TambdiMati

I want to introduce you to the mighty Goan warrior.

The world knows the susegaad Goan, Hindi films have made the perpetually drunk Goan famous, and the hospitable Goan is touted by the tourist industry. But the Goan warrior?

Claude Alvares paid tribute to him at the recently held GBA rally at Azad Maidan.  He doesn’t look like much. In fact he looks like an ordinary man, but his powers are legendary.

He has taken on the might of government, big business and various lobbies and emerged victorious. Even as the state of Goa disheartens us, perhaps it is time to remember that there is hope. Battles have been fought and won.

Here are some of the battles the Mighty Goan Warrior has emerged victorious from.

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The Teatro Tivoli is a charming old theatre on Lisbon’s swank Avenida da Liberdade. It is everything one expects from an old world European theatre, right down to the mouldings and the multiple balconies and private boxes.

On the 25th of this month the Teatro Tivoli played host to the 25th anniversary celebrations of União das Cidades Capitais Luso-Afro-Americo-Asiáticas (Union of the Capital Cities of the Portuguese speaking African-American and Asian countries, or UCCLA). This Union ties together cities from regions as diverse as Brazil, Angola, Cabo Verde and Macau, the commonality being that they are or were once Portuguese speaking countries.

This Union meant for developmental and cultural sharing is not without its problems however. Some would suggest that the idea of Lusofonia that is incarnated in the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP – Comunidade dos Países de Lingua Portuguesa) is Portugal’s attempt to institute a central place for itself within its former empire, and institute a kind of a neo-colonialism. Given Portugal’s marginal and peripheral place within the world order this is not a serious problem.

However given the peculiarities of Portuguese colonialism, it could result in a kind of cultural over-reading where the culture of the colonies is seen as deriving from Portugal.
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Two battalions of an expeditionary force volunteered to serve in Goa during the years that followed the Indian economic blockade, the beginning of the Satyagraha movement, and the unsuccessful diplomatic efforts to convince Portugal to leave Goa, Daman and Diu through negotiations.

Some of those who belonged to that expeditionary force belong today to a Liga dos Combatentes do Ultramar and sought to relive their experiences in India through a series of conferences in 2006. These conferences provided material for a printed book Revisitar Goa, Damão e Diu (Lisboa, Liga dos Combatentes, 2010).

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What would you be willing to give your life for? That might seem like an odd question, but it has been on my mind.

The Naxals and Maoists are constantly in the news as the war between them and the government escalates. The people who the police have arrested seem a world removed from Maoist rhetoric. Instead, they seem to be people like us.

First there was Kobad Gandhi. He was brought up in a rich Parsi family, lived on Malabar hill, and had the best of education.

Still he chose to throw it all up and go fight on the other side of the fence. His wife was a professor of sociology in Nagpur University. Neither of them fall remotely near the stereotype of a naxal as the government projects it – dangerous lawless anarchists.

And a couple of years ago there was excitement over the alleged naxalite with a Goan connection.

Arun Ferreira was arrested from Bandra and held by the police. Arun was educated at St. Xaviers college and again, a world removed from what you would imagine a naxal to be.

There are more Goan connections. Vernon Gonsalves is being held as a suspected leader of the CPI (ML). Arrested along with him was K D Rao – a practising lawyer and office bearer of the Indian Association of Peoples Lawyers.

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Dear Amita,

I want to begin this post by thanking you for your response to Dileep Padgaonkar’s review of Meera Kosambi’s book on her grandfather and Buddhist scholar Dharmanand Kosambi.

In your response you rightly point out that “To refer to the background of a brahmin landowner then as ‘humble’ is misleading and offensive.”

No argument there. You raise points that are normally occluded in the debates and discussions within and about Goa.  On the contrary, I would go further than you do when you say that “the condition of the non-brahmins was much worse, with many in grinding poverty, working on the land owned by the GSBs, unable to even think of basic education, their women and children sometimes bonded in the worst ways imaginable.”

In fact, for most of the non-brahmin Hindu population of Goa, and especially in the Novas Conquistas, the GSB was the oppressor; not the Portuguese, and the GSB continues to be the oppressor. Let us also not forget  that for the GSB the pre-Republic discrimination was not as severe as it was for other Hindu groups.

There were sufficient number of GSBs within the system of the Estado da India to ensure that their interests were served, even while not being centre-stage. These inconvenient facts are unfortunately conveniently occluded in the anti-Portuguese hysteria that is generated by some of the ‘freedom-fighters’ whose lead figures are perhaps not surprisingly GSB!

More recently, in other writings, I have suggested that perhaps the kind of stand-off that one saw in the Subodh Kerkar incident had as much to do with contra-GSB politics as with anti-non-Hindu politics.

Before I go on to my differences with you, and my suggestions of caution – that draw largely from Luis’ response to you – may I direct your attention to The Bomb,Biography and the Indian Middle Class, published in the EPW in 2006, p.

In this essay, Sankaran Krishna points to the biography of the late Raja Ramanna, and the curious fact, that like Dileep Padgaokar’s review, Ramanna’s review too begins with a reference to his Brahmin origins.

Like you do, Krishna leads us from this reference to the Brahmin, to the manner in which this feature limits the extent of Indian modernity. Among other things, it is the basis on which the pride in one’s elevated caste background twines with the politics of ‘merit’ that we uphold to deny the reservation policy that Luis rightly supports, how it constructs the habitus of the Indian middle classes, its (our) response to the masses, and how it twines with Hindutva.

The essay is a gem, and worth reading. I will end here by indicating that reference to the humility of the GSB caste is more than merely misleading and offensive. Padgaokar’s reference tells us also of how Padgaokar perceives himself, and the limits of his own modernity.

My differences with you commence from the position where I argue that it is possible to conceive that the ‘humble GSB’ did in fact exist at the time in which Dharmanand was forced to manage the coconut plantations.

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