India made Goa Portuguese

Recently, there have been a number of voices that have pointed out that a part of the problem in contemporary Goa is the manner in which Goa is being consumed. Writing in The Goan Everyday, Vishvesh Kandolkar pointed out that Goa “is perceived as a perfect holiday destination with its sun, sea, and sand, apart from the Europeanised atmosphere that they [Indian elites and tourists] don’t find anywhere else in India.” Picking up on the concerns raised by Kandolkar, Dale Luis Menezes, writing in the O Heraldo also pointed that Goa’s problem lies in the fact that it is perceived as European, and following an argument by Paul Routledge, argues that Goa was created and projected as a pleasure periphery, a site of tourism and pleasure.

To make sense of these claims it is important that we delve deeper into the process that allowed Goa to be seen, or be represented as European. Most persons with some knowledge of the academic literature on Goa will point out that Goa’s character and European is the result of the Estado Novo’s claims from the late 1940s. Responding to the demand of the post-colonial Indian State that Goa be “returned” to it, Salazar’s Portugal responded that this was impossible. Goa was not Indian, they claimed, it was Portuguese. 450 odd years of Portuguese presence had ensured that Goa was strikingly different from the rest of India, and that the people of Goa had more in common with Europe than India. This way of presenting Goa has given rise to the trope of Goa Portuguesa. 

 

Not to be undone, Indian nationalists, and academics who sympathized with the Indian position, crafted another trope in response; Goa Indica. Rubbish, they claimed, Goa was merely under Portuguese control. It is, and always has been, profoundly Indian. There are some who would argue that Goa Indica was the post-colonial response to colonial propaganda of Goa Portuguesa. The problem with this argument is that Goa Portuguesa has been one of the planks on which Goa’s tourism industry has been built, especially from the 1980s. This is to say, that while Goa’s Portuguese identity may have been initially crafted by the Portuguese state, it was given added life by the post-colonial Goan, and Indian, state, and the allied institutions of film, advertising, that support the state.

How does one make sense of this fact, that it was Indian control over Goa that deepened Goa’s image as Portuguese, Iberian and European? Raghu Trichur provides a very plausible argument in his book Refiguring Goa (2013). He suggests that “[i]ntegrating Goa into the Indian nation-state was more problematic  than occupying and liberating Goa from Portuguese colonial rule, especially if one was to consider the politics that surfaced in ‘postcolonial’ Goa over the two decades since 1961” (p.12). He elaborates that “it was only after the state sponsored development of tourism in the 1980's (two decades after Goa's liberation/occupation in 1961), was Goa effectively integrated into the Indian nation-state” (p.13). Trichur’s suggestion, then, is that the marketing of Goa as Portuguese and European was a strategy of the Congress government that sought to skirt the politics inaugurated by Dayanand Bandodkar and the bahujan groups subsequent to integration into India.

The nature of Bandodkar’s politics, and how it offered a genuine liberation for the Hindu bahujan of Goa is interestingly elaborated in India’s First Democratic Revolution (2015) a monography recently written by Parag Parobo from the department of History, Goa University. The difference between Nehruvian politics and Bandodkar’s politics was recently succinctly articulated by Kaustubh Naik: “Nehru’s vision for India was a result of his upper caste elite background which worked only to the benefits of Indian elites while the marginalized struggled to find a place for themselves within that vision. Bandodkar, with his lower caste capitalist background, set a model of governance that prioritized liberating the Bahujans from bonds of feudal and social oppression.” Indeed, the initial years of the Congress in Goa were marked by complete upper-caste dominance. This hegemony was completely rejected at the polls for almost two decades until the MGP ran out of steam, and the upper-castes were to combine forces and once again re-assert themselves through the Congress party.

There is, however more to this equation that merely trying to reformulate Goa outside of bahujan politics, and this aspect speaks directly to the desires of Nehruvian elites that marked the Congress party in Delhi and their largely upper-caste associates in Goa. This aspect can be uncovered if we ask why Goa Goa’s being European should be exciting for (elite) Indians?

To answer this question requires that we look at the politics through which Europe is constituted. The fact is that while core European values are defined by the practices in the north-west of that continent, such as Germany, The Netherlands, Britain, the South, namely Spain, Italy, Greece, has been marked off, since at least the nineteenth century, as the place largely of leisure and pleasure, tourism and adventure. Northern European, but especially British and American magnates, travelled to the South for leisure and illicit pleasure. Northern Europeans articulated their European identity by setting themselves off as different from Southern Europeans.  This logic was then applied to the rest of the world, where Europe was set off from the rest of the colonised world, just as Northern Europe was set off from the southern part of the continent.

To return to Goa, I would argue that a Portuguese Goa was appealing for the Nehruvian elites because they saw themselves as the inheritors of Britain’s paramount sovereignty in India. With Indian independence they became the British, and inherited the British gaze on the world. Thus, they inherited the British gaze on the Portuguese, as well as the Portuguese territory. Thus, if Portugal, part of the European south, was a place for leisure, so too did Goa become a place for pleasure for the brown sahibs. If European elites went to the South of Europe for their leisure, so too would the Indian elites go to Goa, their piece of Europe, for leisure. In other words, post-colonial Goa was Europeanised to cater to the fantasies of the Nehruvian elites for whose consumption India was constructed.

The problem doesn’t end with just the elites, however, since what the elites do, the upwardly mobile follow. To demonstrate how the consumption of Southern Europe, and the concomitant production of oneself as European of western plays out I would like to offer an example from the city of Bangalore from about little less than a decade ago. Around this time, there were three different real-estate developers who were offering homes around Southern European themes. There were “large Spanish homes” at Mantri España, Purva Venezia “inspired by the magical landscape of Venice", and another development that sought to sell property on the basis that it would feel like home to Vasco da Gama should be return to India.

Given that in our neo-liberal times work demands so much of us, the house is increasingly cast as the space of retreat, and leisure. In such a context, it makes sense that real estate developers would market their properties to the Indian upper middle class, who seek to be western, along lines that would make sense to westerners. Thus, where the house is a space of leisure, it follows patterns of leisure that would appeal to the Northern European. Translated into the Goan context, this ensures not only the hordes of Indian tourists, and the Indian middle class who want to buy homes in Goa, but also the pastiche architecture, with sloping roofs and faux-Iberian aspects. Because of Goa’s indigenous building traditions there is something vaguely local about this contemporary architecture, but its success lies in the fact that it appeals to vague Indian notions about what southern European architecture looks like.

Between the Nehruvian elites, and the upwardly mobile groups of contemporary India, Goa is up for grabs largely because it is a space where, thanks to whitewashed churches and the presence of Catholicism, these groups can pretend that they are in Europe, and play the European. While the Estado Novo may have been responsible for initially articulating this idea, it is the Indian regime, and the comprador class in Goa, that has done more for presenting Goa as Portuguese and European. As Dale Menezes has argued, this has been done largely to suit Indian interests than groups in Goa, the marginalized sections of which continue to languish without necessary attention, or respect.

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo on 16 Oct 2015)

Innocence and desire: Tourism and the continuing colonial project

A fortnight ago I had suggested an odious content to three posters that were used a year ago in a lottery competition in Portugal. Responding to this, two persons suggested that I was over-reading meaning into these posters. These individuals suggested that the persons who designed the posters and the ad campaign ‘were not that smart’ and that they were not drawing on nationalist and Lusotropicalist formula but international formula associated with tourism.

In response to this suggestion, my response was to acknowledge the possibility of over-reading on my part, but to also point out that tourism is not an innocent activity but one that is integrally tied to the colonial project. This column will elaborate on that argument.

Tourism is not an innocent activity. It is an activity that is firmly located within power relations. On the inter-personal level, it is one where the tourist is invariably economically superior to the host. On an international level there is invariably a power relation between the tourist who comes from the global North and travels to the global south. Travel for a long time was the privilege of the elite. In particular, within the international context, it was the privilege of the white elite. These folk traveled either to Southern Europe, namely Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece, whose people were deemed to largely be not-white. In these spaces they engaged in activities of leisure and pleasure-seeking. In this process, they created the image of the romantic and sexy Latin lover. These white folk, also traveled to Africa and Asia, where they ‘discovered’ strange lands and exotic peoples. The pleasure of sexual experimentation was not missing here either.

These images continue to populate the realms of tourist-speak today. Thus the largely white consumer is encouraged to come and ‘Discover India’. The colonial sub-text of the invitation is hardly hidden. India and a variety of countries in the global south are consistently marketed as ‘exotic’. And it is not some evil, neo-imperial foreign master who does this, but very often the neo-colonial national state that does so. Thus the Indian state, as the neo-colonial successor to the British-Raj, markets its own land and people for tourist consumption.

Tourism is not an innocent activity. It is an activity firmly located in the project of performing white-ness. Contrary to popular perception, white-ness is not only about skin colour. It is about social and geo-political location, it is about class, and it is about how one behaves and thinks. One can have ‘white trash’, only because skin colour does not make a person ‘white’. Social behaviour and culture does. Thus Southern Europeans were until recently not considered properly white. Thus many Indians, can and do attempt to pass off as white folk. In fact, tourism is one of the ways in which elite Indians attempt to produce their whiteness. To do so, they reproduce the activity of the white colonial masters. Thus if colonial whiteness was produced, among other things, by traveling to Southern Europe, then the elite Indian has holiday homes in Goa; her own piece of Southern Europe. That both Southern Europe and Goa have similar models of tourism – invasion by charter tourists from the European North, should indicate that there is more than just coincidence operating here.

Further more, travel continues to be a privilege of the elite, requiring not only surfeit of cash (or a favorable currency exchange rate) but also the ability to transcend geo-political boundaries that are selectively permeable. There is no denying that it is much easier for a poorer Briton to travel to India, than it is for a socially comparable Indian to travel to Britain. Leisure travel or tourism then, produces white-ness for larger groups of people, even as it creates black-ness for those who are unable to travel for leisure. It is no surprise then, that the advertising campaign that was referred to a fortnight ago held images of primitive ‘black’ people holding symbols of a ‘white’ culture, rather than some entirely different set of images.

To assert that tourism is not an innocent activity is not to assert that the project of tourism is animated by deliberate intention. It is for the large part not. These power-relations of race, class and power that mark national and international relations also mark tourism, and for the most part operate silently in the background. It is this silent operation that allows tourism to so innocently reproduce itself, and contribute to the fixing of peoples and locations in colonial imagery, even as sovereign colonial power has been replaced with sovereign national power.

As any initial student of economics will know, demand for a consumer product does not just emerge, but is cultivated in an individual. The seed of this desire is planted in our mind, it is watered and nourished and encouraged to grow so that we come to believe that some insatiable need in our life will be met by our consuming that product. The tourism industry operates similarly, it creates certain desires, or amplifies desires that lie in our subconscious. To do this, it draws, either consciously or unconsciously on ideas that already exist, or creates them afresh. Tourism sells to us our desire to be powerful and elite. It sells to us exotic dreams. Its allure lies not only in the possibility of sexual experimentation, but also in the knowledge that we are doing what Kings and adventurers, business tycoons and heroes did before us. It is for this reason that we should not really be surprised that tourism takes recourse to colonial imagery when selling us our tickets…

(A version of this post was first published in the Gomantak Times 1 Dec 2010)