship and enlightened activism, the uncritical celebration of the Bhakti tradition through the symbol of Sant Sohirobanath does not bode well. It only presages the continued brahmanisation of Hindus of Goa, and worsens the shackling of the dalit-bahujan groups who are being directed to expend their energy on religion, rather than the assertion of the rights that are being denied them.

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo dated  6 March 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.