Churches and temples and mosques! Oh My!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(A version of this post was first published in the Herald dated 13 June 2014)

The Taxi gangs and Mafia of Goa? Placing issues in perspective

Since around May this year, there have been a number of reports on the manner in which the tourist-taxi system in Goa works. This attention has been ensured thanks to the reportedly aggressive behavior by the taxi-operators (taxistas), by their request to the government to handle the disputes between the taxi-operator associations in North and South Goa, and the demand by a variety of organizations to ensure that the operation of these taxis is regulated by meters in these taxis.

Given that the taxi system could, and must, operate as a viable supplement to the public transport system in our state, it would be in our best interest to ensure that this segment of the public transport system is well-regulated and accessible to all. Having said this however, it is also necessary to assert that one cannot ensure the fair and honest resolution of a problem by demonizing one party and laying all of the blame at their feet. This is exactly what seems to be happening however, via the various newspaper reports, where it is the taxistas alone who are being faulted as being exploitative, demanding ridiculously exorbitant charges, as well as violently aggressive towards their customers.

The aim of this column is to suggest a more sympathetic viewing of the taxistas, one that moves away from demonizing them, so that we could move toward a just resolution of the problem. As such, the first task would be to question whether the manner in which we view the taxistas is not in fact tinted by class-based prejudices. A recent article in The Goan allows us to place this possibility in context, given that it uses two highly inappropriate words, mafia and gangs, for the informal associations of the taxistas. These words demonstrate the manner in which these groups are not only being demonized but are effectively being criminalized. It is not surprising that these adjectives were being used for groups from South Goa given that there is a long Goan history of depicting the working class Saxticar as unthinking, hot-headed and violent. Every major Goan population has relied on the mass mobilization of Saxticars, but simultaneously has cast them as mobs without political savvy, setting in process this tendency to criminalize the Saxticar. This may also have to do with the kind of class-relations that marked colonial Salcette, given the large landholdings in that taluka, the unequal and oppressive relations between landlords and tenants, the tendency for the dominant class to see the genuine demands of the tenant class as illegitimate, and a situation where there was largely no option for the tenant but to acquiesce or revolt.

The article in The Goan, indicates that there are clashes between the various taxista groups in South Goa, where for example the taxistas in Margão, prevent taxistas from outside the city to operate, but while doing also locates a good reason for this behavior. This tabloid indicates that the State has thus far been remarkably absent in regulating the taxi-system, whether it is among legitimate taxi-operators, or private vehicles operating as taxis. In the absence of a fair and constant regulative presence therefore, it is little wonder that the field of taxistas has turned into the free-for-all that is being reported. Anecdotal observations further indicate that this free-for-all is also the result of the manner in which the State and elected representatives over time have, in the process of creating vote-banks, in fact created the problem by indiscriminately making available more cars for use as cabs, than the market is able to support. Given this situation of excess supply, it is little wonder that the taxistas are keen to ensure that they make as much money from their customers as they can.

Furthermore, while there have been many stories that present the customers as the victims of the predatory taxistas (as no doubt a good number may be), we must also place this plaint in perspective. As Jorge Fernandes, spokesperson for the South Goa Registered Tourist Taxi Association spokesperson is reported to have said “… without a formal meter, it’s the tourists that loot the local taxi operators and not the other way round as propagated by few vested interested people”. Bear in mind that it is not only the middle-class (whether Indian, or Goan) customers who are used to browbeating service providers into the cheapest possible deal, but also the tourists who visit Goa, who are famously known to have perfected skills of bargaining to ensure that services are offered at unsustainable rates.

What also bears comments, is that there is also something odious about the suggestions that are being made, and accepted by the taxista associations, of etiquette classes that the taxistas need toattend. It would be great if the taxistas were able to attend courses that would provide them a greater sense of the world, the nuances of the multiple social orders that they cater to, and the social skills required to do so. However, we shold ensure that such a program does not begin from the assumption that the taxistas in themselves are lacking. Such a course should not slip into one that urges taxi-drivers to wear shoes and socks, and perhaps prompting them to open doors for customers once they reach their destination. Such course content would emphatically NOT be about etiquette. It would be a class-based, Hollywood-fantasy inspired, desire of elitist segments of our society to convert service providers into servants. If the Goan taxista has a sense of self-worth that makes him (since it is invariably a him) feel that the customer should also acclimatize to their sensibilities then we should in fact recognize that it has been this sense of self-worth that has even from colonial times marked off the Goan as different and special in the subcontinent. Where providing a taxi service is a way out of many individuals and families from earlier feudal relationships, we cannot in the process of upgrading the industry, push these groups back into conditions of servitude

Finally, the demand for a meter fails to take into consideration that Goa’s spatial arrangement, being deceptively ‘urbanesque’, is unlike other urban locations that are marked by a high population density needing, and willing to pay for transportation. It is quite possible for a taxi to be hired from the airport (in South Goa), to take the customer to Tivim for example, which not only does not offer a high-density market, but is also many precious petrol-kilometers away from the taxistas eventual destination. Any regulatory system, whether meter or otherwise, will have to take into consideration these logistical issues and the complexities of the market that the taxistas operate in.

The suggestion this column makes, is not that relations between the taxistas and their customers is absent of manipulation and aggression, but that this behavior is in fact being overdramatized because of the inherent class biases that we hold. Further, this column suggests that the behavior that reportedly exists in the taxi service industry is the result of a system, deliberated created by the political elite of the State. This is a clear indication of that oft-used Sanskrit aphorism, Yatha Raja, tatha praja (as the ruler, so with the people). This system of looting the system while there is stuff to loot (what ecological economists have called the tragedy of the commons) is not peculiar to the taxistas, but is a marked feature of the entire system in Goa, from political elites, to mining and other aspects of the tourist industry. In such a case, why blame the taxistas alone, and why start with them, definitely small fry in the larger picture, first?

Clearly then, what is required is not merely the introduction of meters into taxis, but the presence of a genuine regulatory system, one that does not operate merely to punish, but to ensure fair and equal treatment for all involved. Thus we do need a greater presence of the State in this scenario, but it is not merely a punitive police State, but a justice-concerned regulatory State. This latter State, most of us will acknowledge has been more than absent from Goa for a good many years. Furthermore, it is important for us to take off our prejudiced blinkers, stem the criminalized perspective from which we view the taxistas, and recognize that while actively contributing to the mess that the taxi-system in Goa is, they are as much victims of the system, and it would be more appropriate to see their behavior as the result of the position that they have been cast into.

(A version of this post was first published in the Gomantak Times 8 Aug 2012)

My way or the highway: Thoughts on the value of process

The O Heraldo carried a rather shocking report on the twenty-eighth of last month. Titled ‘Farmers, NGOs raise huts in Margao’, the report was about the unchecked vigilantism by a group of citizens, who in the face of the alleged lethargy of the State authorities about a collection of tents, decided to take it on themselves to demolish these make-shift dwellings. Subsequent to this demolition, these citizens then informed the authorities to make sure that the materials of these tents was carried away, and the tents not allowed to be set up again.

This report was tucked away in an internal page of the paper, and was a little fragment of the day’s news, which is tragic. The issue holds grave consequences for the state of civil society and governance in our State and should not be brushed away so lightly. To begin with, what we have here is a case of citizens taking the law into their own hands. There is no doubt that all too often the state machinery does not move fast enough for us, and indeed in many cases there appear good reasons for us to take the law into our own hands and set matters straight. To do so however, is to ensure that we are effectively going down the road of such groups as the Sri Ram Sene, who take it on themselves to institute a case, adjudicate it, and then execute the decision taken as per their sense of what the law should be. There has been a lot of debate in Goa as to whether we should allow the Ram Sene to enter Goa, and there should be this discussion. But alongside the pleas to the Chief Minister to ban the Ram Sense, there should also simultaneously be pleas to the Chief Minister to not take this thus-far-minor incident in Margão lightly. On the contrary, the Chief Minister should take stern action to ensure that the group that motivated this action is hauled up before the law and punished appropriately for its roguery. 

This actions by these so-called NGOs is perhaps more appalling because of their timing, and the nature of the groups that they were attacking. The news report indicated that the people living in these small tents were waste recyclers, and it was their fouling of the local area both with plastic waste that they could not recycle, as well as their excreta, that caused the attack to be carried out. We should be clear then, that this attack was one by middle-class persons against persons who would very well qualify as poor. That this action should have been carried out in the course of the monsoons, is perhaps the most inhumane part of the exercise. While there is no doubt that the tent-dwellers may have inconvenienced these middle-class groups, we must not forget that these persons would have no doubt also had older members of their families, as well as children who also lived in these tents. Thus, what this vigilante demolition effectively did, was to ensure not only that these vulnerable segments of already marginalized groups were forced to be without a roof over their head in the course of the pouring monsoon, but also ensure that these segments would have missed meals, for reasons of losing not just hearth, but possibly kitchen stocks as well. The heartlessness of this action should leave us speechless for shame!

Interestingly, these aspects of the incident were not included in the report on the incident. The report only included the opinions of these self-righteous vigilantes. To that extent one wonders whether the sympathies of the reporter lay with these vigilantes. Good and sensitive reporting would have articulated a much larger picture, rather than merely present a small little snippet that seems to justify the action.

This column however, does not wish to dwell solely on this issue. Rather, it would like to relate the outcome when this report, and the outrage at this action, was shared with others on an internet forum. The first response to the sharing was a question “So do you favour the mushrooming of these structures?” This was a response designed to flummox. Surely this person realized that the issue being raised was not the validity of “these structures” but the problems with the process being used to resolve the matter?

The conversation continued, shifting wildly from the original suggestion that we ought to find this action unacceptable for the manner in which it effectively made a segment of our citizenry homeless, to what was effectively a plaint of middle-class persons against the awful manner in which they are being treated.  In the course of this discussion, it became increasingly clear, that it was not that this, and other, individuals did not want to distinguish between the harm that had been caused to the tent-dwellers and the harm that is being caused to the largely middle-class Goan folk on that internet forum. On the contrary, what became painfully obvious was that this person was UNABLE to distinguish between the two.

It is so much easier to condemn a person for failing to have a conscience, but what we often fail to realize is that having a conscience is often about being able to distinguish one situation from another. It calls for a complexity of vision, so that one can distinguish a cause and an effect, between an end and a process. Such a complexity of vision, it has to be recognized, doesn’t just spring in people automatically; it is cultivated, through observation, discussion. If one goes onto the internet, a space where so many Goans attempt to articulate and discuss their issues, one notices largely, the absence of any protocols of discussion, and the inability to entertain nuance. The situation is largely a case of with me or against me, and following that, the hurling of abuse.

This situation definitely does not augur well for us. Goan society is clearly in a state of flux, facing a great many challenges, and if the vast majority of our people are unable to see the nuance in debates that are being proposed, then we are done for. We are done for, because failing the development of this capacity to see nuance and be able to engage in discussion, we will largely continue to favour actions such as resulted in the demolition of the tents in Margão. As was suggested above, there is not much difference between the actions of groups like the Sri Ram Sene and the actions of these ‘NGOs’. They are both vigilantes committed to their idea of the truth and unable to tolerate the ‘Other’, both of them with scant respect for process. Process, at the end of the day, whether the legal concept of due process, that prevents us from taking the law into our hands; or the simple concept that privileges discussion, is critical to addressing the challenges we face.

The solution for Goa then, lies not merely in finding the solutions to the many problems we face, but in finding a manner in which we negotiate the process in which we arrive at the possibility of solutions.

(A version of this post was first published in the Gomantak Times  on 7 July 2012)

Konkani and the Silence of the Goan Catholic: The Concanim Series

There was a commotion in Cyberia a couple of weeks ago, around some of the observations made by Adv. Uday Bhembre in the course of an interview. The statement that caused so much of consternation was made in explanation of why Adv. Bhembre opposes grants-in-aid to schools that impart primary education in English. To give a sense of what irked the cyber-Goemcars, the statement by Adv. Bhembre is extracted in some length below.

“Let me narrate to you a glaring incident that happened in my life. When I was the Independent MLA of Margao in 1985-89, I was invited by the Grace Church Parish to speak to the youth on Culture. The audience comprised of young boys between 20 to 25 years of age, to my surprise there were no girls. I don't know. The three preceding speakers spoke in English and I spoke in Konkani. During the question and answer session the Priest requested them to ask questions, I too requested them. But they did not respond, later the priest told me that if I had spoken in English perhaps they would have understood. Then I asked him (priest) why they did not understand. “They did not understand because you spoke in Konkani and not English”, the priest replied. It was all the more astonishing that all of these youth were Goans and did not understand or might not want to speak in Konkani. And if that was situation in 1988 what would it be now? So that kind of a situation is bound to develop according to me if English is encouraged at primary level itself in Goa."

Adv. Bhembre is perhaps not the first person to face this strange situation, given the two other similar situations this column will narrate, but perhaps he (and the friendly parish priest) may have misinterpreted the situation they faced.

The first of the situations took place in a training session for rookie ‘announcers’ for the AIR. The crowd was largely English speaking and faced with a Konkani speaking staff member of the radio station. The session was a nightmare though, for not a single question presented by the trainer drew a response from the audience. It seemed as if the explanation articulated by Adv. Bhembre, would have held good here as well, a crowd of young Goans, brought up to be English speaking, and yet unable to speak in Konkani.

Subsequent to the training session, asking one of the members of the audience if it was the case that she did not speak or understand Konkani, drew a fierce response. ‘Ofcourse not!’ she responded, opening her eyes wide. ‘I sing in Konkani, I do the readings in Church, I can manage quite well in Konkani. But his (referring to the trainer) Konkani is different no?’

This response affirmed the capacity of the silent audience to speak and understand Konkani, but it provided no reason as to why, because there were two different Konkanis in operation, the response of one of the Konkani speakers should be silence. This reason was provided in another conversation, this time round with a Catholic priest. In the course of our conversations around Konknai, this priest indicated a strong friendship he enjoyed with a Hindu gentleman. At one point however, the priest recounted that he was reproached by his friend; ‘Why is it that you never speak to me in Konkani’ the friend asked. To this question the priest responded that he felt ashamed, since his friend’s Konkani was so perfect, so pure, whereas his own was the ‘impure’ version that the Catholics speak.

This deep-rooted sense of inferiority of their version of Konkani is the reason for this silence among vast sections of the Konkani-speaking Catholic population in Goa. This sense of inferiority is not the result only of the dominance of the Antruzi variant since the legislation of the Official Language Act in 1987. The hierarchy that privileges Antruzi is the result of larger theoretical understandings that have been deeply grounding in society, since they came into operation since the nineteenth century, though to be sure these understandings have been underlined by teachings in school since 1987.

This silence is not a uniquely Goan phenomenon however. This response in silence has famously been highlighted by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in his exploration of the power dynamics among dialects within France and their relationship with ‘official French’. Bourdieu points out that as a result of the active diminishing of the legitimacy of other variants of the language, and the stress of auto-correction that persons who do not naturally possess a facility with the official variant encounter, there is a tendency of working-class children to eliminate themselves from the educational system, or to resign themselves to vocational courses and training. He also pointed out to the unease and ‘the hesitation leading to silence’, which may overcome individuals from lower-class backgrounds on occasions defined as official.

The silence among Adv. Bhembre’s audience is not therefore the result of not knowing Konkani, but of the shame that has been drilled into Catholic society (not least by their own intellectuals from the nineteenth century on) that the Konkani that they speak is not proper Konkani. This logic is not limited only to those sections of the pro-Konkani world that favour Antruzi as the finest form of spoken Konkani. Take for example the spelling of the Thomas Stephens Konknni Kendr, which seems to replicate the Sanskritized sounds of Antruzi, rather than the broader sounds typical to the Concanim spoken among Catholics in Goa. From Bourdieu’s work it would appear that introduction of the ‘official variant’ into schooling compound the problem, since it provides a systemic production of this shame. From this logic, it would appear therefore that rather than addressing the problem Adv. Bhembre mistakenly perceived; schooling in Konkani is one of the systemic forms of perpetrating the shame and driving more and more young people away from Konkani. The solution that Adv. Bhembre seeks therefore, may come from routes other than the compulsory education in a language form that many students do not in fact identify with.

The provision of solutions to Adv. Bhembre’s pickle is not the purpose of this column. The purpose of this column was to stress that there are multiple ways in which silence can be read. Silence is not always a sign of stupidity or a lack of knowledge. Silence can be the mark of shame, or unease, or equally of disobedience. The silence in response to Konkani speakers among Concanim speaking audiences could very well be one among these many reasons. Indeed, we can safely say that it is not one of either stupidity or lack of knowledge.

(A version of the post was first published in the Gomantak Times 31 Aug 2011)