"Visions of Ourselves" in THE GOAN EVERYDAY (11 February 2017)

Exhibitions in the cities of Panjim and Paris prove the need for art curation that heeds history and Goans themselves.

In The Rape of Europa (2006), a documentary about World War II-era efforts to protect European art from the looting Nazis, there is a striking segment about St. Mary’s Basilica in Kraków, Poland. Its storied altarpiece had been dismantled and taken to Nuremberg by the Germans. This loss was not only that of an artistic legacy, but that of the community’s heritage. When sculptor Veit Stoss’ Gothic masterpiece was unveiled in the fifteenth century, the Polish were awestruck. But it was not religious wonderment they experienced as much as a sense of familiarity. The icons that constituted the altar looked like them, ordinary Poles. Stoss had used his neighbours as the models for his creation.

In December 2016, for the first time in my life, I entered the Palácio Idalcão, recently thrown open to Goans after years of having been off-limits due to renovations. Beautifully restored, the nearly half-millennium old building overlooking the Mandovi river in Panjim, was the site of an exhibition that constituted the Serendipity Arts Festival 2016. As in Kraków, ordinary folk in Goa would have been able to see people who looked like themselves in an artistic setting. On exhibit was a set of vintage photographs titled “The Way we Were”. Curated from the archive of Souza & Paul, a studio still in existence in Panjim and whose origins date back to the late nineteenth century, many of the images were on view publicly for the first time.

While art and exhibitions of it delimit viewership by class and social status, the situation of these historic photographs in the iconic building in the capital city of Goa denotes the importance of creating public spaces in which Goans can appreciate their own artistic heritage. There has been talk for some time now of the Palácio serving as a permanent museum of specifically Goan art, but one wonders why it took an effort from outside Goa to create the exhibition being discussed here. A museum at the Palácio would go a long way in bolstering art appreciation and education in Goa, but it would also re-enliven engagement with Goa’s history. When I asked the person that gave me a ride to the exhibition to drop me off at the Adil Shah Palace, he looked at me quizzically. “Old Secretariat”, I clarified. 

Certainly, the Palácio’s function as the former site of the Goa Assembly is one that is far more recent than its having been the viceregal residence during the Portuguese era, or Adil Shah’s summer palace until his ouster by the Portuguese in 1510. Yet, the erasure of the edifice’s erstwhile name from public memory, and the absence of any prominent signage to mark the building’s originary title, evidences the ongoing amnesia around and deliberate eclipsing of Goa’s Islamicate heritage. The ability of museums to serve as public spaces through which to propagate such learning was made apparent at an exhibition I visited at Paris’ L’Institut du Monde Arabe, or the Arab World Institute (AWI).

The AWI exhibition “Ocean Explorers from Sinbad to Marco Polo” (15 November, 2016 to 26 February, 2017) puts on display objects associated with the history of medieval and early modern seafaring. Prominent among these are elements specific to Goa and Iberian history as they relate to the Islamicate world. As one of the exhibition notes explains, the European search for oceanic routes to the Indies was largely predicated upon undermining the centuries-old “sea trade between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean [which] was controlled by the Muslims … Right at the end of the 15^th century, the Portuguese began to sail in the Indian Ocean…” Consequently, there was a rise of exports from such places as “Goa and Iznik [Turkey], [where craftspeople] began to work in a semi-industrial way to produce the goods destined exclusively for external markets. This … established new dynamics, laying the foundations for the first phenomenon of globalisation”.

Items such as an ornate late-seventeenth century chest with inlay work, exported from Goa, serve as proof of the region’s involvement in this global circuit. Simultaneously, the influence of Goa’s contact with other parts of the world is to be seen in various artefacts. Chief among these is a sixteenth century marble tombstone from Goa (on loan to the AWI from Lisbon’s Society of Geography Museum), which bears inscriptions in Roman and Arabic scripts in addition to calligraphic design. It struck me that one had to come to Paris to see such instructive examples of Goa’s past.

Part of the educational experience was the level of detail in the curation, something which was sorely lacking at Serendipity. For instance, many of the Souza & Paul images were presented sans dates and with dubious information about the subjects. “Christian Man” a note would say, as if the subject’s ‘Western’ garb would be enough to derive such information. As Goan art historian Savia Viegas demonstrated in “Moments, Memory, Memorabilia: An Exhibition of old Goan Photographs”, which she curated at the Xavier Centre of Historical Research in December 2015, even Catholic subjects would sometimes affect ‘Hindu’ style in order to demarcate their caste standing. The curators at Serendipity, it would seem, needed to have done a little more homework.

When Stoss’ altarpiece was rescued from Nuremberg, it was returned to its rightful owners, the people of Kraków whose likeness the sculptor had captured. Likewise, the Idalcão belongs to the people of Goa. That it could serve as the site of preservation and propagation of Goan art can only be a vision fulfilled if it also involves those whom that art represents.  

From The Goan.

 

"You Came, You Saw..." in THE GOAN EVERYDAY (18 September 2016)

While others have the luxury of leaving when they find Goa is no longer pristine, it is Goans who have to continue to bear the consequences of a deteriorating environment. 

 

It wasn’t so much the issue that Goans were being told that there was something rotten in their homeland. No, this would assume that Deepti Kapoor was actually aware of the presence of Goans. To be fair, in her article “An Idyll No More: Why I’m Leaving Goa” (The Guardian, 7 September, 2016), Kapoor registers an impressive set of real grievances. She laments the pollution of the beaches with “plastic bags” and “shards of glass from … bottles”. She decries the condition of “the hills and roadsides, covered in garbage”, as well as “the earth inland that mining has stripped bare”. She denounces the “floating casinos and effluent” in the Mandovi river. She has decided to leave, the dream now having turned into a nightmare.

Kapoor tells her readers that she moved from Bombay to Goa eight years ago along with her husband so that she “could study yoga”, and because of “the beaches! The restaurants! The music, and the people!” (Yes, she really is that overenthusiastic with her use of exclamation marks!) She reveals that “when the sun is setting over a village called Aldona, and the evening bread is delivered on the backs of bicycles, you can convince yourself that Goa is all right”. But nostalgia no longer serving to blunt the vagaries of development, Kapoor feels it is time to call it quits. Given all the ills that she lists, who can blame her? Except that it is exactly people like Kapoor who are the problem, and even more so that they fail to see themselves as being at fault. 

For Kapoor, the inconveniences she lists are something she can escape. Yet this is not the luxury available to the people of Goa. And if Goans must leave their land, it is not always because they have a choice in the matter. That “village called Aldona” is the place my paternal family has called home for more than a century. I often wonder what my now deceased grandmother whose home once overlooked the greenest paddy fields would think of the changes in Aldona. What would she make of the altered landscape, where second homes built to serve as vacation getaways for upper class Indians have become commonplace? 

A wise woman, she would recognise that the cost of living has shot up to such an extent, that Aldonkars not of means have been priced out of the real estate market in their ancestral lands. And in the waters, those Goans whose traditional occupation is fishing, must continue to rely upon the catch, regardless of the pollution which threatens their livelihood, their health, and that of those who eat what Kapoor describes as “shellfish … decimated by coliform bacteria...”, among other forms of affected water life.

But it is as if Goans do not exist for Kapoor who like so many other Indian sojourners consider the region to be solely the preserve of those of their ilk – the yoga-learning dilettantes and those with the option of decamping to “Europe or Latin America”, as Kapoor says she might because things in Goa are so rough. Sure, Kapoor mentions “Reginald or Tulsidas or Lata or Maria [who] stand at the front gate speaking to that passerby at dusk…”, but in the same way as she lists the beaches! The restaurants! The music! At the end of which index she adds “the people”, almost as an afterthought and as much as the backdrop for and the service providers of the idyllic life she bemoans the foreclosing of.

No doubt, Kapoor does convey the efforts of some Goans who have been doing their bit to save the environment. The writer also highlights such entrenched issues as systemic corruption and an economic overreliance on tourism without the creation of adequate infrastructure to protect beaches or the tourists who frequent them (again, it is as if the safety of locals must come second, if they are to be thought of at all). Additionally, she refers to the destruction of six villas (which she misclassifies as “Portuguese”) – heritage homes that are being torn down to make way for luxury apartments that will not house Goans. Of course, it would be naïve to believe that Goans are not part of the many problems enumerated by Kapoor, but their involvement in the ongoing destruction of Goa’s natural and architectural heritage does not occur in a vacuum. 

As Raghuraman Trichur argues in his book Refiguring Goa (2013), it was the rise of tourism in the coastal location that first made the Indian bourgeoisie interested in Goa economically. There was once a time when my parents were able to run a small home-based tourism business, but their little outfit folded when larger corporations started to set up shop in Goa. Today, as Kapoor finds, while many Indian tourists come to Goa, they contribute little to the local economy, for much of the money sustains the corporations rather than the actual location. 

Indians continue to find Goa attractive as an investment opportunity, with real estate topping that list. Completely blind to the irony, Kapoor finds common cause to commiserate with one “Phil from England, who has been coming [to Goa] for 25 years, [and who] said: ‘The joke I made this season was, we all used to say Goa was not the real India, but now REAL India has turned up’.” Yes, Phil. And that REAL India looks like Deepti Kapoor, the interloper who got what they wanted, leaving a mess for others to deal with.

From The Goan.