The Itinerant: Saint Christopher’s wardrobe

St. Christopher in the Cathedral in Toledo.

The Cathedral of Toledo, in Spain, hosts on one of its walls a monumental painting of St. Christopher. St. Christopher, legend tells us, started out as Offero, offering his services to people to help ford a river. He remained Offero, until one stormy evening, he forded the river with a child on his shoulders. Particularly insistent on crossing despite the storm, on reaching the other side, the child revealed himself as the infant Jesus and indicated to Offero, that since he had carried Christ that evening, he would hence forth be called Christ-offero.  In offering his shoulders to Christ it turns out, Offero not only gained a name, but provided for the Catholic church, the patron saint of travelers.

The depiction of Christopher in the Cathedral in Toledo wears what medieval depictions of European saints are normally depicted wearing, a long tunic, that is, in the case of Christopher, hitched up at his waist so as to not get too much of the garment wet. The same saint is depicted, on a somewhat smaller scale, but no less dramatically in the Cathedral in Old Goa. This depiction of the saint, at least with respect to his garments differs dramatically from the depiction of Christopher in Toledo.

Detail of the image of St. Christopher in the Se, Old Goa.

This Christopher in Old Goa, hangs immediately to the left of the main entrance of the Cathedral, and has been the subject of some excitement in the field of art history. Amateurs and professionals have pointed out that this St. Christopher wears what some would call a dhoti or a langoti. What is often left out however, is that this is not the only piece of native clothing that the Goan Christopher is wearing. If one looks very closely, one realises that the shirt that Christopher is wearing in this version, has rather peculiar features. It looks akin to the many versions of the Persian jama that filtered into the sub-continent. This shirt, does not boast buttons, but the front of the shirt is held together by knotted strings, just like the many varieties of the jama or angarakha are even today held together.

St. Christopher's wardrobe in Goa

Ibrahim Adil Shah, Sultan of the post Bahmani State of Bijapur

When the art historians realized that St. Christopher in Old Goa was wearing a dhoti, they forwarded the argument that perhaps the artist who painted the image of the saint, was not Catholic, nor European, but a native and a Hindu. In doing so, they seek to stress the Sanskritic nature of pre-Portuguese Goa. If however, we recognize that the garments of the saint are composed of more than just the dhoti, but this jama shirt as well, then our view of the possible identity of the artist must necessarily be complicated. There is no need for us to make the argument that the artist was in fact Muslim. However, we must recognise the fact, that if the artist was in fact native, then the vocabulary of the artist was more than just Sanskritic, but one that was at home with the Persianate and broader Islamicate fashions that had been dominant along the west coast ever since the ascendancy of the Bahmani Sultanates in the Deccan. It points out to us that Goa’s pre-colonial history, and its pre-colonial peoples were a culturally complex lot.

(A version of this post first appeared in The Goan dtd 16 April 2013)

The African in Goa: Village Goa beyond the Gãocaria

Every month the Xavier Centre in Porvorim hosts History Hour, a platform for local (national and international) scholars to discuss their works. In doing so it provides happy stimulation for a diverse audience. Last Friday the Centre played host to the release of Beyond the Beach: The Village of Arossim, Goa, in Historical Perspective. The work of Dr. Themistocles D’Silva, the book is a history of the village of Arossim from which Dr. D’Silva hails from.

The work is clearly a labour of love from one of its native sons, perhaps born from the nostalgia that émigré sons feel for their motherland. Dr. D’Silva’s work however also continues a longer tradition, that initiated by his father, Justino da Silva. Justino da Silva, was an archivist of village history, having laboured over the genealogical charts of the prominent families of the village. In his presentation of the work at the Xavier Centre, Dr. D’Silva pointed out that he hoped that his book did not remain an isolated work. On the contrary, he pointed out that there was a need for greater numbers of us to put into writing the histories of our villages, increasing the documentation on the rich histories of Goa beyond the beach. Such histories also go beyond the Goan histories obsessed with the sixteenth century and the Portuguese governance of the territory. Indeed, in the course of the presentation Dr. D’Silva pointed to the urgency of the task given that many of the older generation and their memories are passing away, and that private archives fall victim to the ravages of insects and weather. On this front perhaps Dr. D’Silva was being kind to the custodians of these archives. Though Goan society has produced a number of luminaries, the same intellectual drive that powered these luminaries is not necessarily passed on to the next generation. Many archives have no doubt been discarded into dust heaps and kitchen back-yard fires.

What is most interesting in this book, is that Dr. D’Silva has written it by combining the various influences that have moulded him as an individual. In doing so, he brings to the fore a central problem in the manner in which we think about the Goan village, and thus Goan identity.

A member of the village elite of Arossim, his book locates the village gãocaria (or Comunidade) as one of the points of departure for his narrative. This is not entirely out of place; the Comunidade was a powerful institution in our history and to speak of a village history without delving into the history of the Comunidade would produce a dull, incomplete history. However to speak of the village from the point of view of the Comunidade alone does not exhaust the history of the Goan villages, since there were (and are) a number of people who while living in the village, were not gãocars of the village. What would the history of the Goan village look like if we were to write a village history from their point of view? The threads that Dr. D’Silva draws out gives us a hint into this possibility.

Dr. D’Silva points out in his book a fact that has by and large been left unsaid and unspoken in the public sphere about the Goan village. This fact is of the presence of African slaves within our village communities. The few voices that do mention the presence of the African are Dr. Savia Viegas, Adv. Valmiki Faleiro, and Margaret Mascarenhas in her novel Skin. While speaking of the presence of the African slave in Goa, Dr. D’Silva manages to point out to us that the Goan village was not an idyllic, happy setting for all. These slaves were ill-treated sufficiently to make them want to escape. And escape they did, into the jungles of British-India where slavery was abolished much earlier than it was in Portuguese-India. Dr. D’Silva made reference to the fact that the failure of their master’s to provide a nutritious diet to the slaves forced the latter to poach for fish from the village ponds at night. He also pointed to the fact that these African slaves and their descendants lived at the edges of the villages, pointing to their social marginalization.

When we speak of the African slave’s presence in Goa’s villages, we must recognize that their descendants married local men and women, or if they did not marry, in any case produced babies with local persons. This gives to a good amount of Goans, a history different from those of the gãocars – who in any case could not have been a majority of the population. When speaking of the Comunidade we often create – as did Dr. D’Silva - for the Goan, a Hindu pre-history. If we recognize the presence of the African’s as a part of the Goan village – by not being obsessed with gãocarial histories – we create a Goan with an African history. And what a different, richer and more exciting history that would lead us to!

The entire row over a proposed mosque close to the site of the former World Trade Centre resulted, among other things, in a couple of discoveries about US History. It was pointed out that by virtue of the presence of African slaves in early USA and the site of New Amsterdam (subsequently New York city), early American history includes the history of peoples who professed an Islamic faith. True many African slaves were baptized when they were brought to Goa, but as the Hindu-past obsessed histories tell us, mere baptism does not drive away former influences. In addition to these African slaves, Adv. Valmiki Faleiro has pointed out the presence of Chinese labourers (who worked the railway line that passes through Arossim) and of their marriage to local people. In addition, we have the presence in pre-Portuguese Goan history of the many Muslims who converted to Christianity to save their lives and properties.

All of these people contribute to the histories of Goan villages, which we, befuddled by Gandhian idiosyncrasies, often erroneously believe to be where the real Goa resides. To effectively write about these histories, or to even realize that they exist, we need to move beyond the framework of the Comunidade centered histories that we still take as the central focus of our local history writing. While largely within the frames of this traditional perspective, Dr D’Silva was possibly able to move beyond this traditional framework because of the fact that he is not trapped by traditional social-science ways of writing about Goan history. Or the fact that he has clearly spent a good amount of time in and interacted with the politically inclusive trends of thinking about society within the United States.

For his effort we must thank Dr. D’Silva, buy his book, and then go write our own village histories!

(A version of this post was first published in the Gomantak Times 12/ 11/ 2011)

Opening the Third Eye: Goan History after Into the Diaspora Wilderness

This column last week challenged the notion of Goa Indica as being an incomplete cliché, incapable of capturing the nuances of Goa’s history. Because it sought to do battle with the idea of Goa Dourada, an idea promoted by Portuguese imperialism, the contours of Goa Indica are suffocatingly nationalistic. Manifesting in local rhetoric, Goa Indica had to deny the Portuguese impact, and look for an independent Goan identity prior to the Portuguese. As a result, it fell into the Indian nationalist trap of looking at history from a brahmanical point of view. This ignored, almost entirely, the history and experience of the non-dominant sections of Goan society, especially those Catholic groups that were the non-dominant (or subaltern). To be sure this was not a malicious overlooking, but the result of the position from which this history was being written. Where the Catholic faith was seen as a Portuguese injection into Goa, how could anything that these groups possessed, be capable of yielding a ‘pre-Portuguese’?

This forgetting of the subaltern Catholic is however, gradually being redressed, and thank goodness for it. The movement for the recognition of the Roman script and the cultural productions associated with it, the celebration of Cantaram with the recent Konkani Rocks concert, are moves that seem to be slowly addressing this grave lacuna in the crafting of the Goan identity. To this happy move, was recently added Into the Diaspora Wilderness, a book written by Selma Carvalho about the Goan ‘diaspora’ in the British Empire.

Carvalho’s book is a must read because it shifts the focus in the telling of Goa’s story in many ways. Already in the ‘Short Introduction’ she indicates a few changes in the way in which she looks at Goa. She is critical of “[A] miniscule section of the Goan population (who) sat indolently in the grandeur of chandeliered reception halls”. This book is not about their story. This is a story of those who moved away. Those who could not see the otherwise much celebrated “quiet eloquence of rural Goa: the peace, tranquility, self-sustaining village life in which one seeks solitude”. This is the story of those who could not bear the 'desultory, isolation of the vaddo...the eerie silence of the night...The empty, hollow sense that nothing could germinate in the village which could take one beyond its boundary”. And it is because it is a story of those who moved away, it is not a story that is tied to Goan land and histories of gãocarial connections to land. It is a story that is forged by the traveler, in particular the otherwise-mocked tarvotti, the sneered-at Gulfie, whose travels “have profoundly shaped our cultural mores.” These stories take us across the seas, into Africa and are twined with British Africa, and the Anglo-Saxon world. Carvalho is fully aware of these shifts she is making, evident when she says; “Very often, when the story of the Goan migration is told, it is done from the vantage point of Goa. It is as if Goans went to these countries but somehow remained unaffected by what transpired in these distant lands, as if they existed in a political and cultural vacuum. The reality is, there were transformations taking place every step of the journey, transformations which have inevitably affected the collective Goan psyche.” This story then, makes the profound point that has to be made again and again, and again before it becomes part of Goan commonsense; the Goan psyche was profoundly influenced by experiences outside of Goa, and these Goans were subaltern folk, who left Goan shores in search of financial sustenance, often to escape the suffocation of a caste-ridden, hierarchical and unimaginative society. There is a third shift she effects. She speaks of Goan times, under Portuguese sovereignty, but there is barely a reference to the Portuguese. In doing so, she prompts us to ask if when looking at the histories of the Goan subaltern, the Portuguese were perhaps not the main referent? Perhaps this obsession with the pre-Portuguese past is just a red-herring that disappears when we start looking at the histories of the subaltern Goan? In other words, the crafting of a Goan identity need not centre (as Goa Indica also does) around the Portuguese. They were merely one small, if significant, chapter in a larger Goan story.

Carvalho rescues the stories of a number of persons for the telling of Goan history; the otherwise uncelebrated Caitans and Joãos, who no doubt went to their grave thinking they were nobodies. But Selma also tells these stories twined with her own. Like Maria Aurora Couto before her, Selma too tells a daughter’s story. This positioning of both these Goan raconteurs within the bosom of family is perhaps not coincidental. Like Selma points out, Goan migration was often pioneering, going into uncharted waters. For these groups, subaltern in the larger global hierarchy, security and upward mobility came not from State or Company, but via the support from family and the connections generated through creating familial relationships with each other.

One wishes though, her narrative had dealt with caste a little more critically than it does. By virtue of telling the stories she has, she is forced to mention caste. But having done so, she falls into the old Goan Catholic trap of not discussing caste in public. We pretend innocence about it. As a result, she mentions caste, but fails to attempt a critical discussion of it. This failing is nowhere as obvious as when she discusses its presence among the Goan communities in Africa. Thus for example in the case of the relationships that Goans in Kenya had with the future of a postcolonial Goa she refers to the fact of the two sides (pro-India led by J.M. Nazareth and pro-Portuguese faction led by Dr. A.C.L. de Souza) being motivated by caste battles. Having done so, she refuses to elaborate on the name of these castes or elaborate on these divisions.

But perhaps this silence is also because through her writing what Carvalho is also attempting is a rescuing of the dignity of the groups she writes about, from the humiliation they normally experience. The discussion of caste could perhaps wait another day, when we are more secure in, and less apologetic about our identities. Carvalho however, also seems to uncritically accept other hierarchies, for example that of the white (Anglo-Saxon) man who crafted the British Empire. While acknowledging the role of the Goan in lending vital support to this Empire, she does not seem to be critical of the manner in which it moulded the Goan psyche. Did being the Imperial overseer create racial prejudices that we do not acknowledge? Where there are possibilities to take this forward, she unhappily lets these threads fall. At times, one could not help in wondering, whether the twining of the Goan story with that of Empire, does not make the Goan somewhat nostalgic for this time of Empire.

Finally, even though it is a wonderful read and a critical contribution to Goan historiography and literature, the stories that Carvalho narrates are often snapshots strung together from disparate settings. There is none of the thickness of description that is the demand of the ethnographer. Very often, the story has only begun when it very frustratingly ends. One wonders therefore, if her book would not have been better served through more focused elaborations of selected theaters of Goan migration. But then on the other hand, this is perhaps only the first of more productions that will fully elaborate the untold stories of the subaltern Goan abroad? It would be a shame if Selma Carvalho, with her charming prose, resolute voice, and unflinching gaze stops at just one book.

(First published in the Gomantak Times 1 Sept 2010)

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)