Through the Looking Glass: Examining memories of the Estado da Índia Portuguesa

image obtained via:
https://dsgnarchive.com/restoration-of-goan-portuguese-house-567/

A few weeks ago, while dwaddling in the bye-lanes of social media I ran into an antique image of the streets of Lisbon decorated to celebrate a public festival. The caption indicated that this was an image of the celebration of the establishment of the Estado da Índia in Lisbon. The image had been shared from its original source by a group whose postings I follow and in this group the image was accompanied by a caustic observation “When the Portuguese had a memory”.

I smiled, if somewhat sadly, at this observation because I knew it to be true. The Estado da Índia Portuguesa is only a fading memory in contemporary Portugal.  Younger generations in this Iberian country are less likely to know, or feel strongly even if they know, about the Portuguese territories in South Asia because this history is no longer fed by state propaganda. For most contemporary Portuguese, Índia Portuguesa is something that is in the past, and for some, as I will soon demonstrate, an object that is perhaps safest in the past.

There was a curious timing to my viewing this image and caption, because just a few days prior to this my attention was drawn to another link on a social media group. This link highlighted the interview conducted for the Portuguese newspaper Diário de Notícias with Luís Filipe Castro Mendes, a Portuguese diplomat who was ambassador to India between 2007 and 2011. The link drew the readers’ attention to the following quotation, which I reproduce in the original Portuguese and will then translate to English:

... vou-lhe contar uma história: uma aristocrata [Goesa], dessa classe dominante, era uma salazarista militante e um dia vem a Lisboa visitar Salazar. Ele diz-lhe que ela fala muito bem português e ela responde que é portuguesa. Ele pergunta-lhe se tinha sido o pai ou o avô que tinham ido para Goa, mas ela fica gelada e responde-lhe que a família é católica e portuguesa desde o século XVII. Na cabeça do Salazar, para aqueles lados eram todos selvagens debaixo de coqueiros e toda a civilização que tinha ido para lá era da Europa.

[I’ll tell you a story: an aristocrat [a Goan lady] of this dominant class was a supporter of Salazar and one day comes to Lisbon to visit Salazar. He tells her that she speaks Portuguese very well and she replies that she is Portuguese. He asks her if it was the father or grandfather who had gone to Goa, but she gets frosty and replies that the family is Catholic and Portuguese since the 17th century. In Salazar’s head, those parts of the world were populated by savages under coconut trees and all the civilization that existed there was that which had gone there from Europe.]

There is a moral to Ambassador Castro Mendes’ narration. It participates in the demonisation of Salazar that marks the Third Portuguese Republic and offers an example of why the confidence that the Portuguese people, in this case the segment of the Goan aristocracy of which this lady was a representative, was misplaced. Salazar, in this telling, was nothing but a racist boor and an entirely irredeemable character in the long story of Portuguese history.

This, then, is the kind of memory that is being built up in contemporary Portugal of the former Estado da Índia Portuguesa, or at least this is the way that I read Ambassador Castro Mendes’ reminiscence – that the quincentennial history of Goa with the Portuguese is intimately related primarily to Salazar and the Estado Novo and for this reason the longer history of Goa and its relationship with Portugal should therefore be treated like a bad dream that we move on from now. If Portugal has moved on from Salazar, to the Third Portuguese Republic, Goa (that central constituent of Portuguese India) has also moved on, and is now part of a democratic India, which despite the current challenges, Ambassador Castro Mendes is confident, will always remain democratic.

I would not like to contest the truth content of the anecdote related by Ambassador Castro Mendes. First, because I know the Ambassador personally, recognise him to be a scrupulously honest man and count him among my friends, even if we have somewhat different political positions. Secondly, because even if Ambassador Castro Mendes reads this anecdote that he narrated in the way I suggested above, counting on its veracity, I read it in a somewhat different manner.

My reading does not seek to reprieve Salazar, on the contrary it relies on Salazar actually having said and thought the things attributed to him, because the response of the Goan aristocrat is more interesting. When she realises that along with the nature of her Portuguese-ness, the antiquity of her noble ancestry is being questioned, she turns frosty. This is not the response of an underling. This lady is affronted and even though she is speaking with the de facto head of state she is willing to put him in his place and dispel his offensive ignorance. This is not an unusual feature of the Goan aristocracy.  Goan public memory delights in recounting how in the Portuguese Governor Fernando de Quintanilha da Mendonca Dias slapped the Goan Antonio Bruto da Costa in the course of a vigorous argument. Rather than take this humiliation lying down, Adv. Bruto da Costa returned the slap, leading to a fistfight between the two men which – according to the memoirs of an ADC present in the room – the Goan won.

This willingness to stand up for themselves was a feature of Goan elite of the times, but also speaks to the nature of Portuguese citizenship that we continue to be heirs to. Portuguese citizenship was not some gift that simply dropped from the lap of the Portuguese monarchy, and subsequently the various republics. It was a right that was wrested from the realm of the legal discourse and concretely realised through the activism and self-assertion of the Goan elite. The Goan elites, and we the Goan people who are their political descendants, were not Portuguese because of some accident of history, or some coercion. No, they were – and we are if we chose it – Portuguese because we actively engaged with the circumstances of the time and asserted our equality within the order in which we found ourselves. We would do well to remember this.

The narratives that are established by contemporary Portuguese elites, and Indian nationalist elites whether Goan or otherwise, often mask the agency demonstrated by the Goan people – whether elite or otherwise – in the course of their history. The Goans took the Portuguese framework that they were placed in, and cleverly, and bravely, asserted themselves within that frame. They asserted a unique culture within that framework, where they were Portuguese while simultaneously Goan. We should not forget that Goans were not victims of history, and they should not be.

 (A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo published on 9 Aug 2023)

Plotting for a Catholic Politics in Goa

Some months ago, I became aware of a curious trend on local social media. It appeared that there was a systematic pattern where local news agencies would release little phrases, or headlines, often quoting the chief minister of the state. Take, for example, the references to the dubious policy of the present government to reconstruct temples allegedly demolished by the Portuguese. Interestingly, none of these phrases could be used as the basis to prosecute the speakers. They could very easily be explained away, as indeed this temple policy has been cleverly explained away in the face of public outrage.

In fact, it appears that these phrases were cleverly designed to vitiate the public discourse in the state, one small, innocuous, drop at a time, till we wake up one fine morning to realise that the entire well has been poisoned. Impossible to address them individually, it will be even more difficult if not impossible, to address the damage once these little provocations have done their work, which is to provoke the communal passions of those in the state, and principally the passions of those groups who have been constructed as the “majority community”. We know, of course, that there is no such thing as a majority or minority community. Rather some communities are, often consciously and deliberately, designed as majority, while others are pushed into minority positions. These news bytes I refer to seemed similarly designed to not just further deepen the minoritisation that has been systematically taking place of the Catholics in the state, but also to create an emotionally volatile situation in the state, such that violence seems to be the only possible response.

Marveling at the wickedness of this stratagem, I realised that it was only a matter of time before we started behaving as Catholics, Muslims, and Hindus, rather than as members of a common political community. Indeed, this time is already here, and to some extent has been here since the integration of Goa into the Indian Union in 1961. It is just that things are going to soon reach a whole new level of crazy in the coming years.

If it is to be the case that we are going to have to start operating as Catholics first, what is to be the nature of this Catholic politics in Goa? I am personally convinced that these politics should most certainly not be identitarian in nature. Rather they should be ethical. To an extent we do not really have a choice, since even the Catholics in the state have taken up ethical positions, the opposition to the routing of the Konkan railway, for example, or tourism in the state, it has often been represented as communal in nature.

The Latin inscription reads:

 "We shall attain the excellence of virtue with the grace of God and the effort of our will."

https://flic.kr/p/3JmbGh

Nevertheless, there is something we can do, which to my mind has not yet been attempted in the state. It is my proposal that we shift to cultivating among Goans a politics of the classical and Christian virtues, and thus have a long-term project in mind, rather than focus solely on short-term issues, where the agenda is set not by us, but by others. Sun Tzu, the Taoist author of the treatise The Art of War would no doubt agree with me that one should always choose the terrain of battle, rather than fight on a terrain chosen by the opponent.

The appeal of cultivating the virtues among Catholics is immediately obvious. In an age where cynicism and the naked pursuit of either power or pleasure, or worse, both, is the norm in Goan politics, whether social or electoral, speaking of the virtues will offer an ethical framework where we can pause and evaluate our actions and those of others. Additionally, given its classical origins, these virtues are in fact shared across religious groups. Thus, while our effort will be directed primarily to Catholics, this discourse can just as easily be shared across religious boundaries.

Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude; these are the cardinal, or moral, virtues, handed down to us via the Hellenistic (the Graeco-Roman) world and further elaborated on within the Catholic intellectual tradition. To these four cardinal virtues, these Christian intellectuals, added the theological virtues, of hope, faith, and charity. In a time when social politics seems to have largely forgotten that this world is not restricted to the material, but has a spiritual or transcendental element, these latter virtues would offer us a way to move beyond the superficiality of the cynical politics of our age.

Another reason why I believe that the cultivation of the virtues is a good idea is because it also involves an intellectual element. One has to grow in the three intellectual virtues: knowledge, understanding and eventually wisdom. The reduction of our horizon to just the material world, and our activities essentially to (frenzied) consumption, has resulted in a situation where all we are interested in is accumulation of knowledge, or information. There is largely no movement toward relating that information to obtain understanding, and then moving on to the contemplation of these understandings that leads to wisdom.

There is no development of the virtuous life if it is not accompanied by a life of the mind. Classically there was an understanding of the crucial role that the intellect played in strengthening the will and tempering our desires. It must be acknowledged that despite our best efforts we in Goa have been lacking on this front. The reason for this lack is not, as I have suggested above, for lack of trying, but because our intellectual efforts have been largely restricted to the secular frame of liberal modernity. Left almost entirely untouched is the deep river of the Catholic intellectual tradition, which boasts persons like St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, and by adoption the classical philosophers like Aristotle. How many Catholics in Goa are aware, in any depth, of this intellectual tradition?


An engagement with this tradition will allow us to move beyond the rousing of the faithful for short-term political movements. Rather it will develop within them the ability to think deeply, and independently, and more importantly act instinctively to prefer virtuous living. All too often, despite our protestations, too many of us are invested in the deeply unvirtuous public life that marks contemporary Goa. If you can’t beat them, join them, seems to be our attitude.

A politics that rests on the practice of the virtues seems to me the best way forward into the mess that will mark twenty-first century Goa. It is a politics that is categorically not identitarian, and that with time will offer a solid mass of virtuous actors who will block the further descent of Goa into the darkness that threatens. 

 (A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo dated 14 Dec 2022).

In Hoc Signo...

image via https://planetgoaonline.com/the-cross-the-tulsi/

Late last month the leader of the RSS Mohan Bhagwat affirmed that all persons living in India are Hindus. Given that this assertion is a core part of the RSS imagination, he has not been the only person to say so, with one of our former Chief Ministers having also stated that Catholics in Goa are culturally Hindu. At the time a number of Goan scholars jointly offered a nuanced response to this latter assertion, indicating that, in fact, Goans were culturally Catholic. It would be fair to say, however, that while many Goans were culturally Catholic, nowadays, with the rise of Hindu nationalism, this cultural constitution is changing, and with scary consequences.

We need to take a rather large detour to appreciate this suggestion.

It is commonplace, both popularly and in scholarly discourse, to declare that the crosses that one finds by the wayside, and other locations, especially in the Velhas Conquistas, were placed there by European missionaries to displace the deities and spirits that the local population, now converted to Catholicism, used to worship earlier. This assertion always carries with it the suggestion that this missionary act was one of violence, or an attempt to trick people, over generations, to worship a foreign God.

What no one seems to consider, however, is that the locals who had converted to Christianity may have been the ones to erect the cross or request the erection of a cross in those locations. The ignoring of this possibility is not surprising, since as Aditi Shirodkar, scholar from Chicago University, demonstrates in her doctoral thesis, there is never any attribution of agency, or self-determination, to the locals. There is just an assumption that the locals followed the missionaries as if they were Mary’s little lambs.

But the fact that the erection of crosses was not a single act, but a continuous one, carried on over time, and following an ancient logic, but within a Christian meaning system, or world view, became obvious to me a few weeks ago. Travelling from Britona to Salvador do Mundo I came across a cross on the khazans that I have seen multiple times, but this time something clicked. The cross was erected to the memory of a young man who reportedly met with an accident and died there, at what was once a very lonely spot. The logic for erecting this cross can possibly be traced to an ancient pre-Christian logic, which says that persons who die violent deaths become restless bloodthirsty spirits. As I have discussed elsewhere, this belief is also the origin of the Zambaulim Damodar temple, which was originally built to satiate the spirit of a brahmin groom Damodar, killed on the edge of the village as his wedding party returned to his home. According to this belief, the restless spirit could be appeased by a blood sacrifice – whether animal or human – once a year.

It is at this point that Christianity offers what was possibly a welcome relief to those who had earlier followed these pre-Christian beliefs. For the logic of the cross is that Christ has offered the one and single sacrifice through his death on the cross. There is no more need for any bloody sacrifices. I have no doubt that this was a welcome news to the neo-Christian communities in Goa, especially those from the working castes who were the ones most in contact with the spirits that ruled pre-Christian Goa, and from whom sacrificial victims would most likely be chosen. These blood-thirsty and violent spirits lived on the borders of, and outside, the safe environs of the village and were known to cause harm to innocents straying into their territory. For these working persons, it made sense to erect a cross, sign of the great sacrifice that abolished all others. All one now needed to do was pray to Christ, vanquisher of the greatest of evil spirits and death itself. For those who died violent deaths, bloody sacrifice could now be replaced by prayers for the soul of these persons. The Roman Emperor Constantine reportedly saw a vision of a cross surrounded by the words “In Hoc Signo Vinces” (Under this sign you will conquer) prior to the battle which won him the title of Caesar. Our convert ancestors too would have realised that they would conquer a malign spiritual world under the sign of the cross. As is repeated so often in Konkani before every rosary, “Povitr Khursache  kurven Amcheam dusmanantlim Nivaramkam, amchea Deva”. If, therefore, we today encounter crosses at various places, like at the sluice gates of the various manos, or in fields, or hillsides, it is because the cross was possibly erected there by the native peoples who embraced Catholicism, since it liberated them from the blood thirstiness of the ancien regime.

The capriciousness of this ancient regime was substantially visible more recently when the switch from one party to another was justified by reference to the time-honoured practice of kaul prasad – divination by consulting a deity. The MLA who so justified his switching of electoral parties has been mocked substantially, but it is important to believe him, and take his action at face value, in the process respecting not just him but also the divination practice that he used to arrive at a decision. Indeed, if one looks at the way in which his actions were received in the media, one can discern that he was being judged – both by Christians and Hindus – according to Christian standards, suggesting he had spoken to the one God, rather than any one of the multiple deities that are peculiar to the non-Christian world the MLA belongs to.

If we mock his decision it is because, contrary to the assertions of a number of contemporary ideologues, we have all – regardless of the religions we profess – internalised Christian values which demand a certain ethical rigour. To such a mind, the fickleness of a yes today, and a no tomorrow, even from a deity is not well regarded. But this erratic behaviour was the nature of the pre-Christian ethical world, which was marked by a range of belief systems, many of them being substantially capricious and beholden to unpredictable deities.

The flip in the decision of this elected representative was not the last example of the dark possibilities contained within a non-Christian worldview. Some days after the departure to the ruling party, two individuals visited the temple of Bogdeshwar in Mapuça and offered the deity nine bananas,  betel leaves and areca nuts with a prayer that the deity teach the eight defecting MLAs ‘a lesson’. This request for ‘a lesson’ sounds suspiciously like a curse, and is unknown to the Christian ethic – which commands that we love and pray for those who do us evil and persecute us.

With the rise of Hindu nationalism, ably assisted by the scholarly project of postcolonialism and all manner of woke politics, the Christian worldview that was dominant not just in Goa, but to some extent in (British)India as well, has gradually started being eclipsed, such that we are able to see pre-Christian worldviews re-emerge. These worldviews are not necessarily benign, which, interestingly, shows us why our first-Catholic ancestors would have gladly taken to Catholicism, and actively embraced the worldview taught to them by the European missionaries.

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo on 12 Oct 2022).

Language and Education: Refuting the lies on forked tongues

An easy way to respond to the small, but very vocal group, that insists that all state-supported schools in Goa impart education in the vernacular medium would be to point out that this group is animated essentially by Hindu nationalists. Their dangerous ideology is perilous to the health and well-being of all in this country, as is being demonstrated in the criminally negligent way in which the ongoing pandemic crisis is being managed.

Such a response is not, however, sufficient to understand why this group gets adherents, even among those who may not overtly identify with Hindu nationalism; and to offer a reasoned rebuttal of their problematic arguments.

The primary, and perhaps the best, argument of this group is it claims to offer a scientific reason, but which is best described as pseudo-scientific. They argue that young children are best educated in their ‘mother-tongue’. Prima facie this is, in fact, a logical argument. A young learner, especially a first-generation learner, would perhaps learn best in their first language, rather than through a second language for which they have no support outside of the classroom. The fundamental flaw with this argument, however, is the assumption that the vernacular medium is the first language of the student.

Take the case of Konkani, or even Marathi, as taught in schools. Highly sanskritised forms of dominant caste version of the languages, they bear little resemblance to the language spoken by the student in the home. We are familiar with the argument of the many Konkani-speaking Catholics in Goa who argue that as adults they have difficulty in understanding the Sanskritised Konkani that is introduced to their children in school. The response to this argument is to challenge the validity of the Konkani spoken by Catholics. And this is exactly the problem with the insistence that the medium of instruction necessarily be in the vernacular, that this vernacular is actually not a vernacular at all, i.e., it is not the language spoken by the child in the home. It is the official state language, which is very often quite divergent from the natal language of the child. In effect, with instruction being provided in the official language(s) of the state, the child still has to struggle with a second language.

If such is the case, then the valid counter-argument is: why should the parents not decide which (second) language to have their children educated in? Surely it is the right of the parents to decide what is best for their children? The state cannot be said to enjoy this right; it merely has an obligation to enable the parents to exercise their rights. To not recognise this fact would push us towards authoritarianism, which as we see from the experience unfolding around us, is exactly the kind of political regime that Hindu nationalism is comfortable with.

Equipping their children for social mobility is one of the aims of all parents – including those who cannot afford private education. It is primarily for this reason that parents opt for English as a language of formal education. They know for a fact that an international language opens up wider vistas for their children. The vernacular languages, on the contrary, tend to limit the capacities of their children not simply because these languages are restricted in scope, but also because these idioms are tied to the very local casteist social regime. The fact is that the official languages of states in India, and especially in Goa, are largely pegged to the linguistic form of the Brahmin, which in Goa means the Gaud Saraswat brahmin. As such, no matter how well a person learns this form, the ultimate arbiter of the perfection of the language will always be a Saraswat, and all others, will be seen as trying to reach the ideal. In other words, with an education in the official language of the State, not only are one’s horizons limited, but one is also chained to subservience in a grossly unequal socio-political order.

The argument of those demanding compulsory education in the vernacular also draws on the emotional charge of respect for the mother-tongue. Capitalising on the love that one feels for one’s mother, and the desire to show her respect, these activists suggest that a desire to be educated in English is to show disrespect for one’s mother-tongue. We have already seen how the medium of instruction used in schools is not the mother-tongue of students, but in fact a second language. The concept of the mother-tongue is an invention from the late-eighteenth to nineteenth century. This was the period when both in Europe and subsequently across the colonized world there was an attempt to build national states.

Language was used to build national communities and for this reason language was represented as a mother, and individuals presented as children of this mother with a duty to protect her. The relationship with language was more complex prior to this period. One did, of course, belong to a language group, but one’s socio-political relationship was not entirely determined by belonging to one language group, or any single social group. On the contrary, a person belonged to multiple groups. One could speak one language to one’s caste group, for example, and another language in the bazaar. For those who belonged to elite groups, or merchant groups, the number of languages that they could speak increased. Take the Saraswats who operated as translators (Dubash) for the regional courts. They spoke their caste form of Konkani within the home, spoke Marathi in the Maratha courts, and Portuguese in the Portuguese establishment for which they worked. It is inconceivable that these men, who benefited in all these situations, would argue that they did not belong to these multiple worlds. The argument of respect for the mother-tongue, therefore, is merely a cheap exercise in sentimentality, which cannot and must not, be allowed to trump the rights, and the futures, of persons.

(A version of this text was first published in Fr. Agnel's Call, Vol.56, June 2021, pp. 10-11.)