"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.

"To Hope Again" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (Goa - 20 October 2012)

The website of the American embassy in London informs me that I can deposit my absentee ballot with them ahead of the upcoming election. However, I am anxious to make it back to the United States in time to vote with everyone else. Despite my enthusiasm for the democratic exercise, I continue to be ambivalent about the idea of having national belonging to any country, because of my family’s diasporic history as well as my own transnational circumstances. So why is it so important for me to be present at or feel the strong need to cast my vote in the impending U.S. election?

When she left Goa, it likely did not cross my grandmother’s mind that she would be laid to rest in another country, one far away from her own native land. My grandmother probably did not think of the children she would have, leave alone the grandchildren, who would journey even farther afield than British East Africa where she settled. Her youngest daughter, my mother, emigrated to the United States from the Arabian Gulf, along with her family, under an African quota. I was to enter the new country of my residence because of Kenya, a place I had never known. In 2008, it finally became untenable for me to continue to hold on to my original nationality – the citizenship of a country I was not born in. That year, I voted in my first U.S. election, bringing to power a man of part-Kenyan origin, America’s first black president.

Just before the historic election, I had the opportunity to visit Kisumu, where the Obama family is from. The 44^th U.S. President’s Kenyan origins had, until recently, been the reason why there was so much suspicion about his birthright to that office. I also visited the sites of my family’s own history in Kenya, including my grandmother’s last resting place in Mombasa. Since living in the United States, I have not been to Kuwait where I was born an Indian national due to the citizenship restrictions of my birthplace. My last time there was during a transit stop on our voyage as immigrants to California, which was to become our new domicile. Northern California and North London see most of my time currently, though I routinely visit my parents who now live in Goa. Given my past, to this day, and maybe forever, there is a question that will always confuse me: “Where are you from?” Is there solace in knowing that even the President of the United States has himself been repeatedly asked that question?

While Obama evokes my family’s history in so many ways, when I vote for him again this year, it will be with all the doubts I have about his political record, and with particular misgivings about his handling of foreign affairs. Nor is my vote in promotion of the ideals of multiculturalism as a form of American exceptionalism. Rather, it is a vote for the importance of difference within and outside borders. If in 2008 I voted for how that idea crystallizes in Obama, my vote this time is for the belief that difference inspires even beyond the limits of that which symbolizes it. I vote to hope that things can and will be different. 

The online version of this article may be accessed here.

"My Friend... Dominic" - TRIKONE (California - Summer 2012)

A man diagnosed with HIV is humiliatingly arrested and then sequestered in a tuberculosis ward where he is the sole inmate. This dramatic scene might as well be fiction, seeing as it repeatedly appears in such works as the novel The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay (2009) by Siddharth Dhanvant Sanghvi and the film My Brother... Nikhil (2005) by Onir. Neither mentions the person who actually lived through those events. The year was 1989; the place, Goa. Rather than being advised of his condition, a frequent blood donor finds out he has contracted HIV upon being detained by the authorities. His disease is equated with criminality. They knew him as Goa’s Patient Zero: the first reported case of HIV. To me, he was my friend Dominic D’souza.

I remember when we first met.

“Hi, I’m Dominic”, he had said, but I hoped he was not. The year was 1990 and I was being introduced to members of the Mustard Seed Art Company in Panjim, Goa. When I auditioned to join the Seeds as a teenager, I had heard of someone named Dominic who had been in the news. Indeed, all of Goa, if not India, knew about that Dominic. Surely, it was only a coincidence that the lead actor of the theatrical group had the same name as that other person. This Dominic was solemn, yet charismatic. I was to find that he could as easily be a goofball with a wicked sense of humour. His knack for giving ear to my adolescent woes without judgement made us fast friends. So, to me, my friend could certainly not have been that Dominic... or so I convinced myself. For as long as the facts remained unclear, I could keep myself and my parents in the dark. But in a small place like Goa, it was not long before they discovered the truth. Having been curious about who this Dominic was, when they had their suspicions confirmed, my parents confronted me. All I heard as they upbraided me were not full sentences, not even phrases – it was just that word: “AIDS”. It was the one thing I had hoped not to find out about my friend.

Looking back, I realise that most of what I learned about Dominic’s activism came from others because he was never one to seek plaudits. As a friend, Dominic was just that and never the public figure he was elsewhere. The disease had brought him notoriety, but rather than being concerned with how he had become infected, Dominic was more interested in how he could change social perceptions about HIV/AIDS. In the film My Brother... Nikhil, I recognise the activist, but I fail to see the Dominic I knew.

The movie’s title character is the son of the Kapoors, a couple in Goa who, with their daughter Anamika, relate the episodes of Nikhil’s life, in retrospect, between the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although the family’s ethnicity is not revealed, Anamika comments on how her mother is proud of her Portuguese heritage. The father is perhaps, as one might gather from the family name, of North Indian origin. The film is mainly in Hindi, with a smattering of songs in Konkani, one of Goa’s official languages. As the story develops, Nigel de Costa – Nikhil’s boyfriend – is introduced as a Goan from Dubai. Even as the movie fictionalises Dominic’s life, it appears to be uncertain about how to represent Goanness, in the midst of portraying gay identity in India, while also making a point about the ostracism faced by those with HIV/AIDS.

Though Goa was a Portuguese colony for 451 years, interraciality was rare. It is thus striking that the Kapoors are cast as a family whose Goanness is created by coupling characters that are of North Indian and Portuguese heritage. In their ability to speak Hindi and being, at least part, North Indian, the family is expected to appear more Indian than had they been distinctly Goan, an ethnicity often rendered as anomalous to mainstream Indic culture. Interestingly, the Kapoors’ religious persuasion is also left unclear, lest the prospect that they are Christian inhibit them from being seen as the average Indian family. What this negates is that while Christianity in Goa is syncretically Indian, the majority of Goa’s people are, in fact, Hindu. Delivering some of his reminiscences about his boyfriend against the backdrop of a Church, Nigel is meant to be seen as a Christian. Yet, as the foreign-returned Indian who challenges Nikhil for being in the closet, Nigel’s openness is associated with him having lived abroad. His liberal nature is also linked to his financial security, evidenced by his beachfront property. These ambivalent characterisations, then, partake of Dominic’s life story as a Goan person, but attempt to subsume Goanness within a general perception of Indianness. At the same time, the film aims to focus on the trauma of its gay Indian characters by making their struggles synonymous with a more global interpretation of gay rights, itself associated with being male and middle class. Relying on the “Indo-Portuguese” and diasporic identities of the lovers as multiculturality, the film attaches the travails of its characters to the plight of other gay men like them in the world beyond India.

While AIDS cannot be separated from the history of the gay rights movement in the decades since the disease’s advent, it has never been an affliction that only befalls homosexual men. In his review of We Were Here (2011), Andrew Pulver of The Guardian applauds David Weismann and Bill Weber’s documentary about “the ravages of the AIDS virus ... on early 1980s San Francisco, where thousands of gay men died ... before prevention education and community activism helped slow the devastation”. But Pulver notes that “the ongoing disaster in Africa gets barely a mention”. Indeed, this omission occurs because We Were Here spotlights the experiences of white gay men, which are meant to stand in for those of all HIV/AIDS victims in 1980s America. Among the film’s main interviewees, only one is an African American. Though gay men were at the forefront of AIDS activism in the 1980s, the film notes that lesbians also looked out for the community, but little is said about how the disease affected people of different socio-economic and racial backgrounds, many of whom participated in the movement too. That these AIDS-related issues in the United States are themselves connected to access to care across the globe is additionally occluded by the film’s myopia.

Similarly, My Brother... Nikhil, purportedly the first Indian film about homosexuality, “owns” AIDS as a gay disease – In it, the greater risk of contracting HIV through homosexuality becomes symbolic of the trauma of being a middle class, Indian, gay man. In the hateful Goa of the film, already having to deal with the incarceration of his HIV-infected lover, Nigel returns home one day to see the word “faggot” spray-painted on the walls of his house. Forgoing Hindi, which the film had to this moment used as its mode of expression, the slur in English communicates local knowledge of homophobia from the world beyond. Literally, the writing is on the wall as provincial Goa becomes no different than the rest of the planet in its treatment of gay men because of AIDS.

While the film does well to identify prejudice and the need to address it, in parlaying Dominic’s legacy into an insular form of activism, it denies the greater activist potential of the queer movement. In the movie, Nikhil establishes an organisation called People Positive, mirroring Dominic’s own work in creating a non-profit called Positive People which was the first Goan organisation of its kind and one that still exists. Despite the way he had been treated, Dominic loved Goa and saw himself as part of it. He wanted that no one else in Goa should have to go through what he did. Simultaneously, his advocacy efforts took him around the world where he became a voice for those discriminated against because of HIV/AIDS. This contrasts with My Brother... Nikhil where discrimination becomes the driving force for instituting a gay identity that separates itself from ethnicity while conjoining with more global iterations of gay rights that are largely male- and middle class-centric. At a moment where gay rights in several parts of the world has become so eminently concentrated on marriage equality, AIDS activism no longer occupies centre stage as it did historically. Due to advances in medicine, living with HIV is no more the death sentence it was, but this is not a global phenomenon and access to healthcare, even in countries like the United States, leaves much to be desired for communities of colour and those who are low income. Dominic’s brand of activism is a reminder that acceptance cannot be narrowly defined.

I remember the last time we spoke. It was the only occasion Dominic said anything about his activist work to me. He mentioned an impending conference abroad. Suddenly, he was not just a friend I knew from the theatre, who laughed at my jokes, and empathised with me. He was someone whose influence touched the lives of people on the world stage.

Dominic, I did not get to say goodbye to you twenty years ago in May 1992 when you breathed your last in a Bombay hospital. I had hoped you were not that other Dominic, because it would mean losing you. But the world is a better place because you were in it. Not a day goes by that you are not remembered, my friend. Rest in peace...

To purchase a copy of Trikone, visit their website. This article has also been reprinted in the Summer 2013 issue of Pink Pages. Another article on the film My Brother... Nikhil appears in the March 2011 issue of the Journal of Creative Communications.

"The Taste of Vinegar" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (Goa - 15 September 2012)

“Business is good,” he said in reflective response to the question, “but it’s difficult to get vinegar.” Continuing the conversation in Konkani, the historian commented, “But you were getting a regular supply from Tony, no?” The restaurateur’s visage grew pensive as he remarked, “Tony died a few months back.” Pondering this, the professor solemnly said, “I didn’t know...”

The deceased Goan man was unknown to me, but I shared in this moment of loss along with the other four present. The group comprised of a colleague who is a prominent writer on Goa, the owner of the restaurant who had joined us during the course of our lunch, the historian – an eminent scholar of Goa and a long-time friend of my father’s, and his spouse. It was my first Goan meal on this my first trip to Lisbon where I had attended a conference. Preceding the visit I had felt ill at ease, but this sombre moment had the paradoxical effect of providing me with a sense of calm. Perspective, even.

As I prepared to journey to Portugal, I had felt the weight of history. I was the first in my family to make this trip. Neither of my parents, nor their parents before them, had ever been. The irony of this is that they had all, with the exception of my mother, been born Portuguese citizens of Goa. My mother’s British citizenship had been of an odd variety – as with other residents of colonial East Africa, there was no pretence that her circumscribed rights were on par with those of Britons in the colonizing homeland. Living in Britain, any contemplation I had of a familial history that linked me to the land of my residence was ambivalent at best. As it were, there were plenty of other reasons to reflect critically upon the post-imperial and still imperious British nation. However, Portugal presented a whole other set of challenges – far more personal and now unavoidable.

The meal at the Goan restaurant, nestled on a cobblestone Lisbon street, had been the tastiest one I had had in Portugal. My only experience with Portuguese cuisine had been the dishes my father had learned to prepare. Little did I know that his interpretation had been severely Goanized: lots of pepper and other spices flavour his bacalhau, for instance. I was surprised to find that the “authentic” version of these dishes were bland in comparison. If the Portuguese had journeyed to Goa five centuries ago in search of spices that would preserve food and mask the taste of decay in a time before refrigeration – an effort that led to Goa’s colonization – then contemporary Lisbon had foregone this history in serving up its less than piquant fare. 

 

And, yet, here was this motley group of Goans I found myself amongst in the postcolonial city, lamenting the loss of an erstwhile traveller. Like Vasco da Gama and de Albuquerque before him the Goan man had also journeyed. Clandestinely, he had ferried the flavours of Goa to the once imperial centre. Those bottles of vinegar - an elixir, so potent and integral to a way of life – retain the flavour of colonial history and make it relevant far away from home, wherever it may be.    

An online version appears here.