The GTDC plans to turn
Aguada Jail into a tourist attraction, but will this imprison its history?
A prison is not an amusement park. And
while the Goa Tourism Development Corporation (GTDC) may not seek to convert
the Central Jail Aguada, which formerly existed at the same site as the
seventeenth century Aguada
Fort, into a funfair per se, its recently
announced plans to makeover the location sound rather Disneyfied.
Consider GTDC’s proposal to turn the fort
and the jail into a tourist attraction by having a sound and light show,
activity zones, and more at the location. Ostensibly, the purpose of the
intended phantasmagoria is to pay tribute to Goa’s freedom fighters. The
connection to the historical spot is that it is famously known as one where
agitators against Portuguese rule were incarcerated. Yes, the changes GTDC
wishes to make have an educational element in that the proposed show will give
tourists the opportunity to learn about Goa’s anti-colonial legacy. However,
one must be suspicious of the motives of this scheme which seeks to fold Goan
history into a general understanding of the region as part and parcel of India.
As these things go, it can be expected that the ‘teaching’ imparted through the
edutainment will be anti-Portuguese while also being hyper-nationalist.
For example, according to a 7 August, 2016
news report, GTDC has expressly stated that it wishes “to
restore and revive the history and heritage of the jail in line with the
concept at the British-built Dhagshai Jail in Himachal Pradesh and Cellular
Jail in the Andaman Islands”. In other words,
the plan is to make Aguada get in step with the rest of the nation’s colonial
history, even though Goa was not a British colony. In turn, this then leads one
to believe that any attempt to render Goa’s freedom struggle in the spectacle
GTDC hopes to produce at the jail will link it, predictably, to that of
formerly British India.
While there were strands of Goa’s complex
anti-colonial movement that aligned themselves with Indian nationalism, even
these elements foresaw liberation from the Portuguese as being rather different
from its outcome. In his 2012
essay on “O Barco da África/The Africa
Boat” (1964), a short story by Laxmanrao Sardessai (1904-1986), Paul Melo e
Castro explains that though Sardessai was an “active campaigner against
Portuguese rule”, his fight was not against the Portuguese language or culture (pp.
129-30). As proof of this, Melo e Castro points to the fact that it was not
until Sardessai’s post-Liberation return to Goa from political exile that he began
writing in Portuguese, having hitherto written largely in Marathi. The impetus
for this, Melo e Castro gathers, was the political moment that ensued with the
ousting of the Portuguese and Goa’s uneasy transition into the Indian fold.
“Sardessai’s writing was explicitly in the
service of supporting cultural and political autonomy for his society”, Melo e
Castro observes, and goes on to argue that “Sardessai’s turn to writing in
Portuguese (and Konkani) after a lifetime of renown as a Marathi writer must
also be seen as a response to de-specify Goa…” (p. 130). Published in separate
Portuguese and Marathi versions, Sardessai’s “The Africa Boat” is also instructive
for the discussion at hand, for it too is set against the backdrop of Aguada
Jail.
Evidently, Sardessai must have drawn from
his own life experience in writing the short story, having served time as a
political prisoner. In the tale, which takes place during the Portuguese era,
an unnamed Goan prisoner, incarcerated for his involvement in the anti-colonial
struggle, strikes up a friendship with his jailor, who is African. In depicting
a kind of Portuguese multiculturality, Sardessai also captures a moment in Goan
history when soldiers from Portugal’s African colonies were brought to Goa to
quell uprisings. Not only does this demonstrate the particularities of the Goan
milieu at the time at which the story is set, but the short piece is also
remarkable in that it depicts Portuguese culture in the absence of any white
Portuguese characters. While this is made apparent in the language in which the
story is written, Portuguese would also have been the only tongue common to
both the Goan prisoner and the African guard.
It is with scepticism, then, that one
regards the ability of GTDC’s planned sound and light show to capture such
nuance in depicting Aguada’s legacy to tourists, especially when nationalism is
high on the agenda. But what is also of concern is how the making of Aguada
Jail into yet another badly thought out tourist trap will obscure such issues
as prison reform.
Transitioning from being the carceral
space that once held anti-colonialists to then becoming a jail after
Liberation, Aguada now no longer serves that function, with the prison having
been relocated to Colvale. While it was a prison, the Central Jail attracted attention
for the poor conditions in which inmates were kept, there being reports of food
poisoning, and even a
2013 death as a result. Thanks to the efforts
of prison reformers such as the late Sister Mary Jane Pinto (1941-2016),
Aguada’s prisoners were not entirely forgotten. Her
efforts in teaching them a trade,
gave credence to the notion that reformation is an alternative to unredemptive
carcerality. By turning Aguada into an amusement site, not only is its history
at risk of being mangled, but so also empathy for the incarcerated and the need
to rethink prisons. As the jail will now symbolise the idea of national and
personal freedom, where tourists can frolic, its nuanced past will be held
hostage instead.
From The Goan.
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