"Aguada and History in the Unmaking" in THE GOAN EVERYDAY (21 August 2016)

The GTDC plans to turn Aguada Jail into a tourist attraction, but will this imprison its history?

A prison is not an amusement park. And while the Goa Tourism Development Corporation (GTDC) may not seek to convert the Central Jail Aguada, which formerly existed at the same site as the seventeenth century Aguada Fort, into a funfair per se, its recently announced plans to makeover the location sound rather Disneyfied. 

Consider GTDC’s proposal to turn the fort and the jail into a tourist attraction by having a sound and light show, activity zones, and more at the location. Ostensibly, the purpose of the intended phantasmagoria is to pay tribute to Goa’s freedom fighters. The connection to the historical spot is that it is famously known as one where agitators against Portuguese rule were incarcerated. Yes, the changes GTDC wishes to make have an educational element in that the proposed show will give tourists the opportunity to learn about Goa’s anti-colonial legacy. However, one must be suspicious of the motives of this scheme which seeks to fold Goan history into a general understanding of the region as part and parcel of India. As these things go, it can be expected that the ‘teaching’ imparted through the edutainment will be anti-Portuguese while also being hyper-nationalist.

For example, according to a 7 August, 2016 news report, GTDC has expressly stated that it wishes “to restore and revive the history and heritage of the jail in line with the concept at the British-built Dhagshai Jail in Himachal Pradesh and Cellular Jail in the Andaman Islands”. In other words, the plan is to make Aguada get in step with the rest of the nation’s colonial history, even though Goa was not a British colony. In turn, this then leads one to believe that any attempt to render Goa’s freedom struggle in the spectacle GTDC hopes to produce at the jail will link it, predictably, to that of formerly British India.

While there were strands of Goa’s complex anti-colonial movement that aligned themselves with Indian nationalism, even these elements foresaw liberation from the Portuguese as being rather different from its outcome. In his 2012 essay on “O Barco da África/The Africa Boat” (1964), a short story by Laxmanrao Sardessai (1904-1986), Paul Melo e Castro explains that though Sardessai was an “active campaigner against Portuguese rule”, his fight was not against the Portuguese language or culture (pp. 129-30). As proof of this, Melo e Castro points to the fact that it was not until Sardessai’s post-Liberation return to Goa from political exile that he began writing in Portuguese, having hitherto written largely in Marathi. The impetus for this, Melo e Castro gathers, was the political moment that ensued with the ousting of the Portuguese and Goa’s uneasy transition into the Indian fold. 

“Sardessai’s writing was explicitly in the service of supporting cultural and political autonomy for his society”, Melo e Castro observes, and goes on to argue that “Sardessai’s turn to writing in Portuguese (and Konkani) after a lifetime of renown as a Marathi writer must also be seen as a response to de-specify Goa…” (p. 130). Published in separate Portuguese and Marathi versions, Sardessai’s “The Africa Boat” is also instructive for the discussion at hand, for it too is set against the backdrop of Aguada Jail. 

Evidently, Sardessai must have drawn from his own life experience in writing the short story, having served time as a political prisoner. In the tale, which takes place during the Portuguese era, an unnamed Goan prisoner, incarcerated for his involvement in the anti-colonial struggle, strikes up a friendship with his jailor, who is African. In depicting a kind of Portuguese multiculturality, Sardessai also captures a moment in Goan history when soldiers from Portugal’s African colonies were brought to Goa to quell uprisings. Not only does this demonstrate the particularities of the Goan milieu at the time at which the story is set, but the short piece is also remarkable in that it depicts Portuguese culture in the absence of any white Portuguese characters. While this is made apparent in the language in which the story is written, Portuguese would also have been the only tongue common to both the Goan prisoner and the African guard. 

It is with scepticism, then, that one regards the ability of GTDC’s planned sound and light show to capture such nuance in depicting Aguada’s legacy to tourists, especially when nationalism is high on the agenda. But what is also of concern is how the making of Aguada Jail into yet another badly thought out tourist trap will obscure such issues as prison reform. 

Transitioning from being the carceral space that once held anti-colonialists to then becoming a jail after Liberation, Aguada now no longer serves that function, with the prison having been relocated to Colvale. While it was a prison, the Central Jail attracted attention for the poor conditions in which inmates were kept, there being reports of food poisoning, and even a 2013 death as a result. Thanks to the efforts of prison reformers such as the late Sister Mary Jane Pinto (1941-2016), Aguada’s prisoners were not entirely forgotten. Her efforts in teaching them a trade, gave credence to the notion that reformation is an alternative to unredemptive carcerality. By turning Aguada into an amusement site, not only is its history at risk of being mangled, but so also empathy for the incarcerated and the need to rethink prisons. As the jail will now symbolise the idea of national and personal freedom, where tourists can frolic, its nuanced past will be held hostage instead.    

From The Goan.

"The Scribe and the Nun" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (15 May 2016)

A writer of history and a prison-reformer leave behind legacies to contemplate even as they are no more. 

It is true that I knew neither, not the Scribe nor the Nun, except through the legacies they left behind. Both worked with or within structures. For the Scribe, an architectural historian, buildings were culture writ in stone. And for the Nun, the walls of a prison were not what defined its inmates.

Born in 1941 in Arusha, Kenya, the Nun was an educator whose service brought her to Goa, the land of her peoples. Though a participant in causes around India, she is probably best remembered for her work at the storied Aguada Central Jail. They called her the Angel of the Prisoners. Tying together a desire to improve the natural environment with a passion for prison reform, in 2000 the Nun involved the prisoners in an anti-plastic bag drive. The People’s Movement for Civic Action, a group that campaigned against the use of plastic bags, were recruited by the Nun to train prisoners in the skill of recycling newspapers into paper bags. Unenthusiastic at first, due to the low wages associated with such work and not least because of their situation, the prisoners came around when the Nun explained that this training might potentially increase their employability upon their release. But the Nun did more than this by advocating for a reduction in sentences: each set of a thousand bags crafted by a prisoner would lead to his prison-time being shortened by two days. Prison authorities noted that other reforms that the Nun instituted at the jail, such as music and literacy classes, as well as mediation practice, promoted a calming effect. Inmates were less stressed at court hearings, for instance.

While the Nun’s work took place within, for the Scribe the importance of structures derived from their interplay with history. Born in 1952 of Portuguese origin, in addition to writing about Goan architecture, the Scribe also spent time in Goa. In his scholarship of Goan architecture, and in particular that of churches, the Scribe saw in Goan structures of the late colonial period that they could not merely be understood as having imbibed the style of the metropole. Even as it notes that Goan architecture might participate in the use of European aesthetics, the Scribe’s book, Whitewash, Red Stone (2011), sees Goan architecture as being of its own ilk – not a European copy, but uniquely Goan. In establishing stylistic norms, these structures demonstrated institutional power, and that of their elite, in their own local milieu. This counters easy assumptions of the lack of agency in colonial contexts while simultaneously demonstrating the complexity of native hierarchies of authority that did not rely solely on the imprimatur of the coloniser. Structures for the Scribe, then, were not only about edifices, but also how they functioned as metaphors of institutionality.

At the nexus of how the Scribe and the Nun saw structures was in the ability of architecture to render meaning. Evidence of European design outside of Europe need not mean that a Goan church is simply mimicking a foreign style. Rather, the Scribe would have us see such a manifestation of aesthetics as being not only about power, but also the creation of European stylistic culture beyond the limits of geography. In other words, the making of European style can occur outside Europe itself, but its uses are definitively local and germane to the settings of their creation. For the Nun, on the other hand, a structure cannot define its occupants even as it constrains their freedom. The prisoner is no less human based on his or her incarceration. In being invested in prisoner reform, the Nun was, even if indirectly, being critical of the function of prisons which seek only to criminalise and never to rehabilitate. The Nun’s work not only extended to the education of the average inmate, but also advocacy on behalf of those serving life sentences. She saw more for them than the structural confinement of their jail cells.

Paulo Varela Gomes, the Scribe, died at the end of April after battling cancer. Reverend Sister Mary Jane Pinto, the Nun, breathed her last on the twentieth of the same month. The Scribe and the Nun may be no more, but their work on and in Goan structures is a legacy that allows for future possibilities in how we think about architecture and meaning making, of space and confinement, and style and power. May they rest in peace.

 

From The Goan.