"Haven't We Seen this One Before?" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (24 July 2016)

Goa University’s plan to inaugurate a Bollywood course needs a rethink that includes the history of Goans in the industry.

A couple of weeks ago, ­­Goa University’s Board of Studies announced that it will introduce an optional undergraduate course in Indian cinema, tentatively titled “History of Indian Cinema, 1913-2013” (O Heraldo, 8 July, 2016). Commonly referred to as Bollywood, India’s is the most prolific dream factory in the world. While for this and other reasons Indian cinema is worthy of study, the trajectory of Goa University’s proposed course gives cause for concern.

Quoting Prajal Sakhardande as “[t]he brain behind the concept”, the news report chronicling the development of the film course states that the curriculum would cover the origins of “the Indian film industry in 1913, migration to talkies in the ‘30s, growth of regional cinema, Bollywood’s golden age from the ‘40s to ‘60s and the advent of ‘masala movies’ from 1970”. Additionally, Sakhardande is reported to have said that the course would focus on such components as the “[m]ovies starring members of the famous Prithviraj Kapoor family to decades when Dev Anand, Rajesh Khanna, Amitabh Bachchan, Dharmendra, King Khan, Madhubala, Hema Malini, Sridevi and Madhuri Dixit ruled the industry…”­ Ambitious, no doubt, but the projected curriculum leaves something to be desired.

Indeed, there are plans to offer the Bollywood course alongside a couple of other options as part of the Choice Based Credit System (CBCS) available to undergraduates. Sakhardande states that “[b]esides Bollywood cinema”, other offerings may include the “history of regional cinemas, including Konkani films…” This is precisely the problem. Again, the study of cinema is important, and within its scope there is room for the consideration of the multiple regional forms generated within a national context and their relationship to one another; yet, what the proposed Goa University course seems to imply is that there is (or was) no Goan contribution to the cinema of India. Even as it is important to study Konkani cinema, the question to be asked is what does it mean to teach about Indian cinema in Goa without considering the place of Goa and Goans in the history of this national industry?

To say that the current curriculum privileges a mainstream perspective on Indian cinema is not a stretch, especially given how those who have conceived of the course have chosen to highlight the legacies of a set of particular players. On the one hand, this privileging of cults of personality suggests that things to do not bode well for the inculcation of critical analysis through the syllabus. And on the other, by uncritically presenting the cinema of India as the cultural production of Hindi-speaking actors and directors, Goa University participates in the occlusion of minorities, such as Goans and Baghdadi Jews among others, who greatly contributed to the history of Indian cinema. Such a nationalist agenda obscures the major contributions of Goans to the music and other facets of the Golden Age of Bollywood as evidenced in Naresh Fernandes’ Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The Story of Bombay’s Jazz Age (2011) and the Konkani language film Nachom-ia Kumpasar (2015), directed by Bardroy Barretto.

It is no uncommon fact that the place of Goans in Indian cinema history has been relegated to the mists of time, leaving the contributions of many unknown even to their fellow Goans (leave alone Indians in general). For instance, it might come as a surprise to many that Anthony Gonsalves was a real person who worked in Bollywood and is not just the Christian character to whom he lent his name in the cult classic Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), in which Amitabh Bachchan plays the fictional Anthony. Ironically, even as Goa University has a Chair that is also named after the late and otherwise uncelebrated Anthony Gonsalves, its future Bollywood course does a further disservice to unsung Goan musicians and entertainers. Devoid of any consideration for how mainstream Indian cinema once thrived on the creative labours of such minorities as Goans, only to side-line them after their value had been expended, a nationally inflected curriculum taught in the very homeland of these forgotten artists participates in a dominant representation of Indian culture that refuses to grapple with its religious and cultural biases.

While several may not know of the impact of Goans on Indian cinema’s history, what they know all too well about Goa’s place in Bollywood’s imagination is the portrayal of the region in any number of Hindi films. Bollywood’s continued dalliance with Goa is as a hedonistic beach paradise and with all that such a place entails. Goa is the seemingly unpeopled land that hosts the shenanigans of party-loving Indians who seek a reprieve from the mainland, thus exemplifying the relationship between the metropole its colonial pleasure periphery. And if perchance a film might actually remember that Goa is not devoid of locals, then their depiction is often that of a stereotypical nature, where the sexuality and drinking habits of these characters are the stuff of ridicule. Beyond this, one still wonders why any of these Goan characters speak Hindi, which is again testament to the culturally homogenising nature of Indian cinema. 

Any Bollywood course at Goa University that fails to take up a critical analysis of Indian cinema’s gendered, class, and ethnic representations while also not pointing out the history of the industry’s cultural co-optation will simply rehearse a script we are all too familiar with. The proposed course represents the opportunity to correct Bollywood’s egregious treatment of Goans while also paving the way to offer undergraduates a chance to engage with cinema anew. In the meantime, the audience awaits.

From The Goan.

"Gaitonde between Goa and Guggenheim" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (22 November 2014)

The wait outside the iconic coil-shaped landmark seemed interminable as the autumnal weather grew colder, wetter, and windier. I reminded myself that I had been looking forward to this exhibition since it was first announced. When the doors were finally opened to the Saturday “Pay What You Wish” crowd, I dodged through the throng. I steeled myself as I entered the gallery on the fourth floor. Perhaps it was because of the miserable weather outside that I expected to see a bleakness of expression in the man’s art. Indeed, I had let myself be prejudiced by the knowledge that the artist had been distant from his family and a recluse. Instead, face to face with his work for the first time, I realised that nothing had prepared me for the profound simplicity of the art of Goan painter Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde (1924-2001).

Curated by Sandhini Poddar, this first major retrospective of Gaitonde’s oeuvre brings him to world attention, just as one of his pieces sold for the highest amount ever paid for a work of art in India at a Christie’s auction last year. Titled “V. S. Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life,” the exhibition at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened in October and will run till February 2015.

Having spent the earlier part of the evening taking in The Metropolitan Museum’s Cubism exhibition and seeing still more abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art, it was easy to see how Gaitonde’s paintings might sit side by side with that of his Western contemporaries, such as Klee and Rothko. In the book of the same name as the exhibition, Poddar quotes art critic Geeta Kapur’s observation “that modernism as it develops in postcolonial cultures has the oddest retroactive trajectories … [which in] crisscrossing the western mainstream and, in their very disalignment from it, … [restructure] the international.” This view is bolstered by critic Hal Foster, whom Poddar refers to as saying of abstraction that it has no “single origin … [A]bstraction was found as much as it was invented.” Surveying earlier Indian, Chinese, and Japanese art – the last mostly because of her subject’s own interest in Zen Buddhism – Poddar successfully demonstrates how Gaitonde, his Indian contemporaries, and Asian art in general, must be accounted for if modern art is to be understood as a comprehensively international phenomenon.

And, yet, despite the retrospective’s desire to posit Gaitonde as a notable exponent of modern abstraction of an international ilk, it can only do so by resolutely claiming the artist as an Indian figure. While little may be known of Gaitonde due to the limited recognition he received in his lifetime and having died in near-obscurity, the exhibition further obfuscates the painter’s origins. A timeline that intersperses events in Gaitonde’s life with South Asian and Indian national history can be seen by those that come to the exhibition. It notes his birthplace as Nagpur, Maharashtra, but it also states that he spent part of his childhood in Goa, where his parents were from. Curiously, even as the timeline records India’s independence from the British in 1947 and, then, the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, nothing is said of the transference of Goa between Portugal and India in 1961.

It is not that one should expect that an exhibition of this nature would necessarily underscore Gaitonde’s ethnic origins even as it mentions them in passing, but it is also noteworthy that it

constantly reiterates his Indianness for specific purposes. The first is to fix Gaitonde as a product of the artistic milieu of the formerly British India, especially because of his time from 1948 on at Bombay’s Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy School of Art, and so, consequently, to highlight how Gaitonde and his peers fit into a schema of art history that proves Indian modern art should be considered as being on par with its international counterparts. That other artist of the post-Independence Progressive movement, F. N. Souza, finds mention in Poddar’s book, but nothing is said of his Goanness or his friendship with Gaitonde. To be clear, it is not the lacunae around Goan identity that I am calling out here, but how the retrospective’s binary of India and the West can only be created by eschewing any consideration of the cosmopolitanness of being Goan. 

Certainly, Gaitonde may have spent most of his lifetime outside Goa and a brief stint in New York, but one wonders how Goa may have influenced his art. As I take in the vision of this master of balance as it communicates itself to me through his work, I notice how he plays with depth: it is like looking into a boundless ocean at times. “Gaitonde missed the sea…,” his friend and fellow artist Ram Kumar says in Poddar’s book. And though Goa is disappeared in this presentation of his art, one may speculate how inescapable the trace of it is when Poddar shares the words of Burmese Indian critic Richard Bartholomew, who writes: “The landscape of memory is the subject of painters like … V. S. Gaitonde.”  

From The Goan.

"Windows Between Worlds" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (19 July 2014)

Save for their shape, the little panels of mother-of-pearl looked like the ones in the windows in my grandmother’s house. As a child, I had always marveled at the beauty of the delicate translucence of those windows. My uncle responded to my question by saying that mother-of-pearl was used before glass became more readily available and because, for Goans, the sea gave them shells to make windows with. Because the milky pearl-like shingles let in light but not sight, he added, old Goan homes could also do without curtains. This was certainly true in the Mandarin’s House in Macau, which I visited last month. Its naked windows were a display of wooden geometric shapes that, in lieu of glass, held captive nacreous bits that I learned had come from Goa.

The Mandarin’s House, thought to have been built in the late 19^th century, was recently restored and its doors thrown open to the public in the last few years. Its 21^st century renovation was overseen by the Chinese government, perhaps in an attempt to highlight Macau’s pre-colonial cultural ties to the mainland. That notwithstanding, the Mandarin’s House clearly demonstrates architectural traits that are not solely East Asian. As with Goa, Macau was a Portuguese territory; it was handed over to China in 1999. In various parts of the city-state, Lusitan influence is still apparent postcolonially. This is evident in the names of streets such as Avenida da Amizade and Rua da Madeira, as also in the fact that Portuguese is still an officially used language. In the Mandarin’s House, European design elements come into relief alongside Chinese ones, but as the use of the Goan opaline shards in the windows attests, there are other cultural factors to consider.  

In Goa, it is not exactly rare to see both chinoiserie and pottery of Chinese origin dating back to the colonial period. While blue and white pots punctuate the furnishings of the Mandarin’s House, bathed in the refracted light that filters through the iridescent window panes, the counterpart would be the family heirlooms and objet d’art of East Asian origin that are sometimes to be found in Goan homes or other institutions. They may take the form of vases and crockery in the colour scheme of azulejos, itself an Iberian art form borne of Moorish and orientalist imitation. 

The itinerary of these various objects – opalescent glass, blue and white tile, and china – suggests the cultural circuits of colonial trade that gave shape to class-inflected taste. But what do we know of the labour that fashioned and transported these items or of the colonial consumption of such articles that exceeded the specificity of a given household or institutional milieu? How did the travels of these pieces impact multiculturality within and across Portuguese colonies, to say nothing of the metropole in relation to these outposts? 

In other words, if a shared coloniality made for the appearance of the prized crockery in my grandmother’s home in Goa, do the windows in my ancestral home open onto another former Portuguese colony, one that shares the same kind of portals even if they are shaped differently? Did it mean the same thing to have “Goan” windows in Macau as it did to have “china” in Goa? Even as the Mandarin’s House takes pride of place in recently Chinese Macau, its legacy would seem to be a window into many other worlds, but not just those of times gone by.

To see the print version of this piece as it appears online, visit here.

"Tracking Down History" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (26 April 2014)

“[Their] … naturalization as British citizens moved the location of identity for Goans from Portugal to Britain. Geographically though, they lived in Africa.” In so saying, A Railway Runs Through: Goans of British East Africa, 1865-1980 (2014), Selma Carvalho’s latest book, encapsulates the complex socio-cultural and political identities of Goans in a history spanning Asia, Africa, and Europe. Because of my own familial connections with once-British Kenya, it has often been a source of wonderment that a community as small as the Goan one has not only found itself in so many parts of the world, but also been enmeshed in global histories. East Africa is so embedded in Goan cultural memory that even for those not connected with that diasporic history, the Swahili song “Malaika” is one that forms part of the “Goan soundtrack” – that aural legacy that continues to be heard at family and village celebrations, like stories of relatives in far off places. Bearing witness to the importance of oral accounts, Railway successfully transits from interviews to written sources to record a storied past.

In comparison to her previous book Into the Diaspora Wilderness (2010), Carvalho is far more attuned to the formation of racialized Goan identities in East Africa in Railway. This is apparent in her analysis of how Luis Antonio de Andrade, born in 1865 of mixed Portuguese and Goan origins, prospered in Zanzibar in the early 20^th century. A shrewd businessman, Andrade capitalized on his position “[a]s medical assistant to Sultan Sayyid Ali Bin Sayid,” while “never […] compartmentalis[ing] his identity. He was a Portuguese man; […] a member of the European clubs […]. But that did not preclude him from being an intrinsic part of Goan society” in Zanzibar. “Photographed on occasion wearing an African-styled fez,” Andrade was awarded the Brilliant Star of Zanzibar and honoured as a Chevalier of the Order of the Immaculate Conception by Portugal. 

 Yet, this analysis may have been extended by comparing someone as high profile as Andrade with such other transnational figures as the Goan cooks who also traveled between Asia and Africa. How might we understand their racialization as cosmopolitan figures who traversed continents and empires, even? This is not to imply that Railway does not address issues of class and caste. One notable area where it does so is in speaking of the 1936 “break-away and founding of the Goan Gymkhana” in Kenya, which “made a faction of upper-caste Goans even more insular and exclusivist.” However, even in highlighting the peculiar nature of political rifts in the community, it is still the history of the elite that dominates, further obscuring subalterns.

Because most of the oral history the book relies on emerges from interviews with East African Goans now resident in Britain, Railway eschews how those accounts might have been “coloured,” had

Africans also been interviewed. Apart from a reference to Joseph Zuzarte Murumbe, decolonized Kenya’s second Vice President – a man of Goan and Masai heritage – there is little other mention of the names of black Africans. Nonetheless, Carvalho effectively explores intersectionality in the making of identities in East Africa. For example, note her observation of how “[t]he unsung African-Asian partnership was pivotal in the emancipation of Goan women and the development of a middle class.” This astutely demonstrates how colonialism may have subverted entrenched notions of gender and class, but did so by participating in a larger system of racial difference. Accordingly, Railway is a useful text not only for those with an interest in postcolonial studies, but also for those wishing to explore the multiple tracks of global Goan history.  

An online version of this piece as it appears in print can be seen here. For more on the Histories of British-Goans Project, visit their website.

"Figuring Out Goa" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (15 February 2014)

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 17^th 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 19^th 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.   

To see the print version of this article, visit here.