One sentiment that will stay
with readers of Refiguring Goa: From
Trading Post to Tourism Destination (2013) is what the author has to say
about Goan Studies: “Local scholars and researchers engage with each other […]
However, a careful scrutiny […] reveal[s] a silo or tunnel effect. The
discussions are in-depth but isolated.” With this provocative opening, one
might expect Raghuraman S. Trichur’s book to interrogate academic and other
intellectual institutions in the state.
And while that would be useful to get to the heart of the problem that
Trichur identifies, his express purpose is to consider Goa’s economic and
social history, engaging them as an anthropologist who sees the two as having
been at odds with one another at various points in time, and particularly to
the detriment of subalterns.
Refiguring Goa ambitiously covers the early colonial period, the
acquisition of the Novas Conquistas,
as also the relationship between metropolitan Portugal and its colonies during
the establishment of the Estado Novo
and, then, Salazar’s dictatorship, and, finally, Goa’s association with India
during the postcolonial period. For Trichur, Goan Studies would do well to
“investigate the social relations that contribute to the constitution of
historical facts,” a process that the writer undertakes in his own study
through economic analysis grounded in Marxist thought among other theoretical
perspectives.
In so reading history,
Trichur effectively exposes how key players came to occupy the positions they
did at opportune moments. For example, the author observes that “[w]hile trade
remained centrally important to Portuguese India in and after the 17th
century, it was not so much the Portuguese […] who prospered from it. It was the native
elite,” namely, the Gaud Saraswat Brahmins (GSBs). Here, Trichur keeps with
current trends in postcolonial thought, which attend to power relations across
lines of race, often noting how collusion and strategy come into play. The
dwindling of Portuguese imperial power in comparison with other Europeans that
were making inroads into the Asiatic arena was coupled with the Iberians’ lack
of emphasis on inland trade. Having focused primarily on the sea trade, the
Portuguese witnessed a “decline in [their] prosperity” which, in turn, “saw the
rise to power of the local GSBs.”
Yet, as Trichur finds, “[b]y the 1540s the changing
political economic situation in Portugal, combined with the increasing
influence of Christian missionaries in Goa, altered the situation of relative
tolerance towards local customs,” which resulted in land confiscation among
other draconian measures. Clearly, what this indicates is that the changing fortunes
experienced by the Portuguese led them to turn their attention away from trade
and more toward governmentality, guising economics as politics. Trichur seems
to stop short at entertaining the possibility that this political
transformation due to a sea change in economic trends was also what caused the
growth of religious influence. After all, these would have been conjoined ways
of exercising institutional authoritarianism.
Importantly, Refiguring Goa situates
the erosion of the gaunkari or communidade system within this political
economic context, because “[t]he Crown was [now] free to dispose of the land as
per its wish.” Even so, the precolonial institution of gaunkari was to find
itself undercut most dramatically “in the New Conquest areas […] under
indigenous regimes […] By the end of the 19th century,” Trichur
writes, gaunkari had been “reduced to a corporate share and land-holding entity
with different categories of membership,” as characterized by the exploitative
relationship between bhatkars and mundkars.
Similarly, Trichur’s book detects the ways in which
capitalist development through industrial growth, as with mining, greatly benefitted
Goa’s elite communities in the postcolonial era. So also, he pinpoints how
tourism has allowed Goa to be included in the Indian imaginary in a way that
identity politics could not. With both these industries, nonetheless, Trichur
maintains that it is the subaltern Goan communities that have been most affected.
With Refiguring Goa,
publishing house Goa 1556 decisively queries the state of the non-existent
field of Goan Studies. But a little self-reflexivity would serve the publishers
themselves well. Although Trichur’s book is well-researched, some of its data
requires more currency and it is apparent from the lack of uniformity of the
citations that a style sheet was not employed. One hopes that the book will
jumpstart an academic discipline that would be of great use to Goa and Goans.
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