"The General is Resurrected" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (2 November 2013)

As I write this column here in Goa, on the other side of the planet – at the University of Iowa in the United States – the latest edition of Peter Nazareth’s novel The General is Up is being ‘cyberlaunched’. First published by the Writers Workshop in Calcutta in 1984, then Toronto’s TSAR Publications in 1991, the 2013 edition has been produced by local publishing house Goa 1556. Yet, despite Nazareth’s Goan roots and his use of Goan characters, it would not be right to say that the novel’s circuitous publishing history has finally brought it home. Indeed, at the crux of Nazareth’s tragicomic novel are the deeply perplexing questions: ‘Where is home?’ and ‘Whose home is it?’

Employed by Uganda’s Ministry of Finance until the early 1970s, Nazareth left the country during perilous times to take up a fellowship in the States. Presciently, his first novel In a Brown Mantle, published in 1972, foretold the expulsion of Asians from Uganda by President Idi Amin that same year. In The General is Up, Nazareth reuses the fictional African country of Damibia, which he introduces readers to in his debut novel. Nonetheless, it is clear that the author draws from his own intimate knowledge of political instability and personal loss, and that the novel’s dictatorial namesake is the very real Amin. Consequently, the postcolonial setting in Nazareth’s work is used to explore themes of nationalism and displacement. Goan characters, such as Ronald D’Mello in The General is Up, find themselves on the verge of being exiled from a land they had thought of as home. Interrogating concepts of national identity and belonging, the profound comment the novel offers is on the use of fiction in politics: the made-up nation of Damibia is as ‘real’ as the manufactured truth of nationalism.

Because of its multiple locations – East Africa, Goa, and the West – The General is Up is both record and allegory of the human geography of Goan identity. The just released Goan edition resurrects Nazareth’s novel for a new generation of readers. But why should this text matter to Goans? I would suggest that the novel still functions as an index of identity issues that continue to inform the fraught relationship that Goans have with the postcolonial nation, as well as class and caste. Take the aforementioned D’Mello’s reminiscence of his time in Goa: “He could not go to any of the Damibian ... schools because ... the colonial government had made sure that there was no racial mixing ... [I]n Goa, ... he had discovered that there was nothing inherently middle-class about Goans. Just like Damibians, Goans could be servants, bus drivers, peasants, as well as the occasional landowner.” 

Through D’Mello’s experience, Nazareth presents a critique of social stratification and internalised racism. By telescoping what his character finds in Goa to the diaspora, while also critically diminishing the difference between the two, the novelist assesses the limited bases of community formation and ethnic solidarity, simultaneously holding the nation to task for its imperious designs – the collusion betwixt these elements hangs thickly in the background of events that unfold in the novel. It is not just the General, that ironic symbol of postcolonial freedom, that Nazareth holds up to scrutiny, but also those seemingly average actors who play their part in perpetuating the status quo. Even now, The General is Up still reads as a cautionary tale of how home is never what it seems.

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

"The Journey Home" - INDIA CURRENTS (California - October 2013)

It was a strange, yet somehow very Indian American moment. In January, this year, I was to meet Andy in front of McDonald’s. “The one across the street from the KFC,” I had said on the phone. The McDonald’s in Bandra, that is. By the time I got there, Andy had already arrived. The post-work traffic whizzed by on Linking Road as we embraced in front of the golden arches. “I am SOOOO happy to see you,” Andy said. “Can you believe we’re here? In Bombay? In front of this?” I asked, indicating the Mickey D’s behind me. “I know right?!” Andy said with that unforgettable chuckle in his voice. We laughed together at the delicious irony of the American fast food company dishing out such fare as the “McSpicy Paneer.”

This was Andy’s first journey to India. It was a lifetime in the making, and the trip of a lifetime. I got to know Andy in 1998, during my junior year at UCLA. In the years following, he would often express his interest in visiting India, knowing that I went to see family. However, after a while, I could not help but think: “Sure… that will be the day.” So, when he emailed to say that he was actually going to do it, I could barely believe it. Having already been in India a few weeks at that point, I was all the more excited at the prospect of sharing Andy’s experience.

 

In 1998, UCLA hosted the South AsianYouth Conference (SAYC) for high school students, primarily. Most attendees were from schools in and around Los Angeles’ Little India: Artesia and Cerritos, for example. The conference had been organized by a group of students who called themselves Sangam, a word in Hindi that means coming together. The organizers who had constituted Sangam solely for the purpose of the youth conference were spurred on by its success, and decided not to disband after. I had attended SAYC, and thereupon was invited to join Sangam. It was where I met Anand “Andy” Shah, a staff reporter for UCLA’s newspaper the Daily Bruin. While there were other South Asian American student organizations on campus that served a social purpose, Sangam strove to educate about progressive causes that had a political bent.

It was a heady time as protests erupted over issues of affirmative action and the dwindling numbers of Latino and Black students on campus, along with other underrepresented minorities from Asian and Pacific Islander communities. What Sangam did was to include South Asian students as activists by building awareness and solidarity within and across lines of race. We were on the front lawns of Royce Hall protesting along with other student groups as the Regents made decisions that would impact generations of Californians. We tried to remind the UC system that as a public university, it had a mandate to serve the community in all its diversity.

These were the kinds of goings on that Andy reported on for the school newspaper, while also being involved in Sangam’s activist efforts. Additionally, he was part of various community outreach and educational projects the group undertook. Among others, these included a SAT tutorial project in the Bangladeshi community in LA’s Korea Town, a mini festival of films from South Asia and its diaspora, and

efforts to expand South Asian Studies at UCLA. But Sangam was not just an organization that was somehow different from other ethnic student groups because it was more political. Like those other groups, we bonded over our commonalities. Andy was part of a community of young South Asians who were not what might be considered typically “model minority.” There is little doubt that what drew us together was the sense of family we felt in our shared differences from the norm: we were the offspring of divorced or separated parents, or parachute kids and new immigrants, or queer and otherwise non-confirming. And it was in knowing that we had each other that we gained an education our classrooms could not provide.

This intimate knowledge of why social justice was so important to us and others like us, and to those whose causes we might have little personal experience of, led Andy to be an advocate for change even after his time at UCLA. Because he knew only too well about domestic abuse, the marginalization of those who are both queer and of color, and anti-immigrant sentiment, he sought to build awareness around these topics through participation in community and national organizations and also by writing about these matters. For Andy, who always had an interest in journalism, the issue was representation. Or, more aptly, how the media skews representation, particularly when it comes to minorities.

On September 5, 2013, while Andy was crossing a street in Beverly Hills, he was struck by a vehicle. At the time of writing, the driver in this hit-and-run incident has not been identified. At the age of 33 when he still had so much more to give, my friend was no more. From India, I made the mistake of watching the online story about his death as it was reported on by a Los Angeles news station. I will forever be haunted. It was not just that my friend’s entire life had been reduced to a nameless image of his face in this report that referred to him as, only, “Norwalk Man.” It was not just that the news channel felt the need to display the crime scene while Andy’s remains were still there. It was that none of these elements bore any relevance to the ostensible reason for the story, which was to bring to public awareness that the perpetrator had fled the scene of the crime. This was a telling instance of the usual manner in which Los Angeles news deals with cases of this nature. There is no thought to how such callousness affects a grieving family and only adds to our desensitization to violence, because of the proliferation of such decontextualized images in the media. What irony that a person so aware of the media’s distortion of representation should be so represented.

I am saddened not to be in Los Angeles with Andy’s mother and brother, and our friends, as they say goodbye to someone who touched our lives so deeply. There is some solace in knowing that in those brief days in Bombay, which would be the last time I would see Andy, I was part of his life’s journey at such a significant moment for him. Though he had never been before, I remarked at how he seemed as comfortable in bustling Bombay city as he had always been in Los Angeles. He navigated the town like a native, hailing cabs and rickshaws, informing drivers where to take us, and pointing out the city’s sights to me. Now, neither Bombay nor Los Angeles will ever be the same for me Andy, because I was lucky to know you. Rest in peace.

The print and online versions of this India Currents article can be seen here. Obituaries for Andy appear in the Los Angeles Times and on the Road Peace memorial website. An open letter to ABC 7 about their coverage of the aforementioned accident runs on Streetsblog.

Anand "Andy" Shah (February 19, 1980 - September 5, 2013). Photo courtesy of Sanna Malick.

"The Ugly Politics of Beauty" - OUTLOOK INDIA (25 September 2013)

 The racist tweets about 2014 Miss America pageant winner Nina Davuluri have become the stuff of legend, sparking reactions quite contrary to the expectations of the twits that tweeted, and only further raising the title-holder’s profile. Indeed, writers from India and America, including American writers of Indian origin like Davuluri herself, have weighed in with opinions about how the ugly tweets do not reconcile with the beauty of America’s diversity as represented by someone like Davuluri, and also how the newly crowned Miss America could never be Miss India because, though beautiful, she is far too dark for mainstream Indian tastes. Lakshmi Chaudry notes in her piece for the Indian blog First Post that Miss USA’s “dusky” complexion would not make her the ideal candidate for Bollywood stardom, the endgame of several Miss India winners, “unless she makes the miraculous colour ‘adjustment’” required by the profession. What Chaudry alludes to is not only the prevalence of skin bleaching as part of a regular maintenance regime for beauty pageant contestants and actors, but also the role played by Indian celebrities in shilling skin whitening products – a role the dark-skinned Davuluri was just not born to inhabit.  On the same blog, and also on the Huffington Post, Sandip Roy opines emphatically that “Nina Davaluri’s Story is an American Story, not an Indian One.” Hmm… I am not so sure about either of these claims.

But before I take up those issues, a little side trip is necessary to a land that is neither India nor the United States, but this detour is, nonetheless, still about beauty being more than skin deep. Like Davuluri, Yityish Aynaw made beauty pageant history for similar reasons. She was named Miss Israel 2013, the first black winner of that title. Like other Ethiopians of the Jewish faith, Aynaw came to live in Israel as an aliyah immigrant. She had been orphaned at a young age in her birth country before she moved to Israel with her grandparents. While Aynaw gained publicity for her success story as a black Israeli woman, news reports about the lives of several Ethiopian women, many of them refugees, told a far from positive tale. Revelations emerged that thousands of them had been injected against their will with Depo-Provera, a contraceptive. As The Guardian reported, “The phenomenon was uncovered when social workers noticed the birth rate among Ethiopian immigrants halving in a decade. An Israeli documentary investigating the scandal was aired in December [2012]…” Then, in February 2013, Aynaw received her crown. 

“So what then, to make of Aynaw's crowning as Israel's latest beauty queen (apart, that is, from the irony inherent in treating winning an appearance-based contest as some sort of victory for human rights)?” asks Ruby Hamad, writing for Australia’s Daily Life. As Hamad poignantly states, “It is indeed tempting to take [Aynaw’s] triumph as a sign that things are changing but her victory is at best purely symbolic and at worst utterly cynical.” And it is the symbolism that is inescapable here, as in the moment when the first black Miss Israel, upon special invitation, met America’s first black President on his official visit to Jerusalem a month after Aynaw was awarded her title.  

Miss Israel named Obama as one of her heroes, seeing the similarities between them: “Like him, I was also raised by my grandmother. Nothing was handed to me on a plate and like him I also had to work very hard and long to achieve things in my life.” Clearly, what is being evoked here is the symbolic rhetoric of pulling oneself up by their bootstraps – that oft-told tale of immigrants being able to succeed if they try hard enough, a foundational element of the ethos of the United States. While other allegations have arisen this year of how, generally black, asylum seekers in Israel have been discriminated against when searching for accommodation, Aynaw’s victory not only serves as PR on domestic race relations, but also in using race to support diplomatic relations across borders. Of course, US-Israel relations have a long history, but the depths of that connection continue to emerge, as in The Guardian’s exposure of the “memorandum of understanding” between the NSA and Israeli intelligence. Politics, they say, makes for strange bedfellows, but does it also help if they are beautiful? And what does that query have to do with the reigning Miss America and the land of her ancestry? 

If there is one thing that many Americans, if not several around the world, have heard of India lately, it is the news of the vicious rapes, with the December 2012 Delhi gang-rape case being the most well-known example. The brutal incident resulted in the young victim, a student of physiotherapy, losing her life. Nation-wide protests ensued in India, and international attention was drawn to questions of the treatment of Indian women. Just a few days prior to the Miss America contest, the sentencing of the convicted men in that case was pronounced. What I have to say next, is not pretty. Davaluri’s win projects her, just as Aynaw’s did her, as someone markedly different from those others of her ethnicity – hers is an exceptional position because of the country of her citizenship. 

While for Aynaw the comparison to be made is to other Ethiopian Jewish women in Israel, in Davaluri’s case she is remarkable because, as an American of Indian provenance, she is to be seen as unlike women in India. Aynaw becomes an icon of immigrant aspiration while obscuring the plight of black refugees – victimized by the state and society – who, if they “work very hard and long” can achieve some measure of success. In other words, the onus is not on the state, but on the individual herself. Davaluri, meanwhile, becomes an illustration of how her country has allowed her to fulfill her potential as a woman of immigrant roots – she can aspire to be both a pageant winner and someone who wants to go on to study medicine. Quite by coincidence, there is a similarity between the 24 year old Miss America’s vocational goal and the 23 year old Delhi victim’s paramedical field of study. In contrast, then, India is relegated to the position of a patriarchal society where women are seen as victims, not least because of the pervasiveness of rape culture.

This is not an attempt to diminish the very real existence and problem of rape, patriarchy, or even their interconnectedness. Nor am I arguing that pageants are part of some nefarious state design to afford a nation the moral high ground either in domestic concerns or international affairs. (Yet, one must admit that it is very interesting that pageants use the imperial language and symbols of state: queens, their reign, and crowns, for instance…) Rather, I want to make a case for how pageantry works politically, even if unintentionally. An Indian American winner counter-poses America and India, likely indicating that one of those nations is more patriarchal and discriminatory against women. Simultaneously, what does it do for American women themselves? How does it take attention away from legislative battles over women’s rights to reproductive and sexual healthcare in states such as Texas, or reduce concern over the cover up of rape on US college campuses, because the notion is that these problems must be far worse in a developing nation like India – that foreign land of Davaluri’s origins? 

Admittedly, charges of India’s treatment of its women citizens were not the most apparent on social networks where users were more concerned with calling Davaluri a terrorist or a Muslim (or some combination thereof), but what those racist tweets did was to underscore Davaluri’s foreignness, and all it stands for, even if she was born in the United States. This is precisely why pageants themselves need not be directly calculated in their political intent; the mechanisms are already in place for their outcome to be judged, a second time, in the popular arena. Racism, beauty standards, the media, and the contemporary ubiquity of social networks where commentary can be passed freely and invisibly are all in place to mete out opinion based on the color of a woman’s skin. In that sense, not much has changed since thirty years ago when Vanessa Williams became the first black Miss America, only to be stripped of her title for having appeared in an adult magazine.

Speaking of the color of a woman’s skin, much has been made of why the dark-complected Davaluri would not fare as well in a pageant in India as she did in the country of her birth and citizenship. Undeniably, the most famous winners of the Miss India title, some of whom like Aishwarya Rai went on to win the Miss World contest, have all been light-skinned women, giving even more of a fillip to a thriving industry in skin-lightening products. However, just because such beauty care items are not as commonly seen or advertised in the United States does not mean that a nexus does not exist. For example, Amway, once a sponsor of the Miss America contest, is but one of many multinational beauty product companies that sell skin-lightening products in India and other parts of Asia. In itself, this begs the question of why an event that casts itself as a scholarship, rather than a beauty, contest would be financed by a cosmetics giant. Apart from the politics that pageants may unwittingly participate in, there is also a pretty penny to be made from issues tied to race and appearance. Miss America Nina Davaluri may not be hawking skin-lightening cream in India, but who is to say that she will not be the face of a cosmetics line that will use her appearance to open doors in the land of her ancestry?


This article appears on OutlookIndia.com.

"Common Sense and Hindu Nationalism: Why the Catholics in Goa are Not Hindu" - KAFILA (India - 16 September 2013)

Can a Goan Catholic be Hindu? Can Catholics professing a tradition of Catholicism that is over five centuries old be considered Hindu in culture? This is what the Chief Minister of Goa, Manohar Parrikar, sought to suggest in a recent interview with Sambuddha Mitra Mustafi of the New York Times India blog IndiaInk, where he said,

I am a perfect Hindu, but that is my personal faith, it has nothing to do with government. India is a Hindu nation in the cultural sense. A Catholic in Goa is also Hindu culturally, because his practices don’t match with Catholics in Brazil [a former Portuguese outpost like Goa]; except in the religious aspect, a Goan Catholic’s way of thinking and practice matches a Hindu’s. So Hindu for me is not a religious term, it is cultural. I am not the Hindu nationalist as understood by some TV media – not one who will take out a sword and kill a Muslim. According to me that is not Hindu behavior at all. Hindus don’t attack anyone, they only do so for self-defense – that is our history. But in the right sense of the term, I am a Hindu nationalist.

Parrikar’s bizarre statement was in response to the question of whether he saw himself as a Hindu nationalist. Of course, a quick and easy response to his statement would be to summarily dismiss it as expected rhetoric flowing from his saffron affiliations; yet, questions persist, not least because of the peculiar and oft-misrepresented Goan scenario.

More than meets the eye

Goan Catholics today find themselves in a strange situation. On the one hand they are summoned to maintain a distinct Goan identity which rests in large part on the Portuguese past of the territory. This distinct identity is called upon not merely by an officially approved tourism policy and practice, but also by local elites who use the claim of a distinct identity to cyclically generate local mass movements that help them maintain their dominance. On the other hand, as Victor Ferrão argues in his recent book Being a Goan Christian: The Politics of Identity, Rift and Synthesis (2011), there is a simultaneous suggestion that this Catholic ‘cultural’ element is not compatible with a Goan and Indian identity; this is precisely what Parrikar is proposing here. What he further does is to paint the community as a monolithic entity, despite a situation where large segments of the Catholics are being delegitimized by dominant-caste members of their own faith who participate in a Hindu nationalist reading of Goan history. Parrikar’s statement also distorts history through a saffron lens, contributing to the further marginalization of not only Goan Catholics, but also Goan Muslims, Dalits, and Adivasis.

Finally, when Parrikar says that his Hindu faith has nothing to do with governance, he is cleverly skirting the intimate connection that religion and caste ideologies, including the right-wing one he professes, have with state apparatuses in post-1947 India. In the political mobilizations of the dominant as well as the subaltern sections in India, religion has emerged as a potent and important factor. Our contention, not necessarily a new one, is this: that religion in post-1947 India is not a personal affair; it is deeply public and profoundly political, and has now become even more overtly so with the rise of the BJP.

Goa’s encounter with Christianity

This background of political machinations and mobilizations makes it even more necessary to unpack Parrikar’s statement against the actual historical context in which Goa and Goans encountered Christianity.

As has been pointed out by the historian R. E. Frykenberg in his book Christianity in India: From the Beginning to the Present (2008), despite appearances to the contrary, the transmission of Christianity from the proselytizer to the converted always involved shifts in practice. These shifts resulted in new and unique forms of Catholicism or Christianity as the converted took in the message of the faith and made it their own. Thus, when Parrikar views a Goan Catholic as different from “Catholics in Brazil”, he is right only to the extent that there would be some ethno-local differences, because the local culture of Goan Catholics is Goan culture in its multiple variations, including, but not limited to, Hindu culture. Further, just as there are many shades in Goan identity, as also with the universality of Catholicism, there are many identities of the Brazilian Catholic. So which Brazilian Catholic is Parrikar referring to? Or is this also part of the fascist project - to understand every community or region everywhere in terms of its majority or dominant group? 

Pre-Portuguese Goa was not a Hindu Space

When Parrikar suggests that the Catholic in Goa is culturally a Hindu, and that Hindus and Catholics in Goa match in their practices and ways of thinking, he lends weight to a particular assumption about pre-Portuguese Goa: that it was a Hindu space. The truth, however, is that the territories that became Goa following Portuguese conquest in 1510 were, if anything, Islamicate spaces. This means that, although the majority of the people were not Muslim, they were culturally influenced by the Persian, Arabic, and Turkic traditions of dominant Muslim groups. As Phillip Wagoner and other scholars of the Deccan have pointed out, the notion of kingship in the early modern Deccan was firmly fixed within Perso-Arabic, and Turko-Afghan traditions that had taken root among the elites of the peninsula. Even the ostensibly Hindu kings of Vijayanagara adopted a vast variety of Islamicate traditions, in addition to styling themselves as “Sultans among Hindu kings”. The control of pre-Portuguese Goa shuffled between the Delhi Sultanate, the Deccan Sultanates, and the Vijayanagar kingdom for close to two centuries before the arrival of the Portuguese. In turn, this laid the ground for an Islamicate culture in the territories. So, when Parrikar proposes that Goan Catholics are culturally Hindu, he effectively obliterates the vibrant erstwhile and contemporary manifestations of the Islamicate in Goa by suggesting that the state’s society is one of Hindus and Catholics (with putative Hindu pasts) alone.

Goa’s pre-Portuguese history prior to the Islamicate period similarly reflects a complex diversity. There were communities who followed indigenous belief systems which cannot be considered Hindu, and ruling classes that were only recently Hindu. There is strong evidence of Jain and Buddhist communities in the Goan region in the first millennium of the Common Era, communities who were wealthy enough and politically dominant enough to leave behind fairly substantial architectural remains. While there are those who would lump both Buddhist and Jain ideas into Hinduism today, the fact is that these faiths arose and developed in opposition to brahmanical ideas. Parrikar’s statement thus erases the complex cultural life of pre-Portuguese Goa, collapsing it all into ‘Hindu Culture’ even as Hindu “practices” become the benchmark of evaluating the Goanness and Indianness of a Goan Catholic.

Parrikar’s logic implies that Goan Catholics are lesser citizens

Parrikar’s assertion that Catholics are culturally Hindus has another insidious side to it, for it draws from the old accusation of Hindu nationalist historians that Christianity and Islam are foreign to India. While Parrikar may not have actually said that Christianity is foreign, his statement makes it foreign. The truth though is that just as the Christians of the subcontinent are not foreign, their practices embody the culture of the land too. To label such culture as Hindu is not just erroneous, but also pernicious. As a corollary question to Parrikar’s logic, are Hindus living in Christian-dominated countries ‘culturally Christians’?

As Victor Ferrão demonstrates in his book, assuming and asserting a Hindu or brahmanical character to pre-colonial Goa has another ramification. It brings into play the purity and pollution principle that structures caste life within the political realm. The colonial period, and the colonial introduction of Christianity, is seen as polluting the former purity of the Hindu body politic. Consequently, Catholics are placed outside the purview of legitimate citizenship in Goa and India, because the nation’s purity is predicated upon assumptions of its essential brahmanical Hinduness. In Ferrão’s words: “Being polluted by the colonial era, [the Catholics] are thought to have lost their ability to take Goa to the path of authentic progress”. The Catholics may remain in Goa, but every time they make a demand that challenges the assumptions of Hindu nationalism, they are charged as being anti-nationals. This can be seen in the response to the demands for the recognition of the Konkani language in the Roman script, as also the demand for state grants for primary education in English. Thus, even though Parrikar’s statement on the cultural essence of Goan Catholics may seem to embrace, it is in fact a reminder of the second class location of that community within the Goan polity.   

Reinforcing clichés of the nationalist historiography of India

The assertion that the term ‘Hindu’ “is cultural” rather than “religious” privileges only a certain rigid notion of Hindu culture and way of life, while relegating anything that is not Hindu to a second class status; this of course also begs the questions as to which religion is not a prescription for a way of life? It also relegates everybody in India who is not of the ‘Semitic’ faiths into the category of ‘Hindu’ by default.  Such co-option has been challenged in Jharkhand where a struggle is on to give official status to the local Sarna religion. Dr. Ram Dayal Munda, the former Vice-Chancellor of Ranchi University, has written in detail about how the Sarna faith differs in cosmology, myths, deities, rituals, priesthood, and other details, from Hinduism. Yet for many like Parrikar, non-Christian and non-Muslim Adivasis are ‘automatically’ Hindu. Kancha Ilaiah also discusses similar processes in his path-breaking book Why I am not a Hindu (1996). Ilaiah points out that for many children of subaltern communities even in the 20^th century, the introduction to Hindu deities, epics, rituals, and other traditions happened only when they joined school, and the novelty was on par with learning Christian faith traditions.

Parrikar’s assertion that Hindus do not attack except in self-defence, i.e. they are a peaceful and tolerant people, is another myth that has been successfully contested by historians as well as scholars of contemporary caste society. That the Hindu nationalists play the card of perpetual victimization, as Parrikar does, when in reality it is the Dalits, Adivasis and many minority groups who are violently oppressed and abused by the caste nature of South Asian society, a society whose ethos, traditions and survival are now championed by Hindutva politics, is an old irony. As for peacefulness, Parrikar may never take up a sword to kill, but he is already neck-deep in a discourse that is violently casteist, racist, and – not to forget – Islamophobic. Furthermore, he does not have to personally pick up a sword because the Hindu right-wing has set up several proxy organizations that do the job, while political leaders like him either plead helplessness or remonstrate that such violence is not ‘true’ Hinduism.

A ‘Universal’ Church divided in itself

What Parrikar and others who think like him should acknowledge is that many of the converts to Christianity were from the subaltern communities. But it is also necessary to acknowledge that the Church hierarchy in Goa is not only dominated by upper-caste Catholics, but displays a tendency to discriminate against the subalterns in a manner similar to that of Hindu caste society. There are many examples of this, as when the demand for the Roman script of the Konkani language to be given official recognition in the state, which was made by subaltern-caste and -class Catholics, was opposed by the sections of the Catholic clergy. Ironically, many of those clergy members themselves use the Roman script on a daily basis. The discrimination against the subaltern Catholic groups is intensified by the tendency of the Hindu Bahujan Samaj to ally with the Hindu dominant castes. This tendency is most evident in the way the Saraswat-led Konkani language establishment allied with the Hindu Bahujan leadership to ensure that English language education at the primary school level was denied state grants; a move that the Catholic hierarchy acquiesced to. Grants were thus reserved for schools offering education in Marathi or official (Nagri) Konkani, a move which seriously hurt only poorer (and subaltern-caste) Catholic families, the wealthy being able to shift their wards to private schools where they could continue with an education in English.

Summing up

Goan Catholics are not Hindu. Most never were. The reality and history of Goa militate against the simplistic concepts offered by Parrikar. His understanding of universal Hinduness deliberately excludes the minorities while at the same time strait-jacketing and leveling any differences from the point of view of the dominant sections of the majority community. Such notions may appear to unite communities but in reality foster discrimination.

This article appears online at the Kafila website, and was co-written with Dale Luis Menezes, Albertina Almeida, Jason Keith Fernandes, and Amita Kanekar. Versions of it have also appeared in The Goan, on UCAN, and Round Table India.