I
recently attended a Siddi wedding in Yellapur, a town located in Karnataka, a
couple of hours away from that state’s border with Goa. Witnessing the wedding
traditions being celebrated, what became apparent to guests in attendance from
Goa was the congruence between this African Indian community’s customs and
their own. Additionally, the Catholic nuptial mass was conducted in Konkani,
which is not entirely unusual, since the language is spoken in Karnataka, too.
The priest that officiated the wedding said that he had familiarized himself
with the vernacular of his predominantly Siddi congregation, and that it was a
pidgin form of Konkani with elements of Kannada. This prompted a conversation among
the Goan wedding guests who began discussing what the most authentic form of spoken
Konkani is. It struck me that what was being considered while guised as a debate
about the purity of linguistic expression - itself troubling because it
participates in a politics of casteist hierarchies and exclusionary difference
- was whether there might be an authentic connection between Siddis and Goans
that went beyond language and culture.
That
the Portuguese enslaved Africans and transported them to Goa in the Early
Modern period has been documented, as well as the subsequent flight of these
slaves to neighbouring Karnataka, outside the Portuguese Indian realm. There,
they formed communities that continue to exist. “With Cultural Strings
Attached,” an article in last week’s The
Goan, chronicles the existence of other geographic communities of Siddis –
an identification given to all Indian groups of African origin regardless of
their lack of historical connections to one another. In the article, Ammu
Kannampilly notes that “since 1956, [Siddis] have been the beneficiaries of
affirmative action policies in India. The Sports Authority of India (SAI) even
launched a special Olympics training centre in Gujarat in 1987, in an attempt
to capitalise on the athleticism of the African-origin [people].” Not much more
need be said about the inherent racism of this alleged “affirmative action”
effort, which presses stereotypical notions of racial ability into specialised
labour for the benefit of the multicultural nation. What is also telling is
that after centuries, Siddis continue to be looked upon and classified by the
State as not authentically Indian. By this I do not simply mean that Siddis
have been acculturated as Indians, but that they are also biologically so after
having been in the Indian subcontinent for several generations. 
In
Routes (1997), James Clifford
explains that “multilocale diaspora cultures” have the ability to “connect
multiple communities of a dispersed population.” In the Goan context, its most
readily identified diasporic communities are the ones in East Africa, the
Middle East, Britain, and even Bombay. Their global dispersal notwithstanding,
what connects these multilocale diaspora cultures, among other elements, is the
commonality of ethnicity. If members of these diaspora locations are culturally
hailed as Goans despite their distance from the homeland, then the absence of
Siddis in the Goan cultural imagination needs to be viewed as an unexamined
racial bias. Doing so requires not only the acknowledgment that Siddis share a
Goan heritage that includes biology, but also that Goans have black blood in
their veins.
To see this post as it appears in its print version, visit here.
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