"For King and Country" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (6 March 2016)

It has been twenty five years since the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles. The event continues to resonate internationally, especially given recent events in India. 

The 3^rd of March, 2016 marked the 25^th anniversary of the late Rodney King’s beating by Los Angeles police officers. Over a year later in May 1992, the tumultuous scenes of civil unrest in Los Angeles could not have felt any closer to home, even as my family and I watched them on the television in Goa. The newscaster offered a recap of the story that we had been following intently since April. Tensions had flared in the aftermath of the verdict in the King beating trial. Despite videotaped evidence by George Holliday who lived near where the beating had taken place, the jury exonerated the policemen responsible for violently assaulting the black motorist. The acquitted policemen, as well as the jury, had been all white. In a year, we would be emigrating to the United States. Los Angeles was our destination. And, like King, my first name is Rodney.

King was so much a part of my consciousness that I would often introduce myself as “Rodney… You know… like King? Rodney King?” I needed the added qualification because, as I was told on more than one occasion, it was odd that someone of my racial background would have “a name like that.” In a city as diverse as Los Angeles, multiculturalism does not equate with awareness or the lack of segregation, and the same could be said for the many places I have called home across the world, India included.

During the unrest, when King famously made his televised plea for the people of his city to “get along,” his statement became the stuff of legendary ridicule. Was it that the notion of co-existing amicably was so simplistic, or that the sentiment had come from an ordinary black man with a rap sheet who had been beaten by the police? What the incident had done was to raise questions about police brutality and whose rights the keepers of the peace were protecting. For South Asian Americans, among members of other ethnic communities, similar issues of racial profiling and civil rights violations rose to a crescendo in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks. Racial injustice may not be unique to any one minority group, but it is this very ubiquity of violence that should make us more mindful of its existence, as well as the role the state plays in using violence to undermine the rights of minorities. 

Echoes of the legacy of King’s beating can be heard 25 years later in the contemporary United States where the Black Lives Matters movement continues to draw attention to the deaths of Black people at the hands of law enforcement. Similarly, the movement incited by the January death of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula in India has underscored how state-backed educational institutions perpetuate upper caste privilege while turning a blind eye to the plight of Dalit students. It is no coincidence that in the Vemula moment, charges of anti-nationalism have been levied against those on campuses that have been allegedly involved in questioning abuses of state power. Even so, it is essential to note that current discussions of political dissent and freedom of speech cannot stand in for the struggles of Kashmiris or Dalits.    

King’s arrest still resonates internationally 25 years later as evidence of how it is often the targets of state violence who bear the brunt of having to prove their victimisation. If even after his death, there continue to be efforts to depoliticise Vemula’s suicide through ludicrous claims by the police that he was not actually Dalit, there are parallels to be drawn to the fashion in which Black victims of police violence in the United States find themselves having to prove their lack of criminality. In her article “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia” (1993), Judith Butler explains how King’s body was made synonymous with a threat that required policing to ensure white safety. Similarly in India, Dalit bodies become the site of recognition of upper caste privilege; in effect, saying Vemula may not have been Dalit attempts to reduce upper caste culpability in his death. 

While King’s beating highlighted the racialised nature of state-sponsored violence, it was never his intention to be a cause célèbre. “Long after your case is closed, you are going to have to be Rodney King for the rest of your life. Do you think you can handle that?” attorney Steven Lerman had asked his client, the Los Angeles Times reported in a story following King’s death in 2012. “Steve, I just don’t know,” King replied. The article also quotes an earlier interview in which King mused, “People look at me like I should have been like Malcolm X or Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks … But it's hard to live up to some people's expectations...” King was an ordinary man upon whom national attention had been thrust. Yet, 25 years later, his story still bears relevance. The same will be true of Rohith Vemula, an ordinary man whose mind was “a glorious thing made up of stardust”, a young person who could not live long enough to see things change, but one who hoped his death would not be in vain.

From The Goan.

    

"The Lost Generation: 1990" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (21 February 2016)

Is it still home if it no longer exists? Reflecting on Goan history through the memory of expulsion, the writer asks if it is ever possible to recover what was lost. 

My father sends me an image over WhatsApp. “Tony took this photo,” he explains. “Do you recognize it?” I squint to decipher what it is I’m supposed to see in the tiny picture on my phone. The photograph, taken from the inside of a car, is mostly subsumed by the rear-view mirror, with towering skyscrapers in the backdrop, reaching into the sun which reflects blindingly off their mirror-like exteriors. “You see the small building?” dad coaxes. And then I notice it, a miniscule boxy structure, dwarfed by the high-rise modernity around it. “That’s where you grew up.” 

Even now, Kuwait will catch me unawares. I’ve been struck by how many times in the last few weeks mention of the place has come up. While I was in Beirut last month for a conference, I met several Arabs who, while not Kuwaiti, had been born in Kuwait, just like me, my sister, and my cousins. We reminisced about our childhoods, our recollections of school, the Hungry Bunny jingle on TV, and going to Entertainment City – the amusement park. Pieces of the past come back to me from the dim fog of juvenile memory. But it is also evident to me that more than twenty five years since the Iraqi invasion and the ensuing Gulf War, there has been a collective recall of that time and place in the contemporary moment. Note the January release of the Indian film Airlift (2016), which chronicles the Indian government’s evacuation of expatriates from Kuwait during the invasion – the largest of its kind by a civilian air carrier in history. Sure, it’s not the first time that 1990 has returned to remind us of its impact; Al Jazeera has often run stories about that year, such as their series “Kuwait: Class of 1990” (29 July, 2015). “The occupation of Kuwait may have only lasted seven months, but the memory of it remains strong, not least in the minds of the children of that conflict,” the lead piece in the sequence muses. 

Neither my family nor I had been in Kuwait when the invasion occurred. My parents had decided to return to Goa the year before. But in a matter of months, we would be reunited with the many Goan families we had known in the Gulf state. The war had brought several people I had grown up with ‘back’ to Goa. We were the lost generation: Goans our entire lives, suddenly plunged into a foreign place called home. For some, there was no getting over the culture shock. Like many other ‘Gulfie Goans’ of my generation, I went abroad to continue my college education. My journey to California in 1993 called for a change of planes in a country I thought I would never see again. My non-Kuwaiti blood having disbarred me from being a citizen, I was only permitted to view my birthplace from the airport. There was war damage that was still being repaired. 

Certainly, I felt a sense of saudades – that Portuguese word adopted by Goans to explain feelings of loss, yearning, and nostalgia; a word that has no equivalent in the English language. In his biographical introduction to his wife Violet Dias Lannoy’s novel, Pears from the Willow Tree (1989), Richard Lannoy refers to the writer and her first husband, Behram, as members of the Lost Generation, the fledgling postcolonial cohort that saw the promise of decolonization rent asunder by “[t]he communal bloodshed of post-Independence India” (xv). For Dias Lannoy, this shattered promise reverberated in the Indian annexation of Goa, much to her shock as an activist-teacher who had worked with Gandhi. In her novel, the Goan protagonist Seb struggles to find his place in the new country, only to realize that it can never be his but not for lack of trying. The theme of loss due to invasion is a recurrent theme in Goan history and that of its diaspora. Much like the expulsion from Kuwait, many generations of Goans remember the exodus from Burma when Japanese forces occupied the region during World War II. 

My attempts to write about my childhood in Kuwait often feel like they meet with failure – the lost words of a lost generation. In this recovery effort, I am reminded of a photograph in my aunt’s home in Miramar. “It is nowhere,” she responds puzzlingly to my query of the image’s provenance. “We lost our albums during the invasion. I had no photos of me and uncle. Your cousin recreated this one from two separate pictures.” The collage is proof of the past, much like the image of my childhood home proves it still exists. Even so, is it the place I remember? 

From The Goan.

"The Enemy Within" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (10 January 2016)

In exploring how Goans with familial ties to Pakistan are dispossessed through the Enemy Property Act, Konkani film Enemy? questions the state’s relationship to the nation. 

 

Saturated as much with colour as symbolism, a pivotal scene in the film Enemy? (2015) comes to mind in epitomising the film’s success in delivering its message, but also its heavy-handedness. Set against the backdrop of a deeply hued sunset, a meeting between an informant and government officials ends with the former satisfied that the evidence he has offered about an enemy property in his village will allow him to occupy the seized house, which belongs to a relative. Upon his departure, the representatives of the Indian state deliberate over their own designs for the grand old edifice, and smirk about how they have duped their Goan informant. As they bask in the moment, the iconic beauty of Goa sparkles in relief behind them, palm-fringed and sun-drenched. Revelatory, even if heavily didactic, the audience is given to understand that the relationship of India to Goa is one of desire – a covetousness of its land, accompanied by a disregard for its people, both facilitated by law.

Directed by Dinesh P. Bhonsle, the plot of the Konkani film revolves around events that transpire in relation to the seizure of a family’s ancestral home under the aegis of the Enemy Property Act of 1968. Created in the aftermath of the India-Pakistan War of 1965, the Act was instituted to allow the Indian government to take over the properties of those deemed citizens of enemy nation-states. The Act targeted Pakistani nationals, and primarily those who would have been displaced by Partition, post-Independence, but as Enemy? reveals, it also affects the lives of many with a tangential connection to Pakistan. 

Despite attempts to amend the Act in 2010, its intent remains problematic, as does its name. An op-ed in The Hindu notes: “The issue is simple: the property rights of a section of Indian citizens were wrongly taken away and a limited attempt is now being made to restore them. In fact, the government should have … change[d] the very name of the Act, which not only projects a wrongful image of Indian Muslims, but also implicitly carries the suggestion that all Pakistanis are enemies of India. As the ‘enemy properties’ were left behind by migrants to Pakistan, not during a war but due to the exigencies of Partition, there was never any justification for the name …” (28 October, 2010). For the many Goans targeted by this Act, it was not Partition that cleaved them from their land, but the annexation of Goa by India. 

In flashbacks, Enemy? communicates how Mrs. Almeida, a widow, came to own the home she loves so much. Shortly after she is married, the newly named Mrs. Almeida discovers that her father has a second family in Pakistan, where he is employed. Upon this revelation, his Goan wife asks him to leave for good. In bidding his daughter farewell, he bequeaths the house to her, and tells her to take care of it and her mother. Mrs. Almeida, at first tearful, steels herself and, like her mother, spares no more pity for her cheating father. From then on, she takes residence in the house and comes to raise her only son there. As must now become clear, Mrs. Almeida is dispossessed of this very house, because her father was a Pakistani national and the house was not officially in her name. Envisioning the Church as a supporter of the community, rather than a patriarchal force, the film uses the figure of Father Britto – a friend of the Almeidas – to stress the need for Goans to be more mindful of legal matters pertaining to land ownership.  

Despite Mrs. Almeida’s son being a Captain in the Indian Army, they are evicted. That her son is named Sanjit is meant to indicate the change in political dispensation between the time of Mrs. Almeida’s father’s employment in Pakistan and then her son’s occupation in the Indian armed forces. It was likely Mrs. Almeida’s intention to have her son ‘blend in’ in a post-Independence India by giving him the more Hindu-Indian name of Sanjit in comparison to his Portuguese Catholic family name. Yet, neither this nor his allegiance to the nation as a soldier is sufficient in helping the family regain their land. 

As the aforementioned flashback chronicles, it was not uncommon for Goans from Portuguese India to work in Pakistan when it was part of the British Empire, just like India once was. In effect, Portuguese India had a very different relationship with the world outside itself in comparison to the contemporary associations between post-Independence India and those countries it has named its enemies. That Goans now finds themselves trapped within the political machinations of histories external to their own is epitomised by the plight of those affected by the Enemy Property Act. The appropriation of the Almeida home is thus symbolic of a double occupation, where law and postcolonisation combine to ostracise Goans within their homeland and the nation that claims to be their home – further proof of the region’s status as the colony of a postcolony.

From The Goan.

"Afonso de Albuquerque, a Journey of Self-Making" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (13 December 2015)

On the 500^th anniversary of Afonso de Albuquerque’s death, how does his conquest of Goa serve as a metaphor of the complexities of Goan and Portuguese identities? 

At a recent conference presentation where I considered the differences between Portuguese and British colonisations, a member of the audience insisted that such nuances were negligible. It struck me that, in raising this concern, my interlocutor had been focused exclusively on the role played by the colonisers, completely eschewing any consideration of how the colonised might have exercised power within colonial systems. For instance, I explained, Goans travelled between Portuguese and British India, most notably in the nineteenth century, in pursuit of employment opportunities, and then to other parts of the British Empire for the same reason. Often, these Goan travellers, generally Catholic, parlayed their Portuguese colonial identity as cultural currency, having been set apart from other South Asians in such multicultural locations as British East Africa. That Goans were then slotted into and partook of a racialised system that disprivileged black Africans is also important to note, as is the fact that the Portuguese supported the distinction drawn between Goans and other South Asians in the British colonies, particularly as decolonisation movements ramped up in the twentieth century. Indeed, as we approach the 500^th anniversary of the death of Afonso de Albuquerque, who perished at sea near Goa on 15 December, 1515, it is useful to think about how this Portuguese figure influenced the ways in which Goans and Lusitans would come to be defined for half a millennium.

For instance, examining de Albuquerque’s legacy reveals that the making of Catholic Goanness began, not with groups that we would now refer to as Hindu, but with Muslim women. Upon his defeat of Adil Shah, ruler of Goa in 1510, de Albuquerque had the widows of the deposed king’s soldiers baptised, whereupon they were married to the various members of the Portuguese fleet. Historians have commented on the colonial pragmatism of this move, which was meant to instantiate a new ‘race’ – an intermediary between distant Portugal and the Indies. And even as de Albuquerque hoped that his Politica dos Casmentos (a law promulgating mixed marriages) would create a white race in Goa that would expand Portuguese power in Asia, this racial fantasy had as much to do with remaking Portugueseness as it did with establishing Goanness.

 Because the Portuguese had been reigned by the Moors for some 700 years – rulers who had only been ousted a short period before the Iberians began to explore the sea routes to Africa and Asia – the conquest of Goa, whose potentate, like the Moors, happened to be Muslim, functioned as a retroactive avengement of Portugal’s occupation by that race. Yet, this conquest also provided the possibility of remaking whiteness. Iberia – Spain and Portugal – in having been a former Moorish enclave, could not and cannot forego a history of being marked, culturally or racially, even after the conquerors’ exit. The creation of a new state allowed for the making of new laws and, therein, generated the potential to remake the European self by creating a new Indo-Portuguese breed in Goa.

Nonetheless, this attempt to recast whiteness through miscegeny would inherently bear witness to the impossibility of purity. Reimaging the miscegenated identity of the first Indo-Portuguese as an authentic reflection of Portugueseness remade Goan and Portuguese identities. In effect, it established a global Portuguese identity in a new world order. Additionally, inculcating Catholicism beyond Iberia’s shores, would not only lead to the localisation of that faith, but also the creation of Europeanness outside Europe through non-white bodies. It should thus be noted that even as the Portuguese tried to check Islam during the Age of Discoveries, their conquest of Goa may have limited the rule of Adil Shah, but did not succeed in wiping out the presence of Muslims in the soon-to-be colony. Rather, by favouring the Muslim widows because of the lightness of their skin, de Albuquerque’s conversion of them to Catholicism inadvertently guaranteed that their bloodline would be part of the founding of Portuguese India and, moreover, that this heritage would be protected and perpetuated under his aegis. 

It is evident even from his name, an Arabic derived one, that de Albuquere’s family’s legacy was, at least culturally, influenced by the rule of the Moors in Iberia. Five hundred years later, in recalling his time in Goa, it serves as a reminder of the complexity of identity in the region and the need to question origin myths as claims of purity.

From The Goan.