Pork and the Goan pre-Portuguese past: Food habits that surprise!

It seems almost lost in the mists of time now. That time when the idea of Goa Dourada, a Goa that was Lusitanian, or Portuguese, needed to be fought with another idea. The idea that eventually emerged to contest that of Goa Dourada was that of Goa Indica; the Goa that was Indian. If one idea pointed to a Lusitanian inspiration for Goa, the other pointed more properly to a brahmanical inspiration for Goa. The support for Goa Indica was found in geographical contiguity, in Puranic legend and sundry other clues.

Now this Indic connection for Goa was not unwarranted. There was a need to overact the rhetoric overdrive of the Estado Novo, and Goa Indica played its role in this ideological battle. The question remains however, if Goa Indica managed to capture the entire essence of Goa, or was it another incomplete cliché that needs to necessarily give way to another? Where would this new cliché come from if at all? Thankfully, Mother India in her variety provides the answer to that question. In the early 1980’s a group of scholars who had suckled right at the brahmanical breast of the Mother emerged with an interesting intellectual agenda. Styling themselves the Subaltern Studies Group, this group of scholars argued that there was much in the history of the subcontinent, and the manner in which we thought about it that had to change. We had to move away from the understanding of history as the progress led by great men, to a history that features the non-elite groups, the subaltern, as agents of social and political change. This focus on the hitherto small people of history, was matched by the independent growth in the Dalit movement in India. As a result, we can today actively think of crafting a history of India based on Dalit and subaltern experiences and push back brahmanical histories from the centre-stage it has occupied till date.

One of the many problems with Goa Indica is that when it thought of the pre-Portuguese past, it thought of Goa as a brahmanical centre. The history of this pre-Portuguese past was the history of the great men and groups in the brahmanical tradition. There was, and is, no space for the non-brahmanical groups in the imagination of a pre-Portuguese Goa. Having said this though, it must be pointed out that Goa Dourada, at least when used within the Goan context, was a reference to the self-image and perceptions of the Lusitanianised brahmanical and elite groups. Between the two cliches, you have the nationalist, and imperialist imaginations of the elite and the brahmanical. If one has to redress this understanding of Goa then, at the same time not fall into Lusitanian moulds for Goa, where should we go? Where do we find the trope that will allow us to place at the centre, the experiences and histories of the Goan subaltern?

Happily it appears that we may not have to go too far. Perhaps the answer was sitting before our very noses all the time and thanks to our elitist obsessions we just didn’t recognize it!

The eating of pork is essential to any Catholic feast or festive occasion, and many assume that the consumption of pork was something that was ‘imposed’ and introduced to the ancestors of today’s Catholics by the Portuguese and the accompanying missionaries. What if however, this was not quite the story? What if pork was already a part of the Goan diet before the Portuguese came in? Would that possibly change the way in which we look at the constituents of Goan Catholic culture?

It is possible, and no doubt documented, that the missionaries urged pork on to the populace that converted to Catholicism way back in the 1500’s. However, to assume that this was the first time the converts to Catholicism had ever consumed pork is to assume that the entire population that converted was possessed of brahmanical sensibilities. If one looks around, at social groups in the rest of Mother India, one realizes that there is a good portion of the non-brahmanical population of the sub-continent that quite enjoys eating pork. We can also safely assume that these groups were insulated from the rigors of that famed beast, the Holy Inquisition in Goa, and that their pork-consumption is not a savory leftover from their missionary-scarred past. The consumption of pork then, it turns out, is not in fact some Portuguese introduction to Goan cuisine, but in fact foundationally (pre-Portuguese) Goan!

A significant social scientist in Goa, was recently contemplating the fact that the social groups, at least in Catholic Bardez, who were professional cooks were groups that in other parts of India were seen an untouchable. What caused then, this scholar wondered, for the missionary priests, to attach cooking as the traditional occupation of this group on their conversion to Christianity? If one realizes that these groups were in any case consuming Pork, and that the missionaries came from Europe with a taste for porcine flesh, then voila! One sees a natural partnership being produced! This association begins to make more sense when one realizes that the first Christians in Goa, were not members of the Brahmanical castes, but in fact the non-brahmanical castes, no doubt eager to get away from the stuffy sensibilities of the brahmanical groups. The fact is that only after the enactment of penal legislations did segments of the brahmanical groups convert to Christianity.

Realizing that the consumption of pork was a part of the pre-Portuguese culture of Goa pushes us to realize that there is much that we assume to be Portuguese impacts on Goan culture that are in fact remnants from the elusive pre-Portuguese past. To be sure there was some amount of colonial influence in the manner in which pork consumption spread. But for that matter, most of the constituents of sub-continental cuisine, are the result of the intervention of the Portuguese. It was because of the colonial transportation of American spices that we have the Indian cuisine that we are familiar with today.

In sum then, while the idea of Goa Indica was relevant and helpful, it is time we started relooking the clichés we use to describe Goa. Looking at the practices of the non-brahmanical groups in Goa, would perhaps give us another interesting angle to enter the Goan experience.

(First published in the Gomantak Times 25 August 2010)