"The Past, Presently" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (26 July 2015)

On a recent visit to Singapore, I was reminded that the Portuguese had forayed into the region some years after their Malaccan encounter in the sixteenth century. In 1587, the Portuguese, led by Paulo de Lima Pereira, destroyed Johor Lama, the royal administrative centre of Temasek or Singapura, as it was then known. Returning to the present, 2015 is the year that the city-state of Singapore celebrates its 50^th anniversary as a modern nation, giving rise to many cultural programmes. Among them is the Singapore International Festival of Arts which will take place in August, and as a precursor to its main exhibition, the organisers hosted “The Open Participate Engage Negotiate” (O.P.E.N.) programme from 16 June to 4 July. According to the event brochure, since art festivals are so fleeting, the planners created O.P.E.N. to serve “as a popular academy … to transform attitudes, mindsets, knowledge and emotions…” To this end, the pre-festival included the work of Bangalore-based visual artist Pushpamala N. Using José Veloso Salgado’s 1898 painting “Vasco da Gama perante o Samorim” as her inspiration, Pushpamala N. recreates the orientalist canvas depicting the Portuguese navigator’s first meeting with the Zamorin of Calicut, in 1498, as a photograph. While nearly identical to Salgado’s portrayal of the historic moment, Pushpamala N.’s remake, titled “The Arrival of Vasco da Gama”, departs significantly in that not only are all the figures in her image, including the Portuguese, ‘played’ by South Asians, but also in that it is a self-portrait. The artist herself occupies the role of da Gama.

Painted four centuries after da Gama’s audience with the Zamorin, Salgado’s painting conveys the significance of the incident, not least because of the Portuguese discovery of the sea route to the Indies. Yet, rendered at a point in history when Portuguese colonial power had rapidly been declining, Salgado’s representation of the legendary episode was meant to function nostalgically as a reminder of past glory. In so doing, the picture also reimagines the past, for the Zamorin is said to have been less than impressed with the goods da Gama brought along for the purposes of trade. As for Pushpamala N.’s recasting of Salgado’s depiction, the artist’s use of South Asian bodies, including her own, to people the tableau, strives to centre the colonised, postcolonially. By cross-dressing as da Gama, Pushpamala N. deliberately genders the colonial past, and asks how women, while absent from Salgado’s memorialisation of historical events, might be returned to the scene. Replacing da Gama’s body with her own, Pushpamala N. enquires into the impact colonisation had on those subjects who were part of the milieu in which Salgado’s painting is set, even as their presence is erased.

However, in noting the “feminist commentary” Pushpamala N. offers through her photograph, critic Mayo Martin remains wary of how successful the artist is at dismantling “the original painting’s politics”, given that “[w]hile an Indian cast … take on the roles of the ‘Portuguese’, the ‘Indians’ are, well, still Indians. And it’s still a face-off” (Today, 26 June, 2015). What Martin zeroes in on is an excess of identity in the artwork – an overdetermined ‘Indianness'. But it is precisely because the Indianness in the tableau still settles into a dichotomy that one must question why this is so. A postcolonial rendition of an allegedly successful endeavour, as put on display at a programme hosted in conjunction with the 50^th anniversary of a nation, Pushpamala N.’s meta-image at O.P.E.N. links oceanic histories and places nationalism in tandem with historical fiction. Nevertheless, how effective is the piece in deconstructing the replication of power hierarchies even when the coloniser is removed from the picture?

To answer this query, I turn to the Indian politician Shashi Tharoor's speech last week at the Oxford Union. In it, Tharoor, who hails from Kerala – coincidentally the coast upon which da Gama met the Zamorin – argued that Britain owed India reparations for having impoverished the region which, prior to the arrival of the English, had been on the rise economically. Apart from retroactively imagining a precolonial Indian ‘nation’, Tharoor, much like Salgado's painting, conjures up a mythical past worthy of celebration. For Tharoor, therefore, the problem is solely colonisation, with no mind paid to such matters as caste divisions that not only predated the colonial era, but also continued on and still exist even after the exit of the Europeans. The parallel with Pushpamala N.’s installation, then, and its inability to erase difference in postcolonially representing oppression, is that both Tharoor and the artist fail to see how Indianness is quite capable of sustaining its own hierarchies with little to no assistance from elsewhere. Colonisation may have added other shades of oppression, but the canvas of the past was never pristine to begin with.

From The Goan.

"States of Suspended Animation" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (28 June 2015)

A key of gold unearthed from a pregnant woman’s grave; another pregnant woman hacked to death; and an exhumed corpse discovered to be as fresh as on the day it was buried. These are the strangely wondrous elements of Johny Miranda’s novella Requiem for the Living (2013), translated by Sajai Jose from the original in Malayalam, Jeevichirikkunnavarkku Vendiyulla Oppees (2004). That the title and the aforementioned moments from the narrative reveal its obsession with death and thwarted reproductivity is apparent. At the book’s centre, however, is a man whose youth is meant to symbolise futurity. Osha/Josy Pereira’s Portuguese name evidences his identity as a Paranki. Descendants of the Eurasian encounter between Iberians and natives of the Malabar coast, they were speakers of the once thriving Cochin-Creole language. Despite the potential of his youth, Osha’s quest to find the lock to which the golden key is the counterpart serves as a metaphor for his impotence; an ineffectualness that is itself a metaphor for the condition of his community. And herein lie the parallels that can be drawn between the religious minority around which Miranda’s magical realist story revolves and Catholic Goa. 

The most obvious linkage between the two is their shared religious and colonial heritage. All too often, because the Malabar came to be seen as a Dutch colony, its historical intersections with the Konkan have been obscured. Of the influences that make up the historical, cultural, and linguistic background of the Parankis, J. Devika notes in the introduction to the novella that it is just as important to consider the Eastern influences that Portuguese colonisation would have brought along with it to the Malabar. Cautioning against binaristic notions of miscegeny and other forms of cultural mixing, Devika catalogues “elements from South-east Asia, especially Java and Malacca, which were prominent centres of Dutch and Portuguese trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” as also being part of the Paranki experience. Clearly, Devika cites the need for an understanding of colonialism that is not only beyond the usual Anglo-centrism of the field, but also of the nexus between colonial powers, and the trans-colonial trajectories of subaltern groups. Similarly, in Goa, one might ask how coloniality can be understood as a local experience marked by the multiculturality of early modern and later coastal interactions that were Arab, African, European, and South Asian on the one hand, but also intra-Asian and inter-coastal on the other. 

Though these cultural crossings on both coasts may ostensibly represent an openness, as Devika points out, “foreigners and foreign ideas were welcomed only insofar as they were willing to be integrated within the terms of the highly iniquitous hierarchy of caste…” Within this twisted notion of cosmopolitanism, what becomes of the Parankis – a community whose very miscegenation and religion renders them impure? Relegating their Eurasianness to the mists of time, Devika chronicles how the 1931 Census decreed that Parankis – a term derived from the Malayalam word for Portuguese – “no [longer had an] admixture of foreign blood”, but also that “[t]hey differ[ed] very little from Indian Christians”. This official redesignation of Paranki identity not only signifies a crisis over concerns of racial purity, but also the primacy of caste-Hinduism in the nationalist conception of proper Indian subjectivity and its resulting religious hierarchies. As suggested earlier, Miranda’s Parankis may well be seen as occupying a similar strata in contemporary Indian society as their coastal cousins, the Goan Catholics.

It is no surprise, then, that Osha, Requiem’s protagonist, lives in a state of suspended animation. This is proven by his reluctance to consummate his marriage and his impossible pursuit of a lock that can be opened by a key he found in a pregnant woman’s grave. That the dead woman’s own future was cut short is amplified in that she was pregnant, her unborn child symbolising the lost hopes of a new Paranki generation. The requiem, or oppees, of the book’s title refers to a prayer offered in memoriam for the dead, but in this case it is a dirge for those whose impending demise is in sight, while the ultimate horror resides in the realisation that even this self-awareness cannot ward of the inevitable. Though Devika argues that Miranda’s book is a prayer for the imminent loss of a community whose unique set of ritualistic practices and cultural expressions are being swallowed up by Roman Catholicism, this critique of institutionality must also be extended to the State which has marked the Parankis as other to itself.  For even though cosmopolitanness is prized as a signifier of Indian modernity, Parankiness is difference for all the wrong reasons. Yet, Requiem is not a tale of hopelessness. Reminiscent of the relic of St. Francis Xavier, the unearthing of the unblemished corpse of Osha’s grandmother – a female village elder – represents a cultural remnant that lingers despite efforts to bury it away.

From The Goan.

"Building an Identity: Book Release of The Indo-Portuguese House" - THE GOAN: Kalaa (Goa - 13 April 2013)

Aptly, the lecture drew a full house. On 30 March, 2013, those that came to hear architect Gerard da Cunha speak at Kala Academy, Panjim, found themselves in a gallery featuring paintings of colonial era architecture by Japanese artist Akeru Barros Pereira. The occasion was the release of the book The Indo-Portuguese House on which the architect and the painter collaborated.

In his talk, da Cunha sought to contextualize the book’s architectural focus within the history of Goa’s encounter with the world. Yet, the architect began with a reference to how “an arrow shot into the seas by Lord Parashuram had given rise to the land in which Goa” finds location. In employing the story of the Sanskritic figure, perhaps da Cunha’s purpose was to imbue Goa’s oceanic geography with the Indic connection of his book’s title. This overshadows the ordinary and more palpable ways in which the author does situate Goa in relation to the Konkan and Malabar coasts. For example, da Cunha mentioned the agricultural practices that relied on local ingenuity to manage irrigation through “the use of sluice gates.” Just as this would have been an expected feature along the coast, the author also illustrated how “internal courtyards were common” to the construction of pre-colonial houses in Goa, as is true of Tharavad-style homes in Kerala, for example. In both regions, large domiciles served joint families and the courtyards were communal spaces that provided privacy within the dwelling itself.

 

da Cunha theorized that with conversion to Catholicism in the Portuguese era, “women were allowed more visibility,” rendering internal courtyards obsolete. An interesting way of considering how social changes affected architecture. Nonetheless, conversion was not all-encompassing nor did it affect all levels of the socioeconomic strata equally, a theme that seems absent from the book due to its concentration on grandiose heritage homes. By the writer’s own evidence, the internal courtyards resurfaced because they were “conducive to cross-ventilation,” a decided climatic necessity. To this end, the architect’s identification of the use of taller windows and “escape vents for hot air,” more readily show how design evolved with time.

Even as da Cunha maintained that it was Portuguese colonialism that gave rise to the uniqueness of Goa’s architecture, in developing his historiography of Goa he allowed for other cultural interactions. He spoke of how the Chinese had pre-dated the arrival of Europeans to Goa by nearly a century and how travel between Lusitan colonies, in later times, expanded Goan tastes as seen in the eclecticism of furnishings and decor. For instance, a home-owner with an African connection might demonstrate this “by having a zebra worked into a tile mosaic.” East Asia, too, could be seen in the patterns of china imported from abroad. Homes of the past, then, must be viewed as a composite of the multiple influences which make them unusual, for the houses da Cunha and Barros Pereira’s book chronicle are part of a Goan legacy that connects it to a history of many strains, several of which are obscured here.

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