Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

A Goan Waltz around Postcolonial Dogmas



Some days ago I found myself invited to a ball in Lisbon hosted by the Austrian embassy in Portugal. Revived after more than a decade, the current initiative was conceived of a way to generate funds for deserving causes. In this inaugural year, funds were raised in support of A Orquestra Geração, which is the Portuguese application of the El Sistema method created in Venezuela. Another objective was to introduce Portuguese society to aspects of Austrian, and in particular Viennese, culture.

It was because the event was billed as a Viennese ball that I have to confess being somewhat concerned about the protocol at the event. For example, would there be dance cards? It was when I actually got immersed into the ball, however, that I realized that I was not in foreign territory at all. The ball followed a pattern not merely of contemporary wedding receptions and dances in Goa, but also approximated quite well the manners that had been drilled into me as a young boy, when first introduced by my parents to ballroom dancing. One requested a lady – any lady – to dance, accompanied her on to the floor, and at the end of the dance, one thanked her, applauded the orchestra or band, and returned one’s companion to her seat. In other words, there was, structurally, not much at this ball that I, as a Goan male, had not already been exposed to.

This encounter made me realize once again, the validity of the argument that my colleagues at the Al-Zulaij Collective and I have been making for a while now; that Goans, or at least those familiar with the Goan Catholic milieu, are in fact also European. Given the fact that Goans participate in European culture, and have been doing so for some centuries now, denying this European-ness would imply falling prey to racialised thinking that assumes that only white persons born in the continent of Europe, are European.

To make this argument is not the result of a desperate desire to be seen as European, but to assert a fact. One also needs to make this assertion if one is to move out of the racialised imaginations that we have inherited since at least the eighteenth century. It is necessary to indicate that European-ness is not a culture limited to a definite group, but like other cultures, is a model of behavior, in which one can choose to participate in. And one chooses to participate in this cultural model because the fact is that, whether we like it or not, this is the dominant cultural model in the world. The choice then is not determined by a belief in the model’s inherent superiority, it is simply a matter of pragmatic politics.

Some days before the ball, I intimated a continental Portuguese friend about this upcoming event, and the fact that I was on the lookout for a place I could rent a tailcoat from. She sneered. The suggestion in the sneer was, why do you have to become someone you are not. One should remain true to one’s culture, and not try to engage in the culture of others, or in other words, not engage in social climbing. The response was upsetting, but not particularly out of the ordinary. This is, in fact, a standard response, one that derives directly from our racialised imaginations. There is this misplaced idea that when we participate in one cultural model, say the European, one is abandoning other cultural models, and, more importantly, that non-whites would always be on the back foot when faced with European culture. A look at the cultural practices of Goan Catholics, however, will demonstrate the ridiculousness of the proposition.

Goan Catholics have not only taken up Western European cultural forms, but in fact excelled at them. In doing so, they have not abandoned other cultural models, particularly the local, but in fact rearticulated both these models at the same time. One has to merely listen to the older Cantaram (Concani language music) regularly played by the All India Radio station in Goa, to realize the truth of this assertion. Take the delightful song “Piti Piti Mog”, crafted by the genius Chris Perry and Ophelia, for example. Set to a waltz, the song talks of the desires and sexuality of a Goan woman. The emotions are honest to her social location. There is no betrayal of the local here, even as Perry articulates it within an international idiom. Indeed, one wonders if there is much of a difference between this song, and the soprano aria “Meine Lippen, sie küssen so heiß”. From the opera Giuditta, and featured at the Viennese Ball, this aria also sings of the sexuality of a young woman in her prime.

There are some who would argue that what has been described above is not participation in a cultural model, but in fact mere mimicry, or at best syncretism or hybridity. To put it bluntly, Goans are mere copycats, there is nothing original in what they do. Indeed, a good portion of the post-colonial academy would describe the examples I proffer as syncretism or mimicry. To such critics my question is this, were the young Portuguese women and men, making their social debut in the ball, not also participating in an etiquette that is not quite Portuguese? The waltz itself, that great institution of the Viennese balls, originated in Central Europe. Does their participation pertain to the category of mimicry, and syncretism, or is it somehow an authentic performance? To suggest that it is, would be to fall right into the racist paradigm where things European appropriately belong to whites, and the rest are merely engaging in impotent mimicry. The anti-racialist argument would recognize that all of these groups, whether continental Portuguese, or Goans (indeed also Portuguese by right), are participating equally in a common cultural model, each of them giving a peculiar twist to the model in their performance, all of them authentic.

Another challenge to my argument would perhaps emerge from Indian nationalists. If no one culture is authentic, and one merely choses to participate in random cultural models, why privilege the European? Why not join in the Indian cultural model? In the words of a passionate young man from the Goan village of Cuncolim I once interacted with, why not prefer your own people over foreigners? At that interaction I pointed out that crafting the choice in terms of Us Indians, versus Them Europeans, and stressing a biological or genetic proximity was falling back into the very racist equation we should be trying to be exit.

To begin with, this construction of the Indians, versus Portuguese works only because like most Indian nationalists he privileges the terrestrial contiguity of Goa to the subcontinent. The art critic Ranjit Hoskote phrased a succinct response to this claim in the curatorial essay for the exhibition Aparanta (2007) when he argued “Geographical contiguity does not mean that Goa and mainland India share the same universe of meaning”. In highlighting Goa’s Lusitanian links, Hoskote rightly pointed out that the seas were not a barrier to conversation but a link, and maritime connections are no less powerful than the terrestrial. Indeed, while connected to Europe, Goa has been an equal part of the Indian Ocean world, often sharing as much, if not more, with the East coast of Africa than with the Gangetic plains; that privileged location of Indian-ness. Terrestrial contiguity apart, this nationalist argument also succeeds because it willfully ignores a legal history, of Goans being Portuguese citizens, and hence European, in favour of a biased construction of cultural history. 

The most important support to nationalism, of course, comes from the racism inherent in the post-colonial order which is built on recognizing cultural difference managed by nationalist elites rather than stressing continuing connections. Indeed, as I go on to elaborate below, to some extent everybody participates in the European model in today’s world – in clothes and speech and education and science, and so forth. But the control of nationalist elites over the national space, and the international post-colonial order itself, would be threatened by such recognition. It is therefore necessary that while quotidian affairs run along European lines, the extraordinary is sanctified by the irruption of the national. Thus, while Indians wear pants and shirts every day, they believe that special days call for traditional garb, like kurtas. The Goan bucks this trend by privileging special moments with a lounge suit. In other words, Goan culture celebrates what is overtly European, which is what the Indians don’t like as its wrecks the nationalist posturing of not participating in European culture.

To those who would simply ask, why not exert a choice in favour of the Indian, the answer is two-fold. The first, is that there are many Goans, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, who are in fact choosing the Indian model. They do so because they see that this is where local power lies. Behaving like Indians, they believe that they can make their way better in the Indian world. Others, however, recognize the limitations of the Indian model. It can take you only so far. Upwardly mobile Indians themselves recognize that they have to perform by different rules when they emigrate. Worse, the captains of industry will tell you that they have to perform by European rules whenever they meet with their compatriots from other parts of the world. As indicated before, where the European cultural model dominates the world, it is merely pragmatic politics to follow that model. Finally, it is precisely the lack of social mobility that makes many wisely avoid the Indian cultural model. The very attraction of the European model is that practically any person can learn to perform in it and be accepted as authentic. Indian models are so limited to Hinduism and caste that one cannot hope to make this parochial model work as a tool of social mobility. Indeed, one could ask whether there in an Indian cultural model at all, and if it is not just a savarna/brahmanical model?

This lack of social mobility is best illustrated by an example from Goa, where the Saraswats are a dominant caste. Speaking with a Saraswat gentleman at a Nagari Konkani event, he indicated to me how pleased he was with the response to the elocution competitions organized by the Nagari Konkani groups. Many a times the winners were Catholic girls. “But their accent is so good”, he shared with me, “one cannot even tell that they are Catholics!” Where Nagari Konkani is largely based on the speech of the Saraswat caste, one is forever trapped into behaving like a Saraswat, and distancing oneself from one’s natal behaviours. One can never be Saraswat unless one is born into the caste. A good part of the Indian model is similarly pegged according to the behavior of the dominant castes of various regions. This model has been created not necessarily to enable a democratic project, but to ensure their continued dominance within post-colonial India. As such, they will put a person in their place when a person from a non-dominant caste performs effectively. The adoption of the European model, however, is not restricted to birth precisely because it has been adopted so universally. The adoption and occupation of this model by diverse groups has thus ensured that its very form now allows for local variation. Indeed, it needs to be pointed out that the model is very dynamic. Let us not forget that at one point of time one was expected to speak Queen’s English on the BBC, but the same platform, at least in its local transmission, has now made space for a variety of accents.

The policing of cultural boundaries is one of the silent ways through which racism continues to flourish. It is in partly in the breaching of cultural boundaries that racism can be broken. Further, it is in operating within the idiom of power, and then filling the forms of power with differing contents, that negotiation with power operates and one moves from the margins of power towards the centre. In this project, Goans are past masters. Viva Goa!

(A version of this text was first published in Raiot on 26 April 2016)

Thursday, February 4, 2016

The Church in Goa and the assembling of Konkani culture



Towards the end of last year Naguesh Karmali alleged that Church in Goa is doing what the Portuguese could not do to finish Indian culture.  “The suppression by Church today is much larger than the way Portuguese suppressed it in the 16th and 17th century”, he is reported to have said.

The souls of hundreds of dead Catholic priests must have begun clamouring for justice when they heard this baseless and hateful assertion. For, the fact is that a good amount of “culture”, Indian, Goan, or otherwise, in Goa today, was either formulated by Catholic priests in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and then more assiduously developed since the 1960s.

Nationalism and its child, post-colonialism have assumed – often erroneously – that Christianization under the aegis of European expansion resulted in the destruction of culture. However, this was not necessarily the case. Much local culture is the result of European intervention and interpretation. This position derives from larger arguments that suggest that the need to understand local cultures, customs, and laws, in order to govern the territories, and the subsequent misunderstanding by the British, or the misrepresentation by local groups, especially elite groups, resulted in the Indian cultures that we are witness to today.

Going by this understanding, in Goa too, local culture, and in fact Konkani culture was developed by the missionaries.  Prior to the coming of the Europeans, it would be difficult to suggest that there was such a thing as society, in the sense of a community committed to the care of its constituents. There was a caste polity, and while the castes could understand each other, they did not share a common culture as we understand it today. For example, the language of the dominant castes, was definitely not the language of the oppressed castes. Konkani, as a single language spoken, and eventually written, by a wide variety of groups was created by missionaries trying to preach the Christian faith to locals. By this understanding, Konkani was the result of missionary intervention and seen as the language of untouchable Christians. It was for this reason that poor Varde Valaulikar had to struggle so hard to convince his caste fellows to abandon Marathi and claim Konkani as their own.

The Church’s patronage of Konkani in the Nagri, Sanskritized variant, became even more aggressive in recent times. This was soon after the Vatican Council II. Spurred on by the permission to translate the liturgy into vernacular languages, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Goa lost no time in switching over to Konkani. They produced a liturgy, songs, music. Read through the issues of Renovação, the bulletin of the Archdiocese, and one can sense the systematic way through which they went about installing Konkani in the liturgical life of Goan Catholics.

Their interventions were not restricted to the spiritual lives of Catholics alone. Rather, they also supported secular initiatives to promote Konkani in Goa. Take, for example, the fact that it was Diocesan schools that first made the switch to the Konkani medium in the Nagri script. In 1964 Fr. Vasco do Rego pioneered Konkani primary education by getting four schools in the vicinity of Loyola High School, Margão, to introduce Nagari Konkani as the medium of instruction in the primary section. Later, in the 1990s, when the State government refused to support English as a medium of instruction, the Archdiocese adopted Nagari Konkani despite vociferous and sustained protests from parents.

Some have argued that this was because the Diocese had no choice in the matter. This is but one side of the story. The other side of the story is that there were a great number of linguistic nationalists within the Church, and they rubbed their hands with glee at this opportunity. What is also true is that even before the pronouncements of the Vatican Council II, the universal Catholic Church had been priming itself to make space for vernaculars alongside Latin.

Uncharitable voices often argue that the Catholic Church did so because the Vatican was trying to suck up to the newly independent nations. While this may be true in part, what must not be discounted is that already, from the early 1900s, a number of Catholic thinkers were committed to producing distinct national Catholic cultures. The Church has always been producing nuanced vernacular versions of Christianity, as can be seen in Goa. However, in the twentieth century, a world in the grip of racist ideologies, ultimately traceable to the Romantic movement, was unable to appreciate these nuances. The forms of the Catholic Church were seen as European, rather than universal, and sought to be replaced wholescale with “native” culture. In doing so, these Catholic leaders played along with nationalist forces. However, they did this out of conviction that they were doing the right thing, not out of fear of the nationalists.

As I have suggested, the clergy in Goa were no different, and have played a significant role in assembling a more sanskritic Konkani identity for Goa.  It is a shame that this selfless yeoman service, even if misguided, not only goes unsung by their former collaborators, but worse, is neatly swept under the carpet to suit the interests of a wicked cabal.

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo dated 5 Feb 2016)

Saturday, August 29, 2015

Reflections from Midsomer



Over the past couple of weeks I have been viewing back episodes of the British murder mystery TV series Midsomer Murders. Set in the fictional English county of Midsomer, the series revolves around the efforts of Chief Inspector Detective Barnaby, who is attached to the CID of a town called Causton, to resolve the murders that afflict the county.

A possible reason for the attraction is that the series is a loving dedication to the English countryside, and to the imagined English way of life. Midsomer Murders elevates what it sees as English reality with great aplomb. There are long loving shots of breath-taking English countryside. Added to this are the details that are worked into the stories: a focus on contemporary English villages, the age-old social institutions, the rituals of these institutions, the relationship between the gentry and the village-folk. So lovingly ethnographic is the gaze of this series, that despite the glut of murder and nastiness that fills these episodes one can’t help but feel how wonderful it must be to live in rural England.

After a substantial period of time, when I was more than a dozen or so episodes into the drama, a rather discomfiting thought hit me. The series contained an overwhelming number of white persons! It seemed as if there were no persons of colour in the episodes. That is when I started actually looking for people of colour and sure enough, not a single person in evidence! 

Reflecting on this situation I was reminded of an article that discussed the problems of race in video games. Mounting responses to the standard apologies that one gets, the author Bao Phi phrased one that has remained with me ever since, and seemed particularly appropriate in the case of Midsomer’s disappearance of English people of colour. The apology normally reads “Games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Age are based in European folklore and there were no people of color in Medieval Europe.” Phi’s response is clever and hits the nail bang on the head: “Actually there were people of color in Medieval Europe.  You know what?  There were more actual people of color in Medieval Europe than there were REAL FIREBREATHING DRAGONS OR PEOPLE WHO COULD SUMMON MOTORCYCLES OUT OF THIN AIR WITH THEIR MAGIC POWERS.”

This response makes it so obvious that the constructions of our fantasies are not as innocent as we make them out to be, but invariably involve a choice. That there were more murderers in fictional Midsomer than people of colour suggests that the producers of the show wished to show was that there was no space for people of colour in real English life and the England of the imagination. 

Something else that struck me about Midsomer Murders was the dramatic way in which it contrasted with American versions of the similar genre like Castle, or Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. In the episodes that I have seen, Chief Inspector Barnaby and his associate have practically never been shown with a gun. American versions of this genre, however, are replete with the presence, and use, of guns. It should be pointed out that I am unfamiliar with the way in which the police and detectives in England actually operate. It is possible that just as the non-depiction of people of colour highlighted the way the producers of Midsomer wished to imagine England, perhaps the depiction of a folksy and unarmed police detective is also far from English reality. However, what is important is the manner in which the ideal comportment of the police are depicted. As suggested earlier, just as with advertising, television series such as Midsomer Murders are important because they set up an ideal world that we then look for in real life. To this extent, Midsomer Murders suggests that the use of guns is an aberration, while the American series normalise the use of guns suggesting that the ONLY way in which law and order can be enforced is via the use of guns.

Because television is so ubiquitous in our lives it forms the basis of our expectations of reality. For the great Indian middle class that feeds off American television, American drama series offer a vision of what life in the USA is like. Seeing police with guns, all too often their demand is that police in India also be armed with guns. What they do not see is the kind of racist and gratuitous violence that is meted out by police in the US to persons of colour, and the fact that this violent tendency is aggravated by the carrying of lethal weapons. Of course, given the caste-based nature of the Indian middle class, it is perhaps something that they would not care too much about. Nevertheless, it bears remembering that once unleashed, the spiral of violence is difficult to contain.

It is not uncommon to hear howls of protest whenever social justice issues are raised vis-à-vis films and episodes on television. “Oh, but this is just fantasy” it is claimed. Another standard trope is, “but film is about stereotypes!” Indeed, televisual representation may be about stereotypes, but these representations also impact on our expectations of reality. It is for this reason that it is critical that the representations in film and television are not simply shrugged off as fantasy, but challenged not only to embody reality, but also embody a just reality that we would like to see translated to reality.

(A version of this post was first published in The Goan Everyday on 30 Aug 2015)

Thursday, June 11, 2015

Learning from Tiracol: Elements in the Dismantling of Goa



Some weeks ago I had the opportunity to view an illustration by the artist Angela Ferrão which is reproduced with this column. Titled, The Extraction of Goan Identity, the image was clearly inspired by the horrific acts of 16 May 2015 when the village of Tiracol was set upon by men and machinery with a view to surreptitiously destroy the orchards and pave the way for a golf course and hotel. The image depicts a landscape ravaged by the destruction of trees, of gaping holes and mounds of loose soil, and the presence of cranes and other earth-moving equipment. Indeed, one could suggest that Ferrão has also illustrated the miserable outcomes of mining in Goa. To that extent, Ferrão’s image speaks beyond the immediate scenario of Tiracol and to the larger way in which Goa is being ‘developed’, and forces us to ask fundamental questions about the future we desire for Goa.

My interest, however, was piqued by another element in the image. Squat in the centre of the foreground is an issue that Ferrão clearly identifies as central to the problem of Goan future: “Out Migration of Goans”.

I was delighted when I saw this articulation because it dovetailed with my own estimation of the problem. The out migration of Goans is one of the significant issues faced by contemporary Goa. What was particularly heartening, however, was that while the artist identifies out migration of Goans as one of the problems, she does not similarly identity migration to Goa as a problem. I think that while the migration into Goa of “outsiders” is popularly seen as a major problem threatening the survival of a Goan identity, this in-migration to Goa turns problematic primarily because of the out migration of Goans, and the denigration of extant Goan cultural practices.


Making this argument does not mean that I seek to blame Goans, as some are wont to do. Rather, I believe that rather than blame Goans, or the migrants into Goa, the root of the problem lies in the structures which cause Goans to leave, as well as those structures that make it possible for lived cultural practices of Goans to be denigrated, even as an unreal Goan-ness is celebrated to feed the profits of the tourism industry and the coffers of the Indian state.

Coincidentally, it was as I was formulating these thoughts that I came across an article by Haineube Newme titled “The root causes of racism against North Easterners”. Reading through his reflections I was struck by the similarity in his analysis of the problem. Newme suggests that the racism against persons from the North East of India does not emerge from personal racism, but, rather, is fed by an institutional racism.  “The North Eastern regions have been neglected economically and socially”, he argues. Goans and people from the North East both seem to have one thing in common, and that is a high rate of migration. So to phrase it in Newme’s words “The relevant question would be: why have so many people fled their villages or towns and come to live in the metropolitan Indian cities?” Newme could be speaking about Goa when in response to this question he asserts: “Comparably, if greater opportunities of living were being provided, North Eastern states can be better places to live than the other cities of India. One can enjoy better environment, beautiful landscape and better sanity in the North Eastern region. But, the region suffers from a dearth of employment, development and better education opportunities. The reason as to why many people have fled to various cities like Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai etc. is nothing but to search for better educational scope or survival as they do not see any hope in home states to fulfil their needs.” Once again the pertinence of Newme’s articulation to Goa is striking.

In his insightful book Refiguring Goa, Raghu Trichur has pointed out that since integration into India, Goa’s economic ‘development’ seems to have been restricted to mercantile capitalism.  Thus, while merchant capital encourages the production of commodities, for example iron-ore, or of Goa as a tourist destination, it does not transform the relations of production that produce these commodities. The result is that the emancipation that could be a part of capitalist development is not realized, and unequal labour and social relations continue to be sustained. It is because tourism, or other employments opportunities within the state, do not provide Goans dignified labour that so many migrate. Hence there is a dual onslaught, where Goa’s landscape is capitalised, to allow external and internal capitalists to purchase Goan property, even while poorer locals have no scope to rise socially. It is precisely this that forces a systematic process of Goan sale and migration.

These observations allow us to respond to Chief Minister Parsekar’s recent defence of the golf project in Tiracol on the grounds that it will provide employment. The question that those of us who are interested in substantial development must ask is not whether it will provide employment or not, but what sort of employment it will provide. This is where the distinction, recently raised by Amita Kanekar, between two types of tourism come in. On the one hand is the small scale tourism that first emerged in Goa that allowed former tenants to change their lives and prospects. On the other hand is corporate tourism that follows the logic of mercantile capitalism.

What sets the stage for the institutional racism, and simultaneously colonialism, is the complicity of the State in Goa in this process of privileging mercantile interests over those of the citizen. Goa has been witness to emigration even prior to its integration to India. This emigration was a substantial statement of the inability of the Portuguese state to provide decent conditions to citizens in Goa, as well as an indication of its inability or unwillingness to upset its relationship with landlords and feudal chiefs who propped up the colonial regime. Subsequently, in its early period of its possession of Goa, the Indian state seemed to delight in the fact that it earned foreign exchange via the persons it was sending abroad. To this extent, it seems that the Indian state was not very different from the Portuguese state. Both these states failed to provide infrastructure which would ensure that people were not obliged to leave the state to improve their prospects.

Another observation Newme makes is to point out that “North Easterners are considered as outsiders 'polluting' the existing Indian culture.” This observation ties in with my own assertion, that the migration into Goa is assumed to be a threat primarily because of the disparaging of Goan cultural practices. It is through this dismissal of Goan culture, and especially the elements that predominate among Catholics, that this racism is institutionalised.  Take for example, the condescending manner towards tiatr and cantaram as examples, or the absolute refusal to recognise the Roman script in Konkani. From many Catholics one hears the helpless words “what is left for us here?” It is the fact of this dismissal of the locals, and their practices, that allows for a displacement of Goan culture. Were Goan cultures not faced with such official dismissal, it is unlikely that the presence of migrants would have been seen in quite the same way as it is today.

The Goan Hindu is not spared from this onslaught either. It appears that they too suffer from a feeling of not being Indian, i.e. Hindu, enough. Witness the spate of temple demolitions across Goa, where perfectly stable temples are brought crashing down so that newer temples in “Indian” style can come up. Or take the rather interesting article written on the changes in weddings among Goan Hindus by Padmavathi Prabhu in the Navhind Times in January this year. Prabhu celebrates the trend where elements of North Indian (Punjabi and Doabi) Hindu weddings are incorporated into these weddings. However, the question needs to be asked, would other customs be adopted if one were secure in one’s traditions, and not marked by a feeling of shame? It is only when one feels outside the paradigms of power, that one begins to adopt the customs of others, and those who are in power.

So why are we speaking of all of this when it is the case of Tiracol that should fall squarely within our cross hairs of our immediate concerns? Because all of this continues an argument I began in my previous column. Both these columns point to the importance of articulating a person-centred economics. There is a need for the state in Goa to articulate a developmental programme as if people matter. Should the state fail to do so, then it would only go on to support the institutional racism that we are witness to, and aid in the ongoing systematic dismantling of Goa. Tiracol is not the beginning, it is just one more step of the process, and if not addressed it will only get worse.

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo on 12 June 2015)