Reflections from Midsomer

Over the past couple of weeks I have been viewing back episodes of the British murder mystery TV series Midsomer Murders. Set in the fictional English county of Midsomer, the series revolves around the efforts of Chief Inspector Detective Barnaby, who is attached to the CID of a town called Causton, to resolve the murders that afflict the county.

A possible reason for the attraction is that the series is a loving dedication to the English countryside, and to the imagined English way of life. Midsomer Murders elevates what it sees as English reality with great aplomb. There are long loving shots of breath-taking English countryside. Added to this are the details that are worked into the stories: a focus on contemporary English villages, the age-old social institutions, the rituals of these institutions, the relationship between the gentry and the village-folk. So lovingly ethnographic is the gaze of this series, that despite the glut of murder and nastiness that fills these episodes one can’t help but feel how wonderful it must be to live in rural England.

After a substantial period of time, when I was more than a dozen or so episodes into the drama, a rather discomfiting thought hit me. The series contained an overwhelming number of white persons! It seemed as if there were no persons of colour in the episodes. That is when I started actually looking for people of colour and sure enough, not a single person in evidence! 

Reflecting on this situation I was reminded of an article that discussed the problems of race in video games. Mounting responses to the standard apologies that one gets, the author Bao Phi phrased one that has remained with me ever since, and seemed particularly appropriate in the case of Midsomer’s disappearance of English people of colour. The apology normally reads “Games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Age are based in European folklore and there were no people of color in Medieval Europe.” Phi’s response is clever and hits the nail bang on the head: “Actually there were people of color in Medieval Europe.  You know what?  There were more actual people of color in Medieval Europe than there were REAL FIREBREATHING DRAGONS OR PEOPLE WHO COULD SUMMON MOTORCYCLES OUT OF THIN AIR WITH THEIR MAGIC POWERS.”

This response makes it so obvious that the constructions of our fantasies are not as innocent as we make them out to be, but invariably involve a choice. That there were more murderers in fictional Midsomer than people of colour suggests that the producers of the show wished to show was that there was no space for people of colour in real English life and the England of the imagination. 

Something else that struck me about Midsomer Murders was the dramatic way in which it contrasted with American versions of the similar genre like Castle, or Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. In the episodes that I have seen, Chief Inspector Barnaby and his associate have practically never been shown with a gun. American versions of this genre, however, are replete with the presence, and use, of guns. It should be pointed out that I am unfamiliar with the way in which the police and detectives in England actually operate. It is possible that just as the non-depiction of people of colour highlighted the way the producers of Midsomer wished to imagine England, perhaps the depiction of a folksy and unarmed police detective is also far from English reality. However, what is important is the manner in which the ideal comportment of the police are depicted. As suggested earlier, just as with advertising, television series such as Midsomer Murders are important because they set up an ideal world that we then look for in real life. To this extent, Midsomer Murders suggests that the use of guns is an aberration, while the American series normalise the use of guns suggesting that the ONLY way in which law and order can be enforced is via the use of guns.

Because television is so ubiquitous in our lives it forms the basis of our expectations of reality. For the great Indian middle class that feeds off American television, American drama series offer a vision of what life in the USA is like. Seeing police with guns, all too often their demand is that police in India also be armed with guns. What they do not see is the kind of racist and gratuitous violence that is meted out by police in the US to persons of colour, and the fact that this violent tendency is aggravated by the carrying of lethal weapons. Of course, given the caste-based nature of the Indian middle class, it is perhaps something that they would not care too much about. Nevertheless, it bears remembering that once unleashed, the spiral of violence is difficult to contain.

It is not uncommon to hear howls of protest whenever social justice issues are raised vis-à-vis films and episodes on television. “Oh, but this is just fantasy” it is claimed. Another standard trope is, “but film is about stereotypes!” Indeed, televisual representation may be about stereotypes, but these representations also impact on our expectations of reality. It is for this reason that it is critical that the representations in film and television are not simply shrugged off as fantasy, but challenged not only to embody reality, but also embody a just reality that we would like to see translated to reality.

(A version of this post was first published in The Goan Everyday on 30 Aug 2015)

Goans, Films, and their worlds – Putting Nachom-ia Kumpasar in context

I am always afraid when I go to watch a film that features Goa or Goans, because of the host of problems that plague their representation. These problems were more than painfully obvious in the recent films Finding Fanny (2014) and The Coffin Maker (2011). As in these films Goa is invariably depicted as a land of natural beauty, a veritable paradise. This representation hides not only the challenges being posed to its environment, but also the profound cultural conflicts that are ripping resident communities apart. For their part, Goans are depicted as fun and pleasure-loving folk, non-achievers given to drink, of easy virtue, and marked by childlike simplicity. Such a representation effaces the fact that far from being easy, Goan communities, Catholic and others, are in fact marked by strong moral codes that regulate sexual behaviour.

It was thus with relief that I concluded my viewing of Nachom-ia Kumpasar (Let’s Dance to the Rhythm), the latest Konkani language film directed by Bardroy Barretto. A musical, the film is bereft of the problematic and insulting clichés that guide so many Indian language films about Goa and Goans, and is a must see since it is a fabulous contribution to Goan, and Konkani language, culture.

There are two tensions that guide the narrative of the film. The first is the love affair between the crooner Donna and the musician and composer Lawry Vaz. This love affair provides the meat for the entire film, regaling the audience through the 164 odd minutes of the film. The other tension, however, and in my opinion the more interesting, is that of the complicated relationship between the Goan, and in particular the Goan Catholic, and the Indian state. Indeed, I would argue that the love story is merely a foil for the more assertive political complaint.

The film begins with a grouse; that Goan musicians who contributed substantially to the unforgettable melodies of the Hindi film industry were, and still have, not been given their due. Despite Goans contributing to writing, composing, and arranging the music, the credits invariably went to the established names within the film industry. But this is not all; at the conclusion, the film informs us that the brilliant music that poured out of the Goans in Bombay since the 1930s was forced to suffer a sudden and abrupt death thanks to the Prohibition that was imposed in Bombay by the chief minister Morarji Desai in 1950. Prohibition ensured that the night clubs in the city had to shut down, forcing the destruction of the cultural life of the city that these Goan musicians had contributed vibrantly to. This cultural life has been lavishly documented by Naresh Fernandes in Taj mahal Foxtrot: The story of Bombay’s Jazz Age (2011). With no avenues for live performances, these musicians took up employment in the film industry. Once again, despite their role in producing the cult hits that went on to define the soundscape of Hindi film music, these musicians remained unacknowledged. The final words are particularly poignant: “After a final flourish in the 70s, the curtains slowly came down.There was no finale. No calls for an encore. And no applause.”

In presenting this complaint to the larger public, the film makes a more profound contribution than it may have realised. It is articulating a long held, but rarely voiced, opinion that the contributions of Goan Catholics to India are often ignored, and their cultural life not considered valid, or even legitimate. What the film does is to make obvious that the ignoring was not unconscious but in fact a systemic activity. To this extent it draws attention to the injustices that have governed the operation of the Indian state, where some communities are marginalised and erased, even as their works and efforts are appropriated by the North Indian upper-caste groups who seem to have emerged as the ultimate beneficiaries from the creation of post-colonial India.

A common response to political complaints that are articulated by marginalised groups, and especially in the case of Goans who voice protest about the way in which they are represented, is to dismiss the complaints. What Nachom-ia Kumpasar also does, though perhaps unconsciously, is to mount a rejoinder to the filmic representations of Goans. If the film Bobby (1973) set up a standard for how Goan, and Catholic, women in India were understood, then Nachom-ia offers an alternative way in which to deal with extra-marital sexual relations. As indicated earlier, the film revolves around the love story of Donna and Lawry. However, unbeknownst, to most characters in the film, until it is far too late, Lawry is in fact a married man. This crushes Donna, even more so when she realises that Lawry has not only been hiding the fact of his marriage, but persists in the affair while also hiding the fact that his wife is pregnant. It is only when Lawry is congratulated by members of the band that he and Donna belong too that Donna realises that she has once again been duped by the man she loves. The tears that Donna sheds, the portrayal of the conflicts that Lawry encounters, and the statements of a variety of characters in the film, clearly indicate that love leading to marriage is the ideal within the community that Donna and Lawry inhabit. Rather than offer up a caricature of a community, the film engages with the conflicts that often crop up in communities, whether Goan or otherwise.

The other element of the caricature of Goans and Indian Christians that the film engages with is the relationship of Goans to alcohol. Just as in the lives of most Goan Catholics, alcohol is present throughout the film, be it when persons are drinking at home, at feasts, or in the public space of the tavern. The naturalness of alcohol in social life, as well as the virtues of drink in moderation, are in fact actively highlighted by the presence of the lone alcoholic in the film. The fact that he is the sole alcoholic makes the eloquent point that while drink is ubiquitous in the Goan lifestyle, not everyone is an alcoholic. The advice that this alcoholic gives Donna when she begins her own disastrous descent into alcoholism makes the relationship between the Goans and alcohol very clear. In the words of the character played by the tiatrist Prince Jacob, one drinks for one of two reasons, either out of happiness, or due to sadness and the desire to forget. Forgetting, he advises, is not possible through alcohol. This moment, that draws its gravitas from the Latin maxim in vino veritas, ensures that alcohol and alcoholism in the film are not merely tropes employed to titillate, but are evidence of community wisdom and advice. It is also worth noting that the alcoholic is humanised. He is not a drunk just for the sake of being drunk. That he is able to offer Donna such sage advice means that he has turned to alcohol for particular reasons. This is in sharp contrast to Bollywood representations of Goan alcoholics where one only understands them as being buffoons who drink for no apparent reason.

The manner in which this advice was communicated to Donna via the otherwise comic figure made one more feature of the film strikingly obvious: the power and strength of the tiatr. Those familiar with this Konkani language drama tradition will recognise the extent to which the film is provided substance by the formulae of tiatr. The tiatrist and comedian John D’Silva plays the role of Logic, Lawry’s aptly-named manager and sidekick, through the whole film, while Prince Jacob, a well-known practitioner in the genre, does a brilliant job of playing the alcoholic. While both tiatrist play supporting roles, it is in fact their performances that guide the film and gives it depth and solidity. D’Silva demonstrates his versatility and the capacity of tiatr by operating as more than just the comedian. He also effects a smooth transition to the manipulative manager who gets Donna to sign an unfair contract that will prevent her from singing with anyone besides Lawry. Speaking with those involved in the production of the film I was given to understand that D’Silva was also responsible for shaping the screen play to ensure that it spoke to diverse Goan audiences and did not remain entirely an “intellectual” exercise.  This engagement with the film and indeed the success of the film points to the vitality of tiatr.

It is through these tiatrist and the multiple Konkani speaking actors in the film that one is also witness to the breadth of Goan Catholic Konkani language forms. The Konkani is peppered with words that have Portuguese origin, but have over time been hammered into shape to become uniquely Konkani. Sadly, in recent times this diversity has come under threat through the acts of the state of Goa. Since the recognition of only Nagri-scripted Konkani as the official language of the State of Goa, in 1987, the state has supported only the Nagri script and Sanskritic version of the Sarasawat Brahmins in the territory, and suppressed all other forms of the language. Introducing the audiences to the diversity within the Konkani language spoken among Goans is a highly laudable feature of this film.  A particular target of ire was the language form that gave birth to the tiatr and cantaram, which used words of Portuguese origin, and was written in the Roman script. More recently, voices have been growing in protest against this suppression. In referencing these language forms the film has become one more tool for those struggling to gain recognition for Konkani in the Roman script.

If there is one short coming of the film it is the fact that the lead actors are not Konkani speakers. Their discomfort with the language is obvious and jars against the fluidity with which the other actors speak the language in all its nuances and inflections. A case in point is the stellar performance of Meenacshi Martins, who plays Donna’s mother. In addition, one suspects that it was this unfamiliarity with the language that ensured that the emotional range of these actors and their engagements with each other was not elaborated but restricted to monosyllables and facial gestures. This shortcoming could have been overcome by casting experienced tiatrist in these lead roles.

The location of this film’s storyline in both Goa and Bombay is another issue linked with the recognition of tiatr and other cultural forms of the Catholic labouring castes and classes from Goa. For a long time tiatr artists in Goa were not recognised by the government of Goa given that most of these artistes were based almost entirely in Bombay. As Nachom-ia so clearly shows, Bombay was the space where the labouring Goan Catholics seemed to have been able to assert themselves outside of the suffocating shadow of the landlord, and the social positions that caste and the comunidade system meted out to labouring groups. Celebrated by dominant-caste Goans as the embodiment of village democracy, the comunidade system ensured the communal management of village lands by an oligopoly of dominant caste families to the exclusion of everyone else. While claiming descent from the founders of the village, these oligarchs saw other villagers as merely living in the village, rather than constituting the village.  The position of marginalised castes was ritually inscribed and marked at every event of village life. It was to also escape this ritual and quotidian humiliation that so many Goans migrated to Bombay and further afield.

What is interesting is that it was exactly at the time that the labouring Goan Catholic in Bombay was churning out music, film, literature, and a range of novel cultural forms that pro-Indian Goan nationalists like Tristão de Bragança Cunha (1891 – 1958) and Luis de Menezes Bragança (1878- 1938) were haranguing Goans for their inability to engage in vibrant cultural production. The former of these two nationalists has today been integrated into the pantheon of Indian heroes as ‘The Father of Goan Nationalism’. In fact Bragança Cunha’s analysis of the problem in his famous tract The Denationalisation of Goans (1944) has become the bedrock of the delegitimisation of the cultural practices of Goan Catholics.  Bragança Cunha argued that Goans, and especially the Goan Catholic had become denationalised as a result of adopting a culture that was imitative of the West. In the face of the kind of cultural production that marked the life of the labouring Goan Catholic in the city of Bombay these assertions are bizarre! If taken seriously they can only mean one of two things. First, as was the case with the rest of their upper-caste and landed elite brethren, these two nationalists ignored and disparaged the cultural innovations of the labouring Goan. The other possibility is that the intended audience, and the subject, of their nationalist rhetoric were the Goan Catholic elite alone. In either case what is revealed are the limitations of the current deities of the pro-Indian Goan nationalist pantheon, and their irrelevance in the face of the vibrant cultural life of the labouring or bahujan Catholic.

The tragedy is that this space was destroyed even as the labouring Catholic began to gain in confidence and recognition First, as the film argues, by the Prohibition that marked the beginning of the end of Bombay’s cosmopolitanism, and secondly through the manipulations in Goa that ensured that the language and culture of these labouring Catholic was excised from the realm of state recognition precisely through reliance on the skewed analysis of the type offered by Bragança Cunha. What Bragança Cunha and his ilk had done was to adopt a racist understanding of what culture and Indian-ness meant and scripted anything seemingly connected with Europe outside of this definition. This scripting did not bother them unduely because these nationalists were able to assert their Indian-ness by falling back on their upper-caste identity. That it was a nationalist Gandhian ideology at work in the Bombay of the 50s and Gandhians in Goa who masterminded the displacement of Konkani in the Roman script from official recognition should give us ample proof of the upper caste Hindu hegemony that Gandhian ideology underscores. In addition it should warn us that the contemporary problems that minority groups in India face have roots that lie deeper than the current obsession with finger pointing at the BJP alone.

The final accolade that the film deserves is for casting the spotlight on Lorna, that icon of Goan culture. It is widely suggested that the love story of Donna and Lawry is based on her relationship with Chris Perry. The final segments of the film, which suggest scenes from Lorna’s rapturous return to the Goan stage, indicate just what a phenomena she was and continues to be. Lorna is an icon of Goan culture not merely for the songs she gave, and continues to give, life to, but for the kind of sexuality that she embodies. Her voice does not contain the sickly saccharine and shrill sweetness that marks so much of Hindi film music and embodies virginal, self-effacing purity. Her voice is an earthy one that can roar if there be need for it. The woman that her voice gives life to is conscious of her sexuality and vocal about her desires. It is this kind of mature sexuality that Palomi Ghosh, the lead actress who plays Donna, fails to capture. Rather than the strong woman of Lorna’s life story, for the most part one sees the depiction of a slightly nervous, giggly girl. This is such a shame. One wishes that the lady is memorialised through the naming of a public institution or space after her. Failing that, this film will be one that will memorialise those artists who despite their substantial productions and innovations seem doomed to be kept out of the Indian and statal imagination.

Nachom-ia Kumpasar is a great film devoid of the humiliating clichés that are the stock of Indian filmic depictions of Goan Catholics. The film achieves this feat not because it emerges from within the community, but because it engages politically with the history and the ethos of the community and unapologetically airs a long-held grievance.

(I would like to thank the members of the Al-Zulaij Collective, especially R. Benedito Ferrão and Dale Luis Menezes for their comments on earlier versions of this text. I claim ownership of all errors in the text.

A version of this post was first published in Round Table India. My thanks to them for the opportunity.
The text was subsequently translated into Konkani by Dale Luis Menezes and published in the March 2015 edition of the magazine Gulab.)

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.