Rights trump culture: Lessons in fighting Hindutva

There was a significant amount of virtual rejoicing some weeks ago when the vice-president of the state BJP unit, Wilfred Mesquita, announced that "Prohibition cannot come to Goa... because Goa's culture is to drink." Mesquita’s statement came in the wake of a number of recent controversies involved with moral policing both within the country and also in Goa. Both Chief Minister Parrikar and his colleague Sudhin Dhavalikar had expressed opinions about the need to ban the consumption of alcohol in public. Given that the state government of Kerala had announced a decision to enforced a gradual prohibition of alcohol in that state, and the abandon with which the Hindu right has been going about its agenda of cultural rectification of the country the Dhavalikar-Parrikar comments understandably unnerved many in the state.

We owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Mesquita for having had the moral courage and the good sense to point out that prohibition is out of the question when alcohol is a part of the social rituals among a good portion of the Goan public. May he live long and prosper.

As relieved as we may be by Misquita's statement, it needs to be pointed out that basing the decision to not ban the consumption of alcohol on the basis of its presence in “culture” is not a reassuring fact. Indeed, such a logic is problematic because it is still very much within the Hindutva realm of reasoning.

Hindu nationalism is a cultural nationalism. This is to say that it is a nationalism that privileges culture (as defined by Hindu nationalists) first. All else, including rights, comes after this definition of culture. The opposition to prohibiting an act on the basis of culture is to give primacy to culture, not to rights. Thus, what would happen if there was no culture of social drinking in Goa? Would it be ok to ban drinking then?

This question is important because it is at the root of determining the extent of the censorship powers of the State. The question is one of the extent of the powers of the state to curtail activities of persons, and of the recognition of right of the individual to choose. If I choose to drink, then regardless of whether it is a part of our culture or not, I should be able to drink, and have the right to purchase alcohol for consumption.

Phrasing the question in terms of alcohol, whose consumption is marred by instances of alcoholism, is not the best way to phrase a question of rights. Indeed, members of the right often use the most extreme example to make their case and carry through decisions. If we replaced alcohol with skirts, for example, we may see the dangers involved in invoking culture as the basis to allow, or prohibit an activity. If the wearing of skirts were not commonplace among women in Goa, would it be legitimate to ban the wearing of skirts? Of course not, because one would then be treading on the rights of women to wear skirts should they choose to do so. The law is known to place reasonable restrictions on the rights that citizens enjoy. Should one gravely inconvenience others provisions already exist to remand persons causing a nuisance through drunken behaviour. In the presence of this reasonable restriction the introduction of prohibition does nothing more than allow for the state to exercise unreasonable authority over the ordinary lives of people.

Problematising culture as a way to attack or defend culture also helps to make us aware how institutions that are today crying foul, have been a part of the gradual drift towards the right. Back in the 1980s, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Goa came out strongly against the celebration of Carnaval insisting that it was not a Catholic celebration. Indeed, it did so more recently, once again when Parrikar waded into debates on what is or is not appropriate local culture. In doing so the hierarchy sought to delegitimise Carnaval celebrations. In doing so they were committing a number of errors that haunt us today and will no doubt haunt us in the future. The hierarchy was effectively suggesting that only the religious lives of the Catholics in Goa was worthy of respect. The rest could be dismissed and done away with. They were also setting themselves up as the determiners of all cultural activities that persons who confess the Catholic faith engage in. This was, and continue to be a dangerous position. As much as the Catholic Church has a right to advise its members on the manner of their comportment, it cannot determine what is, or is not part, of the activity of Catholics in Goa. While the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Goa may not be fond of carnival, it ought to have taken a broader perspective and indicated that while Carnaval was not a Catholic religious feast, and the hierarchy had reservations with regard to some of the ways in which it is celebrated, it would not deny that Carnaval is a significant celebration with historical roots in Goa, and especially among Catholics in Goa. We live in a complex world and the only way in which we can prevent institutions, both statal and otherwise, from becoming autocratic monsters is by paying close attention to the rights of individuals.

Despite making culture the basis on which he dismissed the prohibition of alcohol, Mesquita also needs to be congratulated for not making the social consumption of alcohol a feature of Catholics alone. Almost all reports indicate that his statement was “Goans drink at wedding and parties. How can it be banned?” Thus, it was not Catholics drink at social events, but Goans.  This makes sense given that it is not merely Catholicism that determines whether people drink alcohol socially or not, since people were fermenting and producing alcohol long before both Europeans and Christians came to this territory. The European, and possibly Christian, origins of the consumption of alcohol is just one strand in the history of alcohol consumption in the territory.

To return to the thrust of my argument, making culture the basis on which decisions are made will also push us further into the ire of the Hindutva tiger. Given that it is the non-brahmanical culture of Goa that they see as a problem, decisions to protect certain social activities on the basis of culture will work to only strengthen the resolve of these groups to attack the cultural manifestations of Catholics, and other non-brahmanical groups, in Goa. We need to turn the tables on the forces of the right (which includes not merely the forces of Hindutva) and assert that rights are the basis of public policy.

Mesquita's statement may have won us the battle therefore, but will it win us the war?

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo on 5 Sept 2014)

No Carnaval in Paradise: The impossibilities of Carnaval in a post-Christian world

There is a certain familiarity that Lisbon brings to the Goan visitor. The place is full of familiar names, figures and remembrances. In this context, a friend suggested that rather than think that it was Portuguese names that Goans bore, it was in fact Goan names that the Portuguese carried with them. Goa, in other words, is where Portugal originated.

Now this suggestion seems facile, ridiculous even. We would do well to remember though, that history is always an artifice, a construction of ideas, emphasizing some aspects rather than others, the direction of some flows, rather than others. Much writing and thinking, especially within Portugal, begins from the assertion of Portugal’s gift of culture to the world. Where there is talk of counterflows, the influence of the colonized is seen as only ornamental, superficial. The colonized has not really impacted on the famed continental Portuguese soul.

I am led to these ruminations by my thoughts this last Carnaval. Through the entire festival, I was possessed by a strange irritation; an irritation I just could not figure out. I was sure it had to do with my conviction that Carnaval is a tropical feast, and my being out of Goa and missing the passion with which Carnaval is celebrated in Goa. I argued in my last column that the Goan Carnval is now a brief and gaudy lament for a lost citizenship which is why we Goans are still so passionately celebrate it. It was after seeing my thoughts on paper, that it all came together, and I could place a finger on an alternate source of my irritation.

‘These silly Portuguese are not doing it right’ I kept thinking, holding Goan practice to be the model-type. And indeed why not, since as I will go on to argue, the Goan Carnaval continues to approximate the ideal of what Carnaval is supposed to be. The Portuguese Carnaval simply has ‘to suck’ as a Lisboeta friend put it, because it has largely lost any context that a Carnaval ought to have.

The hierarchy of the Goan Catholic Church may disapprove of it; and our last gasp of fun, before Lent may not quite be the spirit in which we ought to approach Lent. However, we must recognize that the fact that Lent is still taken fairly seriously provides a significant context for the Goan Carnaval. Even if we do not abstain during Lent, the Goan Catholic enters into a social context, not different from that experienced by the errant Muslim during Ramzaan. In not abstaining we recognize deep down, that it is we, the non-abstainers, who are the aberration. In the post-Christian society that Portugal has become, the absence of the tension of restraint that Lent provides to the periods of moral laxity and consumptive excess through the rest of the year, results in a Carnaval without an edge.

The Catholic faith in Portugal has been largely replaced by a more secular faith, that of the ceaseless worship of Mammon, through constant consumption and sensorial gratification. Ghalib perhaps captured it best in his couplet; ‘Hazaron qwahishein aisi ki har qwahish pe dum niklen; bahuth nikle merey armaan, phir bhi kum niklen’ (Thousands of desires, each worth dying for...many of them I have realized...yet I yearn for more...). My perspective is to be sure partial and biased. I am but a few months a Lisboeta, and live in close proximity to Bairro Alto, the veritable temple courtyard of Mammon in Lisbon. In this location, and to quote the Hindi poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan in his poem Madhushala, ‘Every day is Holi, and every night Diwali’.

Carnaval is necessarily a period of abandon, when we create a fleeting material paradise of plenty, to contrast with the daily deprivations we may suffer. As such, it is also a festival with stresses our relationship to the corporeal. When in this consumeristic world, every day is a Carnaval, and want is almost unknown, what sense in having a half week of Carnaval just once a year?

Portugal may be poor, its standards of living lower than in the rest of Europe, and yet, this is not the poverty of its not-so-distant past. It has, despite its grumbling, and it has to be said that the Portuguese lo-ove to grumble, settled comfortably into the Pax Europeana. This Pax is what Foucault has would have called governmentality. A situation where by and large our every material need is taken care off, or at least entertainment and distractions provided if it is not. Portugal’s needs may not be taken care of, but it definitely lives within a bureaucratic and consumeristic net where the edge of frustrated desires are blunted. The Goan Carnaval, as I laboured to indicate last week, is powered by the desire to incarnate a radically different citizenship from the one we currently inhere in. At Carnaval, we dance on the edge of that desire.

Goa, and indeed much of the world, lives outside of such a Pax. We may all be made of the same flesh and blood, but thanks to this Pax, this net of distraction, we realize our bodies (our corpus) in radically different ways from those in the European continent. It is perhaps a realization of this radical difference in corporeality, and the ensuing impossibility of Carnaval in Lisbon, that was at the basis of my irritation through Carnaval this year.

The time of Carnaval, and its relationship to the world, is an ideal. Once we are admitted into this reality, there is no new or old, authentic or pretender. When Portugal (or the colonizer) falls away from this ideal, it is indeed, Goa (or the colony) that becomes the model. The colony then, is where the metropole, can now originate from.

(A version of this column was first published in the Gomantak Times, 24 Feb 2010)

Credits

Image No.1 - Campo das Cebolas - Lisbon
http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/photo1087357.htm

Image No. 2 - Carnaval in Lisbon - 1907
http://xafarica.weblog.com.pt/arquivo/158121.html

Image No. 3 - The Fight Between Carnival and Lent - artwork by Pieter Bruegel
http://apor.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/%C2%ABdominica-ad-carne-levandas%C2%BB/

Image No.4 - Roman Triumph
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2008/02/new-roman-empire.html

Carnaval and Citizenship: Capturing the streets without barricades

Year after year, since I began this column, I would, around this time of the year, dutifully trot out a column dedicated to Carnaval. The column would try to contemplate the political significance of Carnaval, gesturing toward its radical potential in overturning norms that normally mark the status quo. Even today, as I think about it, in a severely hierarchical society like India, including Goa, the spring festivals of Holi and Carnaval provide a welcome release for those who have to through the year suffer the insufferable.

This year brings different emotions however, born no doubt from my presence in a different context. This year, I find myself in a city where a number of us would believe that our Carnaval practices were born. As yet, this has to be the most lackluster Carnaval I have had in years. Perhaps we can put it down to the fact of rain that seems to pour down interminably. Carnaval to my mind is necessarily a tropical feast. The cold, frigid rains of northern climes do not sit well with my imagination of the feast. Or it could be the fact that there has not as yet been a public parade like I am used to in the land of my birth. Be that as it may, so far this year, at the time of the writing of this column, Carnaval sucks.

But this is a good emotion; this disenchantment. The disenchantment is

a good emotion because it provides another position from which to think this entire festival through. For a number of us Goans, Carnaval is a time not only of wild celebration, but a time of lament as well. We gather to celebrate and lament the better times that were had before. As I lament this year, for entirely different reasons than the passing of good times, I ask myself if Carnaval has not gained the significance that it does because it is a primarily a time when we mourn something besides the past.

As I have mentioned before, the point of Carnaval is to invert dominant morality for ever so short a period. The Goan Carnaval, however much we may lament the passing of its great age, does invert a morality. It inverts the sanctimonious morality that comes along with the Indian State. Whether this is done to boost the inflow of the tourist rupee or not, the call to inversion allows Goans to flood the streets, drink and dance. In doing so, with the Carnaval parades, with the dances, the drinking, the intruz, they do something that would ordinarily be quite unthinkable. In doing this however, they also celebrate the possibility of a Republic that might have been.

But this articulation of a desired citizenship is no simple articulation of a Goan consciousness. It is part nostalgia; partly fed by the nervousness of a insecure Catholic minority; and partly conceived through the Goan State’s own construction of the Goan identity. Whether we like it or not, the construction of the idea of Goa has critically impacted on Goans, regardless of whether they are Catholic, or Hindu.

There is no other reason that I can think of to explain the gusto with which most Goans I know reach out to use the Carnaval to wear saris and dance in the street, to get on to ridiculous floats, to shave their legs, to capture the street in a couple of brief gaudy hours. What is going on is nothing less than at attempt to assert the possibility for another kind of citizenship that the kind that is currently on offer.

I understand citizenship as the complex of relationships between citizen and State. This bond encompasses a number of relationships that include the political, moral and cultural. It is embodied in the manner in which certain things are allowed, and certain things disallowed. The manner in which you may behave in public, and ways in which you may not. Ways in which political leaders may behave and ways in which they may not.

Take a closer look at the occurrences in Goan public life, and you will realize that since the start of our post-colonial existence, we have constantly been attempting to define the nature of citizenship in this tiny space. The dynamics of this relationship are to be sure over-determined by the inertia of the Indian political system within in which we operate, but between the spaces of the framework there are multiple attempts to configure the dynamics of citizenship in Goa.

The Bahujan Samaj’s bid for Marathi and merger, the ramponcars movement in the 80s, the definition of Goan identity primarily around Konkani, the demand for the recognition of the Roman script for Konkani. In more recent times we have sought to define Goan identity to include a definite spatial aesthetic. Urban design, as I have argued in earlier columns, encompasses definite social relations. We now demand a ‘Special Status’ for Goa. Look closely and away from the immediate issue and you will see that what underlies all these issues is a desire to cast Goan citizenship in very definite ways. There are social movements in many other states in this country. Yet I wonder if they blossom with such frequency in other places, as they do in Goa.

Carnaval is one such time when this desire to recast citizenship is expressed. Not necessarily by all, but definitely some definite segments of our population. This column will be published only after the fires of our desires have been put to ashes. And yet, who knows, some day those fires will burn long enough to brand the world around us? One only hopes that it will reforge the bonds of citizenship with a tendency towards greater equality, rather than the tendency toward autochthony that we so increasingly see.

Viva Carnaval!

(A version of this blog was first published in the Gomantak Times, 17 Feb 2010)

Credits

Holi image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/88411058@N00/3367900205/