"The Saint who Wasn't" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (20 September 2015)

While the controversy that had brewed earlier in the year has quieted down, there has already been a renewal of some of the disagreement in reaction to the Pope’s forthcoming canonization of Junípero Serra in the United States. The sainting of the eighteenth century missionary on 23^rd September at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington D.C. is in keeping with what Sylvia Poggioli, National Public Radio correspondent, describes as “an effort to restore the historical balance away from [the] ‘Anglo-centric’ interpretation of U.S. history to the importance of Catholic missions” (npr.org: 16 September, 2015). One might liken this to a rethinking of South Asian history that takes into consideration the colonial influence on the subcontinent by not only the British, but also the Portuguese. Similarly, the defining of the United States as a once British colony, heavily inclined towards Protestantism, has caused the Spanish and Catholic past of North America to be relegated to a historical footnote. 

Indeed, it is noteworthy that the Church’s first Latin American Pope is to give the United States its first Hispanic saint. This, even as it must be pointed out that the Pope’s ethnic origins are Italian, and that the term ‘Hispanic’ cannot be used interchangeably for ‘Latino’. The former is a term meant to refer to those of Spanish heritage, and is often erroneously deployed to label those of Latin American origins. What should be gleaned from this is that even as Serra’s canonization recalls the non-British past of the colonization of the United States, it continues to highlight the European figures of that past. Given the many radical changes the Pope has wrought in modernizing the Church, dramatically changing public perceptions of the institution, Serra is a peculiar choice for canonization. 

Serra, a Franciscan friar, came from Spain to California to evangelize, founding its first missions in the eighteenth century. Writing for the National Catholic Reporter (NCR), Jamie Manson notes that Serra “is credited by the Catholic church for proselytizing and baptizing the indigenous people”, but that “[his] story is laced with disturbing details…” (ncronline.org: 16 September, 2015). It is not Serra’s holiness – a prerequisite for sainthood – that Manson questions. Rather, in quoting the views of Elias Castillo, author of the book Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California’s Indians by the Spanish Missions (2015), as well as Valentin Lopez, Chair of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band of the Costanoan/Ohlone Indians, Manson states that “Serra was a religious zealot whose primary purpose was to save the souls of the indigenous, whom he saw as savages in desperate need of salvation…” Also writing for NCR, Vinnie Rotondaro chronicles how Native American objectors to Serra’s canonization “point to the rampant death that occurred inside the missions – where thousands perished, crammed into poor living quarters with disease running wild – and say that Serra was so blinded by his belief in his faith and his people’s superiority that he focused more on baptizing Indians than tending to their suffering” (15 September, 2015).

For Goans, it would be rather easy to see the parallels between Serra and fellow-Spaniard St. Francis Xavier. Yet, it would be a false equivalence to liken the conversion of Goans to the plight of indigenous Americans. The throngs at last year’s Exposition indicate the continuing relevance of Xavier to Goan Catholics. Certainly, like Serra, Xavier is remembered by history as having been involved in the subjugation of the indigenous through the nexus between Church and state. It is not their personal piety that is in doubt here, but their unwitting sponsorship of persecution. However, evolving scholarship must also be accounted for when it comes to Goa’s Iberian past, and especially in the context of the Inquisition. Yes, Xavier was responsible for its initiation, but whether it was as repressive as common lore has made it out to be is the subject of contemporary debate. Further, conversion to Catholicism in South Asia was not without some degree of choice. For those that chose to escape the yoke of the caste system, conversion was an expression of agency rather than external force. 

As he did on his visit to Bolivia earlier this year, the Pope is expected to apologize for the part played by the Church in the oppression of indigenous peoples in North America. But this apology is going to be a tone-deaf one in that Serra’s canonization is an institutional choice rather than a popular one. That Goans, Catholic and otherwise, still revere Xavier, for example, underscores how so many centuries later he has come to represent an icon who was adopted by a people. The same is not true of Serra.        

From  The Goan.

"In Fact, Fiction" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (20 December 2014)

At the recently concluded fifth edition of the Goa Arts and Literary Festival, I was compelled to attend a panel with the intriguing title of “Goa’s First Diaspora.” What followed, however, was a perplexing display of cultural hubris and the obfuscation between fact and fiction. In conversation with Dr. Kiran Budkuley, the head of Goa University’s English Department, writer Gopalkrishna Pai discussed his Kannada novel Swapn Saraswat (2009) which chronicles the alleged sixteenth century exodus of 22,000 Hindu families from what we now know as Goa; this, it was averred, was due to the conversions that ensued with the arrival of the Portuguese. To be clear, there is little historical doubt that conversions occurred and people were displaced. Nonetheless, what is less certain in Pai’s version of events is the questionable reality in which these claims are grounded. What Pai’s project entails, then, is the remaking of events in order to claim a history of persecution for a contemporary community of religiously and culturally elite, namely the Saraswats.

In turning a critical eye to the way in which Pai translates assumed fact into fiction, my purpose is not to deny the Saraswats their identity, although others have successfully argued that the very category of the Saraswat is not one that emerged till recently. Rather, what is up for examination is the manner in which Pai uses fiction to establish a Saraswat past. Operating from his own standpoint as a descendent of the diasporic community he fictionalises, Pai – a heritage Konkani-speaker – claims evidence of the persistent existence of this tongue, despite exile, as proof of origin. What is notable here is the equation formed between language, geography, and persecution, which the writer melds together to explicate origin.

Not only does this origin-story rely on the postcolonial idea of language-based states that are the hallmark of Nehru’s vision of modern India, but this linguistic basis of nationalist Goan origin is remade in Pai’s reclamation of a past Goan geography for the Saraswats of his novel as an undisputable homeland. This is curious, because “Goa” of the early modern period at the time of the Portuguese conquest was only the Velhas Conquistas, and one would be hard-pressed to believe that any one language was spoken exclusively in any region. Apart from geographic closeness, if the exiles chose Karnataka, it would also have been because of pre-existing kinship networks and linguistic familiarity. In other words, while colonisation may have caused exile, its routes were pre-ordained.

What this also speaks to is a power-base that extended beyond any one location; so, if such linkages can be traced through language, as Pai does, then they must also be traced through caste. During his panel presentation, neither was Pai questioned about how he dubiously arrived at the figure of 22,000 exiled families from a Goa that would have been far smaller than the region we know now, but also what it meant for such a group to continue to exercise power as an upper caste elite group. It would appear that the panel was more interested in foregrounding Saraswat identity as one of the community having been victims. In such an uncritical mode, no room was left to enquire into the possibility that the purpose of the migration might have been to maintain hierarchical caste power, especially with the advent of a new political force in the shape of the Portuguese. History is replete with examples of power operations shifting to other locations in moments of crisis and the elite continuing to function in such capacity even when in exile.

Pai did make some passing reference to the colonial displacement of other communities, such as the Kunbis. But as is common in all considerations of Goa’s First Peoples, that community is given short shrift in Pai’s evocation of diasporic Goanness, and were mentioned only as an afterthought. One wonders what Pai would make of the fact that African-descended slaves also escaped Portuguese India into Karnataka. Surely they too should be accounted for as being part of “Goa’s first diaspora” if they found themselves in the same region as the Saraswats and in the same general timeframe. Yet, what passes for research in Pai’s mythification of a community is not overly concerned with accounting for “facts” that have little to do with destabilising the ethno-racial and religious supremacy of the people he chooses to centre.

What is one to make of Pai’s strange assertion that he is in possession of a photograph that shows the

Hindus of Goa handing over keys to the Portuguese in the sixteenth century? Later during his talk, he corrected himself and said he meant a painting, instead; but at any rate, whatever the alleged visually symbolic proof of the handover of power, that this serves as research evidence for his novel should raise eyebrows. In lieu of this, Budkuley asked Pai why he felt his novel had received so much acclaim. Pai basked in the moment. Perhaps the answer is that people love stories of the resilience of the persecuted, especially ones that traverse fact and fiction as if they were one and the same.  

From The Goan.

"I Never Lived Here" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (23 August 2014)

All the contents of this house have been boxed up, sold, or given away. In a short while, the rental company will relieve me of the keys. I don’t live here anymore. But this was never mine to begin with. That is not to say that I did not inhabit this home, or that I do not wonder what lies in its future. I will have memories long after I leave this country, but they are momentary in the wider span of the histories that precede mine and legacies that will extend far after I have moved on from this place. Already, the agent has been showing the house to prospective tenants. The time will come when, like the rest of this gentrifying neighbourhood, this old house will give way to some postmodern condominium development: at once a conglomeration of the like-minded and -monied and, yet, each unknown to the next in their atomisation. As one form of lifestyle dwelling replaces the other, what else will be lost?

They call this region the Yarra. But even as it harks back to the past, it is not a name that can be relegated to the mists of time. When I first got to Australia, I was struck by the acknowledgment of Aboriginal history at most public events. As preamble to their own presentations, speakers pay deference to indigenous genealogy, noting the traditional ownership of the land and of Aboriginal elders past and present. In my experience, such awareness of Native peoples in the United States is something that is not generally part of public rhetoric, as is much the case in Goa. Nonetheless, I began to introspect on the effect of such vocalisations of Aboriginal awareness as in the Australian case and, moreover, how such performances participate in the continued effacement of the present realities of indigenous peoples.

When the tribal identities of Goa’s First Peoples are recognised, it is often in the service of usurping the cultural expressions of these marginalised groups for the purpose of promoting the notion of Goan authenticity or tourism culture – and, really, one would be hard pressed to differentiate between these practices of cultural consumption. For instance, note the ubiquity of the so-called ‘Kunbi dance’ performed both at public functions in Goa and the diaspora, but also on the Panjim cruise boats catering to tourists. It is such performances of multiculturalism that need to be questioned for their insidiousness. Accordingly, as much as one might think themselves conversant with indigenous traditions or in a position to be deferential to Aboriginal legacies, such efforts are always fraught with consigning indigeneity to the past while still consuming the traditions of those very peoples as if they no longer exist.

Consider Aboriginal feminist writer Celeste Liddle’s distrust of Australia’s Recognise programme, which she describes as “a government-sponsored ad campaign removed from grassroots Indigenous opinion.” In a blog entry this month, Liddle features a photograph of the symbol of the Recognise campaign as it appears on the side of a Qantas jet, right by the national carrier’s own kangaroo logo. She reveals the cynicism of the manipulative PR at play, saying:  “Yet another gigantic corporate entity decides to show mob just how much it wants us to be Recognised. Doesn't that just give you those warm and fuzzy feelings?” Indeed, what Liddle queries is how ineffectively rhetoric and performance translates to change on the ground.

This ground that I was privileged to occupy belongs to the Wurundjeri people of the Yarra region. I come away from it the richer by not possessing it, by knowing it was never mine. For there is a history far greater than this moment, and I am still learning how to belong to it.

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

"Some Other Country" - INDIA CURRENTS (California - June 2014)

Night had fallen on Melbourne by the time I had gotten through immigration and customs. I made my

way through the crowd of smiling people, some holding up “Welcome Home!” signs. For a moment, I entertained the possibility that at least one of them could be for me. In the arrivals area, I found a quiet spot and, fortunately, free wifi – always such a boon to itinerants. There was just enough power on my phone to send a quick message to let my folks know I had arrived safely. For a long while, I stood by my luggage cart and eyed the exit. I was not ready, just yet, to leave the neutral space of the airport, and step into terra incognita.

Sure, I had found myself in this same situation many times before. But it never ceases to feel daunting, that alienness of being on the precipice of starting life anew. En route to Australia, I broke my journey in Beirut. At immigration in Lebanon, I surmised that the officer was asking me if I spoke Arabic, but being unable to respond in that tongue, I apologized in English. “How come?” He interrogated. “You were born in Kuwait,” he said, jabbing his finger at the tell-tale information in my American passport.

Just a few weeks prior, the moustachioed official collecting departure cards at Bombay’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport – which will always be Sahar Airport to me from my childhood memories of transiting through there between Kuwait and Goa to see my grandmother – insisted on speaking to me in Hindi. As if to go with the nationalistically inclined name change of the airport, he questioned my inability to articulate myself fluently in “the mother tongue” that is completely unknown to my mother who was born and raised in East Africa. Waving my Overseas Citizenship of India card in my face, he chastised me, in Hindi, for not speaking the language of “your country.” I thought of the title of that novel, the one in which James Baldwin writes, “The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world.” I thought of 1961, the year in which Goa ceased being Estado da Índia Portuguesa and, without the benefit of a local referendum to ascertain the will of its people, was handed over to India some fourteen years after a certain “Tryst with Destiny.” I signed my Portuguese name on the exit form, and departed the country that neither of my parents, nor I, had been born in.  

“It’s not just another country for you,” a friend remarked. “It’s a whole other continent.” Nonetheless, some things were immediately familiar, I thought to myself as I prepared the cash to pay the taxi

driver near the end of the ride from Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport. For instance, there was the crowned head on the heavy currency – the paradoxically common royal visage on the coinage of the Commonwealth. I remember her well from those days of scrounging together my all too uncommon wealth as a student in London. And English is spoken here – that other imperial legacy. I thought of 1968, the year in which England withdrew the right of entry to British passport holders from its former colonies and how the lie was given to the concept of the Commonwealth. I thought of “Rivers of Blood,” Enoch Powell’s speech delivered that same year, in which he proclaimed, “Whatever drawbacks attended the immigrants arose not from the law or from public policy or from administration, but from those personal circumstances and accidents which cause, and always will cause, the fortunes and experience of one man to be different from another's.” The rising anti-immigrant sentiment resulted in the turning away of exiles, some of them South Asians from once British East Africa. Never mind that they were part of Britain’s history, or that they spoke “the same language.”

There was an awkward silence when the cab driver finally ended the call he had been on from the time he had picked me up. I had gathered from the phone conversation that he was Punjabi. “How long have you lived here?” I enquired. “Ten years.” After another protracted pause, he asked, “You’re here for work?” I nodded. “Yes. New job.” He said, “Good, good.” Leaning forward in my seat, I queried, “So, some years ago, there were those attacks, no? On Indian students… Some were murdered?” His head bobbed in assent. “But it is safe. You know… just mind your own business. You do your work and you go home after and everything will be fine.”

I thought about whose home this country really is and I thought of homelessness. I thought of 1869 and the ironically named Aboriginal Protection Act, which led to the Stolen Generations of state-abducted indigenous children. I thought of Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence, which was turned into a film and tells the story of just such Aboriginal children who had been taken away from their families. I thought of the earliest South Asians to come to this country, the so called “Afghans” who served as cameleers in the 1860s, transporting goods across Australia’s deserts - Muslim men who married into Aboriginal communities. I thought of the migrant who goes everywhere and belongs nowhere. “This is your stop,” the driver announced as he slowed down. “All the best!”

This article appears in the June 2014 issue of India Currents. A shorter version of it can be read in The Goan.