"Authenticity" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (15 June 2013)

I recently attended a Siddi wedding in Yellapur, a town located in Karnataka, a couple of hours away from that state’s border with Goa. Witnessing the wedding traditions being celebrated, what became apparent to guests in attendance from Goa was the congruence between this African Indian community’s customs and their own. Additionally, the Catholic nuptial mass was conducted in Konkani, which is not entirely unusual, since the language is spoken in Karnataka, too. The priest that officiated the wedding said that he had familiarized himself with the vernacular of his predominantly Siddi congregation, and that it was a pidgin form of Konkani with elements of Kannada. This prompted a conversation among the Goan wedding guests who began discussing what the most authentic form of spoken Konkani is. It struck me that what was being considered while guised as a debate about the purity of linguistic expression - itself troubling because it participates in a politics of casteist hierarchies and exclusionary difference - was whether there might be an authentic connection between Siddis and Goans that went beyond language and culture.

That the Portuguese enslaved Africans and transported them to Goa in the Early Modern period has been documented, as well as the subsequent flight of these slaves to neighbouring Karnataka, outside the Portuguese Indian realm. There, they formed communities that continue to exist. “With Cultural Strings Attached,” an article in last week’s The Goan, chronicles the existence of other geographic communities of Siddis – an identification given to all Indian groups of African origin regardless of their lack of historical connections to one another. In the article, Ammu Kannampilly notes that “since 1956, [Siddis] have been the beneficiaries of affirmative action policies in India. The Sports Authority of India (SAI) even launched a special Olympics training centre in Gujarat in 1987, in an attempt to capitalise on the athleticism of the African-origin [people].” Not much more need be said about the inherent racism of this alleged “affirmative action” effort, which presses stereotypical notions of racial ability into specialised labour for the benefit of the multicultural nation. What is also telling is that after centuries, Siddis continue to be looked upon and classified by the State as not authentically Indian. By this I do not simply mean that Siddis have been acculturated as Indians, but that they are also biologically so after having been in the Indian subcontinent for several generations. 

In Routes (1997), James Clifford explains that “multilocale diaspora cultures” have the ability to “connect multiple communities of a dispersed population.” In the Goan context, its most readily identified diasporic communities are the ones in East Africa, the Middle East, Britain, and even Bombay. Their global dispersal notwithstanding, what connects these multilocale diaspora cultures, among other elements, is the commonality of ethnicity. If members of these diaspora locations are culturally hailed as Goans despite their distance from the homeland, then the absence of Siddis in the Goan cultural imagination needs to be viewed as an unexamined racial bias. Doing so requires not only the acknowledgment that Siddis share a Goan heritage that includes biology, but also that Goans have black blood in their veins.

To see this post as it appears in its print version, visit here.

"The Illustrated Goan" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (Goa - 13 April 2013)

“What should compel me to read these comic books?” asked a middle-aged participant during a session on graphic novels at the most recent Goa Arts and Literary Festival. While one might quibble with this person’s lumping of the two genres together, what cannot be escaped is the intent to relegate the illustrated form, of any literary variety, to the domain of childhood and, therefore, childishness. What the festival participant’s question implies is that adult reading must do only with words. This attempt to empty words of their inherent magic to conjure images also indicates a failure of the imagination. Illustrated books do not simply combine script and graphics, but allow for a slippage between them, as much also of time between generations, human geographies, and within a lifetime.

Take the first block-printed evidence of Konkani. The Hortus Malabaricus, a seventeenth century treatise compiled collaboratively by the colonizing Dutch and local elites, chronicles the Malabar Coast’s flora. Its twelve volumes with descriptions in Latin, Malayalam, Arabic, and Konkanni were published between 1608 and 1703. The Konkanni contribution came from physicians Ranga Bhat, Vinayak Pandit, and Appu Bhat who worked on the project, evidencing linguistic connections between the Konkan and Malabar Coasts. Accompanying the Malabaricus’ text are drawings of plants, making it Devanagri Konkani’s first illustrated book. This February, German artist Wilhelm Bronner displayed his interpretation of illustrations from the Malabaricus in Goa, literally bridging past and present through pictures.

The present enquires of the past in the recent My Godri Anthology (2013). Written by Merle Almeida and illustrated by Nina Sabnani, the Bookworm publication may readily be taken as one for children alone. In it, a parent stitches together the saga of a storied quilt for a child. Needlework and textile patches beautifully match the theme as family histories are uncovered alongside Goa’s. The godri functions as graphic narrative, representing travelogue and legacies in need of revisiting. Goan quilting traditions, this book illustrates, are stories that require anthologizing as they range from one’s granny’s godri to, perhaps, the kawandi made by Karnataka’s Siddi women whose enslaved African ancestors were brought to Portuguese India.

Family lore is again the subject of another Bookworm production. Once Upon a Feast (2012), featuring art by Fatema Barot Mota, is inspired by an account from young writer Mia Marie Lourenc̹o’s mother’s youth. Tasked with dusting the statue of the church’s patron saint in preparation for the feast day, the little protagonist discovers too late that she’s made a mistake. Set in a South Goan village, the local narrative elevates the seemingly ordinary by interlacing dramatic development with stylised architectural and cartographic depictions, as well as rural earthiness. It is in the interstices of this pictorial storyline that the many-layered generations and interactions that constitute a community are made visible. Most emblematically, a child and parent speak to and through one another, as much within the text as outside of it, melding the authorial process with that of the readership.

Rural South Goa is also the partial geography of Savia Viegas’ graphic novellas published last year through the writer/artist’s own Saxtti imprint. Viegas’ outsider art aptly pairs with her evocative tales of characters at society’s margins. In Eddi and Diddi, named for the dogs the book is about, Viegas takes on urbanization; whereas, in Abha Nama, lecturer Abha Dias struggles with institutional hierarchy. Abha’s time in Bombay recalls Goa’s historic and diasporic connections with that city, but her name invokes religio-cultural origins not usually linked with Goa. Viegas’ visuals are both complementary and parallel to the stories, permitting the novellas to be read variedly. This exemplifies the ability of illustrated books to create multiple dimensions, beyond the limits of image or text – an adult appreciation with childlike sensibilities and vice versa.

 

The print version of this piece can be read here. For more on Bookworm, visit their site. Savia Viegas' website can be accessed here.

"The Sacred and the Subversive" - THE GOAN: Semana da Cultura (Goa - 20 October 2012)

As a child, I was told a story by a relative about the frescoes and statues that adorn those Goan churches of the Portuguese colonial era. Commissioned by the Church, these earthly renditions of heaven on high, I was informed, were meant to appear ethereal, radiant, and sacred. Instead, they looked Indian. The Indian workers employed to make manifest the European-tinted iconography of a Semitic-originated Christianity, could only interpret the divine in a corporeality they were familiar with. Their depictions of the godly looked less like the colonizers, who cast themselves as purveyors of the faith, and more like themselves, the colonial commoner.

I share this, perhaps, apocryphal tale from my childhood not to centre the role of sacred Christian art in the legacy of Portuguese influence in colonial and postcolonial Goa but, rather, to consider how art functions as a measure of such culture. Art, like other cultural production, encodes the impact of its time, both as the weight of authority and resistance to it. In this vein, I consider here the capacity of art, often deemed the purview of the elite, to evoke its originary circumstances and, thus, put into relief the everyday, the mundane, and its importance.

For example, as Savia Viegas points out, when Angelo da Fonseca (1902-1967) attempted “to give a new ‘visual lexicon’ to Christian art” in India, his “attempt to root Christian imagery in local culture and art traditions” was met with “[t]he Roman Catholic Church [taking] umbrage against his renderings of a brown-skinned Madonna and various saints ... Moreover, for the [Goan] Catholics, the classical Mary was a source of identity that connected [them] with ‘white society,’ and da Fonseca’s work was deemed threatening.”[1] So much for the egalitarian idea of being made in God’s image... 

What Viegas points to is not only the elitist intertwining of the charade of faith with Eurocentrism and phenotypic bias, but also the polarized deification of the figure of Mary. Robert Newman notes that “[a]lthough modern Europe has only pale memories of Greek, Scandinavian, and Celtic goddesses behind their patriarch-dominated religion imported from the Middle East, it was not always so,” implying the gendered difference between Semitic religious traditions, such as Christianity, and their counterparts which tend to revere a Mother Goddess figure rather than only a paternal icon.[2] In the missionising process of colonial Christianity in South Asia, “[m]any sites that had been sacred to the worship of goddesses ... were re-sacralized by making them important to the Virgin Mary,” Newman opines. He also adds that “[t]he Indian goddess ... is not an intercessor, like the [Europeanised] Virgin Mary, between people and a masculine deity, but a power in her own right.” In her Indianisation, Mary, like other South Asian Mother Goddesses is a deity unto herself – an independent manifestation of female divinity. Hence, while the Goan elite may have taken offence to da Fonseca’s brown Madonna because this had disconnected her from them, he had actually portrayed an icon who in appearance was closer to the masses that had adopted her as their own.

While artistic expressions of religious iconography speak to the identificatory processes of a people grappling with colonial legacies in their everyday lives, it is even in mundane objects that such historical influences reveal themselves. Known as kawandi, quilts created by Karnataka’s Siddi women are of import to an understanding of Indo-Portuguese history and its extant traces. These quilters are descended from Africans enslaved by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century and brought to Goa. Fleeing most notably during the Inquisition (1560-1812), the runaway slaves set up free communities in nearby Karnataka which still exist. Kawandi are not primarily created as art. Instead, pieced together from older garments, the use of brightly-coloured fabrics purposefully functions to brighten rural living spaces with little light. The recognition of the artistic talents of Siddi women has drawn attention to the community’s history where the quilts themselves bear hints of the past.[3]  Kawandi may contain crescent-shaped ornamentation to signify the maker as a Muslim while the works of Catholics utilize cross motifs, bearing testament to conversion. Common to all kawandi is a mark of completion in the form of a corner embellishment made of layered triangular pieces. These are called phula, which in Konkanni – spoken in Goa and Karnataka – means flowers. The adornment, incorporating the linguistic with the artistic, recalls the Siddi community’s past in Goa. In delivering the legacy of quilting from one generation to the next, Siddi women maintain cultural traditions, and also the community’s history as African Indians who defied colonial Portuguese authority to liberate themselves.

Fabric as art also evokes the Portuguese legacy in Goa beyond India’s borders. At the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, California, John Nava’s “Communion of Saints” is a tapestry that features among its subjects a Goan missionary. The Blessed Joseph Vaz (1651-1711), an Indian priest with a Portuguese name, blends in with the tapestry’s other multicultural figures which also consists of unnamed people. This mélange represents the indecipherability between the holiness of everyday folk and the anointed. At the same time, Vaz’s inclusion in the artistic composition as one beatified, but not yet canonised, raises the question of what role race plays in the recognition of venerability. Again, what this summons is art’s interrogation of the complexities of cultural legacies. These legacies are represented in the sacred and the mundane and as a record of authority and resistance, where Portuguese and Goan heritage are imbricated in the complementary and clashing hues of art that does not simply choose to please the eye.

A version of this article appears in print as a supplement to The Goan and can be viewed online.

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[1] Savia Viegas, “Painting the Madonna Brown” in Himal Southasian (August 2010).

[2] Robert S. Newman, Of Umbrellas, Goddesses and Dreams: Essays on Goan Culture and Society (Mapusa: Other India Press, 2001).

[3] An organization called the Siddi Women’s Quilting Cooperative promotes and sells the quilters’ creations.

"Quilted Together" - INDIA CURRENTS (California - August 2011)

On July 15, 2011, the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, California, inaugurated the exhibit “Soulful Stitching: Patchwork Quilts by Africans (Siddis) in India.” Curated by Dr. Henry J. Drewal, Professor of African and African Diaspora Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Dr. Sarah K. Khan, Director of The Tasting Cultures Foundation, New York, the exhibition displays 32 quilts, or kawandi, by members of Karnataka’s Siddi Women’s Quilting Cooperative, a non-profit. Siddi is a term used to describe various South Asian communities of African origin – Their presence is as widespread as Balochistan, Pakistan and Junagadh, Gujarat. The collection at MoAD, however, comes specifically from descendants of Africans enslaved by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century and brought to Goa. Fleeing most notably during the Inquisition (1560-1812), the runaway slaves set up free communities in nearby Karnataka which still exist.

Dumgi Bastav (2004)

Kawandi visually embody the inter-raciality and syncretism that occurred over centuries between Africans and Indians in Goa and Karnataka. Pieced together from saris and other fabric, the quilts may bear crescent-shaped ornamentation to signify the maker as a Muslim woman while the works of Catholics incorporate cross motifs. Interestingly, Dumgi Bastav’s 2004 quilt, featured in the exhibition, bears both icons. What is common to all kawandi is that they are considered incomplete if not embellished at the corners with layered triangular pieces. These are called phula, which in Konkanni – a language spoken in Goa and Karnataka - means flowers. The incorporation of this arguably vestigial adornment, both linguistic and artistic, alongside other cultural signifiers, emblematically bears witness to historical hybridity and contemporary culture in the everyday use quilts provide in Siddi households.

“Soulful Stitching” bills itself as the first exhibition of quilts by Siddis outside India. However, this legacy is little known within India itself. Generally, the cultural imaginary associates India’s experience with Africa through the British colonial-era diasporic presence of primarily Punjabis, Goans, and Gujaratis in the now free nation-states of East Africa. It was also from Africa’s east coast, ironically, that the Portuguese trafficked slaves and where, too, an Afro-Asiatic commerce existed prior to European contact. MoAD’s exhibit here in the United States – a nation itself no stranger to the African slave trade - offers an opportunity to rethink Afro-Indian diasporic cultural heritage through the symbolic quilting together of these identities and their markers in the patchwork of kawandi. The exhibit runs through September 18, 2011.

Versions of this article appear in print and online at India Currents (California) and O Heraldo (Goa). An online version of a longer print article on the exhibit can be read at AwaaZ Magazine (Kenya).